| EATER OF WASPS by Trevor Baxendale |
| Story 44 Synopsis: The TARDIS lands in the sleepy English village of Marpling, in the 1930's. The Doctor, Anji and Fitz meet Hilary Pink, a local rogue who invites them to his home, a manor house belonging to his brother George. Meanwhile, dentist Charles Rigby finds something strange in his vegetable patch, and accidentally drops it in a wasps nest. It stimulates the wasps, which then attack, and it takes over his mind, causing attacks on other villagers, including Hilary. George calls the police, and the Doctor is interviewed as a suspect in Hilary's death. George clears him, and the Doctor then conducts the autopsy, which shows advanced cellular regeneration - turning into a giant wasp incubator. Meanwhile, a small temporal hit squad are on the track of Rigby's mysterious artefact. The Doctor wants to find it, too, before they panic and explode a bomb which will devastate the area. The artefact slowly mutates Rigby into a giant wasp. The hit squad's bomb is primed and the countdown begun. Rigby leads a merry dance before returning to the church at Marpling - which is also where the bomb is. The Doctor finally persuades the creature to hand over the artefact, at which point he smashes it to the ground. The creature follows, dying on impact. The Doctor manages to remove the explosive element before the bomb can detonate. He insists the creature is burned, and clears up the mess of the artefact. |
| Review:- After previously depicting gruesome transformations of people in books set on alien worlds in The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart, Baxendale's 3rd EDA sees him bring that style down to Earth. The sleepy English village of Marpling is familiar enough to readers of Miss Marple stories (and the name of the village is surely a deliberate nod to the same). Whilst there is little play on Anji's skin or gender for the 1930's, the busybody Miss Havers' dismissal of the Doctor and his friends as gypsies, something to be driven out and made unwelcome, is a rather pertinent reflection on some attitudes of the times. Similarly, whilst Hilary Pink's acceptance of them is useful, it is more the kindred spirit of the equally downtrodden and frowned on. The story doesn't waste too much time, Rigby having already found the artefact, and introducing it to the wasps by mistake, before they come back for him. It's then a race against time to recover the artefact before he goes too far. The ticking clock is doubled by the presence of Kala, Jode and Fatboy, the time agents from the future who think their actions can be carried out simply, and who have a last resort which they mistakenly reckon will not affect the flow of history. Their presence is presumably a knock-on effect from the loss of the Time Lords, and their cavalier attitude to their job begs the question how efficient they really are. If they're so feckless that they panic and plan to rush straight to the failsafe option of the bomb so quickly, what damage do they normally achieve? As the slightly clunking finish in the church shows, both the mutated Rigby, and Fatboy, pose an equal danger to everyone. The problem with this is that the story becomes terribly straightforward, and though it's nice to see the Doctor at the centre of it, he only saves the day by luck, and though Anji gets to share time with Hilary, and is later captured by Rigby, Fitz is left like a spare part, occasionally musing on bravery, and keeping in with the cop struggling to make sense of it all. There are dramatic action sequences involving a burning house, and the train Rigby tries to escape on, and all the scenes with swarms of wasps feel almost Hitchcockian. This makes up for the rather less enthralling plot points such as Liam Jarrow's true father, and Miss Havers going unsuspected as a double agent. Of course, her becoming the type of terror she thought she warned the world against is bitter irony. Probably the least successful of his 3 EDAs, Baxendale nevertheless delivers a solid tale. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |