Show: Agatha Christie’s Poirot
Episode
Particulars: S2EP3, “The Lost Mine”, original airdate January 21st,
1990.
Summary: When
a Chinese man named Wu Ling goes missing, Poirot is called in by the head of
his bank, Lord Pearson (Anthony Bate). It seems that Wu Ling was going to sell
a map of a lost silver mine to the bank, something that could be of great
benefit to both the bank and theoretically the economy. Eventually, Wu Ling
turns up dead, and of course the map is nowhere to be found. What comes next is
a lot of the police poking around the Chinatown district for answers,
questioning American stockbroker Charles Lester (Colin Stinton) whose name
appeared in Wu Ling’s notebook, and Poirot fretting over his bank account and
the game of Monopoly he’s playing with Hastings. And if that sentence read like
word salad to you, rest assured that it only makes a little more sense in
context.
Standalone
Thoughts: While the episode has a memorable start (see “Other”), it gives
you a hint of what’s coming very quickly, when stereotypical Oriental music
starts playing the minute an Asian character appears on the screen. It’s not as
bad as it could have been—the accents for the Asian characters aren’t
atrocious—but I spent a lot of the episode in a half-cringe, just waiting for
something really bad. Needless to say, I was completely unsurprised when opium
showed up in the plot; this was the period for it, after all. But at least it
wasn’t obvious it was going to show up from the get-go…?
Looking at the rest of the episode/mystery, it’s pretty
blah. While I do like the period touches of discussing the dangers of stock
investments or a proto Police Dispatch system, it’s pretty obvious that the
Dispatch scene in particular only exists to pad out the episode a bit. There’s
a red herring character who feels a bit unnecessary to me, probably because he
just disappears from the narrative when he’s no longer useful, despite getting
so much attention paid to him. The biggest problem when you get right down to
it, though, is that it feels like the episode is made up of a bunch of
individual scenes that never really cohere together. The scenes with the
aforementioned red herring don’t feel like they’re part of the same story as
the scenes with the American stockbroker. Sure, some of the scenes intersect
briefly, but they don’t flow naturally into each other. And scenes of Poirot
doing actual detective work are few and far between, which I think makes
matters worse. I’m not saying the episode is incoherent, but there’s definitely
a lot about it that feels off.
If this episode has one saving grace, though, it’s that
we finally get my favorite sort of
reveal scene, one with flashbacks showing us how it was done and pulling
together all the little clues. It helps the episode to go out on a high note,
even if it also highlights the fact that it didn’t lay out all the clues in a
way that the audience could “easily” piece it together (one can play fair but
still make it challenging; those are the best mysteries, really). It’s also a
reassurance that the crew is still honing the formula, and that (hopefully)
they’ll sort it all out eventually. Though if that just means we get more
reveal scenes, that would probably be enough to satisfy me for awhile.
Number of Tropes
Followed/Subverted: I’d say we have a 2/15 on tropes and 1/15 subversions
for this one. There’s no question there’s a “Coincidental Comment”, though I’m
not entirely sure what that comment was supposed to signify this time around. I
would also say we have a case of “Ambiguous Foreigners”; in fact, depending on
how you want to classify foreigners, I’d say we have two counts of that. The
subversion, as you can guess, is “Playing Fair”. While Poirot’s explanation at the
end does make sense and shows that we were given a lot of the evidence, I still
feel like we weren’t given enough material to put it all together. Ah well, at
least we had the flashbacks.
Other: *The
opening of the episode was oddly amusing to me. I think it was the overdramatic
music and significant looking shots of a top hat and shoes, interspersed with
shots of Hastings and Poirot playing Monopoly (and using the hat and shoe
tokens). It just made it seem like this Monopoly game was of incredible importance,
and it started to feel like something out of a Monty Python sketch. I feel like
that may mean I was just in a weird mood while watching it, though.
*Japp describes a character as a “part-time opium
addict”. I’m pretty sure that’s not how addiction works, Japp. How exactly
would that even work, anyway?
Most Interesting
Character: Most of the characters today have small parts, which don’t allow
for a lot of personality to shine through. There is, however, one big
exception;
Charles Lester
Sure, a lot of said personality can basically be summed
up as “Obnoxious (to the Brits) American”, but while that sort of stereotyping
can annoy me, I kind of liked it here. I think it’s because it came across less
as actually insulting Americans and more that Poirot was baffled by customs
that were different from his own. Lester calling Poirot “Hercule” after only
knowing him for five minutes was a particularly nice touch in that regard.
Lester isn’t as strong in any of his subsequent scenes, but the first
impression counted for a lot in this case. Though as I said, he was a standout
in a sea of blandness, so…
No comments:
Post a Comment