This is part one of a two part adaptation of The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb and I’m actually really glad that the show chose this as one of their short stories to expand into a two parter. This short story has always struck me as having enough material that it could have been reasonably easily expanded into a full novel. The short story starts after the first two deaths have already occurred and are being chalked up to an Egyptian curse. I think if you expand the story to really take in those two deaths and then spend more time with the characters, of which there are quite a few for a story this short, you’d have a really good Poirot novel or novella at the very least. Anyway, as the above picture shows, this one finds the fussy Poirot forced to travel to an archaeological dig in Egypt after some mysterious deaths awaken fear of an ancient curse. This episode gets a lot of welcome comedy out of Poirot’s discomfort with the heat, the dust and the camels. And if you squint at that picture you can make out the very fuzzy form of Oliver the Duck perched on a camel’s head in the background, so please don’t miss that. This one is a lot of fun and ends with a fun cliffhanger. 3 stars.
tl;dr – Poirot’s off to Egypt to investigate a mysterious curse and this one gets both a lot of humor and a lot of energy from the change of scenery; pretty fun and a nice cheesy cliffhanger. 3 stars.
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