Well, with four episodes of this series remaining, we start out last story, a four-part adaptation of Death in the Clouds. In this episode, Poirot flies from France to England on a small plane and, seemingly like the rest of the passengers, is shocked to find that during the short flight, one of their number has been murdered. I think it would have been cool if this story, and the novel that inspired it obviously, had confined things to the plane. Like a murder happens and now Poirot has only an hour to solve the murder before the plane lands or something. But, no, the murder is discovered when the plane lands and Poirot sets out to solve it after the flight. Still, this episode has one of the best sequences of the series so far which is the flight itself which is nearly ten minutes of very slow, mostly non-verbal story telling as Poirot is just kind of quietly watching all the other passengers and you’re starting to kind of figure out what their personalities are and what their relationships are to one another just by the way they behave. I was shocked that this went on as long as it did. There’s a sequence involving a wasp flying around the cabin that lasts for a minute or so all by itself as the various characters just watch it buzzing around. Now this is great television. I loved that it just took its time and just unspooled at this very slow pace. This was a great opening to this adaptation. Hopefully the series ends on a high note. 4 stars.
tl;dr – part one of this series’ final four part adaptation is slowly paced and methodical in a very interesting way; we’re poised to end the series on a high note with this one. 4 stars.
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