This is the third episode of this anime series and it’s the first to feature Miss Marple. Our protagonist, Mabel West, Poirot’s new assistant is revealed to be the daughter of Raymond West, one of Miss Marple’s nephews. I mean, I’m surprised at just how faithful this all is to the canon. Mabel (and her pet duck Oliver) are characters created for this show, but rather than just kind of creating a great-niece for Miss Marple out of whole cloth, they use the character of Raymond West who is a recurring character in Christie’s stories as a way to get her into the story. Fair play. In this episode, a young couple is left troubled after a rich relative passes away, but his great fortune seems to have disappeared. And yet there was that weird joke he made not long before he died when he, you know, said something about his fortune and then cryptically pointed at one of his eyes. You know, as people are wont to do. Cryptically, I mean. The original story is called Strange Jest, by the way. Anyway, I didn’t like this one much. They kind of overplay Miss Marple being a seemingly doddering idiot and saying silly things in my opinion. I mean, that is part of the character, that everyone underestimates her, but she shouldn’t seem like a complete moron, mainly because it’s not that fun to hang out with a moron, even if it’s only for twenty-five minutes. The solution to the mystery is also kind of dumb and the “logic” Miss Marple uses to arrive at it is forehead smackingly stupid; this solution, by the way, is changed from the original story which relied on a piece of English slang. Anyway, we’ll see how this series deals with Miss Marple; in their first outing, it’s a swing and a miss. 2 stars.
tl;dr – show’s take on Miss Marple is misguided and annoying and the story here is just silly at best and annoying at worst. 2 stars.
More Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot & Marple Reviews!