Okay, here’s my first try at speech-to-text in Google Docs. I have blathered about everything I wanted to say, and then edited it into a readable format.

Last night we watched the Poirot episode Halloween Party from 2010. I am a huge fan of the David Suchet Poirot series, it is a comfort show for me, but I have to admit that I’m more likely to rewatch the episodes from the first five or so seasons where there was more of an ensemble cast. The early shows were 45 minutes in length and they were much more light-hearted. After about the mid 1990s, and I believe this reflects the character arc of Poirot himself (because he retires, he’s getting older, he’s getting sicker,) it becomes a much darker show. They replaced Captain Hastings, Miss Lemon, and Inspector Japp with a writer of detective stories named Ariadne Oliver. 

Halloween Party is one of the later episodes that I do rewatch often, because some of them stand out, but most of them are just sad and depressing or overly complicated. But this one I do enjoy although it is overly complicated, and I’ll admit right to you right here that I don’t understand the entire crime as it is laid out at the end. It doesn’t make sense to me. It deals with greed, of course, and I don’t possess the emotional intelligence to go and dupe someone out of money with the sort of Machiavellian tactics that people in the Christie stories often use. If it was me who needed money I would probably just be putting on a ski mask and knocking over a liquor store while holding a shotgun that didn’t have any shells. 

Anyway, Ariadne Oliver is in a small village celebrating Halloween at the local stately home. She had met a woman on vacation and become friends with her. That woman runs a boarding house and has a daughter who can’t go to the party because she’s sick in bed with a cold. She has given the cold to Ms. Oliver who is feeling bad at the party and so misses a vital clue until later in the story. All of the children are sitting around getting ready to do bobbing for apples I believe and this one girl that’s dressed as a bumblebee (she’s kind of an awkward child that even the adults in the village don’t like) upon meeting Miss Oliver insists that she saw a murder once when she was younger and that she didn’t know it was a murder and won’t be dissuaded. But unfortunately for her, the murderer seems to have been at the party because by the end of the night everyone else is playing this Snapdragon game in another room and she is drowned in the bobbing for apples tub.

So the next day Miss Oliver is sick in bed with the cold and she calls for her friend Poirot to come to this creepy, quiet, very green village to help solve this murder. He shows up and he starts interrogating everyone. The police are not pleased with him until he gets his friends at Scotland Yard to make them cooperate with him. I really don’t want to spoil this episode because I have been doing that a lot lately with blog posts, but I want to point out one thing that really stood out to me in this episode. 

Now keep in mind this is not a faithful adaptation of the story, and I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about whether TV and movies that come from books and short stories are accurate. You can’t do that if you’re going to write critically about cinema because you would spend all of your time doing compare and contrast essays. This is not Christie’s original story, this is an adaptation from Mark Gatiss who is well known by fans of English TV for writing a lot of horror and dark stories. This one doesn’t get very dark: not as dark as the Ghost Story For Christmas episode he wrote that is burned in my brain, but it has its moments. 

The one thing I wanted to emphasize: in this village there was a lesbian couple in the town. I say “was” because before the events of this story took place, one of them had died. There are three deaths that the murdered girl found drowned in the tub of apples could have been referring to when she said that she saw a murder. One of them is one half of this lesbian couple and when the camera cuts to the flashback of her dead body she’s clearly laid out drowned in water in a position looking like the famous John Everette Maillais painting of Ophelia floating in a pond. Now why have they chosen a recreation of this painting of Ophelia to depict this dead woman? She was not happy necessarily in her lesbian relationship because obviously this is post World War II and that was not accepted by society. And indeed someone had been trying to drive her out of the school where she was working. So showing her as Ophelia could be short-hand for the fact that it comes out that she has committed suicide. Therefore she is not one of the murders that the child could have been referring to and that’s the most obvious explanation. There could be a couple of other things. When we look back on Ophelia in Hamlet she’s considered to be a foil for Hamlet and her brother Laertes. Here is this lesbian relationship which, although it ended unhappily, included two women who did love and respect one another. Perhaps these women are a foil for the terrible love relationships that permeate this story. Whether or not they’re secret, or whether or not they are not real and they lead to murder. There’s also a moment at the end where one of the murderers attempts to force someone else into a faux-poetic suicide. Those are the more interesting but less likely interpretations for why she was laid out like that in the flashback.

 I know I said I was speaking more to the adaptation than the source material but I have to say as an aside that Agatha Christie used lesbians a lot in her plots and I never got the impression that she was condemning them. But there were a few murders that took place, and this is in Poirot and Miss Marple stories, because society did not accept lesbians and they were trying to hide their relationship. This is not one of those cases: this is a simple suicide as far as we know and it’s very sad.

 Another thing going back to this being an adaptation that’s fun to think about is that you get two feature length version of this story in modern times. One is this Mark Gatiss version, and the other one is the Kenneth Branagh version which became A Haunting in Venice which went to theaters and couldn’t be more different from this story. If you didn’t know that they had the same framework, and if you didn’t have the detective with the ridiculous mustache, you might never guess that they were the same story. So that’s the great thing about adaptations as far as I’m concerned. Nobody is going to match Agatha Christie, but there are infinite possibilities for reworkings of her plots. If you love mystery, that’s a good thing, a guarantee we’re never going to be without something to watch.

 Maybe the only other thing I noticed about this episode while rewatching for the Nth time last night was that Poirot seems to be using a lot more French and forgetting his English. I don’t know if it’s because he’s getting older and he’s going back to thinking more in French or whether he doesn’t have Hastings running around to help him speak to people as in the early episodes. In this episode he’s mostly alone talking to everyone because Oliver is sick in bed. Maybe it’s simply that he had never really learned English all that well and in the early episodes they often made comedic moments out of him having an idiom wrong. But at this time it’s him going “how do you say” and speaking a sentence in English and then ending in something like ‘n’est-ce pas”  which means “isn’t that true.” Or he could be pretending not to be speaking English very well because he’s trying to throw off guard the almost overwhelmingly deceptive residents of this sort of isolated village. 

As I said, the village is very green, it’s very small, and we see only a limited amount of it. Despite the country setting it feels very claustrophobic. There are no establishing shots of a bustling little village. But maybe this is to highlight a certain location. One of the main locations and you could say characters in the story is a huge garden that one of the suspects is restoring. Maybe you’re thinking of a garden like out in your yard with flowers but this is a garden in a stately home with all these hedges that are made into shapes. You could get lost in there or you could hide a body. Even Poirot asks point blank why this garden has so much effort put into it and yet there are no visitors looking around.

The gardener seems to have some pagan leanings, but he’s probably just using that to cover up the fact that he’s a crazy asshole, spouting garbage about the moon. Maybe he wants us to think he’s the Green Man, but he’s just a mean man. I thought the pagan aspects of this story could have been emphasized more. I thought the Snapdragon game with the chanting snip snap at the beginning sounded pagan, and of course I’ve left out the best character in the show: an old lady who claims to be a witch who says she can read tea leaves, and then proceeds to spill all the tea that allows Poirot to prove that one of the children saw a murder in the first place.

I don’t think I like this speech-to-text method yet. I would have to learn to speak more concisely. If there’s one thing I’m learning from podcasting and speech-to-text, it is how scattered my thoughts are. This is going to be a learning opportunity. But I’ll have to leave it here because my body is saying that’s enough typing for now. If you have taken the time to read through this, I thank you, and I’ll see you in the next post.