#towards zero

TOWARDS ZERO trailer Based on the novel by Agatha Christie

Coming March 2 2025 on BBC One and BBC iPlayer!

AGATHA CHRISTIE'S MARPLE (2004 - 2013) Season 3, Episode 3: Towards Zero

What I wouldn’t give to be doing this to the man of my dreams 💭 💭💭

The deliciously hairy Oliver Jackson Cohen 🥵💜🙏

What a man 🥵💜 So jealous right now ⬇️

One thing I love about Christie is her incredibly pithy lines and her often humorous but incisive observations about human emotion and behavior. Are there any of those that have stuck with you over the years?

ooooh. This is a good question, and one I don't think I should think about too hard, because then I'll massively overthink it.

I think my favorite might be Towards Zero. Stat to finish, just ten out of ten with the setting, the set-up, the strange family dynamics (I love reading about family dynamics, probably a big reason why I love christie so much.) Fantastic puzzle-box, a solution that was so obvious I should have seen it coming, but so well presented and well-hidden that I didn't. It's B-Squad since it doesn't feature any of her most famous detectives, and I don't think that's fair.

I do love a pithy Christie one liner. I think my favorite from Poirot is probably "Two people rarely see the same thing." That's such a through-line through in his stories: people pick up on different details, and perceive details differently, depending on what sort of person they are. Like in Cards on the Table, where the mystery is built around how every participant notices vastly different things about the room, the card game, each other.

And for Marple - she talks about thinking and reasoning in such an interesting way -

"You're laughing, my dear," said Miss Marple, "but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It's really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without have to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before. You catch my meaning, vicar?" "Yes," I said slowly, "I think I do. You mean that if a thing reminds you of something else — well, it's probably the same kind of thing."

I think about that a lot. Marple is a lot more associative than Poirot, she's aware there are different types of people, and people in similar circumstances act in similar ways. I love when she'll notice someone acting a certain way in a very low-stakes situation... which tells her that they'll act that same way given a high-stakes situation.