The miniseries’ focus is less on elegant plotting and more on a gothic sense of paranoia Her And Then There Were None is a puzzle-box mystery with a fiendishly complex plot and murders so remote and so bloodless they barely register as murders. You don’t read Christie to be thrilled you read Christie to work out a set of logic problems. The author has no time to waste on establishing a gloomy, gothic murder house when she can simply say the house is perfectly normal and get to work planting clues and red herrings. Christie’s And Then There Were None is distinctive for the coolness of its atmosphere and the intricacy of its plotting. It’s a telling change, and it speaks to the larger difference between the source material and the show.
The motive of the island killer, meanwhile, becomes far more opaque: Surely these victims are not beyond the reach of the law? Instead, we are left with characters who know themselves unquestionably to be killers, and we are shown the murders in gory detail. The sense of remove that allows Christie’s characters to smugly imagine themselves innocent is gone. The police officer beats the prisoner to death in his cell. In Lifetime's miniseries, the murders are almost uniformly bloody and violent and direct. "But it didn’t seem like that at the time." The allegations against these characters are unquestionably morally evil, but they are not murders in the legal sense of the term. "I suppose, in a way, it was murder," one character says. A mercenary abandons his guides in the East African bush with no food or water. A police officer submits false evidence to sentence an innocent man to hard labor, which kills him. That they were not and could not be prosecuted or otherwise punished for their actions is what motivates each killer to take justice into his or her own hands.Ī general sends his man on a mission to certain death. In Christie’s novel, the murder each character is accused of is a kind of bloodless murder by proxy, a murder that is outside of the reach of the law. Mammoth Screen Lifetime's adaptation recasts the novel's murders by proxy as explicit, blood-soaked crimes (The poem, riddled with racial slurs in its original printing, is now called "Ten Little Soldier Boys.")īut Lifetime's adaptation makes a couple of major changes to Christie's original tale, resulting in a work that ignores what made the novel such a masterpiece while striking out on its own as terrifically entertaining TV. In an eerie touch, the murders of the 10 strangers follow the form of the nursery rhyme hung in each room. Prior to arriving on the island, each was somehow involved in the death of another person, seemingly without consequence - and one by one they are all picked off. At first most characters maintain their innocence, but one by one we learn that their guilt is undeniable. Ten strangers arrive on a mysterious island at the invitation of an unknown host, only to find themselves accused of murder. The plot, to be sure, is more or less the same. It also has little in common with its source material.
#Agatha christie and then there were none tv
Lifetime's And Then There Were None, a TV adaptation of the famous Agatha Christie novel airing in two parts on March 13 and 14, is enormous fun: a lush, lurid, gothic fantasy of a murder mystery. Light spoilers follow, but the identity of the killer is not revealed.
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