Agatha Christie's Poirot: Death in the Clouds

January 26, 2022 9:53 AM - Season 4, Episode 2

While Poirot sleeps on an airplane flight from Paris to London, a notorious French moneylender is murdered with a poisoned dart.
posted by Carillon (3 comments total)

All-in-all I thought this was a solid episode, I enjoyed Poirot's annoyance of being connected as a possible suspect due to the blow gun. As well it's always nice to see him just bulldoze into an investigation and other people act like who's this guy. The dentist's coat/steward trick is nice touch too.
posted by Carillon at 9:55 AM on January 26, 2022

This is the one with the miniature blow-pipe! Christie later wrote, via her alter ego Ariadne Oliver:

"That's where I made a blowpipe a foot long and it's really six feet. Ridiculous that a blowpipe should be that size, but someone wrote from a museum to tell me so. Sometimes I think there are people who only read books in the hope of finding mistakes in them."

(From Mrs McGinty's Dead.)
posted by cyanistes at 12:51 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

This was the best one yet! I fell for all the red herrings. Well I knew that the mysterious daughter was a double and I even went back and checked the maid in her first scene and I swear she had a double chin then. I knew the empty matchbox was A Clue but then I decided the poison dart could’ve been conveyed via the cigarette holder of (former actress) Lady Horbury…somehow.

OTOH, why commit the murder in a closed setting when he could’ve easily pushed her under a bus once the plane landed. Still, I like the longer episodes with more misleading details and a larger cast. But it did bug me that they kept calling that one guy an archeologist when he was an anthropologist.

Favorite bit: the mystery author who claimed his character wrote the stories. Very meta.

Also, Poirot got off that first flight carrying two walking sticks (the usual silver and the monocular headed one) and an umbrella.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:09 PM on January 27, 2022