Category: mystery show

Summary: The new U. S. Ambassador to Britain confides to the Beresfords that on the voyage there someone substituted another travel bag for his, a bag that only contained his boots.

Self, you may go back to this blog some years hence (if the code rot hasn’t claimed it yet!) and say ‘strange, there was an unusually long period between updates and then all at once one day!’ and this episode is why. There’s a scene where one of Tuppence’s friends is wearing a lovely suit and calling the others ‘chums’ and all that and despite some eugenics issues (sigh) it’s generally a delightful character moment and you were like ‘oh I NEED to get a screencapture of that’ and you never did and then it was a whole month later?

Anyway, that’s what happened. And you liked this episode. Except for the part where you knew it was a fake out at one part but for some reason the acting made it seem like it was Albert’s scheme to get noticed by his bosses, not someone else’s scheme.

Had a devil of a time with this episode in that I suddenly could not figure out what anyone was saying. I had to turn on subtitles, which really helped.

So anyway, a good mystery! And not just because someone got murdered. I mean, theft mysteries are good too…

I like the mysteries where they seek it out themselves just to, well, do something because that’s rather novel and when Tuppence gets to shine because she is delightful. I sadly do not have any pictures to share of her outfits which included a marvelous purple cloche and her dressed up as Sherlock Holmes for a masquerade ball.

I have to admit some cultural references were lost on me, I’m not sure what a man dressed up in newspaper has to do with Alice in Wonderland but I really should read that book sometime and not just rely on the Disney cartoon.

There’s a lovely bit in here where Tuppence is trying to dig for info about women who cheat on their husbands and Tommy is just happily saying Tuppence is his best friend (as for why she can’t cheat on him with his best friend). Watch her, Tommy. She’s creative.

Also genuinely upset by murder and death in this episode, which is a change from how mysteries usually go where it’s all a sort of delighted ‘oh a puzzle!’. That said, it was sad seeing Tuppence so sad and shaken.

The premise of this episode was that it was a ‘house seems to be haunted – Tommy and Tuppence prove it’s not!’ except that at no point did anyone think it was haunted and the victim identified who was actually the source of her problems in her interview with the detectives and they immediately pegged the rest. And then the rest of it was solved with a riddle that they just kind of plowed through.

There WAS an adventure part of the episode I liked, where Tommy and Tuppence nearly get shot to death, but alas, I hope the book this episode was based off of is more mystery-ish than this episode. I’m still planning on reading them, after all!

There was also a deeply clever moment where to deter people spying on her, Tuppence gets the man who just pointed where the macguffin was to start pointing where the sun rises, the sun sets, and some other thing and the spyers are like ‘what the hell is going on’. Anyway, I liked that bit. Good bit.