'Towards Zero' Finally Has One (1) Murder in Episode 2
Inspector Leach (Matthew Rhys) survived his fall from the Devon sea cliffs at the end of Towards Zero’s premiere. As there were no dead bodies in the first episode, the cliffhanger of the depressed, alcoholic police officer trying to kill himself seemed like it would be the only death in the first hour of the miniseries adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel. The only witness to his attempted suicide was Sylvia (Grace Doherty), the accused pickpocket and ward of the respectable lawyer Mr. Treves (Clarke Peters). She rushes over to Leach’s washed-up body on the beach, and he tries to scare her into telling no one about what he just tried to do.
When the series aired in the UK last month, some viewers spoke out against the absence of murder in the first ninety minutes of a three-hour series. In fairness to Towards Zero, Christie’s novel has a much longer “start to corpse” time than some of her other books – plus, the rushed conventions of today’s detective fiction TV may mean the average telly viewer finds even the typical amount of Agatha Christie build-up too tedious.
However, it doesn’t excuse some of the more troubling adaptation choices made by screenwriter Rachel Bennette, like amplifying the darkest and most sordid elements in and around Christie’s text, inadvertently sidelining her puzzle mystery structure in the process.
