'Towards Zero's Finale Is Best as The Matthew Rhys Mystery Hour

Credit to Towards Zero, a good murder mystery solution should feel, in retrospect, inevitable, even if we didn’t necessarily see them coming. Granted, the small number of suspects in Towards Zero meant that the grand reveal of Neville Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as the killer was pretty likely. Purely numerically, only Neville, Audrey, Kay, or Thomas were serious suspects, and Neville had the worst vibes throughout. 

The final episode does a good job of temporarily diverting suspicion away from Neville when Inspector Leach (Matthew Rhys) realizes that the evidence pointing to Neville – his recovered jacket, golf club, and cufflink near to the murders – is likely an attempt to frame him, only for the rug to be pulled out from under us with the realization that Neville was trying to frame Audrey as framing him for the murders. 

Neville did the gruesome deeds in a manner that would result in Audrey being convicted and hanged on a mega-public stage, all as revenge for humiliating him via divorce. This was the “point zero” – Audrey planting Kay’s compact in the car that was discovered by a footman and became key evidence in securing favorable divorce terms for Audrey. It appears everyone involved in this is at least a little off their rockers.

We’ll backtrack to the beginning of the hour: Treves has been murdered, which casts doubt on exposed manservant Matthew Hutton (Adam Hugill), currently in custody, being responsible for Lady Tressilian’s death. Sylvia discovers the body, but her shocked reaction is not played for intimate emotion; rather, it serves as a lead-in to the title sequence – a questionable move in a series that has already neglected fleshing out its characters’ inner worlds. Leach is furious that Sylvia has been robbed of a guardian, and locks all the suspects in the drawing room to let them stew – as he suspected, tensions flair and whispered accusations fly about. 

Mary shares doubt about Thomas, Audrey shares doubt about Neville, giving him an alibi for Treves’ murder, and then later backtracks on it. There’s a lot of detective work for Leach and his colleagues, which might be why the final episode is the most pacey and entertaining, even if writer Rachel Bennette and director Sam Yates’ desire to make Neville a titanic, ominous presence in the story pushes every other suspect and victim to the sidelines.

For one refreshing and overdue hour, Towards Zero is the Matthew Rhys show. When Leach realizes that the careful array of Neville-oriented evidence means he’s being framed, the fact that everyone hates his guts becomes material evidence. Neville is adamant that Thomas is delusional, claiming that corrective school messed up his head, and the attempted blackmail against Lady Tressilian is a good indication of malicious intent. Ultimately, no one cares about poor Peter James: Thomas didn’t get much closure, and whether or not Neville intentionally killed the boy fifteen years prior, the point is that getting away with it went to his head.

Perfume on the pillow that smothered Treves and make-up on Neville’s jacket found near Lady Tressilian point to Audrey. Is she setting him up? Could Neville and Audrey have collaborated? He had an alibi for the first murder, and she is his alibi for the second. But if they collaborated on the twin murders, why would she retract her alibi for Neville during Treves’ murder if he could pin Camilla’s on her? 

Another slightly confused red herring comes when Sylvia leads Leach to a rope and grappling hook, which leads him to a broken stone corner at Gull’s Point house. Maybe it was made to look like an inside job, but in fact, the murderer was helped inside? Leach suspects that Kay, Louis and Matthew were working together – but his interrogation of Kay, revealing that she accidentally fell in love with the man she was meant to swindle, only highlights that Kay has been short-changed by the Neville-heavy story thus far, pushing her and Louis to the sidelines to react to bigger plot points rather than influence them.

Here’s where the clues take shape into a graspable theory. Sylvia has nicked Audrey’s compact and tells Leach she got it from her vanity case that morning, when Audrey had been telling people it went missing two days ago. Is she lying? Or did someone take it and then replace it in its proper place? Why would they do this? Well, when the crime lab determines that the powder on Neville’s recovered jacket was in fact Audrey’s and discovers the compact somewhere she claimed it wasn’t, then she’d look like a prime suspect. 

Across long tennis volleys, Leach teases out the solution like he’s auditioning for Poirot. He notices Neville’s twinged shoulder and remembers Mrs Barrett’s fawning scrapbook of Neville’s lifetime of achievements – including being a champion swimmer. Leach surmises that during the 45 minutes Neville was unaccounted for on the night of Lady Tressilian’s murder, Neville swam back to Gull’s Point from the hotel, killed the Lady, and swam back, injuring his shoulder in the process. After Hutton’s arrest, he then killed Treves to turn the police’s focus back to the inhabitants of Gull’s Point – and hopefully the clues that Audrey was framing him.

It’s the type of implausible and unpredictable conspiracy that would delight an audience if Towards Zero were lighter on its feet, perhaps made to be more playful and snappy, but the gruelling pain that infects nearly every scene dulls down the glee that Christie’s puzzle solution could have provided.

Audrey screams and wails at Neville when she learns the truth, and seeing her agony, Neville confesses, even though no jury would buy the convoluted narrative we’ve just been told. Things wrap up with a blend of depression and hope: Hutton and Audrey leave Gull’s Point, reflecting on the problematic and unwelcome ways they have been pulled into this cursed family, and Mary bids her pen pal Thomas goodbye, now set on travelling with her new inheritance. In case you didn’t see it coming from their first scene together, Inspector Leach decides to adopt Sylvia – they’ve got their fair share of issues, but they are among the most normal people that have populated this compromised series.

All three episodes of Towards Zero are streaming on BritBox. A new Agatha Christie adaptation is expected to follow in 2026.