I can’t say the same for the adventures of the mostly absent Miss Marple.Ĭameron: Plot-heavy, character-thin? Sounds like a mystery novel to me, and we are after all dealing with the queen of mystery herself, Agatha Christie. I would have happily watched an entire episode of them being quietly charming together and debating on whether or not to chuck Mary and her literal interpretation of a rock cake. The vicar and his wife, along with Mary, saved the episode for me. It only really came alive when the women of the village gathered together for a spot of tea and gossip about their neighbor’s close encounter with cannibals, or when the sweet Clements were onscreen. Focusing more on the mystery than the characters is a problem that plagues many shows in the detective genre, but it can be made less glaring if the plot is engaging, and most of this episode simply wasn’t. This goes double for the victim, the odious-because-they-said-so Colonel Protheroe. The episode had plot to spare, what with Lettice’s parentage issues, Ann’s affair and Mary’s petulant maid routine, but it was difficult to care about any of it because the episode never bothered to establish who any of the characters were as people. The biggest problem I had with “Murder at the Vicarage” wasn’t Miss Marple’s near magical powers of deduction, it was the utter lack of character work. It can’t be easy trying to infuse life into a character that is so thinly drawn, but she managed it ably. To her credit, Joan Hickson did a wonderful job with the role. I’m going to have to concur with the randomly pregnant Mrs. I’m all for competent female leads, but I’m just saying, the woman gathered quite a lot of information from simply standing in her garden and glancing at the Vicar’s desk for a moment before the detectives arrived. She popped up quite infrequently for a woman whose name is in the title of the series.įrom what I gathered, she was basically an older, even more grandmotherly version of Jessica Fletcher, with less personality, who specializes in sleuthing from afar. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Agatha Christie’s canon begins and ends with the season four Doctor Who episode, “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” so I spent the majority of “Murder at the Vicarage” trying to figure out who exactly Miss Marple was.
Sabienna: Watching Miss Marple, I couldn’t help but wonder if it would play better if I was at all familiar with the source material. Series 2, Episode 2: “Murder at the Vicarage”
Roundtable Review: Miss Marple, “Murder at the Vicarage”īy Sabienna Bowman, Les Chappell, and Cameron White
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