I didn't find this particularly boring. None of the episodes are exactly action packed and the story itself is no more convoluted than usual. The plot lacks the panache of "And Then There Were None" and "Murder on the Orient Express" but then all of these hour-long episodes do.
The photography is especially colorful. You've never seen so many flowers. They gang up on you and overwhelm you as you wander through the xyst. My capacity for admiring them more or less leans on the memory of a lone forsythia in the back yard, an explosion of canary yellow amid the shingles and ashes, signifying that the end of the school year was on its way. In another climate, I managed to grow a sprig of jasmine and it was a transport to another world entirely, much an improvement over the hospital I worked in, where the occasional dead body emitted a dusky aroma of intestinal gas that stained the air of the whole wing.
The plot is full of holes. Are oysters so bitter that they can mask the taste of strychnine? Why doesn't the aristocratic Russian maid run to the police instead of the church? How did the old lady's nephew come to have access to her investments -- or did he? What's the point of the Soviet consul telling Poirot that "popular fiction" was the "opiate of the masses"? How was the detective able to make the fantastic intuitive leap from a flower named "Catherine the Great" to the name of the maid -- "Katrina" -- and what does it have to do with solving the mystery? (And I think it's "Ekaterina".) Nice touch: The old lady's solicitor is unable by law to tell Poirot who inherits the estate but he does so in code, by judging a horse race or a dressage contest or something.
Humorous running gag: Poor Hastings, housebound with allergies, trying to cope with Miss Lemon's unfathomable filing system in order to pay a bill.
The photography is especially colorful. You've never seen so many flowers. They gang up on you and overwhelm you as you wander through the xyst. My capacity for admiring them more or less leans on the memory of a lone forsythia in the back yard, an explosion of canary yellow amid the shingles and ashes, signifying that the end of the school year was on its way. In another climate, I managed to grow a sprig of jasmine and it was a transport to another world entirely, much an improvement over the hospital I worked in, where the occasional dead body emitted a dusky aroma of intestinal gas that stained the air of the whole wing.
The plot is full of holes. Are oysters so bitter that they can mask the taste of strychnine? Why doesn't the aristocratic Russian maid run to the police instead of the church? How did the old lady's nephew come to have access to her investments -- or did he? What's the point of the Soviet consul telling Poirot that "popular fiction" was the "opiate of the masses"? How was the detective able to make the fantastic intuitive leap from a flower named "Catherine the Great" to the name of the maid -- "Katrina" -- and what does it have to do with solving the mystery? (And I think it's "Ekaterina".) Nice touch: The old lady's solicitor is unable by law to tell Poirot who inherits the estate but he does so in code, by judging a horse race or a dressage contest or something.
Humorous running gag: Poor Hastings, housebound with allergies, trying to cope with Miss Lemon's unfathomable filing system in order to pay a bill.