Appointment with Death

by Courtney Hilden

Appointment with Death follows Poirot as he travels to the so-called "Middle East" to see a dig of an ancient city, where a Biblical character is said to be buried.  As always, there's murder in store when the archeologist's wife, who supplies him with the financial resources to dig, turns up dead at the site.  As always, Poirot is on the case, and, as always, there are several red herrings to distract everyone from the crime at hand. 
Poirot, like all great detectives, is all about the details, and in this outing the show itself was all about the details. Poirot, for example, was doing things in style, using an interesting cane device with a built-in binocular that allowed him to see things in the distance.  Some of the details were even creepy, like one man referring to his much younger fiance as his "child bride."  The first victim's unshuttable eyes were also a nice detail, as they emphasized how horrifying her death was.  Even Poirot himself was a little creepy, telling someone that his "gray cells" were "singing" to him while he was trying to solve the case. 

Some of details were also pertinent to the place.  They made a point at depicting the call to prayer, and then later showed a group of local men praying.  It's nice, given that this story is almost chiefly about British characters, that the show's producers and director and creators remembered to show that they are not the only ones around, although almost none of these "Arabs" (a word that is itself very troubling) had speaking parts in the story.  They're more like set pieces, in someways, much like Wedgwood plates and Edwardian furniture in those houses that Poirot so frequently inhabits.   
Speaking of faith, just as is Murder on the Orient Express, this episode emphasized Poirot's Catholic faith.  One of the villains of the story was masquerading as a nun, but Poirot stayed with his faith, even passing it on to one of the ultimate victims of the story, the four children who were brutally abused by the the first murdered victim.  It's too bad that the child abuse aspect of the story was kept at such a minimum, since it was the most interesting and depressing part of the story.