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girlofpreyI'm still bored, so I've decided to make a post I was kind of looking forward to making when I was doing pairing picspams, before I decided to stop doing that. During one of my non-pairing or non-visual fandom weeks, I was going to do one of my new pairings (now nearly a year old, aww) of Miss Marple and the killer from The Pale Horse. I realise that this is a visual fandom, however to the best of my knowledge the episode isn't available on DVD yet, and won't be in the near future, so I can't do screencaps. However, someone who is a fan of the actor who played the killer has put all or most of their bits up on Youtube. Which are what I'm going to try to embed here, along with some typing obviously. So without further ado:
So. Right. You will probably all know who Miss Marple is, she's Agatha Christie's famous old lady detective. Since 2004 ITV have been making TV adaptations of the Miss Marple novels, and some stories that weren't Miss Marple novels, but which have been adapted and rewritten to have Miss Marple in them. Anyway, the idea is basically the same, she's a little old lady who's generally a lot sharper and better at reading people than most of the policemen she runs into, who often gets involved in solving murders. She was played first by Geraldine McEwan, and then by Julia McKenzie. In my opinion Geraldine McEwan was better, but Julia McKenzie has a slightly broader appeal maybe. Though Julia McKenzie is still very good. And Julia McKenzie is who plays Miss Marple in The Pale Horse.
The Pale Horse was apparently one of the novels that didn't have Miss Marple in, but it's been adapted so that she is. Largely by adding in something you don't see in most of the Miss Marple adaptations: she gets involved in this set of murders because a friend of hers, a priest, is murdered apparently in an attempt to cover the rest of the murders up. So her involvement, usually only as a curious outside party and a sleuth, is almost immediately personal.
A thing we do often see in the Miss Marple adaptations though is that Miss Marple often has a young male sort of assistant who follows her around and helps her out. In the earliest adaptations this was usually a police detective who found himself sort of following her lead. Sometimes it's her nephew, a (crime) novelist. Sometimes it's just a random bystander. In The Pale Horse, it ends up being a young man she talks to while investigating the death of her friend the priest. The priest was visiting a woman on her deathbed on the night he died, he took her confession, then left the house and either called Jane Marple or wrote her a letter, then on his way back home was clubbed to death on the street. Miss Marple goes to the house where the woman lived, and ends up talking to another tenant who lives there, a young man named Paul Osborne. He's a chemist, and a very nice and friendly young man, and he happened to see someone on the street, just standing around, before the priest left and was killed.
And it's quite a complicated set of events, really. The woman the priest was visiting was a sort of surveyor woman, she worked for a small company going round to people's houses and finding out what kind of products they use, cosmetics and things. Then she starts acting a little oddly, and talking about sins and things to her landlady. Then she suddenly gets ill, some disease that's seems like the flu but also caused her hair to fall out. And then on her deathbed she called for a priest, confessed something to him, and he got killed shortly afterward. Either the priest sent Miss Marple a list of names that was somehow involved in the confession, or Miss Marple finds a list while she's searching the woman's rooms. My memory's a little patchy, since I can't rewatch the episode. But an investigation into the list of names reveals that a lot of them have died as well, also of a mysterious illness that seemed like the flu but caused there hair to fall out. And it turns out that in a lot of these situations there was some sort of dispute involving the person who died, often to do with money. Which, when the people died, was quite nicely cleared up for whoever survived.
Some more investigation into this leads Miss Marple to a rather shady business run by a corrupt ex-barrister, where you can "lay bets" on how long certain people you know will survive. The man explains that you can place a bet on anything, such as when a certain family relative will die. You set a date, and if they haven't died by then you either don't have to pay any money, or the company pays you money. But if they have died by then, you have to pay the company. It took me forever to realise what that was about, and that basically it was a covert way of paying for the murder of people you know and want out of the way. But anyway, Miss Marple or whoever goes on her behalf feigns an interest, and gets directed to a pub called The Pale Horse in a small village somewhere in the countryside. Miss Marple goes, and goes to stay at the Pale Horse, and finds out from the visitor's book that a lot of the people related to people from the list of names she got, have stayed at The Pale Horse in the last year. And the pub itself is supposedly run by three witches. And there's a man in the village who matches the description of the man Paul Osborne saw on the street outside the surveyor woman's house just before Miss Marple's friend was killed. Except that the man Miss Marple sees is confined to a wheelchair, and Paul Osborne said he saw him standing up. Curiouser and curiouser.
Anyway, it turns out that the witches who run the pub are offering supernatural assassinations on the side. You go to them, give them the name of whoever you want killed, and they perform a ritual asking demons or spirits to kill them, and then shortly afterwards the person gets sick and dies. And there are a number of people staying in the village, or at the pub, who are acting a little bit oddly. And then one of them suddenly dies, horribly and in a fairly unusual way. Miss Marple talks to Paul Osborne again, and he confirms that the person he saw was the man in the wheelchair, but doesn't know how he could have seen him standing when he is apparently crippled with polio.
Miss Marple also makes friends with a couple of young people in the village though, two of whom basically agree to pretend to be a couple, then pretend to argue, so the young man can go to the witches and ask for her to be killed, so they can see what the ritual is and observe what happens to the young woman afterwards. And Miss Marple calls up Paul Osborne and gets him to come watch the man in the wheelchair's house with her, because she's thought of a way Paul could have seen him standing up. The man goes to see a doctor in London for treatment or check-ups on his polio, so it's not someone who lives near him or knows him personally. So he might well have just sent someone else, claiming to be him, in his place, so he could get a polio diagnosis and thus be ruled out possibly committing any of the crimes. And sure enough, as she and Paul watch, they see the man, through the window of his house, stand up out of his wheelchair and draw some curtains.
So the next day Miss Marple gathers all the people involved in the village, and the witches, and the man in the wheelchair, and Paul Osborne, and the police together, to reveal what's been going on.
SPOILER
And some of you may have already guessed by now that it was actually Paul Osborne. The victims of the murders have all been killed by Thallium poisoning, rather than anything supernatural. What happened was that people who wanted someone killed went to the company that offered to "lay a bet" for them and paid and gave the name of the person they wanted killed, then they got sent to The Pale Horse to have the witches do the ritual and give the name of the person they wanted killed again. Then Paul Osborne, who was actually running the company that employed the surveyor woman, found out where the person who was supposed to be killed was living, sent out the surveyor woman to that area to get people to fill in surveys on what cosmetic products they used. Then Paul Osborne would find out from the surveys what cosmetics the person who was supposed to be killed used, bought one of the products and added a lethal amount of Thallium, which I guess can be absorbed through the skin, and then went round to the person's house pretending to be there to read their gas meter, and while he was in the house switched one of their products for the poisoned one. They used it, and then they eventually succumbed to the poisoning, and seemingly got sick and died.
It's hard to say when Miss Marple figured it all out, but it was definitely before the reveal, as she actually set up the whole thing with the man in the wheelchair seeming to get up from his wheelchair. It was actually a policeman, only seen from the shadows, who'd got up and closed the curtains. The man in the wheelchair genuinely was crippled with polio, so it was impossible for him to have been on the street when Paul Osborne claimed he saw him, which meant Paul Osborne must have been lying. But the description he gave of the man was so exact, it meant he must have seen him before, probably driving a car or doing something where Paul didn't realise he was usually in a wheelchair. Which suggested Paul had definitely been to the village where The Pale Horse pub was before, increasing his link to the suspicious events and murders. Also, Miss Marple had done some digging on Paul Osborne, and she had a feeling he was the same Paul Osborne who'd poisoned his stepfather to death when he was 12. Being too young for the death penalty, they'd just put him in jail until he was 18, then released him saying he'd been rehabilitated. Except he hadn't been rehabilitated so much, obviously. If anything, he was more of a murderer than ever.
So. The scenes. These are all of the ones on Youtube, in the order they happen in the programme (from what I remember). I hope they embed.
This is the first scene, where Miss Marple meets Paul Osbourne and talks to him about the night of the murder.
When I first watched it, he seemed so clean-cut, I got the feeling he was going to be her young male companion for the programme, but it seemed like they'd sort of overegged the pudding a bit, making him so sweet. But watching it back, of course, the fact that it seems a bit false makes a little bit more sense. Also, I like how happy he is to give her the information that he'd given to the police, but not overeager, and he doesn't get overinterested in the list of names. I don't know.
The next scene is almost immediately after that one, when he, at her request, accompanies her to the spot where her friend died.
Again, it seemed like such a friendly gesture at the time, and maybe it sort of was. Not friendly, but she asked him to, and he didn't really care enough to see a problem with it, so he went with her. Along with the vague beginning of respect for, or understanding of, her.
The next scene on Youtube is the one where he and Miss Marple go to the man in the wheelchair's house, to spy on him, and as I've said, it's mostly for Paul's benefit.
ETA: Which I now seem able to imbed, so here it is:
Again, it's so weird, but so good, because I think he genuinely was fooling Miss Marple, up to a point, in the first two scenes, at least up to the idea of him being a nice young man. But here she's pretty much figured it out, and she's fooling him instead. While he's still keeping up his act, and she's keeping up hers. Feeding him a fairly preposterous tale, that he must know would mean he was very lucky if it was true, given that he made up the man in the wheelchair's involvement out of thin air, and yet he still goes along with it. And there they are, hiding behind garden ornaments and still talking about solving the crime and exposing the man in the wheelchair together.
And the next scene is the reveal, starting from when Paul is involved in it, I think. It's longer than the others, and kind of amazing. ETA: And like the previous one it can be embedded now, so here it is:
And yeah. There's not much to add to that. I love how Miss Marple just sort of springs it on him. And how he gets progressively angrier and loses his accent more and more as the scene goes on. And how he was apparently, according to Miss Marple, the brains behind this whole - quite elaborate - operation, and yet apparently as soon as the police and Miss Marple got involved, he started going crazy and making things up and poisoning people left, right and centre. It possibly strains the boundaries of characterisation, but it's sort of interesting, the idea that he could be that intelligent and devious, but also not quite clever enough to understand that other people - especially intelligent other people - might be able to see what he's doing. And his continuing refusal to believe that they really do know what's going on, even though they've totally said it, until they've explained each and every detail of what they did and bit of evidence against him. And then finally he has to be dragged out of the room, swearing revenge on them all. Okay, Paul Osborne. Okay.
And now, why I like them. Well. I don't quite know. When I watched the programme, it really came out of the blue for me that Paul was the killer. It's probably the last Miss Marple programme I watched where I didn't quite guess the killer before the reveal. And then I was just really pleased with the way they had, seemingly, turned the whole thing I'd noticed with Miss Marple's Young Male Companions on it's head. Even so, I was still kind of suprised to be suddenly shipping an old lady detective with a young calculating psychopath. But I just found myself really interested in it, and the way it was so different from all the other Miss Marple adaptations. Again, with the fact that her helpful Young Male Companion didn't turn out to be a helpful Young Male Companion at all. With the fact that Miss Marple was up against a proper psychopath, which I don't think she'd been up against really before. Most of the other murders she investigates always seemed to be personal, or for financial gain at least. Not someone who was basically a serial killer, or an assassin at the very least. And Paul did seem to be a proper psychopath, given that he'd killed his stepfather when he was 12. But then even that, the fact that it was a stepfather, and not a proper family member. Maybe they just didn't want to make him that evil, but Miss Marple claimed Paul did it out of "a greed for money and a propensity for wickedness", but we don't actually know what happened in that situation, and why he did it. I'm not saying we can assume he had GOOD VALID REASONS for killing his stepfather, but we don't really know for sure what did happen.
And then there's the fact, as I've said, that Miss Marple is personally involved in the case. And not just a friend asking her to investigate or something. A friend of hers was murdered, and at some point she came to realise that the young man who seemed to be helping her had done it, and she had to keep up her act of pretending to not know he was the killer despite that. But it does eventually come out in the reveal scene, and it's something you don't often see with Miss Marple in the reveal scenes, a deep personal rage. But she kept up the pretence before that anyway. But he seemed to have her fooled to begin with. And then you get the way that their different but still pretty high levels of intelligence sort of played around each other during the investigation. However mad and slightly stupid Paul acted during the investigation, if he really was the "brains" behind that operation, he must have been pretty intelligent to come up with all of that. And apparently he's a qualified chemist, with a deep knowledge of all the chemicals he's using, obviously. And he managed to keep up the "nice young man" pretense long enough to fool the people who decided he'd been rehabilitated before, and to fool the police when they questioned him about the priest's murder. And he must have noticed enough about what was going on in the village where the pub is to know who to poison and how. And then this little old woman comes on the scene, and she's also frighteningly intelligent, enough to eventually realise what he's doing without giving away that she realises it. And he sort of sees that she's pretty smart really, but he doesn't quite see it enough, or thinks too much of himself to think that she'd be able to work him out completely. But she does. It would take an incredibly smart person to do what Paul does and avoid detection, and an incredibly smart other person to work out what he's doing and stop him. And in that way, Paul and Miss Marple are a lot more like each other than the people around them.
And then there's the reveal scene, and the real Paul comes out, furious and self-important and psychotic. And Miss Marple isn't afraid of him. Or shaken by him. Or at least, is more angry at him than shaken or afraid. And she gets to show him what she really is as well. And I don't know. I REALLY LIKE THEM.
I don't see it as a romantic pairing, obviously. I don't even genuinely think that Miss Marple gave it much thought after she'd caught him. Not least because in the proper books she never met him or caught him in the first place. But it's different enough from her usual cases for me to enjoy imagining what she thinks of him, or how she thinks of him. Especially given her apparent interest in people and how their minds work. And from Paul's perspective, being crazy and thinking so much of himself, it makes sense that he'd think a lot of her, or become a bit fixated on her one way or another, as the person who caught him. Although, I'm not convinced he'd have lived long after being caught, given that the book came out in 1961 - when I assume it was set - and apparently the death penalty wasn't abolished in Britain till 1964. Still, you can fudge that if you want, I suppose. But yeah. I don't know. I don't normally ship Miss Marple with anyone, except maybe Joanna Lumley's character when we saw her again in a recent adaptation. But I suddenly massively shipped her, in a way not unlike my usual reaction to psychopathic or serial killer characters, with Paul when I saw the programme. I really really liked Miss Marple/Paul. And I still do.
So. Right. You will probably all know who Miss Marple is, she's Agatha Christie's famous old lady detective. Since 2004 ITV have been making TV adaptations of the Miss Marple novels, and some stories that weren't Miss Marple novels, but which have been adapted and rewritten to have Miss Marple in them. Anyway, the idea is basically the same, she's a little old lady who's generally a lot sharper and better at reading people than most of the policemen she runs into, who often gets involved in solving murders. She was played first by Geraldine McEwan, and then by Julia McKenzie. In my opinion Geraldine McEwan was better, but Julia McKenzie has a slightly broader appeal maybe. Though Julia McKenzie is still very good. And Julia McKenzie is who plays Miss Marple in The Pale Horse.
The Pale Horse was apparently one of the novels that didn't have Miss Marple in, but it's been adapted so that she is. Largely by adding in something you don't see in most of the Miss Marple adaptations: she gets involved in this set of murders because a friend of hers, a priest, is murdered apparently in an attempt to cover the rest of the murders up. So her involvement, usually only as a curious outside party and a sleuth, is almost immediately personal.
A thing we do often see in the Miss Marple adaptations though is that Miss Marple often has a young male sort of assistant who follows her around and helps her out. In the earliest adaptations this was usually a police detective who found himself sort of following her lead. Sometimes it's her nephew, a (crime) novelist. Sometimes it's just a random bystander. In The Pale Horse, it ends up being a young man she talks to while investigating the death of her friend the priest. The priest was visiting a woman on her deathbed on the night he died, he took her confession, then left the house and either called Jane Marple or wrote her a letter, then on his way back home was clubbed to death on the street. Miss Marple goes to the house where the woman lived, and ends up talking to another tenant who lives there, a young man named Paul Osborne. He's a chemist, and a very nice and friendly young man, and he happened to see someone on the street, just standing around, before the priest left and was killed.
And it's quite a complicated set of events, really. The woman the priest was visiting was a sort of surveyor woman, she worked for a small company going round to people's houses and finding out what kind of products they use, cosmetics and things. Then she starts acting a little oddly, and talking about sins and things to her landlady. Then she suddenly gets ill, some disease that's seems like the flu but also caused her hair to fall out. And then on her deathbed she called for a priest, confessed something to him, and he got killed shortly afterward. Either the priest sent Miss Marple a list of names that was somehow involved in the confession, or Miss Marple finds a list while she's searching the woman's rooms. My memory's a little patchy, since I can't rewatch the episode. But an investigation into the list of names reveals that a lot of them have died as well, also of a mysterious illness that seemed like the flu but caused there hair to fall out. And it turns out that in a lot of these situations there was some sort of dispute involving the person who died, often to do with money. Which, when the people died, was quite nicely cleared up for whoever survived.
Some more investigation into this leads Miss Marple to a rather shady business run by a corrupt ex-barrister, where you can "lay bets" on how long certain people you know will survive. The man explains that you can place a bet on anything, such as when a certain family relative will die. You set a date, and if they haven't died by then you either don't have to pay any money, or the company pays you money. But if they have died by then, you have to pay the company. It took me forever to realise what that was about, and that basically it was a covert way of paying for the murder of people you know and want out of the way. But anyway, Miss Marple or whoever goes on her behalf feigns an interest, and gets directed to a pub called The Pale Horse in a small village somewhere in the countryside. Miss Marple goes, and goes to stay at the Pale Horse, and finds out from the visitor's book that a lot of the people related to people from the list of names she got, have stayed at The Pale Horse in the last year. And the pub itself is supposedly run by three witches. And there's a man in the village who matches the description of the man Paul Osborne saw on the street outside the surveyor woman's house just before Miss Marple's friend was killed. Except that the man Miss Marple sees is confined to a wheelchair, and Paul Osborne said he saw him standing up. Curiouser and curiouser.
Anyway, it turns out that the witches who run the pub are offering supernatural assassinations on the side. You go to them, give them the name of whoever you want killed, and they perform a ritual asking demons or spirits to kill them, and then shortly afterwards the person gets sick and dies. And there are a number of people staying in the village, or at the pub, who are acting a little bit oddly. And then one of them suddenly dies, horribly and in a fairly unusual way. Miss Marple talks to Paul Osborne again, and he confirms that the person he saw was the man in the wheelchair, but doesn't know how he could have seen him standing when he is apparently crippled with polio.
Miss Marple also makes friends with a couple of young people in the village though, two of whom basically agree to pretend to be a couple, then pretend to argue, so the young man can go to the witches and ask for her to be killed, so they can see what the ritual is and observe what happens to the young woman afterwards. And Miss Marple calls up Paul Osborne and gets him to come watch the man in the wheelchair's house with her, because she's thought of a way Paul could have seen him standing up. The man goes to see a doctor in London for treatment or check-ups on his polio, so it's not someone who lives near him or knows him personally. So he might well have just sent someone else, claiming to be him, in his place, so he could get a polio diagnosis and thus be ruled out possibly committing any of the crimes. And sure enough, as she and Paul watch, they see the man, through the window of his house, stand up out of his wheelchair and draw some curtains.
So the next day Miss Marple gathers all the people involved in the village, and the witches, and the man in the wheelchair, and Paul Osborne, and the police together, to reveal what's been going on.
SPOILER
And some of you may have already guessed by now that it was actually Paul Osborne. The victims of the murders have all been killed by Thallium poisoning, rather than anything supernatural. What happened was that people who wanted someone killed went to the company that offered to "lay a bet" for them and paid and gave the name of the person they wanted killed, then they got sent to The Pale Horse to have the witches do the ritual and give the name of the person they wanted killed again. Then Paul Osborne, who was actually running the company that employed the surveyor woman, found out where the person who was supposed to be killed was living, sent out the surveyor woman to that area to get people to fill in surveys on what cosmetic products they used. Then Paul Osborne would find out from the surveys what cosmetics the person who was supposed to be killed used, bought one of the products and added a lethal amount of Thallium, which I guess can be absorbed through the skin, and then went round to the person's house pretending to be there to read their gas meter, and while he was in the house switched one of their products for the poisoned one. They used it, and then they eventually succumbed to the poisoning, and seemingly got sick and died.
It's hard to say when Miss Marple figured it all out, but it was definitely before the reveal, as she actually set up the whole thing with the man in the wheelchair seeming to get up from his wheelchair. It was actually a policeman, only seen from the shadows, who'd got up and closed the curtains. The man in the wheelchair genuinely was crippled with polio, so it was impossible for him to have been on the street when Paul Osborne claimed he saw him, which meant Paul Osborne must have been lying. But the description he gave of the man was so exact, it meant he must have seen him before, probably driving a car or doing something where Paul didn't realise he was usually in a wheelchair. Which suggested Paul had definitely been to the village where The Pale Horse pub was before, increasing his link to the suspicious events and murders. Also, Miss Marple had done some digging on Paul Osborne, and she had a feeling he was the same Paul Osborne who'd poisoned his stepfather to death when he was 12. Being too young for the death penalty, they'd just put him in jail until he was 18, then released him saying he'd been rehabilitated. Except he hadn't been rehabilitated so much, obviously. If anything, he was more of a murderer than ever.
So. The scenes. These are all of the ones on Youtube, in the order they happen in the programme (from what I remember). I hope they embed.
This is the first scene, where Miss Marple meets Paul Osbourne and talks to him about the night of the murder.
When I first watched it, he seemed so clean-cut, I got the feeling he was going to be her young male companion for the programme, but it seemed like they'd sort of overegged the pudding a bit, making him so sweet. But watching it back, of course, the fact that it seems a bit false makes a little bit more sense. Also, I like how happy he is to give her the information that he'd given to the police, but not overeager, and he doesn't get overinterested in the list of names. I don't know.
The next scene is almost immediately after that one, when he, at her request, accompanies her to the spot where her friend died.
Again, it seemed like such a friendly gesture at the time, and maybe it sort of was. Not friendly, but she asked him to, and he didn't really care enough to see a problem with it, so he went with her. Along with the vague beginning of respect for, or understanding of, her.
The next scene on Youtube is the one where he and Miss Marple go to the man in the wheelchair's house, to spy on him, and as I've said, it's mostly for Paul's benefit.
ETA: Which I now seem able to imbed, so here it is:
Again, it's so weird, but so good, because I think he genuinely was fooling Miss Marple, up to a point, in the first two scenes, at least up to the idea of him being a nice young man. But here she's pretty much figured it out, and she's fooling him instead. While he's still keeping up his act, and she's keeping up hers. Feeding him a fairly preposterous tale, that he must know would mean he was very lucky if it was true, given that he made up the man in the wheelchair's involvement out of thin air, and yet he still goes along with it. And there they are, hiding behind garden ornaments and still talking about solving the crime and exposing the man in the wheelchair together.
And the next scene is the reveal, starting from when Paul is involved in it, I think. It's longer than the others, and kind of amazing. ETA: And like the previous one it can be embedded now, so here it is:
And yeah. There's not much to add to that. I love how Miss Marple just sort of springs it on him. And how he gets progressively angrier and loses his accent more and more as the scene goes on. And how he was apparently, according to Miss Marple, the brains behind this whole - quite elaborate - operation, and yet apparently as soon as the police and Miss Marple got involved, he started going crazy and making things up and poisoning people left, right and centre. It possibly strains the boundaries of characterisation, but it's sort of interesting, the idea that he could be that intelligent and devious, but also not quite clever enough to understand that other people - especially intelligent other people - might be able to see what he's doing. And his continuing refusal to believe that they really do know what's going on, even though they've totally said it, until they've explained each and every detail of what they did and bit of evidence against him. And then finally he has to be dragged out of the room, swearing revenge on them all. Okay, Paul Osborne. Okay.
And now, why I like them. Well. I don't quite know. When I watched the programme, it really came out of the blue for me that Paul was the killer. It's probably the last Miss Marple programme I watched where I didn't quite guess the killer before the reveal. And then I was just really pleased with the way they had, seemingly, turned the whole thing I'd noticed with Miss Marple's Young Male Companions on it's head. Even so, I was still kind of suprised to be suddenly shipping an old lady detective with a young calculating psychopath. But I just found myself really interested in it, and the way it was so different from all the other Miss Marple adaptations. Again, with the fact that her helpful Young Male Companion didn't turn out to be a helpful Young Male Companion at all. With the fact that Miss Marple was up against a proper psychopath, which I don't think she'd been up against really before. Most of the other murders she investigates always seemed to be personal, or for financial gain at least. Not someone who was basically a serial killer, or an assassin at the very least. And Paul did seem to be a proper psychopath, given that he'd killed his stepfather when he was 12. But then even that, the fact that it was a stepfather, and not a proper family member. Maybe they just didn't want to make him that evil, but Miss Marple claimed Paul did it out of "a greed for money and a propensity for wickedness", but we don't actually know what happened in that situation, and why he did it. I'm not saying we can assume he had GOOD VALID REASONS for killing his stepfather, but we don't really know for sure what did happen.
And then there's the fact, as I've said, that Miss Marple is personally involved in the case. And not just a friend asking her to investigate or something. A friend of hers was murdered, and at some point she came to realise that the young man who seemed to be helping her had done it, and she had to keep up her act of pretending to not know he was the killer despite that. But it does eventually come out in the reveal scene, and it's something you don't often see with Miss Marple in the reveal scenes, a deep personal rage. But she kept up the pretence before that anyway. But he seemed to have her fooled to begin with. And then you get the way that their different but still pretty high levels of intelligence sort of played around each other during the investigation. However mad and slightly stupid Paul acted during the investigation, if he really was the "brains" behind that operation, he must have been pretty intelligent to come up with all of that. And apparently he's a qualified chemist, with a deep knowledge of all the chemicals he's using, obviously. And he managed to keep up the "nice young man" pretense long enough to fool the people who decided he'd been rehabilitated before, and to fool the police when they questioned him about the priest's murder. And he must have noticed enough about what was going on in the village where the pub is to know who to poison and how. And then this little old woman comes on the scene, and she's also frighteningly intelligent, enough to eventually realise what he's doing without giving away that she realises it. And he sort of sees that she's pretty smart really, but he doesn't quite see it enough, or thinks too much of himself to think that she'd be able to work him out completely. But she does. It would take an incredibly smart person to do what Paul does and avoid detection, and an incredibly smart other person to work out what he's doing and stop him. And in that way, Paul and Miss Marple are a lot more like each other than the people around them.
And then there's the reveal scene, and the real Paul comes out, furious and self-important and psychotic. And Miss Marple isn't afraid of him. Or shaken by him. Or at least, is more angry at him than shaken or afraid. And she gets to show him what she really is as well. And I don't know. I REALLY LIKE THEM.
I don't see it as a romantic pairing, obviously. I don't even genuinely think that Miss Marple gave it much thought after she'd caught him. Not least because in the proper books she never met him or caught him in the first place. But it's different enough from her usual cases for me to enjoy imagining what she thinks of him, or how she thinks of him. Especially given her apparent interest in people and how their minds work. And from Paul's perspective, being crazy and thinking so much of himself, it makes sense that he'd think a lot of her, or become a bit fixated on her one way or another, as the person who caught him. Although, I'm not convinced he'd have lived long after being caught, given that the book came out in 1961 - when I assume it was set - and apparently the death penalty wasn't abolished in Britain till 1964. Still, you can fudge that if you want, I suppose. But yeah. I don't know. I don't normally ship Miss Marple with anyone, except maybe Joanna Lumley's character when we saw her again in a recent adaptation. But I suddenly massively shipped her, in a way not unlike my usual reaction to psychopathic or serial killer characters, with Paul when I saw the programme. I really really liked Miss Marple/Paul. And I still do.
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Date: 2011-04-25 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-25 11:15 pm (UTC)Well the episode is basically like I said above, and there's a wikipedia entry about the plot of the novel here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_Horse_(novel)). It sounds like the killer was basically the same character, and the murders that happen over the course of the book are due to poisoning, but they don't go into too much detail about the character himself or if he was supposed to have killed in his teenage years as well. It would make sense if they changed the character to be more like Graham Young though, as it says in the same article - which I read while making the post actually - that the information about thallium poisoning in the book actually helped a doctor realise what was happening to some of Young's victims. Which would make it a sort of complicated shout-out, possibly. It's a little disturbing really, but I do quite like the end product either way.