Elephants Can Remember
- Episode aired Aug 11, 2014
- TV-PG
- 1h 29m
Ariadne Oliver becomes an amateur sleuth when her goddaughter tasks her to find out the truth behind her parents' mysterious deaths.Ariadne Oliver becomes an amateur sleuth when her goddaughter tasks her to find out the truth behind her parents' mysterious deaths.Ariadne Oliver becomes an amateur sleuth when her goddaughter tasks her to find out the truth behind her parents' mysterious deaths.
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Did you know
- TriviaThe novel "Elephants Can Remember" has a subplot in the fading memories of its aged characters. By the time Agatha Christie wrote the novel, Christie herself was suffering from memory problems. A 2009 study suggested that Christie had actually lost much of the vocabulary which she had used in earlier novels, and concluded that she was likely suffering from some form of late-onset dementia, perhaps Alzheimer's disease.
- GoofsWhen the police drain the bathtub where the doctor is, you can see the actor involuntarily wiggle his mouth to keep the cloth inside it.
- Quotes
Hercule Poirot: You say they lived near to Eastbourne? You have acquaintance there? Well, then go. Allez-y, allez-y. Drive about, ask the questions, be the puzzler with the nose.
Ariadne Oliver: Oh, I see, and someone will remember something.
Hercule Poirot: Always someone remembers something.
Ariadne Oliver: You mean elephants. Sorry, I was thinking of elephants at that dinner last night.
Hercule Poirot: With hesitation, I ask why.
Ariadne Oliver: Because the meringue got stuck in my teeth.
Hercule Poirot: I see. Well, the pathway of logic, it is there somewhere, but...
Ariadne Oliver: Meringue, dentures, ivory, elephants. I must find the elephants. Elephants can remember.
Crime writer Ariadne Oliver is approached by Mrs Burton-Cox whose son is engaged to her goddaughter Celia. Her parents General and Lady Ravenscroft died 13 years earlier in what was regarded as a double murder/suicide.
Mrs Oliver recounts the tale to Poirot who asks her to investigate. Poirot is busy looking at the murder of Doctor Willoughby killed in the institute he once ran. His son also a psychiatrist in the institute is a suspect as he has no alibi, because he was sleeping with his secretary.
Poirot later discover that the Willoughby Institute once treated the sister of Lady Ravenscroft and Celia's fiance.
Elephants Can Remember has a lot of fragments of clues thrown about that will help the viewer to work out the main thrust of the plot.
Director John Strickland goes for a few visual flourishes and their is some good use of green screen work. It is a pleasing, pacy mystery, a little convoluted here and there. It is just a shame that the humour of those early Poirot episodes are now almost entirely absent.
- Prismark10
- Dec 8, 2018
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- Sheraton Grand London Park Lane Hotel, London, England, UK(Ariadne Oliver is declared Crime writer of the year)
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