‘Tommy & Tuppence’s Penultimate Episode Gets Heavy

The penultimate episode of Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence is certainly heavier than normal fare. The hour opens with the death of Tommy’s beloved Aunt Ada, hinted at during the final moments of last week’s installment.

Ada’s death doesn’t come completely out of the blue. It happens quite early on in the Christie novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs and is probably something we all should have expected the series might emulate. Maybe we were all thrown off by the casting of Imelda Staunton (The Crown) and hoped her sheer star power could somehow change the inevitable.

(Though there’s no sign foul play was involved this week, so what that bit was about someone tampering with her flask, I have no idea. Perhaps it’s a question the finale will have to answer.)

Tommy, of course, is devastated and struggles to find a way to properly say goodbye to the woman in his life who loved him best. While packing up her room at the senior living center, he’s convinced she left him a final message among her things, the same way she’d often leave clues or notes for him to discover as a child. It turns out she did — and sets Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives on what may be their last case.