Teresa Reviews Motive v. Opportunity (2005)

Teresa reviews Motive v. Opportunity (2005) and appreciates how Miss Marple teaches us to be wary of fake spiritualists.

Source: DailyMotion

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 4 crystal balls

You’ll never catch Miss Marple conducting a séance, but she does here, and it’s for the benefit of the duck.

Quality of episode: 4½ crystal balls

Trauma, dead children, refusal to face reality, fake mediums, and séances. This episode has everything.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

One of the oddities of Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple is that it faithfully adapts stories Agatha wrote for adults for the kiddies. Kid cartoons may include ghosts and séances but they don’t typically include orphans who are adopted and then die tragically at a young age, followed by more orphans being taken in by their deluded and deeply superstitious uncle who wants to rejoin his dead granddaughter more than he loves his nieces and nephews.

Our story opens with a new framing device. Instead of lawyer Petherick telling his mystery at a dinner party, he joins Miss Marple, Maybelle, and Oliver the duck at a séance. Miss Marple, foreshadowing what’s to come, conducts the séance to reach Oliver’s dead mother. Was she was roasted for dinner and left unfinished business with her son? Best not to ask.

Anyway. Oliver’s mother arrives and quacks on cue but Maybelle sees through Miss Marple’s deception. So Miss Marple was teaching her to be wary of fake spiritualists. This leads lawyer Peterick to relate his own séance-riddled story about Mr. Clode, his deeply missed dead granddaughter, his nieces and nephew who moved in after granddaughter Chris died, and a fraudulent medium who planned to cheat the gullible, despairing old man.

As a lawyer, Petherick could tell his client he disapproved but Mr. Clode, despite his belief in the phony spiritualist, is of sound mind and so his relatives are disinherited in favor of Mrs. Eurydice Spragg. She puts on quite a performance to earn her money too!

But later, the will turns out, despite Petherick’s precautions, to be as fraudulent as Mrs. Spragg. Miss Marple guesses the secret because of her nephew Raymond’s boyish pranks.