Teresa Reviews One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (2022)

Teresa Reviews One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (2022), an episode from the Chinese Checkmate miniseries titled The Case of the Poisoned Zha Zhiang Noodles.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Source: Ebay listing

Fidelity to text: 2 guns

You’ll recognize the plot mechanism from One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. You’ll also spot the stolen heart of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, shoehorned in for no discernible reason.

Quality of movie: 2½ guns

It really dragged in spots and the subtitles were maddening, making it a challenge to follow the story line.

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

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

The overall story arc in Checkmate is slowly revealing itself. Situ Yan, our hero, tells Luo Shaochuan, his partner and sidekick, that he’s beginning to think the cases they’ve investigated are related. He’s even more sure when the villain of the current case is discovered dead in his prison cell, poisoned with ricin.

Okay. To explain this let’s go back to the beginning of the series.

If you’ve been watching along at home, you know that Checkmate opens with Murder on the Orient Express. Situ Yan is prosecuting “Ratchett,” a murderer with an even more murderous past. The case got overturned by the obviously bought-off judge when trumped-up evidence appeared at the last minute. This, despite the presence of hundreds of eyewitnesses.

It becomes apparent that Situ Yan, who was not a prosecutor but an attorney assigned to this trial, had been set up to take the blame. In disgrace, he takes the Orient Express from Beijing to Harbin, a city in the center of Manchuria province in the northeast. Along the way, he meets Luo Shaochuan, a soldier, and Jin Qiming, eager reporter.

They also meet Ratchett, who is murdered on the train and Situ Yan solves the murder.

Upon his arrival in Harbin, Situ Yan learns that his mentor has died suddenly of a heart attack. Soon afterwards, Luo Shaochuan’s father is murdered. They solve that case (based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) but there are odd rumors about connections to something bigger.

The next cases arrive quickly. We get “The Nemean Lion,” a story from The Labours of Hercules. He’s told a rich student’s daughter is kidnapped, but learns the victim is her Pekinese dog. Yes, Shen Huatang is a dog-mom. In China. In 1922. Shen Huatang is peripherally involved in a much larger, more dramatic case: her posh girls’ finishing school is haunted by a murderer with ties to Fengtian, a nearby city. That case (based on Cat Among the Pigeons) raised loads of unanswered questions which seem to tie into the overall arc and — I hope! — get answered by the end of Checkmate, including the blockbuster news that the girl student at the heart of Orient Express committed suicide. We’ll find out.

In this radical rewrite of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Shen Huatang (but not her Pekinese dog) becomes very important indeed. She doesn’t show up right away. First, a noodle chef commits suicide, supposedly because he fed a customer meat sauce noodles laced with rat poison. Situ Yan and Luo Shaochuan discover that a very important banker was also in the restaurant when the customer was accidentally poisoned. The banker is Yu Daren, Shen Huatang’s stepfather. Could he have been the target?

Everyone denies this but clues keep pointing back to him. A mysterious woman who showed up frequently at the Jasmine Restaurant (who traveled to Harbin on the Orient Express!) accosted Yu Daren on the street, claiming she and his wife were friends. But Shen Huatang insists that’s impossible. She knows all her deceased mother’s friends and this pushy drug saleslady from Beijing isn’t one of them. But the drug saleslady, who was last seen at the Jasmine Restaurant just before the poisoning, has vanished.

So did the other mystery customer, a young man who only ordered water. Even more mysterious, the regular waitress had run off to another city to join an unsuitable boyfriend. Her replacement isn’t as attentive as she was and has yet to learn all the regulars. Could Zhao Xiaoling know who the pushy drug saleslady was?

Then, a deranged young man attacks Yu Daren in public. It turns out he’s the same young man who was in the Jasmine Restaurant on the fatal day. The drunken co-owner remembered him. So did the inattentive waiter. But did this young, idiotic hothead poison the food?

He doesn’t confess to murder under torture, but he reveals that he was in the restaurant to watch Yu Daren because the love of his life, Shen Huatang, asked him. He’s madly in love with her but she denies the relationship. Is he a stalker? Or did she mislead him so he’d attack Yu Daren with whom she claims to have a good relationship?

It’s around this point — and believe me, we had to rewind repeatedly to read the terrible subtitles to figure this out — that Situ Yan and Luo Shaochuan learn the body of the drug saleslady has been discovered. She’s been dead for weeks. So who was that lady impersonating her at the restaurant? And, even more shocking, they discover that Shen Huatang loathes her stepfather because she believes that he murdered her mother three years before.

Her rich mother, owner of an important bank, married this much younger man because she was besotted with him. Shen Huatang and her brother despised the greedy fortune hunger and were sure he poisoned mom with strychnine but they couldn’t prove it. It wasn’t possible for her tonic to become poisonous. And, both the housekeeper and the stepfather were out of the house on the critical night when mom drank the strychnine-laced tonic.
If the relationship between mom, her devoted housekeeper and companion of longstanding, and the much younger second husband seems familiar, that’s because it arrived from Styles, right down to the housekeeper and the much younger second husband pretending they despised each other.

So what does the murder of Shen Huatang’s mother have to do with the poisoned spaghetti? We’re back to the central thread in One, Two. The banker, Yu Daren, was bigamously married to Shen Huatang’s mother. She was rich and he wanted to be rich. Since his wife was already the housekeeper (keeping her marriage a secret from her employer), it was easy to infiltrate the household, flirt with Shen Huatang’s mother, and marry her. A few years later, he and the housekeeper murdered her.

They thought they’d gotten away with it until one of the housekeeper’s old friends from Beijing arrived in Harbin and, quite by accident, ran into Yu Daren in the street in front of the bank. She didn’t know any of this. But she knew and Yu Daren knew that he’d been married before so she had to die in order for him to keep his posh lifestyle.

Was there also an opportunistic blackmailer like in the original novel? Yes, the drug saleslady met a man on the Orient Express who, when she told him the story, realized he’d struck gold. He blackmailed Yu Daren, leading directly to his poisoned noodles instead of an overdose of Novocain and adrenaline in the dentist’s chair.

Did Yu Daren, when the truth was revealed, insist that he, an important banker, deserved to live despite killing three people to keep his secret? Of course he did. Special people deserve special treatment and who cares about some noodle chef, a drug saleslady, or a bar owner with a shady past. And even more, who cares about some revolutionary who’d fixated on his stepdaughter and was conveniently at hand to take the blame.

All of the parallels to One, Two are there, underneath layers of added complexity and serious rewriting. The especially striking added complexity is Shen Huatang’s own complicity. She talked an idiot wannabe boyfriend into attacking Yu Daren, leading directly to him ending up in prison on murder charges and being tortured. Did she care? No, because special people deserve special treatment and who cares about some lovestruck revolutionary?

Her attitude perfectly paralleled her hated stepfather’s attitude.

Who then mysteriously dies of ricin poisoning in his cell before the trial.

Leading Situ Yan to decide that something else is going on. Something bigger. We’re about halfway through Checkmate at this point, so I hope we’ll learn more in the next installment which rewrites Five Little Pigs.