And Then There Were None / YMMV

And Then There Were None (2015)

Accidental Innuendo: Non-sexual example from the 1945 movie. When Rogers's body is found Ms Brent demands to know where he is (she's hungry dammit!). They say Breakfast'll be delayed and...
Ms Brent: If I had a butler like Rogers, I'd soon get rid of him...
Alternate Character Interpretation:
- Did the Rogerses kill their former employer, or are they innocent and Mr. Owen wrongly executed them? Of all the explanations given by the characters for their crimes, theirs is the most reasonable (Miss Brady fell ill during a storm, and by the time Mr. Rogers came back with a doctor it was too late). On the other hand, Mrs. Rogers' reaction certainly paints them in a bad light.
- Vera Claythorne rushing out into the water too late to save Cyril after deliberately letting him swim out too far: did she have a last-minute bout of remorse and genuinely try to save him, or was she still only making it look like she was trying while deliberately stalling? The 2015 series makes it definitely the latter, but both interpretations are possible in the original novel.
- Some fans interpret Hugo as manipulating Vera into killing Cyril (after all, immediately after declaring his love for Vera, he admits he can't marry her and launches into a detailed reasoning of just why he lost his inheritance) and then dumping her as soon as it was done. Afterwards, tormented by remorse, he sinks into alcoholism and explains to complete strangers (including Wargrave) that everything was totally and entirely Vera's fault while he loved Cyril.
Ass Pull: The video game's twist on the ending can come across as this. Changing the killer's identity to Miss Brent is one thing, but the reveal that she's actually Gabrielle Steel, the actress from the book rumoured to have bought the island, and the lover of Edward Seton who wanted to punish Wargrave for his death is a bit of a stretch, considering how little build up there is to it.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- The Harry Alan Towers film adaptations are full of such moments. For example, in the 1965 movie, Lombard and the butler get into a random fistfight that lasts about one minute before the judge says "Now, now, that's enough"... and it is. It is promptly forgotten, and never brought up again. (It was hilariously used as fodder for the godawful trailer) It also carries over into the 1974 version with Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, and Herbert Lom, though instead of being a minute, Lombard gives him two hits and he goes down, then apologizes to the guests for doing so.
- Or the 1989 movie. There are several moments that fit this trope, but one that stands out in particular is the usual "Marston plays the full rhyme on the piano" scene that is usually in each adaptation (and ends up being crucial to introducing the rhyme to the audience)...except instead of actually playing the rhyme, Marston plays a few seconds of "Mad Dogs and Englishmen". Why? No one knows. And no one spends their time speculating on it, either.
Crowning Music of Awesome: The opening theme to the game. Whether you love or hate the game, hell, even if you hate it, you can't deny that the theme does an excellent job of capturing the creepy atmosphere.
Draco in Leather Pants:
- Good lord, Philip Lombard (in the book and 2015 BBC adaptation only.) Many seem to ignore the fact that he left his men to die, excusing it for Values Dissonance (granted, that was certainly in play). Many like the fact that he's the only one to outright confess his crime, tries to keep everyone alive, and is the only one to make sure no one can murder him without everyone else realizing he's the killer. The fact that he outright guesses the killer's identity correctly doesn't hurt. For this reason, the stage play and most of the film adaptations make him innocent of the crime; in the stage play, he actually tried to save the men rather than leave them to die, and in the 1945 film he died a week before the mystery and his friend Charles Morley impersonated him.
- The actual killer. They are trying to off a group of murderers after all...
Ensemble Dark Horse: Lombard, for being the Only Sane Man and one of the most interesting characters.
- Emily Brent has actually become one over the years.
- Rogers from the 1945 version. His death is also the best choreographed, so that helps.
Fanfic Fuel: So much of it.
- What if someone else was the killer? We've seen it be Wargrave, and we've seen it be a random actress, but how could the story work if someone else was the culprit?
  - Several small-scale theater adaptations have run with this, as did the video game. Alternate killers have included Brent, Blore, Ms Rogers, Armstrong, and Fred Narracott for example.
- What if different characters survived? What if the order of death was different? What if the protagonist was someone completely different?
- What if real life or fictional murderers were put in this scenario?
- What if certain characters turned out to be innocent?
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- A General MacArthur, written before World War II. As such, when the book was adapted into a play in 1943, MacArthur's name was changed to McKenzie, as a famous war hero sharing a name and rank with a murderer (albeit a sympathetic one), might be somewhat offensive.
- The rather large amount of moments where Emily Brent is implied to be the killer (or otherwise noted to be creepy) becomes this, when in the Video game, she IS the killer.
It Was His Sled: All the guests are responsible for the deaths of someone while managing to escape the justice, Judge Wargrave is the killer and everyone is dead at the end of the novel. It's safe to say that someone who didn't already read the book should finish it before browsing its tropes. Of course, given that this is one of Christie's most famous books, this isn't surprising.
- Vera Claythorne actually murdered the person she was accused of murdering. This was pretty damn big twist in the book at 1945 given her status as the Final Girl but pretty much everyone knows it.
- Ironically the Not His Sled adaptations have become more commonly known than the book's (you know, the ones where Vera is innocent, Lombard is someone else in disguise, and both live in the end), to the point where some people are shocked to find a rare adaptation where Vera and Lombard are murderers, and both die.
Magnificent Bastard: Judge Lawrence John Wargrave, aka U.N. Owen manages to craft the ultimate Locked Room Mystery and only his desire that someone appreciate his genius allowed the mystery to be solved. Wargrave, deep down, is an admitted sadist with a bizarre sense of justice and only enacts his cruelties upon the guilty and evil. When he realizes he is fatally ill, Wargrave has nine unrepentant criminals lured to an island with him where he begins murdering them, and avoids suspicion by luring a doctor there into helping him to fake his own death, then murdering said doctor as well. Wargrave proceeds to eliminate his other victims, pressing the final main character who had manipulated a child in her care to his death into suicide. Wargrave ends his plan by committing suicide in such a way that obscures the way he died, with only a written confession in a bottle thrown into a sea revealing the truth.
Misaimed Fandom: Let's just say that if the internet had existed when the book was first published, or if Agatha Christie had lived long enough to see the internet, she would have done a lot of head-desking at the discovery of how fans found some of her most intentionally despicable murderers to be sympathetic.
- Christie was fond of having a sympathetic character turn out to be a murderer, because these types of characters tend not to be suspected by the reader. However, the notion that fans would still find these characters sympathetic after their guilt had become clear beyond a doubt would certainly make her mind boggle.
- Emily Brent drove a pregnant teenager to suicide due to her own religious values. Her death however indicates she's feeling some repressed guilt. In a conversation with Vera, she mentions that she was very repressed as a child. That same conversation also contains some (possibly unintentional) Values Resonance (For 1945 anyway)
- See here for a summary
Mis-blamed: Rene Clair, director of the 1945 film version, received a lot of criticism for changing the ending of the book. A lot of people did not realize that the basic idea for the film's ending came from Christie herself, having changed it upon adapting the novel for the stage in 1943; Rene Clair simply brought about the Adaptational Alternate Ending in a different (and more convoluted) way.
Moral Event Horizon: Has its own page.
Narm:
- Vera Claythorne's internal monologues in the book seem like this to some, though worth noting is the fact that she's going through Sanity Slippage.
- The scene where everyone let out startled ejaculations.
- Anthony Marston's demise in the game.
  - A lot of the game can be incredibly narmy, mostly because of the cheap, limited animation and sometimes very poor voice acting.
- The death of Blore in the 1945 film, unless it was meant to be amusing. Even if it wasn't, it's hard for many viewers not to love it.
- Rogers' reaction to the death of his wife in the 1989 film. And his own death.
Not His Sled: Nearly all adaptations completely change the book's ending to the point where the 2015 BBC adaptation actually following through with the original ending feels like a Meta Twist. The 1987 Russian version was the first to follow the original ending.
- The video game adaptation goes one step further and changes the identity of the killer to a random actress pretending to be Ms Brent, while retaining Wargrave's faked death plan to make it appear that he's still the killer to players familiar with the book until he turns up 100% dead later on.
- Ironically, the twist(s) from the play and most of the films has itself become a case of It Was His Sled thanks to the sheer amount of movies and plays that use this.
Romantic Plot Tumor: Averted in the original novel, and to a certain degree in Agatha Christie's stage version and the 1945 movie as well, but the Harry Alan Towers adaptations put much more focus on the romantic subplot between Vera and Lombard than on the actual mystery itself.
- The video game has this in spades. Witness the thrilling love triangle of Lombard, Vera and our Protagonist.
Ron the Death Eater: A rare non-fanfic example. Lawrence Wargrave is generally much more unhinged in adaptations that contain the altered ending. In the ending of the play, he's written as completely unhinged as he tells Vera how he did it, to the point where the dialogue actually turns the character into a Large Ham
- Armstrong has a lot of haters.
Values Dissonance: Many of the characters demonstrate hypocrisy and a warped worldview which isn't surprising given that this is what led them to the island to begin with. As such a considerable part of the beliefs espoused at various points are a case of Deliberate Values Dissonance with the author choosing specifically the individuals that are less than likely to be considered healthy examples to be followed and wouldn't gather that many supporters even back in the day of the story's setting:
- The very title of the book was subject to the cultural variant of this from the outset: putting the n-word in a book title was much less shocking in England than in the United States, where the slur was considered as vulgar as "fuck," necessitating the rename to And Then There Were None. Instances of the n-word in dialogue were similarly trimmed out, most prominently in the titular nursery rhyme. Decades later, the temporal equivalent took hold in the book's native England after awareness of the n-word's racist connotations became more commonplace, making the American title standard worldwide. The official Christie website has references to the "original British title", without spelling it out.
- Philip Lombard justifies the abandonment of the natives with what amounts to "What Value is a Non-White?" (and Vera seems to agree— Emily Brent, of all people, calls her out on it!); he also refers to Isaac Morris as a "little Jewboy" and figures Morris called his bluff on his need for money because Jews just know these kinds of things. Of course, Lombard is far from an ideal role model even in that time-period.
- More subtly, the main 'clue' of who the murderer is rests on the interpretation that he is the only character who is not guilty of the crime they are accused of committing. But from a modern perspective, Judge Wargrave violated Seton's right to due process under the law by getting the jury to convict him without evidence that he really was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, so the reader may not reach that conclusion.
- In contrast to the novel, the 2015 BBC mini-series has a noticeable payload of f-bombs and similar — how much they would have been frowned on in real life in 1939 is hard to be exact on for different social milieu, but it is definite that they would not have been allowed to appear in print before at least the 1960s.
- The 2015 mini-series also has a couple of quick moments when Blore implies that Lombard is suspicious / the killer because he's Irish, and therefore must be a member of the IRA.
- The reason that Vera committed a crime at all. All the portrayals of her are consistent in this matter: there's no implication that she wanted to marry a rich man, she just wanted to marry Hugo. Hugo was the one who refused to marry her without money; there's no indication that Vera cared about being 'provided for', or that she wouldn't have been happy to continue working if it meant they could be married. If their situation had happened in the 70s/80s onwards, Hugo would have simply have accepted their being a two-income couple and married Vera, meaning Cyril would still be alive.
- Pagan:
  - The killer attributes Marston's selfish attitude (wherein he runs over two children and doesn't care about it except that he lost his license as a result) to upbringing, having not been taught the sense of responsibility as he was "amoral" and "pagan". This is rather than attributing it to an inherent Lack of Empathy as would be more common to audiences nowadays (and the "pagan" remark would be unlikely to enter into the discussion at all.)
  - Additional dissonance on the word pagan, because the common meaning changed subtly from the period it was written. It used to include "raised without any religion at all" and not just "raised in religion outside the Christianity /the norm" (not counting all the meanings and implications of the word and existence of modern pagans/ neo-pagans and adjacent beliefs which would make this entry even longer than it is). Moral dissonance is two-fold. First, someone being Christian (or even religious) by default is not the norm it was before. Second, it is now generally accepted that "Somebody can be good without God", that someone's religion or lack of it are not indicative of their morality.
Values Resonance:
- From Emily Brent of all people. When Vera handwaves Lombard's murder of the natives, saying they were just Natives, Emily retorts that "Black or White, they are our Brothers". This is somewhat negated though, by the fact that Vera's reaction indicates that this is (supposed to be) a sign of Emily's insanity. Then again, the fact that the story considers Lombard a murderer suggests that we might be supposed to agree with Emily after all.
- While it can be debatable how much blame should be attached to Ms. Brent, Christie condemning the idea of family and employers turning out desperate young girls who become pregnant was somewhat progressive.
- In general, the story deals with social issues that are still relevant today, such as racism, bigotry, corruption of authority figures, economical independence and class inequality. Quite ironically considering Christie's rather conservative views, the first faithful adaptation was realized in USSR.
The Woobie:
- Many, many fans find MacArthur to be the most sympathetic of all the guests. He was pretty much dead before he came to the island.
- Armstrong committed a terrible accident that caused his patient's death, which not only haunted him and brought him to an island to be killed, he ends up becoming the killer's fearful pawn. Toby Stephens plays his woobie status up to eleven in the 2015 adaptation.
- Likewise, Ethel Rogers was pretty much pressured into murdering her former employer by her domineering husband, and had to live with the guilt until she was ultimately murdered for the crime she didn't want to commit. This was why the killer chose to give her a relatively painless death.
- Beatrice Taylor was fired by Emily Brent after getting pregnant and committed suicide after even her family had rejected her.
- Whether by Vera or (in some adaptations) not, poor young Cyril was betrayed to his death by someone he loved and trusted.
- In the original, Hugo Hamilton as well. Wargrave coaxes the story of Cyril's death while the latter is Drowning My Sorrows on a boat. Hugo is completely shocked about what Vera did for him, and regretful that his refusal to marry her encouraged her to murder his nephew.
WTH, Costuming Department?: The game has Vera dressed in a bright fuchsia sleeveless dress which would have looked pretty scandalous in 1939, especially for a would be secretary/former governess. It doesn't help that her outfit is very bright compared to the subdued color schemes of the other characters, and a large portion of the game rooms.

YMMV / And Then There Were None

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