Welcome to Shut the Fuck Up, Hastings, my take on the British tv series Agatha Christie's Poirot. I have seen every episode of this series (some more times than I can count) and I have read all the short stories and novels on which they are based. And I have come to one inescapable conclusion: Arthur Hastings is fucking irritating! How that idiot managed to make it through a war without shooting himself in the foot is entirely beyond my comprehension. Oh, but don't get me wrong, he's not the only one. Plenty of the supporting characters in these stories make me want to smash my head (or theirs) against a wall. Heck, sometimes the main character himself would drive a saint--which I most certainly am not--batshit crazy.
Despite this, the series is seriously awesome, as evidenced by the fact that it started back in 1989 and is STILL going. (Though it looks to be ending soon. They are, after all, working from limited source material.)
I started reading Agatha Christie's novels when I was 21 and had to read Murder on the Orient Express for a university class. A couple of years later, my father, who is also a huge Christie fan, introduced me to the television series, which he had been taping since it started airing on PBS. The early episodes of the series are generally quite faithful adaptations of the original stories (with a few exceptions). The later episodes...less so. While I own all the novels and short story collections, I do not currently have them with me, so all comparisons will be done from memory.
So, welcome to my take on the series. Misery loves company, so let's suffer through the adventures of Poirot, Lemon, Japp and...sigh...Hastings together.
