Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’ ending is definitely shocking if nothing else. The 3-part series starring some great actors, legends as well as younglings, is a mysterious whodunit that combines British humor with what feels very much like modern-day espionage. I say that because a lot about this book is dated, and in my opinion, the show tries to focus more on the narration through the lead character rather than the plot itself. What I mean by this is that the main focus of the show is Lady Eileen Brent, aka Bundle. I mean, she really is a bundle of joy, but that’s beside the point. The ending of the show reveals the killer and the plans, yes, but it also reveals what “Seven Dials” is. That’s the real question, amirite? Anyway, the show tells the story of a young woman who finds out that the man she’s likely meant to marry is dead the night after he suggested he was going to propose. There comes the mystery of the Seven Dials, and who killed Bundle’s love, well, dear friend, Gerry, and why? Well, let’s find out in the ending of Netflix’s Seven Dials.
Spoiler Alert
Who Does Bundle Find In The Compartment?
After Loraine Wade, Gerry Wade’s half-sister, escaped from George Lomax’s estate with Dr. Cyril’s formula and his sample pocket watch, she got onto a train, and Bundle followed her onto it with Jimmy and Bill. While it seemed for a moment that Bill was collaborating with Loraine, it turns out Jimmy was the real snake in the grass. Ronny’s dying words had mentioned the Seven Dials and Jimmy’s name in the same breath, but Bundle had misinterpreted him; he hadn’t wanted her to tell Jimmy about the Dials, he wanted her to tell the Seven Dials that Jimmy was the one who shot him. Ultimately, Bundle takes down Jimmy, and Bill handles Loraine, but Jimmy ends up revealing that they were meant to meet their buyer on this very train, in the first-class compartment closest to the engine.
So that’s where Bundle goes, with Jimmy’s pistol in her hand, but when she opens the door to the compartment, she’s confronted by the sight of her mother, Lady Caterham. For a moment, she’s speechless, but then it all comes together and makes sense. Jimmy had already told Bundle he’d done it all for the money, after his debts had grown too large. And the show had foreshadowed, right in the first episode, that the Brents were broke, given they’d been reduced to renting out their mansion to uppity nouveau-riche industrialists like the Cootes, something Oswald Coote openly mocked them for. The disdain went both ways, of course, and Lady Caterham herself doesn’t view this class of upstarts with much respect, feeling almost disgraced at having to accept their money. But at the same time, she’s so entitled that she can’t conceive of living a reduced lifestyle or, heaven forbid, selling the mansion.
So, given she knows it was all about the money, Bundle has to know why her mother decided to kill Gerry Wade, the man she’d wanted to marry. Lady Caterham is quick to deny any responsibility for the murder of Gerry, pointing the blame entirely at Loraine and calling her impulsive, though she does admit he was getting close to uncovering their plan. Love how Agatha Christie uses the rich to tell this story, making it both glamorous and still superbly entertaining. The old rich have to find a way in this modern world, right?
It’s when she’s accused of betraying her country that Lady Caterham gets mad. Her words are almost evocative of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly,” a story that hits especially hard because Mansfield lost her own brother in the war, placing her precisely in Bundle’s position. Bundle’s brother had died fighting at the Somme during the Great War, some 9 years ago, and the magnitude of the loss broke Lady Caterham. The loss of her husband 4 years later drove the woman to the point that she needed to be taken care of by her maid, Emily, and she still largely refuses to interact with the outside world, viewing it all with a tinge of hatred for, in her words, stealing everything she ever loved from her. Everything but Bundle, that is, a technicality that Bundle catches her out on. By the time Superintendent Battle shows up, the young lady’s quite shaken, and she’s only too happy to walk out and give the gun to the policeman. Caterham’s reasoning is interesting, because it does come from a place of privilege. It seems almost like she feels she’s the only person who lost people to the war. She’s out of money, but she does still own an estate and could have made it thrive if she wanted to.
Why Does Dr. Matip’s Invention Matter So Much?
Europe in 1925 was a land still reeling from the memory of the 5-year horror that had been the Great War. Even though Germany was still under arms limitations because of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, there was an air of tension around when the next big war would come. Dr. Cyril Matip’s metallurgical innovation allowed for a material that was supremely tough, as demonstrated when he let Oswald Cootes shoot a watch encased in the material. The fact that Cameroon, where he hailed from, was briefly under German administration, and that Matip himself fought for the Germans in the war, makes some of the people involved in the negotiations to acquire the technology for Britain hesitate. But it was that very colonial conflict of African against African that opened Matip’s eyes to how senseless war was, especially after his whole family died. His own sister was murdered after the war, though, in a Spanish town called Ronda in 1920, when he was trying to escape with his formula.
Whichever country obtains this technology has a massive industrial advantage in the future, which could extend into a military advantage as well. The prospects of a lightweight and strong metal would surely have massive implications when it comes to things like aviation as well, especially given the Great War was the first wide-scale conflict where the concept of military aircraft was demonstrated. In the game of geopolitics and war, the one who invests in the future is the one who wins. Jimmy and Loraine’s misdirection around the German Mauser pistol at the scene of the crime at Lomax’s estate counted on exploiting the Brits’ awareness of the value of this technology to lead them the wrong way, while the culprits were close to home all along.
What Drove Bundle to Investigate This Case?
Bundle’s the kind of girl a mildly misogynistic man might call “plucky” (yes, even Superintendent Battle), and she’s certainly very plugged in politically, even referencing the suffragette movement in the presence of George Lomax, who works in the Foreign Office. But that’s not the only thing that drove her to investigate the series of events that started with the death of Gerry Wade. The man himself was near and dear to Bundle, and though we don’t see them share the screen together for very long, we know he was about to ask her to marry him very soon. He cared so much about her that he even neglected Foreign Office duties to spend time with her when they were all at Chimneys.
But this bond goes back further, too. Wade’s a few years older than Bundle, who was just a child when her brother died. Wade was by her brother’s side in battle, though, and he was the one who dragged his body back when he died. He was the reason the Brents were able to give their boy a decent funeral, even though it was as gray a day as they come. It was her love for Gerry and the memory of her brother that drove her to look for a killer. She couldn’t believe that this lively, driven young man, the love of her life, would take his life just like that. The fact that she’s an incredibly sharp woman with an eye for detail doesn’t hurt either (to the point of noticing that the glass had been moved, allowing her to discover a half-hidden letter even the police had missed), and it certainly catches the eye of Superintendent Battle. Throughout the show, Battle keeps remarking about how he’s not used to the roles being reversed, starting right from their first face-to-face interaction in Battle’s office, where Bundle starts all but interrogating the policeman.
What Do The Seven Dials Have To Do With Lord Caterham?
The seven clocks being arranged on the mantelpiece were nothing more than a play on Jimmy’s part to confuse the inquest into Wade’s death. The Seven Dials is, to put it politely, a downmarket neighborhood in the East End of London, but it’s also the name of a nightclub on Hunstanton Street and, crucially, the secret society that meets upstairs from the club as well. Bundle basically had to force Bill to take her there. In all likelihood, he was embarrassed to be seen hanging out at a place where “interesting” women congregate, likely referring to its reputation as a bit of a lair for prostitution. When Bundle did make her way into the club (after an unexpected reunion with a former Caterham footman, Alfred, who now serves as the doorman at the nightclub), she immediately dumped Bill and went poking her nose around upstairs. When she heard footsteps, she hid herself in a closet and was then shocked to see a group of cloaked and masked individuals walking into a room to sit at a round table, where they discussed the news coverage of Ronny’s murder. While initially, Bundle had thought the Seven Dials were the ones behind Gerry and Ronny’s murders, Superintendent Battle later reveals that he himself is the leader of the Dials. This whole process is a bit dramatic, though, with Alfred holding her at gunpoint and bringing her to a meeting of the group. It’s interesting to note that Alfred went from working for the criminal to then working for the crusaders.
In Seven Dials’ ending, Battle takes off his mask (which does look a lot like the props department started out with a fencing mask) and starts explaining to Bundle that the Seven Dials are an informal group that aims to “keep the world safe” in very broad strokes. And to Bundle’s surprise, she’s been invited to occupy seat number 3, which apparently used to belong to her own father, Lord Caterham. Bundle and her mother were under the impression that her father had died of the Spanish flu, but though he had in fact died in Spain in 1920, he’d actually been gored to death by a bull after he was baited into an arena while looking for Cyril Matip and the people pursuing him. This is what we see right at the start of the show. Lord Caterham had been the greatest of the Seven Dials, in Superintendent Battle’s words. For Bundle to step into his shoes and serve the same ideals has to be a fulfilling feeling, and it seems the series is setting things up for a sequel, possibly based on another one of Agatha Christie’s novels. It’s difficult to see how that would happen, though, since Bundle appears in only two of Christie’s novels, “The Secret of Chimneys” and “The Seven Dials Mystery,” with the former being written in 1925 and the latter in 1929. In the books, Bundle is already well acquainted with Superintendent Battle by the time Wade is murdered, given she’d worked with him already on the first case, 4 years prior. Perhaps the fact that the showrunners decided to set the show in 1925 instead of ’29 means they could still choose to adapt “The Secret of Chimneys” at a later date. It remains to be seen, but it feels like with the level of output OTT platforms have been pumping out lately, Agatha Christie’s 66 detective novels could provide fertile ground for period piece narratives that feel authentic and grounded.
