Author: Editor

SAN FRANCISCO — Wilmer Flores hit a go-ahead home run, Jung Hoo Lee tripled home an insurance run, and same cast that has powered the Giants’ strong start to the season carried them to 5-2 win over the Milwaukee Brewers to begin their homestand Monday night.

The score was tied at 2 when Flores launched a first-pitch sinker from Grant Anderson deep into the left-field bleachers with two outs in the seventh.

His team-leading seven homers trail only four other players for the most in the majors, while only Aaron Judge has more RBIs than Flores (24).

“The RBIs that Flo has come up with, it’s when he does them that’s so impressive,” manager Bob Melvin said. “It’s not surprising by now with all the dramatics he’s had over the course of his career in big spots. But he’s been incredibly consistent, and so has Jung Hoo.”

With three innings of scoreless relief, Hayden Birdsong earned the win in his first work in nearly a week, and with Ryan Walker unavailable after pitching the past two games, Camilo Doval recorded his third save of the season with a 1-2-3 ninth inning.

The Giants improved to 5-0 behind Robbie Ray, but they had to claw back from a 2-0 deficit after Caleb Durbin took him deep in the second inning.

Ray was far from sharp but rebounded from the long ball to turn in one of his longest starts of the season. It took him 91 pitches to complete five innings, and he issued three walks, but he went deeper than he had since April 5 vs. Seattle and issued his fewest free passes since his first start in Cincinnati on March 30.

“Today was probably about as close as I’ve felt to ’21 in a while,” Ray said, referring to his Cy Young-winning season with Toronto. “I felt like my fastball was really good tonight. That was my main focus coming into this: just establishing the fastball.”

Ray attacked the Brewers with 38 fastballs in his first 42 pitches, and one resulted in both of their runs: a letter-high offering to Durbin, which the No. 9 hitter deposited just beyond the left-field wall for a two-run blast after Joey Ortiz reached by beating out a double play.

The runs were the first Ray had allowed against Milwaukee since 2016, spanning 20⅓ innings. He picked off Jackson Chourio in the top of the first to pass Chris Bassitt for the longest active scoreless streak against the Brewers, then lost the belt when Durbin took him deep the next inning.

The Giants got one run back at a time, getting two-out single from Patrick Bailey that allowed Heliot Ramos to race home from second to make it 2-1 in the second inning and tying the game when Tyler Fitzgerald came around to score after legging out his second infield single of the game in the fifth.

It all led up to the big homer from Flores, who has seemingly had as many as any player around the league this season. He also worked a two-out walk that set up Bailey’s RBI single in the second and poked a single past first baseman Rhys Hoskins in the eighth.

“We all know he could do it, it was just a matter of him getting healthy and being able to get that feel back of what he knows how to do,” Ray said of Flores, who hit four home runs and drove in 26 runs all last season while battling tendonitis in his right knee. “It’s been really special to watch

Lee’s triple was his second of the season, one off the major-league lead. He already leads the majors with 10 doubles and possesses a team-best .983 OPS. Before lacing Jared Koenig’s 1-0 sinker into right-center field, the 31,758 on hand were serenading him with his Korean fight song and chants of his own name.

“Triple’s Alley is kind of made for him,” Melvin said. “It’s not the last one you’re going to see from him.”

Playing his first game against his former team, Willy Adames scored from first on Lee’s triple but finished hitless in four at-bats as his batting average sank bank below .200, to .194.

Why adapt a murder mystery if you don’t care about the mechanics of the story to begin with? I ask myself this often when it comes to the work of Agatha Christie, and the question was ever-present throughout the three-part series “Towards Zero” on BritBox.

I’ve been making my way through Christie’s books for the past year or so (70-plus novels, not even counting the short stories) and the qualities that make her such a fun read — or fun listen; the official audiobooks narrated by actors are terrific as well — are rarely in evidence when it comes to newer film and TV versions, which fail to capture her voice. They’re usually too serious and given a “prestige” patina that feels simultaneously undercooked and overdone.

Christie wrote until her death in 1976 (well, almost; her last novel was published in 1973) and her books incorporated subtle details reflecting the changes happening around her. And yet when those same stories are adapted into TV or film, we’re invariably trapped in the 1930s. Specifically, a glamorously imagined version of the ’30s. That’s true here as well. “Towards Zero” was published in 1944 but the setting has been changed to 1936. That’s my first beef.

The original book opens with Christie dropping breadcrumbs that introduce seemingly unrelated characters — whose importance will be revealed later — before getting to the main players at hand. All of that prologue is gone in this version, which makes sense. Condensing a novel isn’t easy. What to keep in? What to leave out? But too many changes to the story itself are fundamentally at odds with the spirit of Christie’s writing. The result is airless. Aimless, even.

Like so many of her stories, this one takes place at a palatial estate and centers on a divorced couple named Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Audrey Strange (Ella Lily Hyland) who split up when he fell in love with a petulant woman (Mimi Keene) he subsequently married.

When the exes run into each other one day in London, they decide to spend a few weeks together over the summer — along with Nevile’s new wife — at the coastal Devon estate of the imperious Lady Tressilian (an excellent Anjelica Huston). It’s where they grew up and the inclination to return makes sense to them, if to no one else. The divorce was ugly and yet here they are, playing nice. How … civilized. But then murder ensues. In the book, police superintendent Battle happens to be enjoying his own holiday nearby, so he’s pulled into service to find out whodunit.

Christie wrote five novels featuring Battle as the primary sleuth, including this one. But adapter Rachel Bennette has other things in mind, excising Battle entirely, replaced by Inspector Leach. Christie readers will recognize the name; he’s Battle’s nephew, who is also a police officer stationed nearby and therefore Battle’s right-hand man on the case. But nothing about this Leach, played by Matthew Rhys, resembles the original. Instead, he’s a despondent war veteran in need of a shave.

Reshaping Leach into a man grappling with (presumably World War I-era?) shell shock and survivor’s guilt feels random, but then, what here doesn’t? Clarke Peters, of “The Wire,” is also part of the ensemble as a guest staying at the house. He’s Lady Tressilian’s lawyer and yet another character whose story contours have been changed for reasons that do not play out in fruitful ways.

Fidelity to source material can be a trap. But change just for the sake of change isn’t the answer, either. Consider the problems created by this version of Leach. Narratively, a police detective has no reason to be around until a murder takes place. But you don’t cast an actor like Matthew Rhys and then sideline him for the first hour. Even so, the series struggles to explain his presence in the early going. More to the point, this guy? Not how Christie viewed the police. They lack the elegant intelligence of a Poirot or a Marple, but they are not anguished — they’re too stolid, too uninteresting for that — and it’s a reimagining that adds no depth to the proceedings.

To encounter Christie today means recoiling from some her worst instincts (the racism for one, which was either her own or simply that of her snootiest characters) and I’m not arguing for that to be retained. To be clear, that’s not an issue with this version of “Towards Zero.” But she had a sly humor that tends to get lost in adaptations. She wasn’t interested in melodrama so much as the messier outcomes of people who fail to see eye to eye, sometimes with violent results. In the novel, Battle makes an observation. “It’s extraordinary the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often — both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.”

Conflict is avoidable except when it isn’t, because humans tend to be such terrible communicators. This adaptation has no curiosity about any of that. And it eliminates an important reveal about the real reason Nevile and Audrey divorced, making their story ordinary in the process and filled with the kind of yelling and screaming the more repressed, falsely polite book characters would have found ridiculous. I don’t get it.

The costumes and sets are expensive looking, and that’s often one of the consistent pleasures of Christie on screen. But you also need a narrative that makes sense. A clockwork story. Written by someone who actually likes her books.

One thing that does work is Huston’s withering performance. To her credit, Bennette has invented some delicious one-liners for her ladyship. “Why have a husband when you can have a lawyer?” is not just droll, it’s Oscar Wilde-esque.

If you can’t give us Christie, Wilde will have to do. Even if it’s just for a brief flicker of a moment.

“Towards Zero” — 2 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: BritBox

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Originally Published: April 21, 2025 at 12:05 PM PDT