- - How Agatha Christie's Seven Dials Changes the Ending From the Book

Rachel KingJanuary 18, 2026 at 3:00 AM

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Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials Ending, Explained Netflix

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Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent is no damsel in distress. She’s not quite Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple yet either, but she definitely shows some promise by the end of the third and final episode of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials. However, the Netflix adaptation of Christie’s 1929 novel veers slightly off-course from the original plot, making the ending a surprise for book readers and newcomers alike.

Spoilers below for the ending of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials and The Seven Dials Mystery.

The book ending

There’s more than meets the eye with Superintendent Battle. Netflix

Let’s start with the book ending, according to the Queen of Crime herself. To start, there was already a major change from the beginning with the swap of two major characters: Lady Caterham for Lord Caterham. In the TV series, Lord Caterham is already dead by the present timeline. (We’ll come back to Netflix’s Lord Caterham later.)

Most of the events leading up to the country party at Wyvern Abbey remain the same, with a couple exceptions, most notably that Lord Caterham and his daughter Bundle weren’t actually at the Chimneys party where Gerry Wade died. They were driving back when they found Ronnie Devereux’s body.

The Seven Dials Mystery: A Novel

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So, after Jimmy Thesiger shoots himself in the arm and Superintendent Battle presents his theories in the salon, it’s a footman, not Loraine, who goes missing. Instead, Thesiger calls Loraine and tells her to meet him and Bill Eversleigh at the Seven Dials nightclub, where Bundle shows them the secret society’s meeting room.

It’s here where the characters start to lose agency and exposition fills in. Both Eversleigh and Bundle are knocked unconscious, but she eventually wakes up in his arms. The nightclub owner leads them into the meeting room, where Number Seven is revealed to be Battle. He informs them that they are doing espionage work on behalf of the British government, and that they brought in their targets: Jimmy Thesiger and his accomplice, Loraine Wade, who were stealing a secret formula. Thesiger killed Gerry and Devereux after they each became suspicious of him. Just as in the show, Thesiger rearranged the clocks in Wade’s room and tossed the eighth one on the lawn to see if anyone reacted to the “seven dials” on the mantle in his room next to his corpse. In the very end, Bundle joins the Seven Dials, replacing Gerry Wade, and she marries Bill Eversleigh.

The show ending

Bundle never saw a cloche hat she didn’t like. Netflix

In the Netflix adaptation, there’s no romance between Bundle and Bill Eversleigh (Hughie O’Donnell) in the show whatsoever. Instead, it was hinted there was a romance between Bundle and Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest) instead, which partially fueled her motivation to find his killer.

Bundle, played effortlessly by Mia McKenna-Bruce, also has much more agency in the mini-series. Instead of simply being told what happened after she was knocked unconscious, Bundle is active in tracking down the killers, the secret formula, and the person they were going to sell it to, a critical detail not mentioned in the book.

“It would’ve been the least satisfying final episode in history of television if we knocked her out halfway through episode three,” the show’s writer and creator Chris Chibnall tells T&C. “I think with the passing of time and she had to have agency, it’s her story from start, from first moment to last moment, but that was an opportunity to go, ‘Oh great.’ She had to be the one making the discoveries, figuring it out, confronting the people responsible, that was really, really key. Then once you start to think about that, that plays into the very final scene with Battle and Seven Dials.”

After Battle (Martin Freeman) makes his presentation in the salon, the group discovers Loraine (Ella-Rae Smith) has stolen a car and left Wyvern Abbey, knocking out a Scotland Yard officer in the process. Bundle takes Bill and Jimmy (Ed Bluemel), still thinking he is her friend, with her in the car and they drive to the train station to try to catch up with her. They board the same train and eventually corner her in a luggage car. It’s here where Bundle finally figures out that Jimmy has been working with Loraine all along. A minor shootout occurs, with Loraine running for the front of the train and Jimmy running the opposite direction. When Bundle catches him, he tells her under gunpoint that Loraine wasn’t looking to meet the contact at the next station but rather at the front of the train. Ensuring he will be watched by other passengers, Bundle makes her way to the First Class car on the train.

It was Lady Caterham all along! Netflix

Opening the door of the first compartment, she is shocked to see her mother, Lady Caterham, sitting and looking out the window. After all, one casts Helena Bonham-Carter for good reason—and just for a few scenes trimming plants around the estate. “Originally it was Lord Caterham, and then when they made that switch to Lady Caterham and we were going to do the mother-daughter relationship, that excited me so much because I don’t think we see a lot of that on screen at all,” McKenna-Bruce told T&C.

Lady Caterham sighs and realizes she could never have hid anything entirely from Bundle. She explains her motive for hiring Jimmy and Loraine to steal the formula, although she insists she didn’t ask them to kill Gerry. But after losing both her son and her husband in World War I, she was both disillusioned with her country and also looking for a large source of income as the estate was penniless. “All of the clues are there throughout,” Chibnall says, pointing out there are gaps on the walls of Chimneys as the story goes on as Lady Caterham sells off their paintings. “Really, the story is about those two generations. Lady Caterham’s generation suffered that loss, lived in the shadow of the first World War and the virus, and have retreated. She has retreated into the house, retreated into herself, does not want the world.”

Lady Caterham ultimately asks Bundle if she’ll let her mother go, but Bundle refuses. Finally, Superintendent Battle arrives and pieces together what Bundle already uncovered.

Bundle goes back to Chimneys and is alone in the house when Alfred, the former footman, shows up and says she’s been summoned to the Seven Dials. When Bundle arrives at the table, it is Battle behind the mask at Number Seven. He tells her the truth about what really happened to her father, Lord Caterham (Iain Glen). Bundle’s father was a member of Seven Dials, at Number Three, and was ambushed and died on a mission in Spain in 1920. Battle, complimenting Bundle’s detective work but suggesting she still has much to learn, asks her to take her father’s place in the Seven Dials. She accepts.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”