The Riddle of the Sphinx is the third episode of the third series of Inside No. 9. It was written by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith and directed by Guillem Morales. Alexandra Roach stars as Nina, a young woman seeking answers to the Varsity cryptic crossword. Critics have praised the episode, calling it the cleverest of the series to date.
About The Riddle of the Sphinx (Inside No. 9) in brief
The Riddle of the Sphinx is the third episode of the third series of Inside No. 9. It was written by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith and directed by Guillem Morales. The episode was first aired on BBC Two at 10:00pm on 28 February 2017. Alexandra Roach stars as Nina, a young woman seeking answers to the Varsity cryptic crossword. The plot of the episode revolves around the clues and answers to a particular crossword puzzle. Critics have praised the episode, calling it the cleverest of the series to date. The final run-time for the episode is 31 minutes and 35 seconds, clashing with the first episode of Catastrophe, the acclaimed Channel 4 comedy, on the same night. It is the second episode of a run of five episodes, of which the second was filmed in December 2015 and filmed in Langleybury, a country house in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire. The idea to focus an episode on crosswords came from Pemberon, who had long been a fan of cryptic crosswords, but particular inspiration came from Two Girls, One on Each Knee: The Puzzling, Playful World of the Crossword, a non-fiction book by Alan Connor. Influences include Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 play Sleuth, the work of Anton Chekhov, and the 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The BBC permitted the final version of the script to be a little longer than the typical half hour, but the production team still needed to lose several minutes in the edit-time of the final cut.
The story begins with Nina surreptitiously entering Squires’s rooms on a stormy night and being discovered; this leads to Squires teaching her how to decipher clues in crypticCrosswords. The crossword featured in the episode was published in The Guardian on the day the episode aired, credited to “Sphinx”. This crossword contains multiple ninas—hidden messages or words. Along with many of the crossword’s answers, one nina is integral to the episode’s plot. A second was introduced accidentally, and then incorporated into the episode. A third in-joke is an Inside no. 9 in-Joke, which introduced after two days’ rehearsals. The third series was announced in October 2015, and heavily publicised in January 2016, at which time Roach was named as a guest star in the series. The series began with the Christmas special “The Devil of Christmas” and continued with “The Bill” The latter of which was the first of the run of 5 episodes, of which The Riddle of the Sphinx was the second. It has been described as a thriller in the style of Sleuth and Ira Levin’s 1978 play Deathtrap. It also has a gothic quality, in contrast to the second series, which they had directed themselves.
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