In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world—the joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—we shall yet find that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose, full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, “Should I be in order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?” Here is a glorious example of Irish humour—the bull not unconscious, not entirely conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman’s humour would have been logical: he would have said, “The orator denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a good example!” What the Scotchman’s humour would have said I am not so certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability of making such speeches on top of someone else’s hat. But American humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.
This is from Chesterton’s essay on Bret Harte, in Varied Types.
There are a great many young men who feel lost and hopeless in the modern world and many of them spend a lot of time on the internet complaining about it. This tends to rub older, moderately successful men wrong—very, very wrong. (Very roughly: men in their mid-thirties or older who have a wife and at least one child.) I’ve wondered about this for a while because I find this reaction in myself—I start out sympathetic but I verge on angry most times I try to interact with such men. I think I’ve finally figured it out: it has to do with the traditional role of adult men in raising other people’s young men into manhood.
Good parents love their children unconditionally and this is incredibly important to children and their healthy development. However, as children make their way to being adults, they are going to have to face other environments than the environment of home; they will have to face indifferent and even adverse environments. For most of human history (and much of the present, outside of some atypical but decreasingly atypical situations), this was especially true of boys. Somebody had to fight the wild animals who wanted to eat one’s children; somebody had to fight the other human beings who wanted to kill one and take one’s things. Defending against these and many other threats were usually best done in groups, often of people near in age, and that means working with people who were not one’s parents and who love one only conditionally. Preparing a boy for these environments is usually best done not by the boy’s father, but by friends of the boy’s father, or at least other adults males of good will. These are mentors.
Mentors do not love the boy unconditionally, as his father does (in the ideal, at least), but are willing to be more generous to the boy than the boy is yet capable of deserving. This mentorship forms a bridge for the boy to become a man. When a mentor demands more independence of the boy, this does not prevent the boy going to his father for unconditional love; by giving the role of being generously and patiently harsh to another man, the father can be a source of support for his son when that is too difficult, restoring the son’s strength, and enabling the son to go back to his difficult work of becoming a man.
This role of mentor is a bit tricky, since it does involve carefully gauging what the boy is currently capable of and only asking of him what he can do—as opposed to asking of the boy what would most benefit the mentor, as one does with, for example, a plumber1. But it does involve challenging the boy and pushing him to be able to deal with circumstances in which he has no support right now, to get him to use his “emotional muscles” to self-regulate and be able to deal with difficult circumstances, so that those “emotional muscles” grow. Because the time is coming when it will not matter how the now-boy feels, it only matters how he will fight in a battle and protect his fellow soldiers, or chase away the wolves, or do the unpleasant work before bad things happen because the work is not done.
Older men who are at least moderately successful (I mean in absolute terms, not as a euphemism for being rich) have the instinct that they should look for older boys and young men who need this kind of mentorship to transition into being fully independent men, and to provide this kind of supportive-challenging environment to help them to grow.
But the thing is, this relationship is very much a mutual one. The boy has to enter into it wanting to become a man. He has to want to be challenged. He has to want to rise to that challenge. All students must, in the end, learn for themselves; a teacher can only give the student what he needs in order to learn.
When you put all this together, I believe this explains why young men complaining about how unfair society is in its current configuration rubs us older men so wrong. This may all be true, but it’s not helpful in learning how to become a man. And a boy is better off becoming a man even in a bad society—there is no society where boys are better off staying permanently childish. Coming to us rubs us so wrong because we’re not the ones that young men should come to for this kind of sympathy. In fact, it would (often) be actively harmful to them to if we gave it to them, because it would discourage them from finishing growing up.
We all have our roles in society according to our station in life. For older men, our role is to act as mentors like this to young men. When young men come to us for sympathy, it feels a bit like coming to us for what they’re supposed to—mentorship—but then they reject attempts at mentorship, which confuses and frustrates us. Young men aren’t supposed to look to mentors for sympathy—they’re supposed to look elsewhere for that. It may be entirely legitimate that they are looking for sympathy everywhere because they can’t find it anywhere, but it’s a problem that this actively gets in the way of us fulfilling our proper role of mentor.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. I doubt it’s for us older men to just to give up on mentorship and become surrogate fathers to younger men, because that would still leave them stunted in their development and unable to fulfill their potential. God knows the answer; I don’t. At least, not yet. But identifying a problem is the first step towards solving it, and I think that this is, at least, a correct identification of the problem.
This is perfectly fair with tradesmen because the tradesman is a full adult who trades what is best for the customer in exchange for money, which the tradesman needs more than whatever minor comfort he gives up in doing the work he is skilled at. ↩︎
Clue, which goes by the name Cluedo in Britain, is a very fun game that has had an enormous number of versions and a very enjoyable, if quite odd, movie based on it.
If you don’t know, the presmise of Clue is that Mr. Boddy has been murdered in a mansion by one of the six guests: Mrs. White, Mr. Green, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard, and Miss Scarlet. (The characters in the screenshot are in that order, left-to-right.) Each player (the game works for three to six players) plays one of the suspects and goes around the board collecting clues, and trying to figure out who killed Mr. Boddy, in which room they killed him, and with what weapon.
This may make a little more sense if you look at the board:
When you consider the problem of trying to make a murder mystery board game that remains interesting when played more than once, the game mechanic is rather brilliant. Each suspect, room, and weapon has a card. You group each kind of card together and shuffle them, then you randomly pick one of each kind and, without looking, put it in the solution envelope (placed in the center of the board). You then, to the best of your ability, evenly distribute the rest of the cards (now combined and reshuffled) among the players. They then take turns rolling a die and moving that many squares, going to the various rooms of the mansion. From a room you can guess that room and any player or weapon that you like (officially, you “suggest” them); you then go counter-clockwise and the first player that has one of the three shows one of the cards that matches the guess to the guesser (without revealing it to the other players). Who answered the query gives limited information to the other players, depending on what they already know and what cards they have, giving material for logical deductions. When a player thinks they know the solution they state it as an accusation, then (without showing them to the other players) look at the cards in the solution envelope. If they’re right, they win. If they’re wrong, they’re now out of the game except for answering the suggestions of other players. If everyone understands the rules and pays attention, the game moves quickly and is a lot of fun, since you stand to learn something on every person’s turn. Indeed, if you’re good, you learn more from the rest of the players’ turns (taken together) than from your own.
The game was developed by Anthony E. Pratt in 1943 while he worked in a tank factory during the second world war. He was inspired by a game called “Murder” that he and friends would play during the inter-war years where people would sneak around rooms and the murderer would sneak up behind them and “kill” them. That and the great popularity of detective fiction at the time.
It would take a number of years before it was actually published, though. He brought it to Waddingtons, a British maker of card and board games founded in 1904 as a general printer that got into games in 1922. It was eventually bought out by Hasbro in 1994. Waddingtons made a number of changes to the initial concept, most of them being to simplify it a bit (such as reducing the number of characters down to six). Something I find very interesting is that its initial marketing focused on the detective aspect, to the point where they even licensed Sherlock Holmes’ likeness from the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
Another change by Waddingtons was the name. Pratt had simply called his game “Murder,” after the house party game that he and his friends used to play during the inter-war period. The name Cluedo was a portmanteau of Clue and Ludo, the later being the popular name in England of a board game Americans tend to know better as Pachisi. (Ludo is Latin and means, “I play.”) Since Ludo was not well known in America—the game was licensed to Parker Brothers for distribution in the US—the name was shortened to Clue for the American version.
There have been many editions of Clue since the original, many of them updated and more modern. The one that I own (pictured earlier) is a “classic” edition which comes in a wooden fake book. (It was a gimmick used for a variety of classic board games but works particularly well for Clue.) There’s a great deal to be said for the classic version because the game is so suggestive of the golded-age detective stories which inspired it and upon which it is (ever so loosely) based. The dinner party in a mansion is rather tied to this time period because people don’t really have dinner parties anymore. There’s so much more to do, these days.
This was actually an interesting needle that the movie needed to thread. Why would there be a dinner party with such different people in a large house? The movie partially solved this by using an earlier time period—the mid 1950s (it was specifically set in 1954). The other thing it did (spoilers ahead) was to make them all blackmail victims who were meeting each other for the first time. This was an interesting approach to giving everyone a motive for killing Mr. Boddy.
The other problem that the movie had, and only partially solved, was how on earth can it be a mystery whether a man was shot, stabbed, strangled, or bludgeoned to death? This is a place where, I think, the movie could have done a little better. It is a solvable problem, at least in the context of trying to solve the crime before the police arrive. (The solution would be to have people trying to frame others and so attack the fresh corpse with someone else’s weapon.)
The movie is rather interesting for another reason, though: it has a nod towards the replayability of the board game. Instead of having a single ending, it actually has three endings. As a gimmick during release, each movie theater was sent one of the endings at random. Fortunately for the recorded version, it was released on VHS long before DVDs were a thing and so they had to figure out something to do for the VHS version. What they came up with was to present one ending, then put in a silent-movie style text cards saying:
And then, after the second ending, we get:
I really like this version. It has style, it’s cool, and it also is an interesting way of poking fun at how mysteries are often indeterminate until some clinching evidence at the reveal. But it also is a great nod to how the board game doesn’t have a single solution.
I don’t know how much the movie led to interest in the board game—I can say that it did for me, but I don’t know many other people for whom it did. But I do know that there were versions of the board game which used art from and based on the movie. And in the 1980s it was kind of a big deal to have a feature film based on your thing—not many things did.
And that does point, too, to the answer to what got me looking into this in the first place: the game changed its art and style fairly often throughout its history. There were, in the last few decades, a rash of various brands trying to distance themselves from their history and from the past, but Clue was not, so far as I can tell, meaningfully caught up in that. It started with an aesthetic that was, at the time it was developed, relatively modern (except for the Sherlock-Holmes-alike, but that was a specific character rather than meant to be referencing a time period) and it changed throughout its history in ways that were contemporary. It also had a variety of tie-in versions, perhaps the most obvious being the Scooby-Doo version (still for sale on Amazon as of the time of this writing):
Having said that, I’ll take the classic version any day.
On the sixth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the second episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Joshua Peabody Died Here… Possibly, it is set in Cabot Cove. (Last week’s episode was Widow, Weep For Me.)
The scene opens on a construction site:
But all is not well here, as there’s a great deal of noise from the many people who are protesting it. After some general milling about and shouting, we meet one of the characters who is organizing the protest:
His name is David. We see him here leading everyone to sit down in front of the truck driving into the construction site.
We also meet Kowalski, who is in charge of the construction, and Harry Pierce, who is a real estate agent but is generally involved in promoting the sale and development of real estate as the plot of an episode may require and is an agent of the developer in some vague, unspecified way.
Harry Pierce is played by John Astin, by the way, who is best known for playing Gomez Adams on the TV show The Addams Family. (The Addams Family ran from 1964-1966, so by the time of this episode it had been almost twenty years since Astin had played the character.)
Harry goes over and talks to David. We establish that Harry thinks that this will be great for Cabot Cove because of all of the tourists it will bring in, though not why on earth he thinks that a twenty story luxury hotel will bring tourists in. Hotels are not usually destinations in themselves and Cabot Cove hardly seems like the kind of place to bring in more guests then residents given how little there is to do here.
David claims that Harry snuck the hotel by the zoning board when half the members were out of town. Harry takes exception to this, pointing out that they had a qorum. Which is a pretty reasonable point—quorums exist for a reason.
Sheriff Amos Tupper then arrives to deal with the uproar.
There isn’t time for a discussion, though, before somebody calls out, “Hey look! Down there!” and everyone runs to look down there.
Presumably it wasn’t the camera that they were looking at, but we don’t find out because the scene then shifts to Seth’s house:
I love the “& Surgeon” as if you might be walking along the road needing an organ removed but not know where to go.
Seth replaces Captain Ethan Cragg as Jessica’s close friend for Cabot Cove episodes. Supposedly this was due in part to Angela Lansbury pushing for it because she didn’t think Jessica had anything in common with the uneducated and taciturn fisherman who often took care of her plumbing, but the town doctor does make a certain amount more sense than a fishing captain since the doctor can be called in to check out the episode’s corpse and thus is a natural part of the episode rather than a fifth wheel merely there for comic relief.
Anyway, we’re introduced to their relationship by Jessica being there looking like she’s a patient:
But despite her back pain, she’s actually here for sympathy because she’s having trouble with her book.
Arthur is trapped in the belfry. His brother Charles is on his way to the minister. Alice is in the shower. And the killer is climbing up the stairs…
Seth interrupts to ask Jessica, “Exactly how long have you had these symptoms?”
Jessica doesn’t get to respond because Amos barges in and interrupts, saying, “Listen, Seth. If you can tear yourself loose from killing off your patients you gotta get over to Main Street quick, and bring your bag.”
I’m not sure how this construction site, which doesn’t seem to be next to anything, is on “main street,” but in any event Amos drives Seth and Jessica to the construction site, where we finally find out what everyone was looking at in the hole that is, presumably, where the foundation for the hotel will one day be laid, once they dig past the loose dirt and hit rock.
Amos figures that this has to be the remains of Joshua Peabody (Cabot Cove’s most famous revolutionary war hero—though whether he existed at all is the subject of debate, with Amos being strongly on the pro- side while Seth is partisan to the con- side).
When Harry tries to hurry things up, Jessica points out that, while it could be Joshua Peabody, it could also be a murder victim and this the site of a murder. (The skull has a large hole in it.) Amos decides that she’s right as soon as he realizes that this means that he can make the construction crew refrain from disturbing the bones.
David then goes home and we get some family life—his kid got in a fight with another kid in the gym because the other kid was making fun of David. His wife wishes David could have stayed out of these kinds of protests just once. Etc. He then gets a call from Jessica because he’s an antiques dealer. She’s examining a long rifle and reads him the inscription, “Phelps and Handley, Liverpool.” David tells her that it was issued to the British army starting in 1762. (Amos seems to regard this as evidence in favor of his Joshua Peabody theory, though why a revolutionary war soldier would have a rifle used by the British is never considered.)
The scene shifts to the other end of the call, where Jessica, Seth, Amos, and Harry are in Seth’s office as Seth takes measurements of the bones. There’s a bunch of arguing and yelling—I’m not sure why TV writers think that yelling makes for good TV—but the important part is that Jessica suggests that the corpse might be quite a lot more recent than Joshua Peabody. She suggests one of the militiamen from the recreations of the battle of Cabot Cove that used to be held until twelve years ago.
We then get a scene with Harry, Kowalski, and Henderson Wheatley (who is the developer putting up the money for the construction of the hotel). There’s some bickering amongst them which is unpleasant to watch, then finally they’re interrupted.
Wheatley is in the center while his laywer is on the left.
It turns out that they’re having this meeting in the hotel lobby, because we meet some more characters (they were the interruption) as they walk in to check into their rooms:
Her name is Del Scott, and she’s some kind of reporter. A hard-boiled one, specifically, who casually insults the subjects of her reporting (she repeatedly calls Wheatley a crook). The two men behind her are nameless and we never see them again.
We then get a scene of Wheatley, outside, ordering his lawyer around a bit, culminating in telling him to, by noon, get a court order to resume work immediately.
And on that bombshell, we go to commercial. Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back, we see Jessica coming out of the Cabot Cove courthouse for some reason.
As she leaves, Del Scott stops her on the street and asks her opinion, as Cabot Cove’s most famous citizen, on Henderson Wheatley’s latest construction project. Jessica replies that she’s famous for her books, not for her opinions and, in any event, this is a town matter, not one of national interest.
As they walk, Del tells Jessica about how she’s hated Wheatley for his sub-standard construction ever since she was covering the weather in Pittsburgh (that seems like the kind of detail that often comes up later—especially because as someone covering the weather in Pittsburgh she’d only have reason to hate Wheatley if a relative was killed in one of his buildings or something like that). Jessica suggests Del talk to someone like David Marsh, who would be far more eloquent on the subject than Jessica. She already tried, though, and Marsh declined. He even requested that they not film him at the construction site, though his request was too late. (This suggests that Marsh doesn’t want to be seen on national TV, perhaps because he’s a wanted fugitive who’s living under a false identity. Alternatively, that he’s someone in the witness protection program.)
The scene then shifts to a couple of hayseeds who are telling Amos that the bones don’t belong to Joshua Peabody, but to Uriah Pickett.
When Amos asks who they’re talking about, the man says that Uriah was a farmer from over “at the Blue Hill.” He disappeared fourteen years ago come April, same time as the fighting, as she recalls. Amos then replies that Uriah didn’t disappear, he ran away to Portland with a red-haired manicurist who used to work for Thelma Hatcher. (How he knows this so clearly when a moment ago he didn’t know who Uriah was, he does not say.)
This meeting is then interrupted by Ellsworth Buffum from Kennebunkport.
He’s the vice-president of the Joshua Peabody Society. He’s hear to take charge of the last remains of Joshua Peabody.
Amos is interrupted before he can respond by an important phone call and has to leave in a hurry.
The emergency turns out to be fighting down on the construction site. Or, rather, protesters standing in the way of heavy equipment and people shouting at each other. When Amos arrives the lawyer hands him the court order that construction should resume immediately. Ellseworth Buffum then calls attention to an injunction which he has from another court stopping all work until a historical examination is completed.
Later, at dinner in Jessica’s house, Seth and Jessica discuss the dinner Seth made (Jessica says it has too much basil while Seth says that there’s no basil in it) and also the corkscrew Jessica has, which Seth dislikes and Jessica says works perfectly well if you know how to use it. Also, Jessica couldn’t find anything in historical records to prove that Joshua Peabody actually existed and Seth says that the skeleton was of a man with a bad back—a problem with his fourth and fifth vertebrae.
Also, David Marsh gave Seth a scrap that was pried loose from what was left of the guy’s uniform:
The idea that something this old and buried for hundreds of years would be just kept in someone’s pocket and handed around like this is absurd, but I suppose we can take this to just be the prop department saving on making some kind of realistic case for it. And, of course, what possible full sheet of paper could this have been a scrap of?
When Seth presents Jessica with a seven-layer cake that they’re going to have for desert, Jessica then gets the inspiration to dig underneath where the skeleton was found for other artifacts. How no one else came up with this idea, I can’t imagine. But it doesn’t much matter, because the actual reason that Jessica and Amos go to the site of the body is to find the murder that this episode is really about:
And on this bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back from commercial, Seth is giving Amos the results of examining the fresh corpse. Wheatley probably died between 4am and 5am, having been shot at close range. (Also, it came up before the commercial break, but it started raining at 2am, at which point Amos came over and put the tarp over the place where the skeleton had been found and under which Wheatley had been found, to preserve evidence from the skeleton. They made a point of establishing it, so presumably someone is going to know something they shouldn’t about it.)
Amos also notes that Wheatley’s car is here and Kowalski sleeps in a motor home on the premises, so he’ll need to interview him.
Amos is prevented in finding Kowalski by Del Scott coming up and interviewing him.
I’d ask why on earth this is in the episode except that her first question explains it:
Would you describe your feelings when you removed the tarp and discovered Mr. Wheatley’s body?
Unless she was the one who put Wheatley under the tarp, she’d have had no way of knowing that it had been under a tarp. It was clearly established that the tarp only showed up a few hours prior to the murder and Jessica and Amos thoroughly uncovered the body when they discovered it, long before Del and her film crew showed up.
In the next scene Jessica ovearhears the lawyer and Kowalski arguing in Kowalski’s trailer with the door open. The lawyer shouts:
You knew what was going on here. You knew the whole scam. Now, I’m the attorney on this corporation. You’ll get not one dime from me.
Jessica then discovers Wheatley’s tie clip, close to Kowalski’s trailer. When Amos comes up and asks what she thinks it’s doing here, her guess is that it fell off when Wheatley’s corpse was carried to the excavation. (Jessica thinks he was shot elsewhere and brought to the construction site.)
Later in the day, Jessica goes and examines the construction site and finds that one one the bulldozers has a busted tread, the wheelbarrow next to Kowalski’s trailer has a dirty handle, and Kowalski has a cut on his hand. He then tells her that she’s trespassing and she does an innocent old woman routine, then leaves.
When Jessica gets to town she’s in time to break up some fighting between David Marsh’s son and another kid. Then, as there’s general bickering, FBI Special Agent Fred Keller shows up…
…and arrests David Marsh, noting that his name is actually Daniel Martin. They’ve been after him for seventeen years.
Harry recognizes the name Daniel Martin as a “nutcase Vietnam protester”. Fred explains that, fourteen years ago, Martin bombed a federal courthouse. Amos shows up and tells Agent Keller that David is actually his prisoner, as he’s arresting him for the murder of Henderson Wheatley.
Amos explains his case—he found a note in Wheatley’s office that Wheatley discovered that David had planted the skeleton to slow down construction. David was also seen in the vicinity of the hotel at the same time that the night clerk at the hotel saw Wheatley leave the hotel. He takes David into custody, which Agent Keller isn’t too happy about, but does not stop.
The scene then shifts to Jessica and Seth in Seth’s office when Agent Keller comes in (he had an appointment with Seth). He explains that they didn’t get a chance to fingerprint Daniel Martin, but they were able to obtain his early medical records and he’s hoping that Seth can compare them with his records of David Marsh to make a positive identification. Seth looks at the medical records, but refuses to give Agent Keller a copy of David Marsh’s medical records. Keller is frustrated but assures them that he will get his man, with or without their cooperation.
After he leaves, Seth hints to Jessica that David really is Daniel Martin, and on that bombshell we go to commercial.
When we come back, Jessica is talking with David in jail, where he admits to her that he is Daniel Martin, though he denies being involved in the courthouse bombing. (The day of the courthouse bombing, he was living in Cabot Cove.)
Jessica then goes and finds Kowalski, who has moved his mobile home to a scenic overlook for some reason. Jessica brought him a salve for the cut on his hand and she insists on applying it for him, which for some reason he agrees to.
As they talk, Jessica says that she couldn’t help but notice the shabby state of the construction equipment and that it must have been difficult working for a man with so little regard for his employees.
Kowalski said that it was. Wheatley’s poorly maintained equipment got several friends of his killed. He names two examples: Bobby Scotto in Pittsburgh and Harry Pateki in Detroit (an elevator cable rusted through and dropped him 32 floors).
Of course, it’s hard to not notice that “Scott” and “Scotto” are very similar last names.
Oh, and Wheatley never paid any of the construction workers on this job; unlike before, money now seems to have been in short supply.
Over at the Sheriff’s office, Amos hands Jessica a paper that came over what sounds like a teletype machine and says that Wheatley owed money all over town. Apparently, Amos believes that the lawyer might be responsible, but Jessica doesn’t buy it. Even if the lawyer had a motive, he had no reason to hide the body on the excavation site. Hiding it there felt almost like a symbolic gesture to her.
Amos then reflects on the case and says that it goes to show that if you have something in your past, eventually it will come out. It just doesn’t pay to try and change your name.
At the words, “change your name” Jessica perks up and, presumably, realizes that it might pay to change your name if you’re changing it to sound better as the weather girl on a Pittsburgh TV station. However, Jessica only asks Amos to stop Kowalski from leaving town and to bring him back if he’s already left.
Jessica stops by the library to get some photocopies of news stories (I assume to prove that Daniel Martin alias David Marsh had an alibi for the courthouse bombing). She then calls the hotel and asks for Del Scott’s room. She gets Del and says that she’ll make a statement on Del’s news program. She’ll meet her at the construction site in an hour.
In the interview, she ambushes Del with her relation to Robert Scotto who was killed in Pittsburgh, where Del came from. Del cuts the interview short saying that it has no news value but Jessica keeps going. Jessica phoned the Pittsburgh hall of records and Robert Scotto had a younger sister, named Della Scotto. She then tells Del what happened: at 4am she called Wheatley saying that she had evidence that David Marsh had planted the skeleton. When he let her into his room so she could show him the evidence, she shot him. (How the hotel clerk saw Wheatley leave at 4am if Del killed him in his room, Jessica doesn’t say.)
Del breaks down and says that it is true that her brother died because Wheatley was too cheap to keep his crane in good repair. It broke and dropped four tons of I-beams on her brother. She admits hating him but denies having killed him. Jessica, however, insists that she did. And that after she killed him she put him in the construction site because it seemed symbolic—a grave that he dug for himself.
When the subject of evidence comes up, Jessica points out that Del knew about the tarp despite it being placed on the grave site at 2am and having been removed before her crew got there.
Del then, through tears, says that she tried for years to prove Wheatley’s guilt honestly but every time she got close he bribed witnesses and suppliers. He bought off the people he needed to so that she could never get him. She finishes with, “I’m not proud of what I did, Mrs. Fletcher, but don’t ask me to be sorry.”
In the next scene Jessica and Seth go to the antique shop, where Agent Keller is arresting the now-free Daniel Martin/David Marsh. Jessica shows Keller a newspaper clipping that places David in Cabot Cove the day before the bombing. Jessica then shows him another clipping about a “Joey Fawcett.”
(It’s interesting that the props people didn’t bother to change the text of the newspaper that they used for this but only made up the headline.)
Jessica says that, clearly, the guy must have fallen and hit his head and died, and at least ten dozen people will swear that Joey Fawcett was actually Daniel Martin.
Agent Keller asks what happened next—the good citizens of Cabot Cove shoveled dirt over him?
Seth replies that there’s no accounting for what folks are here are libel to do.
Seth then hands Keller the fractured femur of the skeleton from the dig and invites Keller to compare it with his x-rays of Daniel Martin. Keller does so and it doesn’t match, which Seth tries to explain as the x-rays of Daniel Martin being from before he was fully grown.
Keller then says:
You know, a man must be very special to have people willing to stand up before an agent of the United States Department of Justice and each of them willing to risk charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and harboring a fugitive. Not many men have friends like that.
He then tells David that he (Keller) was wrong and has been pursuing a dead man, and leaves. Before Keller fully gets into his car, he tells Seth that he might want to brush up on his anatomy. The bone he showed Keller was an arm bone, not a leg bone.
After he drives off, Seth remarks that he didn’t think that Keller was that smart.
Seth then says that one good thing has come of this, though. Now that they’ve proved that the bones belong to Daniel Martin, they can put the Joshua Peabody nonsense to rest.
Jessica tells Seth that’s going too far and they laugh and we go to credits.
It was definitely good to be back in Cabot Cove again. Even though it’s a minority of episodes, Cabot Cove keeps Murder, She Wrote grounded. And it’s nice to meet Seth. As much as I did like Claude Akins as Captain Ethan Cragg, Seth is better. And as the town doctor he fits better with murder mysteries, too. This is discussed a bit in a New York Times article from October 27, 1985 which gives a bit of insight into this change:
The weekly arguments between Mr. Fischer and Miss Lansbury come because she wants to expand the character. When the series began, Jessica Fletcher was a substitute schoolteacher riding her bicycle in Cabot Cove, Me., who had written one detective novel. Now, as the famous author of a half-dozen best-sellers, ”She must avoid at all costs being sophisticated or jaded or superior,” says Mr. Fischer.
”She must consort with people of a certain intellectual level,” says Miss Lansbury, who fought ”tooth and nail” against Jessica’s relationship with the owner of a Cabot Cove fishing boat who also served as her handyman, a recurring character last season. ”There’s something wrong with Jessica if she enjoys spending more than 15 minutes a week with that man,” says Miss Lansbury.
The character has been dropped and replaced by a doctor (played by William Windom) with whom Jessica plays chess. Miss Lansbury has also ”fought and won a battle” against the network, which wanted to supply her with a sidekick. ”The whole basis of the show is that Jessica is a middle-aged woman alone,” says Miss Lansbury, ”and the network wanted to have a character joined at the hip who drove a car for me.” She has also resisted a serious romance, though, for a while last season, it seemed as though a different murderer was falling in love with her every week. ”I said no to those slight romantic liaisons. It makes her seem as though she has round heels,” says Miss Lansbury, using a British expression that decribes a woman who tumbles quickly into bed.
Seth being a good change is about the only positive thing I can say for this episode. The problem that most galls me is that it had far more loose ends than tied up ends. The biggest loose end, of course, being how on earth the skeleton—whoever it is—became buried under eight feet of ground on a cliff by the shore. The only way for it to have happened would have been for someone to have buried him quite remarkably deep for a grave, because dirt does not accumulate at anything like the rate of four feet per century, to say nothing of half a foot per year if this really was from a reenactor. You can easily tell this by going to a cemetery with two hundred year old tombstones and noting that they’re not buried under six feet of dirt.
And how on earth was this skeleton uncovered in a way that anyone noticed? A large, deep cut like this would be done with earth moving equipment. That doesn’t lend itself to noticing dirt-colored bones, even if by pure luck you happened to excavate right above the skeleton, exposing it, rather than picking it up in the excavator’s scoop.
And then there’s the way that the identity of the skeleton is never decided and, in fact, just dropped. The skeleton is hugely important to the episode; it drives most of what happens. And, after a few initial snippets about a British musket near to it and a scrap of paper that is oddly durable, we get nothing more. Everyone just stops caring about it.
I also don’t know why David Marsh/Daniel Martin is supposed to be a sympathetic character. All we know about him is that he’s against an absurdly large hotel in a place that would have great trouble filling it to a quarter capacity, leads a protest that Jessica is sympathetic to though it’s not clear why she should be, is always causing trouble in Cabot Cove, and fifteen years ago he did a bunch of “nutty” Vietnam war protest stuff. Oh, and his son gets into an awful lot of fights. I’m not seeing what we’re supposed to like about this guy. Are we even sure he didn’t plant the skeleton? He certainly was the person in Cabot Cove with the most access to things that can be planted to lend credibility to the “find” and we’ve established that he isn’t scrupulously honest. (Just as a side note: how would tiny little Cabot Cove support an antiques dealership?)
We also get a villain in the episode with all of the sophistication and nuance of Luten Plunder from Captain Planet. So far as I can tell, Henderson Wheatley cheats because he would rather be corrupt than honest. Are we really to believe that it costs more to settle a worker’s death, repair a broken crane, clean up dropped I-beams, suffer delays during which people get paid but work doesn’t get done, and bribe all manner of people to cover it up than it would be to just repair the crane’s cable before it breaks? People do skimp on necessary maintenance when they’re short of money and, instead of doing the things that will reliably make them more money, hope that things will work out until they have the money to cover the repairs. People don’t skimp on necessary when they’re rich because paying for maintenance is much cheaper than paying for repairs. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure to the rich as well as to the poor. In fact, one of the ironic things about poverty is that it’s more expensive to be poor because the rich can avoid all sorts of major expenses by paying much smaller ones to prevent the big expenses from being necessary. All of which makes the character of Wheatley being so rich he can get away with anything not make any sense in the episode.
Especially because it’s actually a plot point that he isn’t so rich. They very clearly established that money was in short supply on this job. They even went so far as to have the lawyer angrily yell at Kowalski that he (Kowalski) knew what the scam was when he started the job. But once Kowalski shares the useful information of “Robert Scotto” having been killed through Wheatley’s negligence, this is entirely dropped.
Overall, this episode is a mess. We don’t get our body until right before the mid-point commercial break, the victim is a cardboard cutout of evil, the supposedly sympathetic characters aren’t sympathetic, and most of the interesting plot threads are dropped for no reason. Heck, we even get unambiguous evidence of who the killer is less than a minute and thirty seconds (not counting the commercial break) from finding the body, making the rest of the investigation obviously pointless.
Oh well. Next week we’re in New York City for Murder in the Afternoon.
On the twenty ninth day of September in the year of our Lord 1985, the first episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in the tropics, it’s titled Widow, Weep For Me. (Last season’s finale was Funeral At Fifty Mile.)
This must have been very exciting for the cast and crew of Murder, She Wrote because a second season means that you’re a success. Of course, a second season in no way guarantees a third, and they would have no way of knowing, at this point, that Murder, She Wrote would run for a total of twelve seasons. It’s also an interesting time for viewers because TV shows would often change fairly substantially between the first and second seasons. The lead-up to the second season was a time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t, what could be improved, and what needed to be streamlined. So now we find out whether all of that made it better or worse.
After the establishing shot of someplace that’s supposed to be the tropics but could be California with a few tiki torches in the foreground, we then get an opening scene of a wealthy woman who writes a letter to Jessica, posts it in the hotel post box, then gets murdered.
We then see the figure wearing all-black raise a knife that he had previously used to jimmy open the door from the balcony:
(I’ve upped the exposure; the original was very dark)
I love how often burglars in Murder, She Wrote wear all black clothing, including black gloves. I suppose it would, actually, help one to hide in shadows, though I can’t help but think that it would look a bit odd while you’re on your way to those shadows.
The hand plunges down and we smash-cut to a wave crashing on the rocks at Cabot Cove:
Instead of seeing Cabot Cove, though, we then cut to a white limousine pulling up to the same hotel. A moment later, Jessica gets out, speaking in her best rich-woman accent:
She asks the man in the uniform to see to her matched luggage. They’re unmarked, and she’d like to leave with them in the same condition.
At the desk, she lays it on quite thick. Evidently, she’s trying to give the impression of a rich, self-important woman.
A woman named Myrna Montclair then approaches Jessica and introduces herself.
Jessica (who is going by the name Mrs. Canfeld, from Nebraska) asks if they’ve met before and is sure that they have. Myrna suggests that Jessica might be recognizing her from her previous career—the movies.
(The actress playing Myrna is Cyd Charisse, who was, perhaps, most famous for being the leading lady opposite Fred Astair in two MGM movies, though she did a lot of other things too and I’m not very familiar with her career. Here’s a clip of her dancing with Fred Astaire in the movie 1953 The Bandwagon🙂
It’s very interesting that they lamp-shade the fact that Cyd Charisse would have been recognizable by having the character be a former movie star.
Anyway, Jessica continues to lay on the “self-important rich woman” shtick. She lays it on quite thick; this shot gives a sense of just how thick Jessica is laying it on:
Up in her hotel room, Jessica takes off the ridiculous turban and reads the letter we saw the woman in the opening write. Before I get to that, I have to say that the outfit looks better without the turban:
I really wonder why those were a thing.
Anyway, the letter says:
Jessica, I’m in trouble. Desperately need your help and advice. I sense a terrible danger, but I can’t leave the island. Will explain when you arrive. –Antoinette
Jessica’s thinking about what she just read is interrupted by a man who calls her “Madam Fletcher” in a French accent:
His name is Chief Inspector Claude Rensselaer, of the Island Police. He then reminds her that they spoke on the phone. (He warned her to not come.)
He’s concerned for her safety as she’s showed up in a manner designed to invite trouble. Jessica explains that Antoinette’s last act was to ask for her help and she’s not going to ignore that request. The two were very close—like sisters—until five years ago when Antoinette’s husband died and Antoinette tried to lose herself in travel, parties, love affairs, and drink.
The Chief Inspector tells her that she was killed by a thief—he’s been operating in the area recently—but Jessica cannot accept that. He says that it is widely known that the victim wrote Jessica a letter right before she died and this might put Jessica in danger. Oddly, Jessica doesn’t point out that this would only be true if the inspector is wrong and it wasn’t just a thief after jewelry who snuck into the room after the letter was posted. Instead, she just explains that’s why she came under the assumed name of Marguerite Canfield (who the Chief Inspector remarks is a famous recluse).
He also asks if she realizes that all of the gaudy jewelry makes her a target for the thief and Jessica replies that she certainly hopes so. Then she asks what they have actually found out.
He says that they have no physical evidence and those who knew Antoinette best all have alibis. Jessica then gets a list from the Chief Inspector of who those people are.
We then meet the first person on the list, Eric Brahm, the hotel manager:
He tried to put the moves on “Mrs. Canfield,” though according to the Chief Inspector he tries that on all unattached ladies in the hotel.
Speaking of unattached ladies, Jessica meets Alva Crane at the roulette table:
Shortly after they introduce themselves, a timer goes off and Alva says that she needs to take her blood pressure medication. As she fumbles in her purse for the medication, we get a closeup of a key in her purse:
I’ve no idea what this is supposed to be a clue for, but they never show us a closeup in Murder, She Wrote without it being important. This one is a bit odd because this was during the time when hotels would use keys rather than disposable key-cards, so we would expect her to have a key in her purse.
After she gives a bit of chatter, a couple comes up, the woman obviously drunk.
She places a bet on number seventeen, as seventeen is the number on her classroom door in Curtis Road Elementary School in Davenport, Iowa. (She loses, of course. It comes up number twenty two.)
When she tries to place another bet the man tells her that it’s time to go to bed and she marvels to the older women that this beautiful man is with her.
After they depart, a middle-aged man with an Irish accent walks up and introduces himself as Michael Haggerty.
There’s a bit of witty dialog—she asks if they’ve been introduced and he says that he believes he just accomplished that formality—then he invites Jessica (as Maggie Canfield) to join him on the terrace and for some reason she accepts. He’s charming and claims to be a man of independent means, saying something vague about the British police thinking that he and some friends of his robbed the bank of England of a million pounds.
Later on, as they’re walking, Jessica asks about the man with the schoolteacher and Michael says that he is “Sven Torvald”. A few years ago he won two gold medals for skiing. These days he a member of the international jet set. A bit of conversation later, as Michael is inviting Jessica to go tour a waterfall with him, a thief grabs Jessica’s purse and runs. Michael gives chase but is knocked down by another man who claims that it was an accident.
The man who knocked Michael down, allowing the thief to get away, turns out to be Sheldon Greenberg, the head of hotel security. When Jessica asks why he’s been watching her all evening, he says that it was because he was worried that something like this might happen because she wears her jewelry so conspicuously. He then excuses himself to go report the theft to the police.
Oddly, we don’t fade to black when going to commercial, but, regardless, had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we get back, Jessica calls Inspector Rensselaer. She asks him if Sheldon Greenberg really did report the theft of her purse, and he tells her that Greenberg has not. She asks what he knows about Greenberg and Rensselaer says that he doesn’t know much, but his credentials check out. He had been a New York City policeman for twenty years with a good record.
After this phone call Jessica spies the drunk woman from the night before running along, stops her, and introduces herself. The woman’s name is Veronica Harrold. She’s on the trip because she won it at a supermarket giveaway. The funny thing is that she doesn’t even remember entering. Also, it was a vacation for one—she met Sven here.
Veronica gets on to reminiscing. The woman who died—Antoinette—was super nice to her on the first day she got here. When Jessica (still posing as Maggie Canfeld) remarks that this was very nice of her, Veronica replies that it was, but also a little strange—it was as if Antoinette had singled her out. Antoinette didn’t get along well with Sven, though.
Veronica then notices Miss Montclair standing by the tennis courts in a tennis outfit and talks about how beautiful she is and how much she (Veronica) loved her (Miss Montclair) in her movies. She saw The Sin of Andrea Crown six times. (Miss Montclair played a woman whose husband is cheating on her so she systematically kills all of his mistresses. This is invented for this episode; it has nothing to do with the movies Cyd Charisse was in, so far as I can tell.)
This is interupted by Sven coming up. He’s rented a boat at the marina and thought they might do some scuba diving. Veronica thinks this is a great idea and excuses herself to Jessica.
The scene then shifts to the hotel manager’s office, where the hotel manager tells Michael Haggerty that he’s checked and there is no Michael Haggerty associated with the whiskey importing business, which puts him in a distressing position since Michael has run up a casino obligation of more than ten thousand pounds under false credentials.
Michael replies that he won’t explain; his using an alias is a personal quirk. However, he hands the hotel manger a cashier’s check for twenty five thousand pounds and tells him that it should ease his misgivings.
It’s a bit odd that he’s made it out to the hotel manager personally, rather than to the hotel, but in any event this does ease the hotel manager’s misgivings and the scene ends.
In the next scene Jessica notices the hotel security man talking, in the lobby of the hotel, with the man who stole her purse the night before.
After the man in the striped shirt leaves and Greenberg goes into her office, Jessica goes in and confronts him. He claims that he found it (full of cash, no less) after scouring the grounds for a few hours, but Jessica asks about him talking with the thief.
Instead of answering, he shows Jessica one of her books with her picture on the back. (I love how in Murder, She Wrote all of Jessica’s books have a large picture of her on the back cover instead of a blurb or book reviews. This wasn’t super-common, though it did happen in the 1980s, perhaps most prominently with Danielle Steele.)
He had her purse stolen because he wasn’t certain she wasn’t Marguerite Canfeld and wanted to look at her passport to be sure.
The conversation then takes a strange turn as he seems to take her presence personally—that she came to make him look bad. Jessica responds by flattering him and even suggesting that she would make him a character in her next book. He takes this well, saying that he’s read all of her books and they’re good, so he offers to help her if there’s anything he can do.
Jessica then calls Inspector Rensselaer and asks if they can meet someplace where they won’t be seen. He says he will meet her in a private place in Turtle Bay in 30 minutes. (Why she can’t just say what she wants to say over the phone, which is not much less private, she does not say. Also, it’s a bit odd that he says he knows where it is but doesn’t tell her where it is.)
There’s then a scene where the hotel manager has a conversation with miss Myrna Montclair, who turns out to be his wife but they’re keeping it secret because of company policy. He tells her that they will be able to go public in few months at the most, suggesting, I think, that he’s supposed to be a suspect for the robberies. Which, of course, guarantees that he’s innocent.
We then cut to Jessica waiting for a cab but Michael Haggerty drives up and insists on giving her a ride, which for some reason she accepts. After Michael passes the correct turn, Jessica asks him to stop the car but he says that he needs a minute to lose the person following them, first. After some evasive maneuvers, he does.
He then pulls up to an overlook and talks with Jessica. She asks if he knew Antoinette and he did, including that she had two marriages, the first of which her father paid to have annulled. When Jessica says it’s curious that he knows that because her marriage to Leon Savitch was a secret she shared with no one, he remarks that it’s interesting that she knows the first husband’s name and asks who the hell she is, adding that he once met Marguerite Canfeld many years ago, and unless she’s grown five inches in the intervening time, Jessica is definitely not Marguerite Canfeld.
And on this bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back, Sergeant D’arcy (who was the one following them) pulls up and asks Jessica, by her real name, if she’s fine, to which she replies that she is. Haggerty takes note of the name. D’arcy shows Jessica his badge and asks her to come with him immediately. The Inspector wants to see her at the hotel—there’s been another murder.
Back at the hotel, Jessica meets up with Rensselaer, who mentions that it wasn’t luck that Sergeant D’arcy caught up with them—he took the precaution of having a homing device put into Michael Haggerty’s car before they drove off. (When Jessica replies, “of course, the doorman,” Rensselaer replies, “let’s keep that our little secret”.)
The victim is a Alva Crane, who was murdered at around six in the morning.
Jessica disagrees that this is the work of a professional thief—Alva Crane’s jewels were good fakes, but they were fakes. And if Jessica could spot that they were fakes, surely a professional thief could, too.
They then check out whether Alva Crane was merely wearing fake jewels to keep the real ones safe or if she actually had little worth stealing. They do this by taking the key which was in her purse, but now is on her dresser, which turns out to be the key for her hotel safe deposit box.
When they open the safe deposit box they don’t find anything of value—only about $1,000 in American money. Greenberg disagrees with Jessica about Alva Crane’s jewels being fakes, though. He thinks that they were real—unlike the jewels that Jessica was wearing.
The subject of fake jewels that someone can spot with the naked eye is rather interesting, because it was somewhat iffy in 1985 and certainly didn’t last much beyond it. In the late 1970s, cubic zirconia became commercially available and high quality cubic zirconia is exceedingly difficult to distinguish from real diamonds with the naked eye—and almost impossible to tell while someone is wearing them, where you can’t control the lighting and angles to see the subtle differences with diamonds. (Synthetic sapphires, rubies, and emeralds were all widely available by the 1960s and the only way to distinguish them from their natural variants is by their lack of flaws—but a lack of flaws is also what you find in more expensive natural gemstones.)
Prior to the 1970s, it was the case that glass might be used as fake diamonds and the trained eye might spot them. If you’ve seen references to “paste” jewels, by the way, it was to this. “Paste” referred to heavily leaded crystal because of the way in which it was made—the ingredients in the leaded glass were mixed as a paste prior to firing in order to ensure uniform mixing. By 1985 leaded crystal glass had largely been replaced by cubic zirconia as fake diamonds, though one might plausibly stretch this that an older lady might have fake jewels she bought at least five or six years before, and hasn’t seen the need to upgrade.
I should add, because most people’s experience with cubic zirconia is with low-grade cubic zirconia, that there are 5 basic grades which are related to the quality of manufacturing (zirconium oxide tends to be monocrystaline a room temperature, not cubic structured; dopants such as yttrium or calcium oxide are used to stabilize the cubic structure at room temperature, each manufacturer having their own recipe). The lowest grade might be sold at prices that teenagers shopping in malls could afford, and consequently his is often what people think of when they think of cubic zirconia. Not only was the recipe used in making these grades chosen for economic efficiency rather than clarify of the resulting gemstone, they were generally machine cut and received only some polishing. The stuff sold in jewelry stores as fake diamonds would be the highest grade, hand-cut, and thoroughly polished. It’s this high-end cubic zirconia that is difficult to distinguish from diamond with the naked eye. It’s also the kind that a rich woman getting a cheap copy made of real jewelry would get when she asked her jeweler to make the copy.
Considering mysteries written today: this is a plot point that isn’t plausible since the widespread commercial availability of moissanite—which simply cannot be distinguished from diamonds by the visible light spectrum, even with tools. Moissanite can be distinguished from diamond, but the tools to do so use electrical and fluorescent properties, not visible light. (Moissanite cost around 10% what diamonds did by the early 2000s and have come down even more significantly in cost since the patents on their manufacture expired in 2018.) In a mystery written today, a person would only be able to spot fake jewels if the fake jewelry was an heirloom piece, made decades before.
Getting back to the episode, Jessica asks Greenberg to explain his theory of the case and he obliges. He suspects the hotel manager, Eric Brahm. He was sucking up to both of the women who died and he’s always on the lookout to make money—always trying to put together some scheme or other.
Jessica then goes and interviews Eric Brahm, the hotel manager. He reveals that everyone knows who she really is, now, so Jessica drops the act and asks forgiveness for having been deceitful. Brahms is understanding, saying that it was probably a wise precaution. She then denies helping the police, but does have one question—could Alva Crane have been wearing paste jewels because she was in financial trouble? Brahm assures her that Alva was extremely solvent—her security holdings are worth millions. And, not only that, her checks were good.
When Jessica gets back to her room, Michael Haggerty is waiting for her. When she asks how he got in, he replies that it’s another of his talents that are best left unexplained. He asks why she was hiding letters from Antoinette and Jessica asks how he knew Antoinette. He explains that didn’t know her, he only knew of her, and says that they should go elsewhere to talk. Which turns out to be a golf course:
There is, I think, a certain wisdom in going to wide open places to have a private conversation. It would be very unlikely for people who want to listen in to have planted microphones in the grass. They are, perhaps, a bit close to the shrubbery, but then they’re moving, so no one hiding in a shrub will overhear much.
He then reveals that Antoinette gave birth to a child six months after the annulment of her marriage to the poet Leon Savitch. Her very wealthy father was furious and refused to recognize the issue of a non-marriage. He threatened to cut her off without a cent unless she gave the child up for adoption. Michael then explains that now, with “the hot breath of his maker warming down the back of his neck” he’s seeking to atone for past sins and searching for the grandchild.
Jessica says that the grandchild would be Veronica Harrold, and Michael praises her deductive skill. The contest idea was the old man’s idea. He’s dying, but still has his wits about him. When Jessica asks how long he’s been working for the old man, Michael replies, “off and on for ten years or more.” He’s done odd jobs that required discretion or involved risk.
Jessica asks, “like robbing the Bank of England?”
Haggerty replies, “You may well laugh, Ma’am, but I actually had to do that once, some years back, by order of the Prime Minister. I was attached to MI5.” (MI5 is the domestic counterpart to MI6, Britain’s more famous intelligence service.)
After thinking some things through, Jessica says that they must go to the marina at once. (Clearly, she suspects Sven, though what danger Veronica could be in I’ve no idea since Sven couldn’t inherit anything from her as a boyfriend and she’d have had no time to make out a will in his favor.)
On the way, Jessica mentions to Michael that several of the letters were mailed from alpine ski resorts. And one of the letters mentions having met a delightful young man there. They’ve spent nights sharing secrets and shutting out the rest of the world. Jessica explains that if this was Sven and Antoinette in a drunken moment told him about her daughter, this would certainly explain Sven suddenly becoming romantically involved with an Iowa school teacher and also why Antoinette and Sven didn’t get along.
When Michael points out that Sven has no reason to kill Veronica, Jessica says that it might be something worse than that. (You don’t see many references to “a fate worse than death” in the 1980s.)
They get to the docks just as Sven and Veronica’s boat is pulling in, and Veronica announces that she and Sven are going to be married in the morning.
Michael and Jessica confront Sven with his acquaintance with Antoinette. Michael adds that the wedding will have to wait until after Sven has had a chat with the police about a murder. At this, Sven tries to run. Michael heads him off and they both end up in the water with Michael holding Sven by the shirt.
And on this bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back, Sven is being interrogated in Inspector Rensselaer’s office, along with Michael Haggerty (Jessica is off comforting Veronica). Sven confirms that Antoinette did tell him about her daughter one night, while she was drunk. He ran into her again on this island, saw Antoinette with Veronica, and put two and two together. However, he denies killing Antoinette, and the scene ends with that.
As Jessica is comforting Veronica, Veronica recalls some useful information that Sven couldn’t have committed the first robbery as he showed up two days after it (the robbery was the day after Veronica arrived).
Jessica goes to see Eric Brahm and interrupts the ending of a meeting with an investigator from the company which insured Alva Crane’s missing jewels. This conclusively proves that the jewels were real, or at least that she owned real jewels. It does make me wonder who contacted the insurance company to file the claim, but it’s usually best not to ask after trifles like this in Murder, She Wrote. After the investigator leaves, Jessica lets Eric know that they won’t find Alva’s jewels in Sven Torvald’s room, as he didn’t arrive until three days after the first robbery.
Brahm then suspects that Jessica suspects him and tells her that he’s planning to fire Sheldon Greenberg—not only is he a total incompetent, but his accuastions against Brahm are beyond the pale. Myrna then shows up and tells Jessica that Brahm was sharing her bed and her affections at the time that Alva Crane was murdered. There’s a really funny bit where she says, “If you’re shocked, Mrs. Fletcher” and Jessica interrupts to say, emphatically, “Oh, I’m not.” Myrna goes on to say that they’re married and have been for nearly a year, which Jessica responds to with “My congratulations to you both, belatedly,” which shows she hadn’t deduced that they were married, which means that, clearly, she thought that Myrna was a loose woman. Fortunately, Myrna doesn’t seem to notice the implication.
When Myrna says that Eric has been trying to put together a hotel on the Mexican Riviera, Eric adds that it may take longer, now. The thing that’s holding it up is money—they key to everything. At the mention of a key, Jessica realizes the solution to the murders, and hurriedly excuses herself to go call Inspector Rensselaer.
She then drops in on Sheldon Greenberg, who is packing up his things—Brahm already fired him. Jessica asks if Eric Brahm had a master key to the safe deposit boxes but Greenberg says no, there’s only one and it never leaves his possession.
Jessica then reveals that it was Greenberg who killed the women, in order to steal their jewelry. Her proof is that Alva kept the key to her safe deposit box inside of a small change purse in her larger purse, but when her body was discovered the key was lying on her dresser, in plain sight. And since Greenberg hadn’t mentioned it, the user must have been him, since no one could have gotten into the box without both Alva and Greenberg’s key at the same time.
As Greenberg reaches for a gun in his desk drawer, Michael Haggerty walks in with a small cloth bag and tells him that the authorities got a search warrant and went through his luggage. Even removed from their settings, the gems will be easy enough to trace to their owners.
Why they authorities let Michael hold the jewels for this confrontation, he does not say.
As Greenberg starts reaching for his gun again, Jessica cautions him not to, and the camera pulls up to Inspector Rensselaer, holding a gun:
(I’ve upped the exposure since the original was quite dark.)
This is dramatic but a bit silly, as he’s directly between Jessica and Michael, it would have been impossible for Greenberg to not see him as he was reaching for the gun in his drawer.
Greenberg gives up and says, “A million bucks. Thanks, lady. I could have lived like a king.”
I can’t help but mention that his math is a bit off. If he tried to live off of this for ten years, that would mean he’d have to make due on $100,000 per year (just under $302,000 in 2025 dollars). If he was staying at hotels the entire time, he’d be able to afford one that cost $273/day ($834 in 2025 dollars)—assuming he could photosynthesize or otherwise do without food. That’s hardly living like a king. To live like a king, he’d need to blow it all in one year, or perhaps in an even shorter time span.
Anyway, the next morning Jessica bids farewell to Veronica. After that, Michael bids Jessica a fond farewell, and we go to credits.
This was a curious episode to start off the second season with. On the one hand, I can see how they could have thought of it as pulling out all the stops. We have an interesting exotic location. We have Jessica pretending to be a rich recluse to solve the murder of a friend who wrote to her right before being murdered. We have the intrigue of a long-lost child. We have a jewel thief who has killed multiple times. We have a charming and mysterious Irishman. We even have a dapper police inspector with a delightful accent.
And yet, the impression I have when it’s over is not that this was a special episode. I’m not entirely sure why.
I think part of it is that I found the character of Marguerite Canfeld insufferable. To be fair, she was probably intended to be insufferable. But pretend-insufferable is still insufferable. Jessica dropped the character roughly halfway through the episode, but that was, really, far too late.
Thinking it over, though, I think that the biggest problem with this episode is that its parts do not relate to each other. Antoinette was murdered for her jewels and it was a complete coincidence that she was meeting her long-lost daughter, that her former boyfriend was now wooing her daughter, and that she sent a letter to Jessica moments before she was murdered. While it is true that red herrings are a staple of murder mysteries, they’re not supposed to be the majority of the story and they’re certainly not supposed to be the most interesting parts.
It’s even worse that this makes Jessica wrong without ever acknowledging it. Jessica repeatedly told Inspector Rensselaer that she can’t accept that Antoinette’s murder was just a coincidence after sending Jessica that the letter saying that she sensed danger. Her being convinced that the motive for Alva Crane’s murder was more than simple robbery is pretty iffy, too. About the only defense possible for it is that the motive was mildly complex robbery rather than simple robbery; that’s not an impressive defense. But Jessica goes on to say that the robbery was a cover for another motive, and here she was simply wrong. She never acknowledges either mistake, I think because it would highlight how much the solution turned out to be uninteresting. (Also, Jessica’s mistakes were not the result of the murderer being clever but simply because the unbelievable coincidences turned out to be true anyway.)
Now that I write that, it occurs to me that that may well be as big a problem as is most of the episode being a red herring. When you get down to it, the solution to the murders is that a person in a position of trust is abusing this trust to steal jewels. This is ordinary crime, and not very interesting. The only mildly clever thing about it was that the guy with the master key to the safe deposit boxes had to kill his victims in order to cover that he was using the master key. But this problem only cropped up immediately before the solution—and if you blinked, you’d miss that it even was a problem. For a mystery to be satisfying, you need to puzzle over the mystery throughout the story then receive a satisfying explanation to it. The puzzle should not be why the solution made sense, requiring you to remember seemingly unimportant bits of dialog to figure out that there was even a problem that the solution solved.
As far as characters go, there’s really only two: Michael Haggerty and Veronica Harrold, and Veronica is only barely more than a rural schoolteacher stereotype, which leaves us with Michael Haggerty. He’s a fun enough character; he does the “man of mystery” fairly well. Interestingly, Len Cariou, the actor who played him, played Sweeney Todd in the same production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street that Angela Lansbury played Nellie Lovett in, and reportedly the two actors became friends. It would be interesting to know if this had anything to do with Len Cariou’s casting.
Inspector Rensselaer is played by an extremely charismatic actor, but there isn’t much to the part. It feels like half his lines are “Madam Fletcher!” Shelley Greenberg is mostly annoying. Eric Brahm and Myrna Montclair are tolerable, though the attempt to use them as suspects falls flat, at least to me. “The hotel manager was seen talking to a guest” is remarkably poor evidence of… anything. And their secret marriage because of company policy couldn’t motivate anything that happened other than, perhaps, motivating robbery, but since the episode spends all of its time insisting that robbery was not the motive, they’re simply not plausible as suspects until after the real murderer has been caught. Alva Crane was fun for the one scene she was in, but all of her lines could have been cut and nothing about the episode would need to be changed, which is to say that she was just there, she wasn’t a part of the story. At least not when alive. Oh, and I nearly forgot that, technically, Sven Torvald was in this. He’s very structurally important, but he’s practically a non-entity in all of the scenes he’s in.
Which reminds me, why on earth did Sven try to run away before the last commercial break? The only thing he had to hide was his relationship to Antoinette, but the only person he had to hide that from was Veronica and running away, if anything, confirmed it to her. I mean, I get that the reason it’s in the episode was to go to commercial break on an exciting cliff hanger, but there was no payoff because, with him not being guilty of any crime, there couldn’t have been a payoff. It made life worse for Sven, and I don’t see how it could have seemed like a good idea to him at the time.
A problem that atheists face is that there’s no way to rationally ground morality within an irrational universe, which is to say, within a Godless universe. Different atheists approach this problem differently—most just do their best to ignore it—but there’s a kind that really perplexes me. This is the kind who says, “if you need religion to be good, that means you’re not good.”
(This is not quite as stupid as it looks on first blush, or rather, it’s as stupid as it looks but not for the reason it looks so stupid. They’re thinking entirely of “religion” as lists of rules like the ten commandments, rather than as as a description of the nature of the universe. Thus they are trying to say something like, “if you need a list of rules to follow it means that you don’t just automatically do everything good.” Which is, of course, true, though one wonders how absurdly hubristic or non-self-aware these people are that they are implicitly claiming that they’re perfect. Especially when they quite obviously aren’t.)
This kind of atheist invariably tries to argue that if a person ever needs to exercise self-restraint, that means that they’re a bad person. It is probably not entirely a coincidence that this kind of atheist is always a gentle autist who would have difficulty picking up a five pound bag of flour. I’ve no difficulty believing that they do not harm others because of any kind of self-restraint, since they’re so weak and unmasculine that they undoubtedly have no aggressive impulses at all. That much makes sense. What confuses me is how proud of this they are. It’s like they want a medal for their lack of ambition. They want people to look up to them for being physically useless.
Even weirder to me is how grossly historically ignorant they are. It never seems to occur to them that even a moderately knowledgeable person would be unable to name a time and place in which a strong, aggressive person who is sufficiently skilled at channeling their aggression so as to be successful—the kings of expanding kingdoms, for example—would not be at the top of social hierarchy while people like them—men who, to use Critical Drinker’s phrase, look like they use safety scissors to open a packet of crisps—would be at the bottom.
No one—anywhere—has ever given out medals for lacking ambition.
Through a series of coincidences, some of which I will discuss soon because they come from beginning to read the compilation Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, which contains a number of detective stories from, roughly, 1892 through 1910, I discovered the existence of the novel Disappeared From Her Home by C.L. Pirkis. Published in 1877, it has been called a detective story, and though it is not a detective story in the modern sense of the term, it is not unreasonable that it is described that way. I find that very interesting.
If I had to summarize the plot to Disappeared From her Home in a sentence despite having only skimmed a half dozen chapters from it, I would say (spoilers ahead): a young woman out for her morning walk disappears and later seems to turn up dead while one of her two suitors figures out what actually happened to her, including finding her alive in France.
This makes it sound more like a modern mystery than it really is; it’s roughly equal parts melodrama and adventure story, at least as far as I can tell from the bits I’ve read. Unfortunately, I’m not really very interested in reading the whole thing because the style is so overwrought. (A metaphor I take from wrought iron that has been wrought far beyond what is necessary for beauty.) I’m far from an expert, or even knowledgeable, about Victorian melodrama, but as far as I can tell from various bits of it that I’ve read, it seems like some time after the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne of England, English people developed a great passion for huge emotions described in complicated and somewhat understated language. This certainly wasn’t the case in the early 1800s, at the time of Jane Austen. (Pride & Prejudice was written around 1796 and published in 1813.)
It also doesn’t seem to have been an overly long-lasting style; Conan Doyle didn’t write in it, for example, so it was on the wane in the final decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. (I should note that R. Austin Freeman, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, did write in a Victorian melodramatic style, so it didn’t entirely disappear by this time.) Another data point is that Father Brown, written in 1910, was not written in this style at all. That said, it occurs to me that the Father Brown stories were all short stories, and perhaps Victorian Melodrama was more a style of novels than of short stories. The short stories that C.L. Pirkis wrote, starting in 1893, about “Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective,” were not in a melodramatic style, or at least nowhere near to the degree that Disappeared From Her Home was.
Anyway, it’s very interesting to find a mystery story almost midway between Poe’s Murder on the Rue Morgue and Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, but while it does certainly center on a mystery, it’s not a detective story, and I have my doubts that it was part of the development of the detective story as we know it today.
An interesting feature of it, by the way, is that it did, in fact, have a detective in it. The father of the missing girl hired a detective who interviewed people and tracked down clues. This makes sense, historically, since the famous Pinkerton detective agency was founded in 1850, and though it was American, it would make sense if there were people doing similar work in England. The detective is not very important to the story, though. It is not the detective to finds the girl; in the parts I skimmed it’s not even necessarily the case that the information he found was all that useful to the suitor who actually found the girl.
The other thing that really distinguishes it from a proper detective story, in my view, is that it doesn’t seem to have anyone who is really trying to deceive the world. The daughter is convinced to go to France, but this simple, and there is a mystery about it primarily because she is convinced to not tell her father so that he doesn’t stop her. There is no effort at concealment past not bothering to send him a telegram or a letter, so far as I saw, and the suitor who solved the case did not match wits with anyone who was trying to prevent its solution. (To be fair, plenty of golden age mysteries were investigating accidents or other mysteries where there was no attempt at concealment, but these were, in general, not the best of the golden age stories.)
I do not know if I will look into Disappeared From Her Home or other such Victorian mystery stories. (It seems to be the case that a person going missing leading to the revelation of dark family secrets was a popular kind of story for a while.) Mostly, because I doubt that they actually are in the lineage of detective stories. But it is very interesting to have learned that they exist.
I was recently talking with a friend about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Sub Rosa and how, while it was bad, it had some cool ideas. (I explained why it was bad in this post.) Specifically, it was interesting how it suggested, though it did not explore, what life might be like for people who had no interest in Starfleet.
In the episode, Beverly Crusher’s grandmother died and Beverly goes and visits the settlement where her grandmother had lived in order to organize her things. While there, she meets an “anaphasic entity” which behaves much like a ghost, and there are elements of gothic horror in the story, which mostly turns stupid toward the end. But before it turns stupid, the community is quite interesting, or at least hints at being quite interesting.
On the Enterprise, everyone is a member of Starfleet and shares Starfleet’s three primary values of exploration, technology, and bureaucracy. But on this small colony on a completely unimportant world that no one else cares about, there’s no great reason for them to care about any of these things, the valuing technology being the most interesting of the three. People need to do something during their day, and Starfleet officers occupy their time by using advanced technology, following orders, and filling out reports. But there’s no need, in the 24th century of The Next Generation to use advanced technology wherever possible. It’s entirely possible to only use it for the things you don’t enjoy doing the old fashioned way, while doing things the old fashioned way that you enjoy doing the old fashioned way.
Indeed, if you look around at people’s hobbies today you can see this all over the place. There are people who knit by hand rather than using knitting machines, though knitting machines certainly exist. There are people who hunt with a bow and arrow rather than with a gun. There are people who sew their own clothes and do some of the seams with a needle and thread rather than with a serger or more primitive sewing machine. Why? Because for the people who do them, these things are rewarding and enjoyable.
In the 24th century, it’s quite possible that people who live someplace where no great empire cares that they’re there would spend their time farming, weaving, making clothes, cooking, and similar things, only using replicators as a back-stop in case something didn’t go well.
Ultimately, these are the people that explorers find interesting, anyway. Explorers are not, generally, satisfied to go someplace else only to find people who don’t want to be there either and are spending all their time looking for something; they like to find new worlds and new civilizations. That is, they want to find new groups of people who actually want to be where they are.
I can see why most Hollywood writers would be terrible at writing this—they’re not happy where they are—but it would certainly be quite interesting to see it done well. Sub Rosa was never going to live up to this promise, but it would be quite interesting if some story did.
And given how much Science Fiction has been written to date, somebody probably already has and I just don’t know it.
A while ago I came across an interesting video from RazörFist called Hollywood Was Always Red. (A warning: RazörFist uses very salty language.)
One of the things that really struck me from it was when RazörFist pointed out that Joe McCarthy did not run the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the first clue should have been in the name: the House Unamerican Activities Committee. How, he asks, would Senator Joe McCarthy run the House Unamerican Activities Committee?
If you look it up, what Joe McCarthy ran were called the “Army-McCarthy Hearings” which were held by the “Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee” (see here). They had nothing to do with Hollywood blacklists and, as the name would suggest, were investigating communist infiltration into the Army.
The House Unamerican Activities Committee, or more properly the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was formed in 1938—9 years before Joe McCarthy would become a senator—and was initially chaired by Martin Dies Jr, a Democrat from Texas. (Check out the Wikipedia page on it.)
When he pointed out that the first clue should have been the name and highlighted the “Senator” in Senator Joe McCarthy and the “House” in House Unamerican Activities Committee, I was stunned. It’s so obvious, just from that, and yet somehow I had never considered that and just went along with the fake history I was told about how the House Unamerican Activities Committee was part of McCarthyism and McCarthy led to blacklisting in Hollywood and the like.
I don’t get stunned watching YouTube videos often. In fact, I’m not sure I have other than with this one. But it’s so strange to have realized that something that was commonplace among everyone I knew wasn’t just wrong, but obviously wrong. Not just obviously wrong, but we had all the information to know that it was wrong and just never put it together. The “House Unamerican Activities Committee” was just a name, not a collection of meaningful words in a meaningful order. But it really should have been.
On the twenty first day of April in the year of our Lord 1985, the twenty first episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Also the last episode of the first season in was set in Wyoming and titled Funeral at Fifty Mile. (Last week’s episode was Murder At the Oasis.)
As the title screen establishes, Wyoming is a beautiful place. This helps to establish a bit of a golden-age mystery feel, since the beauty of the land will contrast with the ugliness of murder.
Right after the first establishing shot we we get another:
On the left we have an ancient Chevy truck driving by, which gives us the sense of a land where things move more slowly. On the right we have a sign that tells us we’re in a small town in Wyoming. A town so small, in fact, that they publish the population down to the individual. Not only are there not that many people, but the number doesn’t change so often that it’s expensive to change it when it does. (Though sometimes such signs simply reflect the population at the last census.)
After this we fade to a funeral where the preacher gives some useful introductions in his closing remarks. First is the deceased’s beloved daughter, Mary Carver:
Standing next to her is her fiance, Art Merrick.
Also is the deceased’s younger brother:
His name is Timothy Carver.
Also mentioned are Jack’s close and inseparable friends.
Doc Wallace:
Sam Breen:
and Bill Carmody:
(If you recognize William Windom, the actor playing Sam Breen, you probably know him as Jessica’s friend Doc Hazlett. That starts in the second season of Murder, She Wrote. Right now her close friend is Captain Ethan Craig, though we haven’t seen him in a while.)
After these closing remarks we find out that the deceased’s name is John Carver, and he was apparently in the military because his coffin has an American flag draped on it. There’s a brief prayer mentioning ashes to ashes and dust to dust, then a bugle plays a mournful tune.
As the bugle plays, a strange couple drives up in a large RV. They get out and walk up to be relatively near the casket:
We get a little bit of military ceremony—a five gun salute and the flag gets folded and given to Mary—then people begin to disband. The strange man asks Carmody if he’s coming after him with that gun and Carmody replies, sourly, that it would be futile since it’s loaded with blanks. We find out that the man’s name is Carl Mestin and the woman, whose name is Sally, is Carl’s wife.
Shortly after, Jessica is walking with Mary and Art and Mary remarks that it’s strange for Carl Mestin to show up since her father never did business with him and no one around these parts can stand him.
During the conversation it comes up that Jessica is, apparently, an old friend, since she can remember when Mary was born. Well, not the actual birth, but having heard that her mother died in childbirth. “We” were so worried, she says, wondering how jack was going to manage all alone, but he did just fine. In addition to this being awkward exposition, it leaves out the really important part—how was a school teacher in Maine friends with a woman who died in childbirth in Wyoming in the 1950s (or perhaps the early 1960s)?
The scene then fades to the Carver ranch, which we can tell by the establishing shot:
A storm is moving in—we hear the sound of thunder and it forms the subject of conversation inside.
We then meet “Marshall” (actually Sheriff) Ed Potts:
He’s read one of her books: it’s not up there with Mickey Spillane, but darn good for a woman.
I’ve never enjoyed Murder, She Wrote‘s attempts at making fun of sexist police officers and this one makes particularly little sense. While it’s true that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (basically) created the genre of detective story with Sherlock Holmes, many of the biggest figures in the genre were women. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh were known as the “Queens of Crime.” Recent reprints of Agatha Christie’s novels often mention that she’s only been outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. Detective fiction is, as fiction goes, probably the most 50/50 genre you can find. The only way to think that the best detective fiction is all written by males is by knowing nothing about detective fiction. (I suppose if you only like American hard-boiled detective fiction—a genre I dislike and am not sure should even count as detective fiction—this would be more defensible. And he did cite a hard-boiled detective writer. But even so. This is just annoying and dumb.)
In case you’re not familiar with Mickey Spillane—as I wasn’t until I looked him up—he wrote a series of hard-boiled detective novels featuring the detective Mike Hammer. From reading the plot synopsis of his first novel, I, The Jury, the name Mike Hammer is a bit on-the-nose as far as the kind of story it was, so just imagine the kind of story featuring a hard-boiled detective named “Mike Hammer” and you’re probably close enough, especially if you consider the various things “hammer” can be a euphemism for and go with all of them.
Jessica smiles and replies, “Yes, we all struggle under Mickey’s shadow, I suppose.”
The contrast is there for the joke they’re making, but it is very confusing with regard to the character of Marshall Potts. How on earth is a Sheriff who prefers to be called Marshall a fan of Mike Hammer stories? That said, he does immediately afterwards say that he doesn’t really read detective fiction, it’s westerns that have his heart. Like “Coop” in High Noon. (This would be a reference to the actor Gary Cooper in the movie High Noon, where Cooper plays a sheriff who stands alone against a gang of criminals.)
Jessica then says she notices that he wears his holster tied down and asks if this is for quickly drawing his gun. He replies that it is, and that he practices for half an hour every day. There’s a bit more banter where he says that he’s ready for someone to “make my day,” which is a line from the Clint Eastwood movie Sudden Impact, which came out in 1983, only two years before this episode. It’s a strange line to quote for someone who loves westerns, but I guess the point is to portray him as trigger-happy.
There’s also a minor point that Tim (Mary’s uncle) calls his own ranch, which neighbors this one, to make sure that everything is OK—that the ranch hands have everything battened down for the storm, which seems to be there already. That done, Tim brings up to Mary and Sam that he had promised to buy the ranch from Mary after John died, to make her comfortable for the rest of her life. Sam says that he doesn’t doubt that they discussed it, but the fact of the matter is that there is no will. Mary, being his only child, will inherit, but it will take longer to run it through probate than it would have been if there was a will.
This discussion is cut short by a loud honking from outside. Looking out the window, it turns out to be Carl Mestin and his wife. Mary tries to throw him out, but he produces what he claims is a copy of John Carver’s will, leaving everything to him except for a little money for Mary. This does not make Mestin’s reception any friendlier and he antagonizes people until Art Merrick has to be held back from punching him.
Mary asks Jessica why her uncle Tim and the others seem to be afraid of Mestin. Jessica doesn’t have an answer, then the Marshall comes over, warns Art that starting a fight isn’t going to help anything, then gives his condolences to Mary and takes his leave. (This is a very strange thing to do without apology, since an incendiary situation would benefit from his presence to keep things from getting out of hand.)
Jessica then talks to Mestin and remarks that Wyoming is very different than Maine. Back in Maine, she couldn’t imagine a father disinheriting his only daughter. Mestin replies that it probably has something to do with having saved John’s life back in Korea at the Inchon landing. Jessica is surprised at this and asks if he knows her husband, Tom Fletcher. He was Jack’s commanding officer. (She clearly doesn’t believe him and is testing him, since her husband’s name was Frank.)
Mestin thinks and remarks, “Oh yeah, Lt. Fetcher. He’s quite a guy. He’s a good guy.”
He then excuses himself. (In addition to not flinching at the name, Frank Fletcher was a captain, though we won’t learn that for a few more seasons.)
I should note, since I complained about it before, that we do, finally, have an explanation for how Jessica knows any of these people who never seem to have left Wyoming—Jessica’s husband and the deceased had served together in the Air Force.
Later in the afternoon, though it looks like night, after Mary is asleep courtesy of a sedative the doc gave her, her father’s friends are putting on rain coats to help batten the place down in the storm. Carl and his wife are arguing over drinking, with her calling him a lightweight and him saying that he’s not getting into a drinking contest with her. She then brags about having beaten him at an arm wrestling contest and he claims that he let her win. She bets him $500 ($1,505.46 in 2025 dollars) that she can beat him right now. She goads him into the match by accusing him of being too cheap or too chicken to do it, and he accepts. The people who were getting ready to help with tying things down in the storm stop their preparations and watch.
She beats him easily.
I don’t know if this will come up later, but it’s curious that they are arm wrestling left handed. It may come to nothing, of course, but it’s hard to not notice left-handed people in murder mysteries.
It should also be noted that this is very strange behavior of a woman who is supposedly his wife. It seems likely that her being is wife is another of Mestin’s lies. Anyway, he pays up, then goes and joins the people getting things prepared for the storm. As he joins them he asks whether a particular door still needs to be tied down in the wind, suggesting he knows the place.
Later in the day, after the storm has passed, Art comes back to the house having been given a ride by one of the employees named Jesús. Art greets the people inside—everyone from the funeral is still here. They ask where he was and he says that he got the pickup truck stuck in the mud on the way back. After two hours of trying to dig it out he gave up and started walking back. Jesús passed him on the road and picked him up. As Art goes to check on Mary, Jesús finds something that scares him in the barn. In a panic fetches the people from the house and they come. Then we see that the thing that terrified him was the body of Carl Mestin, hanged.
We then fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we get back, the Marshall shows up. He doesn’t much know what he’s doing with a murder investigation and Jessica “subtly” helps him out. She points out that a hay bale was dragged near the body, as if to suggest suicide, but the killer seems to have changed his mind or been scared off.
Jessica also mentions that there looks to be a blood smear above his left ear, as if he was hit by something before he was hanged. (Doc checks out the body and confirms this, saying that Jessica has sharp eyes.) Jessica also notes that the rope on the beam had been splintered, suggesting that it was holding Mestin’s weight when it was pulled over.
Jessica asks Doc how long the body had been dead for and he answers 4-5 hours. Which is rather odd precision to give, even apart from not having taken the temperature of the corpse and run the relevant calculations. Anyway, the Sheriff does the math and says that it was around 3pm, when everyone has battening down the ranch.
That evening, Jessica talks with Mary. She asks Mary what she meant by Mestin shortening her father’s life. Mary explains that she was there on her daily visit and saw Mestin coming out of her father’s room. Mestin didn’t say anything to her and just looked smug. Her father was so upset he couldn’t even talk. He was never the same after that and two days later he died.
Jessica points out that the witnesses on the will were nurses. She suggests that Mestin arrived with the will prepared and pressured her father into signing it. Jessica mentions Mestin’s story about having saved her father’s life during the war, but that’s nonsense. She tripped him up with asking about knowing her husband, which he clearly didn’t. Whatever made Mary’s father sign the will, it wasn’t gratitude.
Bill Carmody then comes out and says that the Sheriff wants them assembled for questioning. Mary asks if Mestin might have been holding something over her father and Bill says he doesn’t know and didn’t know Mestin well. Mary asks about a business venture that they were in together and Carmody explains that Mestin talked into buying grain in order to open up a feed store. Bill bought the grain, then Mestin pulled out and left Bill holding the bag, causing bill to lose a lot of money.
Mary then asks why Bill did business with Mestin, since everyone she knew seemed to hate him. Bill replies that he didn’t have much choice, then says that they had better get inside.
Inside the Sheriff asks everyone where they were at the time that Mestin was killed. Doc, Uncle Tim, Sam Breen, and Bill Carmody were all working around the barn and saw each other. Mary was sleeping after Doc gave her some sleeping pills. This woman, who I presume is an employee, never left the house:
Carl’s wife was in her RV “sleeping it off.” Jessica was in her room “getting rid of jet lag.”
Jessica notes that the women are the only ones who can’t corroborate their alibis, but that don’t make no nevermind to this here Sheriff, as he doesn’t think a woman could have done Mestin in the way he was done did in. In his mind, the only possible suspect not accounted for is Art Merrick, which is good enough for him—he concludes with certainty that Art did it. Jessica shakes her head at him, and he replies, “I thought that you were smarter than that, Ma’am. There ain’t anybody else. Process of elimination.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
The Sheriff then goes over to where Art is getting his truck out of the mud. He points out that there was solid ground on either side of the mud hole, so Art clearly got himself stuck on purpose (Art says that it was raining so hard he didn’t see the hole until he was in it). The Sheriff then accuses him of the murder and arrests him.
The next day, in the morning, Mary drives Jessica over to the Sheriff’s station:
I find the interior quite interesting:
The most interesting part to me is that while the matte painting behind the set is quite good—it is appropriately out of focus for the foreground, for example, and thus looks fairly convincing—it’s entirely wrong for the environment and the external shot. (We can see based on how Jessica and Mary walk in that the door behind Jessica, here, is between the building and the hill in the exterior shot. But look more closely at what we can see through the window:
(I upped the exposure and size a bit to make the background clearer)
The hill is missing. Also, that looks like a fairly populous town across an empty plain.
Anyway, Jessica tries to talk some sense into the Sheriff. Mestin was struck from behind on the left side of the head, suggesting a left-handed killer, while Art is right-handed. Also, he didn’t have a motive. The only one who benefited from Mestin’s death is Sally Mestin.
The Sheriff then storms out and Sam Breen tells Jessica that bail is already in the works up at the county seat. Also, he and the boys talked and figure that they should stay close to Mary until things are settled.
He leaves and Jessica goes to Mary and Art, where Art relays what he overheard from a call that the Sheriff got from the coroner. This was more substantive than you might expect because it shook the Sheriff up enough he repeated everything the coroner said. The important part of which is that Mestin died of hanging and the blow to the head came afterward. Jessica wonders why Doc was so sure that it was the other way around, and Mary suggests Jessica ask him since his place is just down the street.
Doc’s house is interesting, partially because the shot is so close-cropped. I wonder where this really was.
Anyway, Doc isn’t in, but his nurse/receptionist/housekeeper is in.
She recognizes Jessica because she’s also the local phone operator and nothing goes on in Fifty-Mile that she doesn’t know about. Doc’s on a house call and will be back in about an hour. Jessica can’t wait and wonders if Doc made any notes about the examination he made the night before and wonders if Doc would mind if Jessica peeked in his files to see. The nurse replies that he’d skin her alive if she let Jessica look through his files—the only time Doc ever lost his temper was when he caught someone poking his nose in the Doc’s files. He threw the man out, using words that would “shame Lucifer himself,” and told him that if he ever breathed a word of what he found out it would be the last words he ever spoke.
Jessica asks if the man was a stranger, but it turns out to be Carl Mestin.
The nurse then says that, in her opinion, a man like Carl Mestin was born to hang. Jessica doesn’t agree, but also doesn’t demur.
Back at the house Jessica and Mary run into the housekeeper, who says that Mrs. Mestin requested a lot of coffee and has been on the phone all morning making calls, mostly long distance. Mary then confronts Sally and demands that she leave. Sally refuses and suggests that Mary leave, instead. Mary asks what Carl had on her dad that got him to sign the will and Sally replies that Carl never told her, but whatever it was it must have been very “juicy” because it was very profitable.
A little while later the Sheriff arrives with Art Merrick. He’s dropped the murder charge after he had a chance to think about Jessica’s arguments. Jessica tells him that it takes a strong man to admit his mistakes. The Sheriff replies that Art is still his best suspect… so if he didn’t do it, who did?
Jessica suggests that the Sheriff challenge Sally Mestin to an arm wrestling contest. He might find it illuminating.
Interestingly, he does.
In the preparation for the match, Jessica drops in and says that she wants to observe Sally’s technique. Sally replies that it’s all in the timing and body English. The women’s North American champion is just a little bitty thing, much smaller than Sally. (Sally is significantly overstating this; while technique does certainly matter in arm wrestling, as in all kinds of wrestling, there are significant limits to the strength difference it can overcome.)
They begin and at first not much happens except for the Sheriff grunting. But right before Sally wins, we get a closeup of her hand:
and then her arm:
They did this pretty quickly in the episode, so I’m not sure that it’s reasonable for them to have expected us to notice, but you can see that Sally has a tan line from her bracelet but not from her wedding ring (she’s wrestling with her left arm, so this is her left hand). So she clearly hasn’t been wearing the ring long.
Anyway, after Sally wins, the Sheriff remarks to Jessica that he never thought a woman would be strong enough to do in Mestin, but Sally is sure strong enough and she’s left-handed to boot.
Sally doesn’t take kindly to this and storms off.
That night, while Jessica is in bed, she hears some tapping on her window. She goes over and looks out the window and sees a noose hanging outside.
Jessica looks thoughtful and says, out loud, “I do believe I’m making someone nervous.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, Sally leaves her trailer and barges in on everyone having breakfast. She’s brash and provocative, and comes on pretty strong to Art Merrick, clearly to antagonize Mary.
Right after she’s served breakfast, though, Sheriff Potts comes in and informs Sally that he has a warrant for her arrest for the murder of her husband. She complains a bunch, then when Sheriff Potts holds up a pair of handcuffs Jessica asks Sally if now isn’t the time to play her trump card, before she winds up on trial for murder.
Sally says that she doesn’t know what Jessica is talking about, but Jessica replies that she does. Her supposed motive for killing Carl is to get ownership of the ranch as his widow, but she’s not, in fact, his widow. She and Carl were never married. Jessica checked on all of the long distance phone calls and they were to quickie wedding chapels in Nevada. She figures that Sally was looking for one that would sell her a forged wedding certificate, and since Sally got so much bolder after those phone calls, she probably found one that would. Jessica suggests that the proof is that the skin under her wedding ring is as tan as everywhere else; only the skin under her bracelet has a tan line. Clearly, the wedding ring was a prop.
Sally sinks down in her chair. She sighs and says that Carl said that people around here are old-fashioned. If they pretended to be married, it wouldn’t make waves. She then gets up and says that if she’s not under arrest she’d like to leave. The Sheriff replies that there are some nice places on the edge of town where she can park the RV, but he recommends not going any further than that from town.
After she leaves, Potts sits down and expresses his frustration. Now he’s back to the beginning.
Jessica says that she can give a description of the murderer. He’s a tall, strong, ambidextrous man who had number of reasons to hate Carl Mestin but only one reason strong enough to kill him.
The Sheriff replies that there ain’t anybody like that around here, and Jessica sadly nods her head and says, “Yes. I know.”
A few minutes later Art, Mary, and Jessica are standing on the porch as Sally drives off. Art says that he can’t say that he’s sorry to wave goodbye to her and Mary replies that in a funny kind of way she feels sorry for Sally. Art then points out that now is a good time to get his truck and Mary volunteers to drive him over. She invites Jessica to come with her for some reason but Jessica declines.
When Jessica comes in, only Doc is at the table, peeling an apple. Jessica notes that he’s left-handed. He replies that he’s very left handed, but not ambidextrous. He asks her why she says the killer is ambidextrous and she replies that Mestin was struck from behind on the left, but the hangman’s noose outside her window was tied by a right-handed person. Hence, ambidextrous.
He asks Jessica if she really knows what she’s saying and Jessica replies that, unfortunately, she does. She then says that she’s going to take a walk, perhaps go down to the barn and look around.
The Doc follows her and asks her to not meddle in things she doesn’t understand. Someone could get hurt. Jessica replies that he’s not talking about her, he’s talking about Mary, isn’t he? It seems to her that Carl Mestin was killed to protect Mary from some terrible secret that’s worse than the loss of her birthright. Could any secret be worse than that?
Doc replies that one could and asks her to drop it.
When she gets to the barn Uncle Tim, Sam Breen, and Bill Carmody are waiting there.
Jessica then says that they’re four men who added up to one tall, strong, ambidextrous killer. After revealing a bunch of what she knows, she then asks about what she doesn’t. Who was Carl Mestin? He knew about the haymow door needing bracing in the wind, so he seems to have worked here in the past, but a long time ago since it was before Mary was old enough remember.
It’s Uncle Tim who finally speaks. Carl—which wasn’t actually his real name—was a randy young ranch hand at Carver ranch. He tried every way he knew to seduce Jack’s wife, but it didn’t work. One day he found her alone and raped her. Then he ran and the five of them—including John Carver—chased him down and caught him. They strung him up and were going to hang him but John said no and talked them out of it. Because he asked it, they instead turned him over to the law. Only Carl escaped and got clean away. And Ruth—John’s wife—turned out to be pregnant with Mary. She seemed to believe that the child was John’s and Doc let her believe it. After Ruth died in childbirth, John raised Mary as if she was his own. He loved her and doted on her, and his one great fear was that she would find out the truth about her parentage.
Jessica asks how Carl figured it out. Sam Breen replies that as near as they can figure out, he changed his name, stayed around near Fifty-Mile but out of their sight, and read about the birth in the paper and did the math. But he needed a clincher, so he broke into Doc’s files. Not Mary’s, but John’s. John was sterile and could never father a child of his own.
The night of the funeral, they saw the horse run into the barn where Carl was and the idea seemed to hit them all at once. They put a noose around his neck and put him up on the horse in order to scare him, but he was cocky and mocked them, saying that they didn’t have the guts. Then there was an enormous lighting flash and the horse spooked and bolted. The fall off the horse broke Carl’s neck when he finally fell to the end of the slack in the rope. It felt like divine providence. After that they knew that one man couldn’t have lynched him, so they took him down, Doc hit him because he knew where and how hard, then they strung him back up, so it could look like the work of one man. It never occurred to them that Art would be blamed. They’d had stepped in if Jessica hadn’t cleared him.
Jessica then asks, “So what happens next?”
Sam stands up and says, “Alright. We’ll go to the Sheriff. Tell him what happened. Stand trial. I don’t know what a jury will say. We’ll even go to jail if it comes to that. But there’s no way on God’s green earth Mary will ever know the reason why. Not from any of us.”
Jessica replies, “Nor from me, Sam. She’s been hurt enough already.”
Sam then takes off his hat, offers Jessica his arm, and they all walk back to the house.
I have very mixed feelings about this episode. On the one hand, parts of it are well done. We get a good sense of the loneliness of the Carver ranch and the close-knit nature of the sort of community which is necessary to thrive where there are so few people. On the other hand, I really don’t like the ending.
The ending violates the ideal structure of a murder mystery. In an ideal murder mystery, the murder—that is, the intentional, unjustified killing—causes a disorder in the community through the misuse of reason. The detective then enters the world, temporarily becoming a part of it, and through the right use of reason restores order to the community. Plenty of mysteries don’t have this structure; however, though it’s not universal, it is common and, more importantly, it’s the structure that the best mysteries have.
The first major violation of this structure in this episode is that the killing isn’t even murder. It is more properly manslaughter, since they did not intend to kill but nevertheless did kill during the commission of a crime (assault).
The second major violation of this structure is that the death didn’t cause a rupture in the community. In fact, Carl Mestin’s presence caused the rupture in the community and his death fixed it. It didn’t perfectly fix it, but everyone was better off with Carl Mestin dead.
Worse, the part that Carl Mestin’s death didn’t fix wasn’t fixed any other way, too: Carl’s inheritance of the ranch. With Carl’s death it doesn’t go to his widow, since he wasn’t actually married, but if he doesn’t have any near relatives, it would go, not to Mary, but to the state of Wyoming. About the best case for Mary would be that, with Mestin dead, no one who will speak up on Mestin’s behalf will mention the existence of this will and consequently Mary can inherit under the rules of intestacy. If things turned out that way it would just bring us back to Carl Mestin’s death being the thing which fixed the problems that his life caused. (It would actually work for Mary to inherit as his daughter, presuming Mestin died intestate, but that just causes other problems.)
Which means that Jessica’s solving of the crime did no one any good.
And the thing is, I mean literally no one. Not even the Sheriff. Contrast this with Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, Murder On the Orient Express. (spoilers ahead, but, dear reader, as you’d have to be 92 years old at the time of my writing this to not have had your entire life to read it, I think you’ve had enough time and I can discuss the plot with a clear conscience.)
Murder On the Orient Express, like Funeral At Fifty Mile, has the solution that almost everyone did it together. And, further, it has the property that the victim really had it coming, and his departure from the world fixed problems caused by his wickedness while it did not introduce any new problems, except for the responsibilities given to the authorities. Which brings us to the key difference: in Murder on the Orient Express, the authorities had a real problem caused by the death. Specifically the director of the Wagon-Lit company had a murder on his train and for which he was responsible to his passengers because passengers really dislike trains on which people get murdered. And owners of companies do not like it when their customers get murdered while being customers. Poirot solved these problems for him without creating more problems. He laid out two possible solutions: an uncatchable fake assassin who crept away in the snow but who was specifically after the victim and who might have killed him anywhere, and the real solution. He laid out the assassin theory first and the director of the Wagon-Lit company at first dismissed it, but Poirot admonished him to not be so quick to dismiss it because he may come to like it after hearing the second solution. And, indeed, he did. After Poirot carefully laid out the real solution, the director said that clearly he had spoken too hastily and obviously the first solution was correct. That is, Poirot gave him a way to fulfill his duty to the rest of society and also to act justly in this case, and left the decision with him.
By contrast, Sheriff Ed Potts didn’t really have any obligation to the community to solve the killing of Carl Mestin because the general opinion in Fifty Mile was that Mestin was born to hang and the world was clearly better off without him in it. And these are the people who employ Sheriff Potts and the only people to whom he answers. Unlike the director of the Wagon-Lit, if he just left well enough alone, everyone would be happy. And it is in this context that Jessica demanded that the four friends not let the Sheriff leave well enough alone.
This brings us to one of the strange things about Jessica Fletcher as a person: her greatest faith is in civic authority. She is, perhaps, best described as a devoted believer in the American Civic Religion. (It’s an amorphous, hard to nail down religion which is vaguely deist and holds America to be something sacred and thus all its institutions are sacred.) She has notions of justice, but her devotion to the American institution of the courts is greater. Poirot, being Catholic, could hold that human institutions are fallible and not always to be trusted with the difficult cases. Jessica cannot; she must see the law carried out no matter what.
Which means that Murder, She Wrote does better when it sticks to actual murder and leaves things like manslaughter, justified homicide, etc. alone. Les Miserables would not be improved by having Javert as the protagonist.
Moving on from the ending, the characters in this episode were mostly pretty good. None of them were well fleshed out but they at least all had a few hints of a personality and the actors did a lot with those hints. William Windon as Sam Breen, in particular, was a ton of fun. This may be why he replaced Claude Akins as Jessica’s close Cabot Cove friend starting in the second season.
The main exception was Sheriff Potts. He was a caricature from the beginning, which can be a fun start if the caricature becomes a character; that is, if he gets turned into a real person who simply has some interesting quirks. That often reflects how we meet people, after all. At first we notice their unusual characteristics, then we get to know them. The problem with Ed Potts is that he never became a character. The closest they came was having him drive Art back home after dropping the charges, as that did require some sense of responsibility. But on the whole I found him annoying without any compensation for that annoyance.
The setting was also enjoyable: Fifty-Mile, Wyoming, was a nice place to visit.
Another point in this episode’s favor is that it does actually establish how Jessica is connected to the place. Over the seasons, Jessica has an oddly large number of old friends who are never really explained and are often not very plausible; attending the funeral of someone her late husband served with in the Air Force is a nice way to explain this that is plausible.
As far as plot holes go, this episode did pretty well. I think one plot hole was that the people were a bit over-concerned that Mary never find out that she was Mestin’s daughter. It would be pretty unpleasant to find out that the man you thought was your father was merely a man who loved you and raised you as his own, but your real father is a scumbag rapist. On the other hand, it’s not like anyone gets to pick his parents and having someone raise you lovingly because you’re the daughter of a good woman he loved would help her to deal with it, and it’s not like anybody in the area believes in a tainted bloodline, so she wouldn’t face any practical consequences. I don’t want to overstate that; I completely understanding not wanting to burden her with the truth, but that can easily be taken too far. Very few good things come from running from the truth. And I very much doubt it would be worth disinheriting Mary rather than telling her the truth. Especially now that she’s an adult. As a child she might worry that she will take after her real father, but as an adult she knows who she is, regardless of who her father was.
The only other real plot hole I can think of is the noose outside of Jessica’s window. That really came from nowhere and went nowhere and didn’t fit the character of any of the four conspirators. They really just did it so that they could go to commercial break on a dramatic note and couldn’t come up with anything. But at the same time it only takes a few seconds and could easily be excised from the episode without anything else having to be changed. Well, that’s not quite true. Instead of Jessica saying that the noose outside her window was tied by a right-handed man, she’d have had to say that the noose around Mestin’s neck was tied by a right-handed man. Half a line isn’t much of an impact.
Actually, there’s one more plot hole I can think of: I’m not sure that Sally not having a tan line under her wedding ring is actually proof that she wasn’t really married. Sally would, in any event, have been pretending that she and Carl got married recently, which means that even if it were true she’d have had no time to get a tan line from her wedding ring.
Well, that’s the end of the first season of Murder, She Wrote. Back in 1985 it was almost five months until Season 2 would begin with Widow, Weep For Me.
On the seventh day of April in the year of our Lord 1985, the twentieth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in the fictional city of Desert Palms, California, it was titled Murder At The Oasis. (Last week’s episode was Armed Response.)
While we hear someone tinkering on a piano we get some establishing shots of a very fancy house with a gate and a security guard house next to the gate on the driveway. Then we then see who is tinkering on the piano and meet one of our main characters:
His name is Johnny Shannon and the various gold records framed on the wall suggest that he is connected to the music business and is quite successful. (Why he’s wearing his coat like a German officer is not explained.)
We also very quickly establish that he’s extremely unlikeable. He calls in his son, Mickey…
…and then berates him for composing such a terrible piece of music. We get the impression that this is a common occurrence because Mickey is only mildly disappointed and calmly tells his father to just play it at the right tempo, which he proceeds to demonstrate.
While Mickey is playing it, Johnny summons his assistant, Buster:
Buster makes Johnny wait a moment, though, so he can tell Mickey that he likes the piece and it’s good work.
Johnny, disappointed by this reaction, orders his car to be prepared because he has a lunch date at a tennis club. On the way there, they receive a phone call on the car phone from a major mob boss, but Johnny refuses to take the call because he’s now “protected.” He clarifies to Buster that he has “a special kind of insurance,” but then says no more about it.
At the tennis club, we actually see Jessica and her old friend Peggy, who is Johnny’s ex-wife.
From some casual conversation we find out that they’re expecting Johnny to join them for lunch.
Which he eventually does. There’s a bit of small talk where it turns out that she recently leased a house in the area so she could visit her children since they rarely visit her anymore. Mickey is one of those children and then we meet the other: Terry.
Terry then excuses herself because she has to meet a friend and Johnny expresses concern that it’s not “that tennis bum”. Her refusal to respond suggests that it is and this is confirmed by the tennis bum coming up to her table a minute later and kissing her for an extended period of time.
Johnny gets up to intervene and Peggy lays a restraining hand on his arm, saying that Terry is old enough to choose her own friends. Johnny replies that she told him this before and she was wrong, then, too.
His interfering goes about as well as one can expect it to; the tennis bum shoves Johnny and then several people whom Johnny employs comes to his aid, restraining the tennis bum.
Curiously, this is interrupted by a man who introduces himself as Sergeant Barnes of the police and asks what the trouble is. When Johnny tells Barnes that he doesn’t want the tennis bum around his daughter, Barnes replies that he doesn’t work for Johnny. Johnny then replies, “You must be new. Ask around. Somebody’ll set you straight.”
He then escorts Terry home.
With Johnny and his entourage gone, Peggy tells Jessica the backstory: when Terry was seventeen she eloped with a boy that Johnny didn’t like. Johnny sent some men after them who roughed up the boy then gave him a one-way airline ticket out of the country. Johnny had the marriage annulled and Terry never forgave him. She still lives in her father’s house to get back at him—to torment him with behavior like this.
Later that night, at Johnny’s house, Buster brings Johnny a glass of milk only to find the door locked. He knocks loudly, then even louder, but no matter his volume he gets no response. In desperation he calls Lou, Johnny’s bodyguard. Mickey, hearing the commotion, knocks on Terry’s door, finding her with the tennis bum.
Back at the door the bodyguard has arrived and breaks the door down. They go inside and find Johnny, dead.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen an ad like this:
When we come back from commercial, Jessica and Peggy are driving along. After Jessica observes that Peggy is driving too fast, Jessica offers her condolences. Peggy replies that at least Jessica had a happy marriage with Frank; Peggy isn’t even a widow. She apologizes then thanks Jessica for going to the house with her because she can’t face it alone.
The scene then shifts to the men’s locker room at the… I’m not sure what this place is. Perhaps a tennis club? Anyway, she goes into the men’s lockerroom and finds the tennis bum she had been with and tells him that her brother is sure to tell the police that he was in the house the night before. She gives him money and tells him to flee the country if he doesn’t want to be part of a murder investigation. She adds that he should not try to contact her.
When the tennis bum asks, “what about us?” She scoffs and tells him to not be stupid. Now that her father is dead, she doesn’t need to play “let’s pretend” anymore. She adds that the truth is that she doesn’t even like him. (He doesn’t take this well, but nothing comes of it.)
Jessica and Peggy then arrive at the house. Oddly enough, she still goes by “Mrs. Shannon” despite being divorced from Johnny Shannon for years.
Inside the house, Mickey is glad to see his mother. He’s also glad to see Jessica, because they can use a good detective. Jessica objects that her exploits have been greatly exaggerated, but Sergeant Barnes walks into the room and answers her that he’s heard differently.
He’s the new police officer from earlier, and he explains that he’s been assigned to the case because in Desert Palms they don’t have a homicide division. He was on duty when the call came in so it’s his case.
Peggy, Mickey, and Sergeant Barnes press her to help on the case, but Jessica is reluctant. I always find this strange because if the police detective doesn’t want her on the case, she can’t be kept out. I wish that she was a bit more consistent as a character. Anyway, Barnes eventually gets her to help by telling her that she’s covered the subject of murder well in her books, even if she’s not always accurate. This piques Jessica’s interest, and she asks why he says this. When he says that he’ll explain on the way to the crime scene, she accepts. As they walk to the other room, he tells her, “You’re a little shaky on police procedure. And you always make your killers more interesting than your cops. You see, most killers are very dull people.”
They then leave the room and Mickey and Peggy discuss Terry in terms meant to make us suspect her, which, in Murder, She Wrote, means that she’s definitely innocent. It’s more reliable than a solid alibi.
In the room where Johnny was killed, Jessica notes that the door had a spring lock, so the killer must have pulled it shut on the way out.
They discuss the room as characterizing the victim:
Barnes says that Johnny was found in his favorite chair. He was shot in the back of the head and probably didn’t know he was about to be killed. Jessica wonders why he was sitting in a chair opposite to a blank TV when there was a perfectly good couch to sleep on, if that’s all he was doing.
Barnes agrees that this is puzzling. He adds another puzzling thing: no one heard a shot. The walls are thick but if you walk past the room in the hallways with the door closed, you can hear if a piano is being played, so they should have heard a gun, which is much louder than a piano.
Jessica says that she’s never seen a silencer herself, but mystery writers are addicted to them. (I think that this was true only of a certain era; but certainly this was part of that era.) Barnes objects that “mufflers” would be a better name for silencers; you can’t actually silence a gun and there’s always some noise.
Interestingly, that’s not quite true. The British developed an effectively silent gun called the Welrod.
It uses a series of solid rubber wipes in addition to many baffles in order to suppress the sound down to the point where it’s quieter than people speaking conversationally. The trade off is that you can only fire a dozen or so shots from it before the wipes are too degraded to suppress the sound that effectively. Also, it fires sub-sonic ammunition. This part is critical because it doesn’t matter how well you suppress the explosion which propelled the bullet if the bullet itself creates a supersonic boom. As a result, it has an incredibly short range—measured in tens of feet. On the other hand, its purpose is incredibly close-range assassination, and it actually has a concave front to allow it to be effective when pressed up against a person, so this isn’t too much of a limitation.
That said, it’s very unlikely that a killer in California in 1985 would be using a World War 2 British special services assassination pistol. There were a few similar guns made over the years but they’re exceedingly rare because there’s basically no market for them. So, in practice, Sergeant Barnes is right.
Jessica says that if the sound was muffled and not recognizably a gunshot, it might have gone unnoticed, confused with ordinary household sounds such as radio, television, etc. Barnes agrees that might be the case, but asks how on earth the killer got through the security system. There are guards on duty 24 hours per day at the front gate and the service entrance, at the back of the house, is protected by a tall fence and a sophisticated alarm system with TV cameras. The gate is opened remotely by the guard at the front gate after confirming the identity of the service person over the camera and through an intercom for voice verification. Nobody pushed the buzzer on the back gate last night and nobody could have gotten over the gate or wall without the alarm going off.
Jessica states the obvious conclusion: the murderer came from inside the house. (This was not lost on Barnes, who had already come to that conclusion.)
Having said that, I’m not sure it’s right. It’s unlikely that the tennis bum got in through the front gate by being on the invitation list—Johnny would almost certainly have told the guards to forbid him entrance—so his presence demonstrated it is possible to get in.
The scene then shifts to Terry pulling up in a fancy car as tense music plays. I’ve no idea why this might be important since we’ve already established that Terry is definitely innocent, but it’s a good excuse to show the front gate:
Terry goes into the house and demands to know what Mickey told the cops before she realizes that her mother is there. She then switches to condoling with her mother, which Mickey doesn’t take very well. Some hot words pass and Terry runs off.
Back in the murder room, Jessica and Barnes are discussing motive. Barnes suggests the standard: someone who stood to inherit. It was the servants’ night off, so other than family only the bodyguard and Johnny’s assistant were there.
When Jessica asks if the motive could have been robbery, Barnes shows her a hidden wall safe in the room which Mickey told him about:
Barnes doesn’t think this is the motive, though, since the killer wouldn’t have shot Johnny before making him open the safe in that case. Unless, as Jessica points out, the killer already knew the combination. Barnes admits this possibility, but while the safe contains valuable things, members of the household confirm that nothing is missing. Jessica then points out that her theory is unlikely since someone who knew the combination wouldn’t need to kill Johnny to steal it, they’d only need to wait for him to be out of the room.
Jessica then wonders if the motive might have been something else. There’s an obvious spot on the wall where something that was framed was missing. Barnes says that it wasn’t anything, though—just an old picture of Johnny and his kids.
This is interrupted by Buster, who asks the Sergeant to come quickly because the bodyguard is convinced that Mickey killed his dad and is busy assaulting him by the pool.
They get there in time and Barnes knocks the bodyguard into the pool. Mickey isn’t feel great from all of the strangulation he just experienced, but he’s otherwise OK.
The bodyguard insists that Mickey needs to be arrested, and when questioned, explains that he finally remembered that he wasn’t the last one to see Johnny alive—he saw Mickey go into the den after he left it.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial Sergeant Barnes asks Mickey what’s up. Mickey says that Lou (the bodyguard) had it all wrong. He did go down to the den to show his father some changes on the arrangement he was working on but his father didn’t want to see it until the arrangement was finished. So he immediately went back upstairs. He wasn’t in the den for more than a minute. (I’m not sure how the short duration is important because it takes only a few seconds to shoot someone in the back of the head. Perhaps Mickey is still groggy from being strangled.)
Mickey then goes on to say that he didn’t always get along with his father and there were times when he hated him, but when he was angry at his father he’d always think of the good times, before they moved out to the desert.
This is interrupted by Terry, who walks up with Peggy. Terry says that Mickey didn’t kill her father, there was someone else in the house—the tennis bum. She let him in at the rear service entrance. She used the master switch to turn off the alarm long enough for the tennis bum to get in and make it to the house. The guard would only notice that the system was switched off if he was paying close attention because the only indication is a tiny red light. The night man reads a lot and doesn’t check the panels often. The TV monitors are always off unless the alarm is tripped.
When Barnes remarks that she knows a lot about the security system, she replies that this isn’t the first time she’s let a man into the house.
When Terry mentions that she sent the tennis bum away and doesn’t know where he is, Barnes borrows the telephone and calls in an APB on the tennis bum.
As he’s doing this, Jessica asks where Lou (the bodyguard) was when Mickey came out of the den, that Mickey didn’t see him. He went to his room because Johnny told him to get lost. Buster says this means that he was expecting a “broad” (a woman). He always sent Lou away when he was expecting a female visitor.
Lou doesn’t think this is plausible, though, because he wasn’t given a name to call down to the front gate. Jessica mentions that perhaps the guard knew this woman on sight. When Lou said that Johnny’s rule was female guests always had to be specifically called down, Jessica looks at Peggy and says, “there are exceptions to every rule.”
Jessica and Peggy talk privately; Peggy confirms that it was her and that she wanted to talk to Johnny about Terry, but she found him in a mellow and affectionate mood and for the first time since she left him, they made love. She then discusses how Johnny always had a way with women—which was why she ended up leaving him. He was always using women and seemed genuinely surprised that Peggy cared. He even once took a girl away from Buster, who was heartbroken over it until he made a joke of it.
A bit of talk later, Jessica asks if Johnny had any enemies and Peggy said that last night Johnny was bragging about “putting one over” on a mobster named Milo Valentine (this would be the mobster who called him on his car phone, that he said he had protection against). Milo started Johnny in show business, but their relationship turned sour. Last night, Johnny said that he felt like he could nail Valentine to the wall, but didn’t explain what he meant by that.
Jessica then goes to Sergeant Barnes at the police station to give him her latest theory that Johnny was killed by a hitman. She remembers reading that shooting someone in the back of the head was part of the mob’s execution ritual. Which sounds rather inconvenient and also at odds with the mark of a professional killer being to shoot someone twice—once in the heart and once in the head. But, what do I know?
Barnes isn’t overly impressed by the idea that Johnny was killed by a hit man but he doesn’t dismiss it. When he worked in Chicago before he came here, he remembers hearing rumors that Johnny had a mob connection.
Jessica thinks that this would put the kabosh on the tennis bum theory, but Barnes disagrees. Hitmen don’t wear a t-shirt that says “professional killer”—they have some kind of cover. Tennis seems good for this, allowing him to move around. He’d have started an affair with Terry to gain access.
Back at the Shannon residence, Buster is out by the pool making a phone call to Milo Valentine, saying that he has an urgent matter to discuss. When he hears Terry draw breath in surprise (she’s listening on another phone, inside the house), he realizes the conversation is being overheard and asks who’s on the line, to no avail.
Jessica then comes up to the house in a taxi, and after questioning the security guard offscreen, she goes inside and talks with Terry, who is sitting in her father’s favorite chair and watching tapes.
She comments on the tape that she was watching. “That Vegas showgirl nearly became my stepmother. But so did a lot of others.”
During the conversation, it comes up that Terry took the family photo that’s missing from the wall up to her room. She took it right after they found her father because she needed something of him to hold onto. The guy on the tapes is a stranger; her daddy was the man in the photo.
Jessica asks about the tennis bum and how they met. Terry says that he was the loudest, most obnoxious player in the bar at the tennis club so, knowing that her father would hate him, she picked him up. She’s fairly certain he didn’t kill her father, though, since when she told him that her father was in the den, the tennis bum was too scared to leave her room.
Terry also ends up telling Jessica about Buster’s phone call to Milo Valentine. Jessica also gets some further information about the VHS tapes above the television. Most are of Johnny’s TV shows, but a bunch are of his pool games. He had a camera installed to record the pool table so he could watch his games and figure out how to improve.
Jessica says that it’s hard to see in the dark corner where it is.
The scene then shifts to a few miles north of the Mexican border, where some police catch up with the tennis bum and arrest him. As he’s being led to the police car, he says that he didn’t kill Johnny Shannon, Terry did.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
(You’d only have seen this particular ad if you lived within a few hundred miles of the Pocono mountains.)
When we come back from commercial we’re at police headquarters where the tennis bum is interrogated in front of Jessica and Johnny’s relatives.
It’s strange enough when Jessica is at police interrogations; I’ve got no idea why almost everyone is here.
The upshot of the interrogation is that the tennis bum believes that Terry killed her father and used him as a patsy, which is why she paid him to leave.
Interestingly, Jessica actually tells the tennis bum to reconsider not having an attorney present, which is out of character for her. Out of character for him, he takes this advice and says that he wants a lawyer, which ends this interrogation.
Once the tennis bum is escorted out to make a telephone call, Jessica remarks to Sergeant Barnes that it seems unlikely a professional killer would have no better escape route than an unreliable van on a back road to Mexico. (She doesn’t add that it’s even stranger for him to hang around and wait to make his escape, rather than starting that night.)
Barnes replies that perhaps he’s new at it, or perhaps he’s not a pro and perhaps he’s telling the truth about Terry. Some bickering later, the Shannons leave for their home and Jessica joins them because she has something she wants to look into. Barnes asks if she’s going to let him in on it and she replies that she will once she’s sure—she’d hate to look foolish in front of the police.
Back at the house, Jessica talks to Buster, who explains that the phone call was only because he was worried that Valentine might have a contract out on Buster as well as Johnny. He also explains what the cause of the split was—Valentine got Johnny started, which gave him control over Johnny, which Johnny resented when he made it big. Johnny chafed under this and eventually started making his own moves. When Johnny failed to make an appearance at a political rally for one of Valentine’s payroll politicians, Valentine flew over and had a meeting with Johnny in the den. Buster wasn’t in the room but did hear the sounds of pool being played.
Jessica puts two and two together and concludes that Johnny taped the game with Valentine and then threatened him with the tape. The killer must have had a double mission: to kill Johnny and to retrieve the tape.
When Jessica tells him not to worry about a contract being out on him—had there been one, he’d already be dead—he tells her to say no more, he gets the picture. She asks him to repeat “I get the picture” then she announces that she knows who the killer is. She calls Sergeant Barnes to let him know that she’s solved it.
When he arrives, she begins by explaining how the killer got in. He kept a close eye on the tennis bum, figuring that he’d be brought into the house sooner or later. That night, he got lucky and followed the tennis bum in. He knew where the den was because Milo Valentine had been in the house and described the layout for him. He figured that Johnny wouldn’t help him find the tape, so he shot Johnny immediately. He then locked the door and searched through the tapes. Jessica experimented and all of the tapes up to the missing tape were played for a short time, while all of the ones after the missing tape were at the very beginning. The killer then turned off the VCR and TV, then waited. While Lou was breaking down the door, Terry turned off the alarm to let the tennis bum out. The killer went out behind him.
Barnes says that this makes sense but leaves them with the problem that they can prove that the tennis bum was in the house and can’t prove that anyone else was. Jessica demurs. The morning after the murder, Sergeant Barnes told Jessica it was his first time in the house, but he knew what was in the picture missing from the wall, despite Terry having taken it to her room right after her father was found dead.
Barnes replies, in surprise, that Jessica is good. He then takes out his gun and puts a silencer on it. He says that he never kills unless he is well paid for it, and it hurts him to make an exception in her case.
Jessica then calls to the waiting people, who come in.
She then tells Sergeant Barnes that he would be well advised to not make any sudden moves. Lou took Johnny’s death very hard.
He thinks for a moment, then smiles and hands Jessica his gun. She thanks him, saying that it means a great deal to her. He asks if she means as a trophy, and she replies no, as the only real evidence that he killed Johnny Shannon. “Ballistics will prove that the bullet came from your gun.”
After a moment, she adds, in reference to their first conversation, “That’s police procedure.”
This was a very interesting episode. It’s most notable quality, of course, is that the police detective was the murderer. This was extremely rare for Murder, She Wrote—as it should be. But I think they did a good job of pulling it off.
The main danger of having the police detective be the murderer is that he is, with regard to the investigation and often with regard to the crime itself, super-powered. That is, the extra powers which the police are given in order to fight crime put them at a tremendous advantage for committing it. The result is that it really should be impossible to catch them, and catching them requires the writer to make them do something very dumb in order to get caught.
I think that they avoid that in this episode. Barnes knowing what was in the picture was, perhaps, not maximally convincing—I’m not sure why he ever looked at that part of room—but it wasn’t dumb. He had been in the middle of discussing the case with Jessica and he had to act the part of the police detective trying to solve the case. He had to discuss it for real in order to be convincing, and he had to reveal to her all sorts of things he learned from the family. It is plausible that he had lost track of what he knew because he was the killer and what he had learned as the police detective, even if the particular execution could, perhaps, have been improved upon.
The other golden age rule this episode broke was having a hitman as the murderer. A professional killer with no connection to the victim and no personal interest in the victim’s death is simply outside of the mystery genre. That said, this episode introduced the mobster right at the beginning and introduced the character of Sergeant Barnes before he was investigating the crime. Barnes remained a significant character throughout. The episode also introduced the idea of the hitman very early, even apart from it being implicit in a mobster being involved. Further, Jessica took the option of the hitman as a live option as soon as it was mentioned. So while it broke the rules, I think that they pulled it off.
I think it was for the best that they had a hitman be the murderer very infrequently. Having said that, I have to admit that it was the case in one of my favorite episodes (Snow White, Blood Red), so when they did it, they tended to do it well.
Another good thing about this episode was the characters. They kept the cast relatively small, which enabled them to have some character development for most of them, which they took advantage of. To be clear, the character development is mostly us learning about the characters rather than the characters having an arc; that’s simply appropriate to the format. But we get complexity on several of the characters. The character of Terry is probably the most obvious, from this perspective: she starts off seeming to be a hedonistic spoiled brat who is coolly distant from her father because he represents restraint, but we find out that she was angry at him and unable to form a real relationship with him. The moment when she tells Jessica that the showgirl in the video almost became her stepmother, but then so did a lot of other showgirls, too, reveals a lot. The moment when she said that the guy on TV wasn’t really her father, her real father is the guy in the picture of happier times was quite poignant. There’s a sense in which it’s true, but also a sense in which it isn’t. Each action that we take does shape us and is part of who we are, but it is also true that some of the actions that we take are unnatural to us—they may warp and twist us, but they are never really part of us. Which is not to say that we can’t cling to them until the original isn’t left, but the distinction remains true even if we turn it into a theoretical, rather than practical, distinction. And underneath the glitzy jewelry and promiscuous behavior, there was a little girl who wanted her father back.
Mickey is another interesting character. At first it seems like he might just be a stereotype of a son who was never good enough for his successful father, but he has real depth. Even right at the beginning, he simply doesn’t respond to his father’s bluster. I didn’t describe it in the plot summary, but Johnny even tells Mickey to let him have it, saying that he (Johnny) told his own father off more than once, but this doesn’t phase Mickey. It’s not that he’s putting up with it; he just doesn’t care. But what gives it depth is that they make it clear that he’s not intimidated. He has his own goals and is pursuing them, and even still has some affection for him. He points out that his father might be wrong because this would actually be beneficial for his father to consider. This gets reinforced later, when he says that he was deeply frustrated with his father but when he gets mad he thinks of the good times.
Peggy is probably the best fleshed out of the characters. She’s divorced from Johnny but clearly doesn’t want to be. The part where she tells Jessica that she’s not even a widow is particularly poignant. She feels a widow’s loss, but does not have the support of the community a widow would have. They do not go any deeper into it than this but it points very strongly to some of the costs of divorce and even more of society having moved to being so accepting of divorce. Worse for the character, she’s one of the people who accepts divorce and thus has no framework to make sense of her grief. She eventually fades out of the story after her reunion with Johnny is revealed in order to clear up a red herring, but had there been more time there would have been very interesting places to go with her.
Even the character of Sergeant Barnes is interesting, in this episode. On the one hand, he’s keeping an eye on Jessica because he doesn’t trust her and wants to mislead her; on the other hand he is a bit hubristic and assumes that he did such a good job that she can’t possibly catch him. This raises the question of whether he was sincere when he told Jessica that she goes wrong by making her killers too interesting while in reality most killers are very dull people. One possibility is that he’s sincere but holds himself to be far more interesting than the average killer. Another possibility is that he’s insincere and thinks that the killers are actually more interesting, and this is misdirection. Yet another possibility is that he doesn’t think of himself as interesting, for as G.K. Chesterton once observed, every man is normal to himself. Or, to quote Chesterton:
To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all. In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
Another unusual aspect of this episode is that I can’t think of any major plot holes. The one question I have is how Barnes knew what the missing photo was, since his business would not (obviously) have taken him to that wall of the room, and it was a very large room with many things on the wall. On the other hand, this could be explained by Barnes making a general search of the room before concluding that the only relevant thing was the VHS tapes. He might even have been looking for the safe in the wall and perhaps tried to get in before concluding that wasn’t a way forward. And, really, that’s it. You can ask questions about how Barnes managed to conclude his business with relatively tight timing, except that I don’t think that the timing was all that tight. Mickey was, supposedly, the last one to see Johnny alive, but Johnny had time to have Peggy over and for them to make love and her to leave; presumably after this he got dressed and, feeling wistful, went to watch some tapes of his glory days, when Peggy was still his wife, where he got shot by Barnes. There is, perhaps, a bit of explanation that would be helpful for why Buster brought Johnny a glass of milk at what must have been one or two in the morning without it having been request immediately before but something could easily have been worked out. As Murder, She Wrote goes, this is airtight.
I wonder how many scientists would get this wrong:
You want to know if one basketball team is taller than another so you measure the players. On the one team the average is 6’5″ (15 players, standard deviations is 1.3″) while for the other it’s 6’6″ (14 players, standard deviation 1.4″). What is the p value for this 1″ difference?
I suspect that far more than zero would do what Gemini did when I presented it with this question:
The p-value for the 1-inch difference in the average heights of the two basketball teams is 0.0571.
Explanation of Statistical Test
To determine if the 1-inch difference in average height is statistically significant, a two-sample t-test was performed. This test compares the means of two independent groups to see if the difference between them is due to chance or if it’s a genuine difference in the populations from which the samples were drawn.
Here’s a breakdown of the calculation:
Hypotheses: The null hypothesis (H_0) assumes there is no true difference in the average height of the two teams (mu_1=mu_2). The alternative hypothesis (H_a) assumes there is a difference (mu_1nemu_2).
T-statistic: This value measures the size of the difference relative to the variation in the sample data. A larger absolute value of the t-statistic suggests a stronger difference. The calculated t-statistic for this data is -1.9894.
Degrees of Freedom (df): This value, 26.44, is a measure of the amount of information available to estimate the population variance. It’s used to find the correct p-value from the t-distribution.
P-value: The p-value, 0.0571, represents the probability of observing a difference in average heights of at least 1 inch (or more extreme) if the two teams were actually the same height on average. A common significance level is 0.05. Since the calculated p-value of 0.0571 is greater than 0.05, we do not have sufficient statistical evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
This means that while Team 2 is an inch taller on average in this sample, this difference is not statistically significant at a 5% level of significance. It’s plausible that the observed difference is simply due to random chance.
This is completely wrong because it’s a trick question. There is no p-value for this 1″ difference because the entire population was measured.
The p-value, used to determine whether a result is statistically significant, is, in theory, the computed probability of the result having been gotten by random chance if the null hypothesis (usually, no causative relationship or correlation existing between the two measured things) is true. However, that’s not how it’s actually used in practice.
The p-value that is used in practice is actually the probability of the results having been generated by random chance simply by how the members of each group being compared were selected from the total population.
Despite how this may sound, it’s actually a really easy concept, so let me illustrate it with an example. Suppose you want to know whether 1 beer is enough to get people drunk enough that they’re bad at playing ping pong, so you select two groups of people, each with fifty people in them, and to one group you give them the beer and to the other group you give them a non-alcoholic beer. (Let’s make favorable assumptions on all of the practical stuff, like having taken baseline measurements of their ping pong skill beforehand.)
Now, we know ahead of time that there is variation in the population in alcohol tolerance. Some people can safely operate heavy machinery after six shots of vodka and some people are under the table after one, with most people falling somewhere in between those two extremes (even apart from variations in body weight). So here’s the thing: what are the odds that instead of both groups being exactly representative of the population as a whole, your randomly assigning people from the population to one of the two groups just happened to put more alcohol-tolerant people into the 1-beer group than is representative of the whole population? The laws of probability tells us that if you run this experiment enough times, at least once you’ll randomly have all high-tolerance people in the alcoholic beer group and at least one other time you’ll have all low-tolerance people in the alcoholic beer group.
What people are measuring by p-value, in almost all scientific experiments, is how likely this kind of skew is. They are not measuring the effect of, for example, random errors in the actual measurements taken. (Conveniently for the researchers, those are always assumed to be perfect, or at least to always balance out.)
This is why the question I started this post with is a trick question: it’s got all of the information that you’d find in a random trial, presented in roughly the way you’d get it in a random trial, except there was no random selection. Within the hypothetical of the question, the entire population we care about—the two basketball teams—was measured. If you want to be super nit-picky, you can say that the p-value is zero since there was no chance of this being produced by random selection, in the same sense that the probability of a coin set down on the table with the head facing up turning up tails is zero.
But the thing is, there are scientists—evidence points to it being an awful lot of scientists—who don’t actually know this is what they’re doing when they run a p-value calculation. And, of course, there are contexts where this isn’t awful. If they’re copying a format for experiments where this happens to work, well, then, it happens to work. But because they don’t understand what it’s about, they don’t realize that the p-value is the absolute floor for how meaningless the result is. That is to say, if the scientist does a randomized (controlled) trial and gets a p-value of .045, which is below the industry threshold of .05, this means that there is a 4.5% chance that the results are meaningless if everything else is perfect.
Imperfections in instruments, fluctuations in the things to be measured, defects in the measuring tools, biases in the researchers, flaws in the study design—these all raise the chance of the results being meaningless, potentially by quite a lot.
Of course, if you want to be cynical about it, it’s in scientists’ best interests to not know any of this.
Most words have multiple meanings, but there are problems when you can’t tell the meanings apart by context. The word “feminism” has exactly this problem because it has been used to refer to people doing superficially similar things in the same contexts which are actually quite different. There have been many feminisms, some of which have been absolutely terrible (especially Marxist feminism). A full taxonomy of them would take more than a little time and probably not actually be very interesting, but there are two types that I would like to distinguish in order to illustrate this point: the feminism of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (in 1848) and 2000s era internet feminism.
The 1848 version of feminism was about the context in which there existed places in America where women could not own property in their own name (the legal context of mid-nineteenth century America was far more heterogenous than modern America) and in some places could not be legally held accountable for their own crimes. In fact, one of the articles in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was that it was not just that, in some places, a father or husband would be held legally liable for a woman’s crimes and not she herself. That is, they asked for a reform to the laws that would involve holding women criminally liable for their own crimes. (Please note: I am not, thereby, saying that this was all that was in the declarations of sentiments or that it was a perfect or an unalloyed good; I’m not interested in discussing that one way or another. My only point is that one of its major concerns was both legal rights and responsibilities, many of which amounted to bringing American law in line with European and especially British legal traditions, rather than innovating.)
By contrast, 2000s era internet feminism was largely selfish people telling obvious lies to justify why they shouldn’t have to treat people decently or even take the trouble of developing basic social skills. You can see this today in the wretches who complain about “emotional labor” and when you look into what they mean, it turns out that they’re talking about the work of living in a society and having to treat other people better than as chattel slaves.
Of course, I’m not saying to never use the word “Feminism.” My point is, rather, that one should rarely, if ever, use it in an unqualified way. When talking about some feminism, it would be much better to say things like “equal property rights feminism,” “suffragette feminism,” “Marxist feminism,” “sexual liberation feminism,” “2000s era internet feminism,” etc. It is more cumbersome, of course, but it drastically improves the likelihood of actually being understood; all the more so as many people are only familiar with some of these and if they’re not familiar with the one you’re talking about they’re going to assume it’s one of the ones they do know about. By adding the qualifiers, this will be especially helpful in this case as their reaction will be “what are you talking about?” rather than “you idiot.” “What are you talking about?” can be an excellent starting point to mutual understanding. “You idiot,” pretty much never is.
A conversation with physicist Dr. Hans Schantz about his upcoming trilogy of books, Fields & Energy, as well as a discussion about the recent history of physics and more.
A few quotes about flowers inspired by this flower I saw growing as a weed on the side of the road.
“What a lovely thing a rose is!”
He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.
“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
In his excellent book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis depicts Hell and Purgatory as the same place, with the difference being whether people consent to leave or whether they decide to stay. Truth to tell, it’s a bit of timid description of purgatory because Lewis was trying to be non-denominational and so he was trying to avoid offending people who are rabidly anti-Catholic in their biases (possibly including himself—He was born in Belfast where anti-Catholicism was in the water). But it’s a very interesting idea which could really use a bit more development, especially with regard to the more fiery depictions of Hell and the more actively unpleasant depictions of Purgatory.
Purgatory is an oft-misunderstood doctrine, but its etymology is a good place to start understanding it. “Purgatory” comes from the same root as the word “purge,” as in “to clean” or “to make clean”. The doctrine of purgatory is a straightforward logical deduction from starting off sinful at death and being sinless in heaven. Something must happen between those two steps, and the thing that happens which cleanses people of their sins was called, very practically, “cleaning,” except it happened to come from the Latin rather than the German roots of English, and hence, “purge”→”Purgatory”.
If you consider how cleaning normally works, on physical objects, you do it by abrading the surface until all of the dirt is gone. If you want to do a thorough job, you often have to be rough with the thing being cleaned—which is why children do not like baths, especially baths which get them thoroughly clean, including, for example, under their fingernails. If we move from the physical to the spiritual, how much more invasive must the cleaning be which cleanses your soul from things like lust, greed, envy, hatred, etc?
From here, it’s a relatively short jump to the metaphor of using fire to purify metal. If you heat metal up roughly to its melting point, any organic contamination will burn away and you will be left with pure metal. (In practice, it will probably need a polishing afterwards, but this doesn’t matter to the metaphor.) And this metaphor for cleaning happens to work very well with the description of Hell as a burning grounds.
That Hell is a burning grounds with constant fire is taken to be metaphorical for the obvious reason that it can’t actually be completely literal. Quite apart from literal fire requiring the afterlife to be just more of the same, rather than different in important ways, if the fire consumes the damned, then they’re not there later be burnt anymore. If the fires don’t consume the damned, they’re not being burnt. It would be, at worst, like chili peppers—awful at first, but if you spend enough time with them you get used to them because you know the sensation doesn’t actually mean anything bad. Since orthodox Christians do not presume God to be incompetent, the fires must be, to some degree at least, metaphorical.
If you put these together, it produces an interesting version of C.S. Lewis’s presentation of Hell in The Great Divorce: if all of the souls go through something which is incompatible with sin, analogous to a bath or purifying metal with fire, and they let go of their sins, this is Purgatory, and they emerge from that process made fit for being perfectly happy being eternally in God’s presence. (Let me emphasize, due to the context of some odd heresies existing, that we are made clean entirely by God’s grace, and entirely by his power. This cleaning is purely receptive on our part and we merely cooperate with it.)
But if the person refuses to let go of their sin, this cleaning never finishes, and therefore becomes eternal—specifically, eternal punishment.
This actually goes quite well with the idea I saw somewhere (I think in G.K. Chesterton) that the fires of Hell are actually the burning love of God, rejected. Bishop Barron used the analogy of a person at a party who doesn’t want to be there, who hates everything that is making the people who do want to be there happy. But if we stick with the metaphor of fire, the light of God’s truth works quite well as a purifying fire that burns away all impurities, since all sin is some kind of lie, and light also heats. In the fullness of the light of God’s truth, unveiled, all lies will burn away, and if a person lets them go, they have been cleaned of the dirt of these lies. But if they will not let go, if they shield the dirt from the burning light of God with their own bodies, then they eternally are tormented by trying to do what they can’t—believe the lies.
This is all, of course, highly speculative metaphor. I’m not trying to say that this is exactly what will happen after we die. For one thing, I have no special revelation so I don’t know. For another, I doubt that any language we humans have on this side of death even contains the words needed to describe what actually happens after death. (The fact that our Lord never tried to tell us strongly suggests, to me, at least, that this is so.)
But I think that this does at least suggest an answer, or at least part of an answer, to the question of how eternal punishment can be just. The point isn’t really to identify the answer, though of course that would be nice. The point is to show that an answer is possible, and therefore any argument which relies on it being impossible is wrong.
I came across another very interesting post by Caroline Furlong which can probably best be described as explaining to women why men’s fiction has so much action and so little emotional talk, but there’s quite a lot more in it—including some interesting discussion of people being trustworthy vs. people who abuse trust, for example—and I recommend reading it in full:
Something I think worth mentioning is that people (I do not mean Ms. Furlong) often confuse what takes up most of the words of a story with what the story is about. I think that there’s a very useful analogy to be had, here, from a physical lens: a lens is a large piece of glass whose purpose is to focus a large quantity of light down to a small point. Similarly, a story is very often a large quantity of words whose focus is a scene or two. But the whole point of all of those words is to earn that scene.
This can easily be shown by taking any truly great scene and showing it to someone who doesn’t know the story. It will, invariably, mean nothing to them. Or you can even see this in jokes: if you tell someone the punchline of a joke without its setup, it’s not funny.
The emotional scenes in men’s fiction are much like this: the extremely rare times when manly men talk about their feelings with each other are incredibly important, but only if you earn them by properly setting up the extremely rare circumstances where this is natural and healthy and manly. A really great example of this is the ending of Casablanca. The speech that Rick gives Victor Laszlo is an example of it; in it he tells him how he feels about Ilsa. It’s also subtle but you can see Victor Laszlo tell Rick how he feels; his almost-smile as he accepts what Rick tells him without believing it, and the way he welcomes Rick back to the fight. Much of the ensuing dialog between Rick and Captain Renault conveys how they feel, even if you have to read between the lines see it. But then you get the magnificent final line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It is magnificent precisely because it is earned by the entirety of the movie that led up to it.
You can also see this in well-written male characters which are written by women, by the way. Consider Mr. Darcy from Pride & Prejudice. It is precisely his reserve that makes it so striking that he says to Elizabeth, “I must tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” It is this reserve that makes the letter he wrote to Elizabeth so meaningful. It’s what makes this line so powerful:
“If you will thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I thought only of you.”
More properly, it’s his reserve combined with all the rest of what he’s done and what happened, that all of these things are earned and we learn of his feelings in conditions that make it reasonable and manly of him to communicate them in those very unusual moments.
All of this stands in contrast to that women’s fiction which is mostly “fluff.” That’s Ms. Furlong’s term for it, but I think it’s well chosen, because the emotions are mostly very transient—like the lilies of the field, they are here today and tomorrow thrown into the fire. This reflects the feminine orientation toward maintaining a household, which involves keeping track of many people and their current relationships to each other. Speaking as someone who does a lot of this himself because he has three children, you need to keep track of how everyone’s doing because the day-to-day changes in people are significant. When someone is suddenly quieter, there’s a good chance that they’re sick—or have some other problem that they need help with. If they’re suddenly louder, they might have a problem they need help with or they might be getting more caffeine than they realize. If they feel lousy and are lethargic about things that they want to do, they’re probably sick, whereas when they just feel lousy they might be having a stress reaction to something they don’t want to do. Similarly, some problems between kids they need to work out on their own, but some you need to step in and guide them to work out because they’re not doing it on their own and you don’t want to let problems fester. Letting problems fester leads to less well-developed social skills than when you step in and fix the problems they can’t, because people will mal-adapt to bad circumstances. Those women who have a facility for this—and it’s probably most of them—find the application of this facility to fiction satisfying, in a very analogous way to how many men find carving, or woodworking, or beating a video game very satisfying to their facility for problem solving. Thus the fluff—tons of transient emotions on display—gives lots of scope for refining one’s reading of people based on their trivial actions and comparing to the feelings that they express. (This is, of course, an oversimplification of what’s appealing about it to the people to whom it appeals.)
I came across this very interesting post by Caroline Furlong when I noticed that she had linked to my post Women Want Men To Show Emotion. I recommend reading her post in full, it’s very interesting:
The one thing I would note about her description of how men deal with anger is that—for very understandable reasons, given that her primary focus is writing fiction—she is mostly describing how young men deal with anger. (Oversimplifying: finding a legitimate target for aggression like a punching bad or wood that needs to be chopped.)
Turning into an adult greatly amplifies the intensity of the feelings one experiences (this is one reason why it’s so hard to be a teenager) and young men aren’t used to this yet. Also, if they’ve been raised at all well they’ve been taught self control, but it’s still a relatively new skill. So finding a legitimate target for aggression serves a purpose they mostly don’t realize it does: physical exhaustion. When an angry man hits a legitimate target over and over until he’s exhausted, this doesn’t directly help him to process the emotions. What it does is physically exhaust him. This counteracts the physical arousal that comes with anger, giving him the ability to think clearly—at least until he recovers his energy. Which is why it’s so important for him to actually do some thinking once he’s tired. This is also why this is where you usually see the older man come talk to him and he’s somewhat receptive. Once he’s tired, he can think, and the older man gets him to do it. Then he leaves and gives the young man time to think about what was just said. But very frequently the scene ends with the young man, who is now somewhat physically recovered, hitting things again. That’s because the physical arousal that returns as his exhaustion dissipates is clouding his ability to think again.
As men get older and more experienced, the physical arousal diminishes slightly but more importantly it’s familiar. In the same way that older men tolerate pain better than younger men do because it doesn’t scare them, older men deal with anger better because it doesn’t distract them so much. This allows them to get to the part that actually helps with the feelings more directly: thinking about the problem. Thinking it through, thinking about whether it was perceived correctly, thinking about how to handle it, thinking about how to handle all of the possible outcomes, etc. This is what actually helps a man deal with the emotion of anger: understanding what caused it and how to deal with it; having a plan for dealing with it.
It is possible that there’s too much to think through for a short time, of course, in which case one needs to think about it in the back of one’s mind while doing other things. When this is the case, thinking about it in the foreground of one’s thoughts is helpful occasionally—almost to check in on one’s progress in figuring it out—but it’s unhelpful or even counter-productive most of the time. In these cases a man will need to distract himself, and will usually do so with some kind of problem solving. Preferably, by doing something useful, but things like video games can also work. The critical thing to understand about this is that it’s not the man refusing to deal with his problems. It is, in fact, the man dealing with this problems. It’s just him dealing with the problems slowly, because that’s the only way that will work. It’s a bit like sleeping on a big decision like buying a house or a car. It’s not that your internal monologue is all about the purchase, but you are none the less doing something useful; if no objections occur to you in that time period it is much more likely to be a good decision. In like manner, when there’s some really big problem making a man angry, shoving it to the back of his consciousness and focusing on other things helps his mind to sort it out. Sometimes what you need are to make connections to things you don’t remember, but over time will think of and then see the connection. But the critical thing to realize is that this is actually quite constructive. If you force to him only think in the foreground of his mind about the thing making him angry, he won’t be able to pull together the various threads of his knowledge and thoughts necessary to really understand his problem and formulate a plan to deal with it. And he will feel awful until he does that. This is why a man talking about his feelings is often not just unhelpful but outright counter-productive. It’s getting in the way of doing the thing that will make him feel better, and emphasizing all of the stuff that makes him feel bad.
Anyway, that’s just an addendum to what Ms. Furlong said. Go read the post, it’s very much worth the time.
A few days ago a tweet went viral about men showing emotion:
wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall
A great many people objected to this because, if a man follows this simply as described, the results are pretty much always a disaster. That’s because there’s a communication gap going on. What she wants is not, in fact, men “openly showing their emotions.” Men have very big emotions and many of them women would find terrifying if exposed to the full force of them. Also, if you’re speaking in the context of people who are merely dating, a man blubbering, out of control, will probably kill any attraction that the woman felt to him.
What she’s actually talking about but not saying clearly is that she wants communication. There’s an old saying in writing fiction that when people give feedback about your story, they’re usually right in what the problem is and wrong about what the solution is. This is a good example of that. If you ignore the suggested solution and focus on the problem, you can see that it’s a real problem.
instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall
If you focus on this part, you can see that this is a legitimate problem. If a man does not communicate anything about his emotional state, at any time, to any degree, his wife will have no idea what’s going on, where he stands, where they stand, whether she can support him, whether it’s a good time to ask for things that eventually need to be done, etc. etc. etc.
And bear in mind that when I talk about her supporting him, I’m not primarily talking about giving him a shoulder to cry on so he can “get it out.” Men mostly don’t work that way. We don’t “get it out.” Talking about feelings does not exhaust them, or reduce them, or put them in perspective. If anything, it amplifies them and makes them harder to deal with. But within a marriage, there are many things each spouse does to support the other. This can range from things like getting the other one a food they particularly like to spending time with them in a way that’s relaxing or fun to letting them know that you’re fine with any outcome. (“Even if it doesn’t work out, we’ll be fine” can take a lot of stress out of many situations.)
For this and other reasons, reliable communication about how the man is doing, emotionally, is extremely helpful to his wife. (I’m talking about wives; all of this is merely prospective when it’s about a girlfriend because she is subconsciously evaluating what life will be like as a wife.) But the key things about this communication is that it is reliable and intelligible. None of this requires it to be performative. You do not need to cry to tell a woman that you’re feeling sad. You do not need to shout to tell her that you’re angry or laugh giddily to tell her that you’re happy. There is substantial individual variation, of course, but it is, in general, quite sufficient to simply describe your feelings in kind and magnitude. Things such as, “I’m not looking forward to work today. Nothing’s wrong, I’m just tired and I haven’t had a break in a while,” and “This problem at work is really stressing me. We’re going to be fine, but the customer is losing $1000 a day and calls us like every hour to see how it’s going” are usually quite sufficient, so long as they’re said with an intonation consonant with the meaning. (All bets are off if you sound like an android when you speak.)
This communicates what she needs to know in order to be a loving wife who works with you to try to make a happy household in which you are raising happy children. However much you deal with your own problems, doing so will inevitably use some of the resources you have for dealing with other problems such as family members making mistakes and being annoying or hurtful or whatever; when they know that you’re dealing with something big they can take extra trouble to not bother you and be extra tolerant if you snap. This is exactly the same as how you treat a person who has a headache or a cold with extra care and are more tolerant—which is why it’s important to tell people when you have a headache or a cold.
But that’s the thing—you want to tell them. The goal is not to simply give up all control and show people exactly how you’re feeling. You want to communicate like a rational human being who trusts the people to whom he is communicating.
And, indeed, this is attractive to women. If you communicate in a controlled way, she will feel that she is able to actually bond with you and form a relationship with you but will not feel that you are weak. Indeed; by letting her know how you feel, she is better able to gauge your strength. Weak people need to conceal their weakness for fear that it will be exploited, just as injured animals like to curl up in a place where no one can get at them and snarl viciously at anything that comes near so it doesn’t get closer. If you do not communicate at all, that can come across as being afraid of her getting close to you, which is weakness. Which is fair, because it often is. It is only strong people who are willing to be vulnerable. The key to the whole thing is: vulnerable in a rational, self-controlled way. What women want is communication, not emotional incontinence.
On the thirty first day of March in the year of our Lord 1985 the nineteenth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in Texas, it’s titled Armed Response. (Last week’s episode was Murder Takes the Bus.)
It opens with a voiceover of someone talking in a thick Texan accent telling the person on the other end of the phone to go to the jail and find someone. We then get a view of him:
His name is Milton Porter and I’d say that he’s a walking stereotype of a rich, predatory lawyer… except he’s sitting down. They lay it on thick, but the specifics don’t matter. He’s really just a convenience to get the plot started.
He meets Jessica at the airport. She’s come to town to testify on behalf of one of his clients. On their way to his car, some kids run into an airport employee who falls into Jessica, knocking her down. Here I have to pause to show the stunt man playing Jessica:
That’s not even the right color of wig.
“Jessica” stumbles, then loses her footing, falling to the ground:
When she’s helped back up her left leg doesn’t feel too steady, so Mr. Porter packs her off into his limousine saying that he’ll take her to the fanciest hospital in Texas and promising that he’ll be able to win at least a $50,000 settlement from the airport for gross negligence. The first half of that is the important part…
…because that’s how we get to the Samuel Garver institute, where the episode takes place.
Then we meet Dr. Sam Garver and Dr. Ellison. (Dr. Garver is the older man, in front.)
And yes, Dr. Ellison is played by Martin Kove, who played John Kreese, owner and sensei of the karate dojo Cobra Kai, in The Karate Kid (the year before).
Anyway, Dr. Garver tells Jessica that she has a small fracture in the fifth metatarsal, but the good news is that she can be fitted with a walking cast. I’m a bit suspicious of this diagnosis since the metatarsal is in the foot and Jessica didn’t put any great weight or sudden impact on her foot. I’d have expected, if anything, some kind of torsional injury to her ankle. That said, I don’t think that this is supposed to make us suspicious of the doctors; it’s probably just medical lingo thrown in to make it sound doctory.
After some banter, Dr. Garver goes to leave and the nurse—her name is Jennie Wells—stops him and says that she wants to discuss a patient on her ward—Mr. Ogden.
Ah, the days before HIPAA, when you can just discuss people’s medical conditions in front of complete strangers. Anyway, Dr. Garver tells her that there’s nothing wrong with Barney, and she says nothing that would show up on a chart, and he replies, very coldly and sternly, “How nice that we agree.”
After this, Dr. Ellison puts the cast on Jessica:
It seems to be a plaster cast, which is a little odd since they had fiberglass casts at the time and one would expect them to use more modern technology in such a high-end hospital. Anyway, he says that to be safe, they want her stay overnight. Wanting her to stay overnight for observation for a small hairline fracture strongly suggests that they bilk patients through unnecessary procedures, but Jessica seems to think that this makes sense.
She then identifies his accent as being from Chicago. She has a cousin who sounds exactly like him and was born and bred on the north side. Dr. Ellison sighs and replies that he’s from the south side. (The south side of chicago is poorer and more crime-ridden than is the north side.)
We then meet another patient:
Her name is Mrs. Sadie Winthrop and she’s loud and gregarious and loud. Also talkative.
We then meet the head nurse:
Her name is Marge Horton. She and Jessica chat about the weather in Texas vs. Maine, then Jessica tries to present her medical insurance card but Miss Horton says that they don’t deal with insurance here. (The lawyer stereotype is taking care of it and he expects the airport to take care of it.)
They then run into Dr. Wes Kenyon in the hallway:
He takes a look at the cast and sounds concerned when he hears that Dr. Ellison applied it, though he can find no fault with it.
After he leaves and Jessica is wheeled to her room, she asks about his reaction and Nurse Wells tells her that Dr. Garver has a habit of destroying the reputation of anyone he fires and there’s a rumor that he’s bringing in a replacement for one of Ellison or Kenyon.
Later that night, at a party at Dr. Garver’s house, we witness a rich hypochondriac who doesn’t get along with her husband squabble with him in front of Dr. Garver and Dr. Kenyon.
Dr. Garver excuses himself from this because of a telephone call which turns out to be from Nurse Wells, who says that she needs his authorization for some tests. He curtly answers “no” and tells her to never call him at his home again.
When he gets back from that, Dr. Kenyon tells Garver that he’s leaving as he’s on duty in 45 minutes. When he thanks Garver for inviting him, Garver replies that he’s inviting Ellison for brunch on Sunday, since he can’t play favorites.
Back at the hospital, Jessica meets Barney Ogden after unsuccessfully trying to buy something at one of the vending machines.
It seems a bit strange that she should have to buy something at a vending machine in a luxury hotel, but I suppose she needed to meet the other patients somehow. They actually lampshade this when Jessica goes to get change at the nurse’s station and Nurse Horton tells her that she shouldn’t be up and about and that they would have brought her tea. Jessica says that she didn’t want to trouble them because they’ve got too many people who are really sick. (I’m not sure that this is true.)
Just as a side note, Jessica is walking around on crutches with the leg in the cast held off the ground, despite supposedly being put in a walking cast. I doubt that’s supposed to mean anything, but it is strange.
Anyway, Doctors Ellison and Kenyon walk into the nurse’s area, arguing loudly. Kenyon then notices all of the people looking at them and tells Ellison that if he wants to talk they should do it in private. They then walk into an office and proceed to argue even louder. The walls and door are, apparently, quite thin, because everyone can still hear them.
We then fade to an establishing shot of Dr. Garver’s house, then we cut to an establishing shot of a security company, from which the episode derives its name:
I love the vinyl siding on the office building.
I can’t help but also show what the interior of the security office looks like:
So many blinkenlights! And wood paneling!
I can’t imagine that this security office is even slightly realistic, but it is very evocative.
Anyway, the alarm for Dr. Garver’s house goes off and the guard sitting at the computer places the olbigatory phone call. When no one answers, the guard who was over by the map says that he’ll check it out. On his way to Dr. Garver’s house he comes to a three-way stop sign and sees Nurse Wells stopped at the stop sign, on the street to Dr. Garver’s place as if she just came from there:
This is quite suspicious, of course, meaning that Nurse Wells is definitely innocent.
When the guard gets to Dr. Garver’s house he runs in and discovers Dr. Garver, dead:
The camera zooms in on the body in the pool, then we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we get back from commercial we get an establishing shot of the Garver Institute, then we move inside where Jenny serves Jessica Dr. Garver’s “world-famous” apple flapjacks. After which Sadie Winthrop arrives. She asks for flapjacks and coffee. Jennie replies that she can have flapjacks but no coffee. Dr. Kenyon got the word from Dr. Sam that she’s been much too active. Until further notice, she’s being put on carrot juice. (Sadie does not like the look of the carrot juice.)
Barney Ogden then walks up and apologizes to Jessica about having been rude to her the night before. Jessica Demurs and Mrs. Winthrop tries to give him her carrot juice.
They then hear a scream and Nurse Horton runs through. Dr. Kenyon follows her but doesn’t catch up to her. When Nurse Wells asks what’s wrong, Dr. Kenyon tells her that Dr. Sam is dead. Murdered last night. The radio report he heard said that there was the possibility of someone having broken in.
When Jessica returns to her room, she meets Lt. Ray Jenkins.
He’s the homicide detective in charge of the case and he’d like Jessica’s help. He’s not sure that the killer was just an intruder. One reason why is that the body might have been moved to the fish pool since the bullet entered at a forty-five degree angle which means that he was either sitting down or killed by an NBA center.
Lt. Jenkins has a good-ol-boy, shucks-ma’am style of speaking, but you do get the sense that it’s a Columbo-style attempt to be underestimated, not a lack of intelligence. When Jessica demurs, he tells her that he just transferred in from a rough neighborhood and doesn’t know how to talk to fancy folk like the ones at the hospital.
Jessica agrees and suggests that they start at the scene of the crime. Lt. Jenkins replies that it’s only five minutes away and the scene shifts to Dr. Garver’s house. There, he explains how the alarm works. I’m actually surprised by the amount of detail given; by the mid 1980s home security systems were far from universal but also far from unheard-of. And we already saw all the important parts anyway.
We do get some times, though. The alarm went off at 11:06pm and the officer arrived at 11:15pm. A next door neighbor thought that she heard a car backfiring a few minutes into the 11:00 news. (Backfiring, which is the rapid burning of fuel in the exhaust system, was more common in cars in the days before computer-controlled fuel injection and catalytic converters; older systems of mixing the fuel and air could easily lead to over-rich fuel-air mixtures and incomplete burning which allowed for the conditions for it to ignite in the exhaust. These explosions sounded somewhat like gun shots.)
The only other clue he has to tell Jessica about is that they found Garver’s keys by the front door. When Jessica asked what they were doing here Lt Jenkins replies that he must have dropped them. When Jessica asks why, because he was already in the house. Lt. Jenkins smiles…
…then asks her, very dryly, “Got any ideas?” His manner strongly suggests that he knew perfectly well that it makes no sense that Garver’s keys were outside of his door and we’ve come to the part why he asked Jessica to come—that is, to the hard part.
Jessica chuckles as she realizes that she can’t get away with doing only the easy part then says that she’s sorry but she doesn’t have a glimmer of an idea.
Back at the hospital, Jessica is met by Dr. Kenyon, who tells her that they were just about to send a search party out for her. She says that her leg is acting up and asks for a wheelchair. Dr. Kenyon obliges and personally pushes it. On the way back to her room, he tells her that he wasn’t surprised by Dr. Garver’s death—Garver had a lot of enemies. In ensuing conversation, Dr. Kenyon says that it was generally understood that he was next in line to run the hospital. Dr. Garver didn’t say so explicitly, but the signs were clear.
Jessica brings up Dr. Ellison and Kenyon says that he’s never liked Ellison. There’s something dangerous about him—a street kid who couldn’t leave the streets behind. He also mentions that Dr. Ellison keeps a gun in his car. I’m not sure that this would seem that out of the ordinary in Texas, but Hollywood writers generally know nothing besides Hollywood. And, to be fair, Dr. Kenyon doesn’t have a Texan accent.
When Jessica asks if Kenyon is trying to suggest that Ellison killed Garver, Kenyon replies that he’s a doctor, not a policeman, and excuses himself. (In other words: yes.)
Jessica then drops in on Barney Ogden. She’s clearly curious about what’s wrong with him. Then Mrs. Winthrop drops in and tries to bully him into being happy. When she asks if he’s only here because he likes it and doesn’t he have someplace else he’d rather be, he replies that no, he doesn’t. His wife died nine years ago and he never had any children. All he’s got is a nephew who only wants his money and a few cousins in Alaska.
After this scene winds down, Jessica spots Nurse Wells being escorted into a police car. In the lobby Lt. Jenkins is thanking Nurse Horton for her help when Jessica arrives. Ray explains that she’s been taken in for questioning since the security guard spotted her about three blocks away from Dr. Garver’s house. When Jessica says that there must be some mistake, Nurse Horton tells her that one of her nurses saw Nurse Wells sneaking out the back way at around 11:00.
And on this bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, the Lawyer stereotype shows up at the hospital in response to a summons from Jessica. She wants him to rescue Nurse Wells. After some back and forth, we get a bit of exposition—from an off-screen conversation that Jessica had with Nurse Wells. She did leave the hospital but only to talk to Dr. Garver. She arrived at 11:10 and there was no answer to her knock. (The lawyer stereotype balks at taking the case until Jessica threatens to not testify on behalf of his client that she’s in town to testify for.)
In the next scene Lt. Jenkins is calling Jessica from a payphone to let her know that Nurse Wells has been released. Jessica is delighted to hear this then says that she’d like another look at the crime scene.
As Jessica is waiting for Lt. Jenkins to pick her up, Dr. Ellison runs into her. She learns from him that the trustees of the hospital have named him and Dr. Kenyon to jointly run the hospital on an interim basis. She also finds out that Ellison was sure that the new doctor was to replace Kenyon. Garver didn’t like Ellison’s family tree, but he knew a good doctor when he saw one.
On the way over to Dr. Garver’s house, Lt. Jenkins tells Jessica that shortly before Dr. Garver died he called the hospital and left a message on Nurse Horton’s answering machine. He has the tape with him and plays it for Jessica.
Marge, it’s me. A couple of things for the morning. I’ll be in late. I want Peabody up and walkin’ no matter how much he complains. Second, get Sadie Winthrop on carrot juice. She’s too hyperactive for her own good. One other thing. That Nurse Wells is gettin’ to be a real problem—startin’ to think she’s a doctor. Now, find some excuse to get rid of her. Now I’m goin’ to bed. See you tomorrow. You take care now.
I really like the establishing shot of Dr. Garver’s house, by the way:
He was a rich man.
Lt. Jenkins tells Jessica that they already had Nurse Wells’ opportunity and now they have her motive. When Jessica says that this is rubbish, he asks why she’s defending Nurse Wells out of pure guesswork. Jessica replies that it’s called reading people.
This is interesting because Jessica deciding that someone is definitely innocent is a common occurrence in Murder, She Wrote. Jessica has the writers on her side so she’s always right, but it’s often hard to see what she’s going on other than the episode portraying the character as sympathetic.
Anyway, they go inside. Jessica looks around and says that the tape contradicts Jenkins’ theory that Garver was attacked while he was getting back from a walk. If he was going to bed, he must have been killed inside the house, which means that his body in the pool in the foyer was staged.
Inside they discuss some possibilities, then discuss the question of why the body was dragged out to the fish pool. Jessica says that the pond was heated because of the fish, which makes the time of death uncertain. Lt. Jenkins wonders at this because the neighbor heard the shot at 11:05 and the guard arrived at 11:16, so the time of death doesn’t seem very uncertain. Jessica then asks if he has any blanks for his gun.
They then stage the experiment where Jessica visits the neighbor while Lt. Jenkins fires the gun. They hear the shot and the neighbor says that it’s exactly like what she heard the other night. (There’s an annoying comedy bit where she’s sure that this isn’t really police business and there’s a hidden camera where she’s supposed to taste-test coffee or something.) The only thing is, Jenkins didn’t fire one shot, he fired two. The first inside the house, the second outside the house, the latter being meant to obscure the time of death.
That night at the hospital, Jessica visits Nurse Horton. After pumping her a bit, she reveals that she and Dr. Garver and an intimate relationship. She narrates how the day she learned of Garver’s death went. It’s sweet, but clearly here to give us the salient fact that she didn’t play the answering machine tape until later in the day. Then she’s interrupted by a nurse who tells her that the police are searching the locker room with a search warrant.
In the locker room Lt. Jenkins is there with some uniformed police offers and explains that he received an anonymous tip that the murder weapon was in Nurse Wells’ locker.
They find a gun—which Nurse Wells protests is not hers—in Jennie’s locker so Jenkins directs the officers to arrest and book Nurse Wells.
When Jessica tells him that he’s making a dreadful error, Jenkins replies that they have motive, opportunity, and now means. He says that they’ll let ballistics decide if it’s the murder weapon.
Jessica retorts, “Well of course it’s the murder weapon. Who ever heard of framing someone with the wrong gun?”
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial we’re at the lawyer Stereotype’s office. Jessica is telling him that the murder weapon was obviously planted in Jennie’s locker when Dr. Kenyon comes in. He informs the lawyer stereotype that the hospital stands behind Nurse Wells completely and that they will be responsible for any legal fees involved.
Back at the hospital, Jessica runs into Barney Ogden and Sadie Winthrop who are playing gin rummy together and clearly enjoying each other’s company. Barney is in remarkably good spirits as he wins the hand as Jessica walks up. A minute later Sadie gets carrot juice and this puts Jessica in mind of something. She goes off and calls Lt. Jenkins.
We then cut to Lt. Jenkins in front of the nurse’s station asking Dr. Ellison if the gun is his. Ellison denies even owning a gun, but Kenyon contradicts this. Ellison replies that he told Kenyon a lot of things, many of which were not true.
Jessica then barges in and begins angrily asking Lt. Jenkins what is doing. After a bit of bickering, she asks to speak to him privately and then goes into the same room that Ellison and Kenyon had their fight in. Lt. Jenkins follows her and the two begin yelling at each other.
Various people in the lobby comment on the fight, then Jessica walks up behind them and says hello, then calls out to the Lt. that he can come out now. Which he does, holding a boombox which is still playing their argument.
We cut to Dr. Ellison and Dr. Kenyon looking like they’ve been caught, but smart enough to not say anything. Then Jessica asks Nurse Horton whether they witnessed a similar scene two nights ago when Dr. Garver was killed. (She says yes, of course, since we obviously did.)
Jessica then goes on to produce the evidence: Dr. Kenyon switched Sadie Winthrop to carrot juice for breakfast on Dr. Garver’s orders but Nurse Horton didn’t play that tape until lunchtime. There was only one way he could have known about those orders: if he had still been at Dr. Garver’s house when Dr. Garver dictated them onto Nurse Horton’s answering machine. He must have killed Dr. Garver right after the phone call, but before 11:00. Then someone had to go to Dr. Garver’s house and fire the gun outside then set off the alarm during the very public argument behind closed doors.
Ellison breaks down and explains what happened. It was Kenyon’s idea but he went along with it. He then narrates what happened, which is basically what we already knew. Kenyon stayed behind and shot garver, then they staged the argument and Ellison went back and opened the door, setting off the alarm, and fired a shot into the air. He came in the same way he left.
The next day Jessica is walking to a car without crutches, talking with Nurse Wells. Jennie thanks her lucky stars that Jessica was here to help her and asks why they did it . Jessica says that it was simple survival. One was about to replaced and his career destroyed, but they didn’t know which, so they decided to put aside their differences and eliminate the threat that faced both of them. They only decided to pin the murder on Jennie after the fact. Jessica wishes Jennie well and then asks her to write and let her know how the love birds (Sadie and Barney) are doing.
As the final thing in the episode, the lawyer stereotype pulls up. He banters with Jessica and we learn that he’s taken on the case of defending Kenyon and Ellison. He wishes her farewell and as she gets into her taxi, she tells him, “See you in court!”
And we go to credits.
This episode had some really fun things in it and some really stupid things in it. Let’s start with the fun things.
The basic mystery was fun. A murder in a big, empty house with apparently tight timeline is always interesting. There were clues which weren’t obvious that turned out to be meaningful, such as the body being in the fish pool and the keys being found outside the house. The apparent alibi of the two most likely suspects was also interesting.
I also really liked Lt. Jenkins. I think that the character fell a bit short of his promise but he felt like a Columbo-like character, which is very interesting to pair with Jessica. Jessica is used to estimating the competence of the police to be very low—accurately, most of the time—so that part fits. Seeing her surprise, and the contrast of detective styles, was interesting. I wish that they had leaned into this more; it would have been fun to see Jessica having a little bit of competition and rising to the occasion.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for the stuff I liked.
I really disliked the lawyer stereotype. All of his scenes should have been replaced by more characterization of actual characters. (This is a knock against the writers, not the actor—he did a fine job with what he was given to work with.)
I also think that the character of Nurse Jennie Wells was a big mistake. Admittedly, she’s a pretty, young woman in trouble so she is automatically sympathetic, but this has to work against the character as she was written. She’s meant to be the kind of medical practitioner who cares and goes the extra mile, and we’re supposed to approve of her for it. In the end of the episode she asks Jessica how she can thank Jessica for saving her and Jessica replies she can thank Jessica by continuing in her career because medicine can use a lot more like her. The thing is, it really couldn’t. Nurse Wells never actually helps anybody—she just gets in the way of the people who are. The episode even spends several minutes showing us conclusively that Dr. Garver was right and there was nothing wrong with Barney Ogden. He didn’t need treatment, he just needed a friend. Running the tests on him that Nurse Wells wanted to run would have turned up nothing useful and created the possibility of misleading results that led to unnecessary treatment.
Moreover, calling the head doctor at home, then skipping on her shift and driving over to his house in order to talk him into tests was highly inappropriate. Doctors go off duty for several reasons. For one, they’re human beings and deserve time off. For another, they need to rest so that they can do a good job when they’re on duty. People who are burned out because they never rest don’t do a good job. It’s also the case that there is an on-duty doctor at a hospital who can handle any emergencies which come up. There’s no way to need emergency tests at 10pm at night and have to call an off-duty doctor rather than finding the on-call doctor and asking him. Even worse than this, a nurse doesn’t order tests and require someone’s permission to do it; the doctor is the one who orders tests. This is because doctors have trained extensively under supervision from other doctors in order to have a sense of what’s needed and what isn’t and the complex interplay of many different things. That’s not to say that doctors are always right and there’s nothing that would prevent a nurse from extensive study and gaining this knowledge on the side, but if she did this, it’s only reasonable to take the time to prove it to people before she asks them to trust her. But we’re given no reasons to believe that Nurse Wells has done any of this training and we are given reasons to believe that she hasn’t. The only beneficial things we actually see her do anyone are to push Jessica around in a wheelchair and serve pancakes.
Frankly, Dr. Garver was right to want to get rid of her.
Probably the worst thing about this episode was that the episode hinged on carrot juice replacing coffee. Everything about this plot point was stupid. First off, the order to put Sadie Winthrop on carrot juice makes no sense. She has a broken leg and she’s a fiesty, energetic woman who’s bored and looking for stimulation. She’s not active because she has coffee. She’s active because that’s the kind of person she is. Putting her on carrot juice will just make her more bored and make her look for more trouble to liven up her day. And it’s not even a problem if she is active—she’s got a broken leg that’s in a cast. As long as she’s not whacking things with her cast as hard as possible, she’ll be fine.
But even if we accept this, the next step was that Dr. Kenyon, who was hiding out at Dr. Garver’s house, listened to the message he left on Nurse Horton’s answering machine carefully enough to hear the instructions, then after murdering Dr. Garver, he still dutifully carried out Dr. Garver’s orders about the carrot juice when he knew that Dr. Garver had left them on an answering machine for someone else! He wouldn’t have done that if he’d just stayed late at the party because he lost his favorite tie-pin, because people don’t ordinarily rush to implement orders that were given to someone else. But after committing a daring murder, he decided that ridiculous medical instructions are the better part of valor and put the carrot juice order in himself, lest the patient have an extra cup of coffee in the morning before Nurse Horton heard the message and put the order into effect. As unscrupulous as he was to plan a murder instead of just securing another job before Dr. Garver could fire him, he couldn’t bear the thought of an excitable patient—moreover, a patient with a broken leg and not something sensitive to caffeine like a heart condition—having one extra cup of coffee. And if it weren’t for that level of dedication to his patients, he and Doctor Ellison would never have been caught!
This is almost Encyclopedia Brown levels of “you made one mistake.”
(To be clear, I like Encyclopedia Brown stories quite a lot; but they are highly simplified for their intended audience of children and mostly don’t stand up to exacting scrutiny because they rightly prioritize intelligibility to children over verisimilitude.)
One of the causes that you will see put forward as to why so many people are overweight, fat, or obese is that we evolved for a food-scarce environment and now live in a food-rich environment, so our natural inclination to eat everything available and store fat for the lean times is no longer adaptive. This hypothesis has a natural conclusion about how to not get fat: limit what you eat and always be hungry. To lose weight, limit what you eat even more and always be hungrier until you’re thin, then just limit what you eat and always be hungry.
Like the idea that carbs are more filling that fats because carbs have 4 Calories per gram while fats have 9 Calories per gram, so carbs take up more room in your stomach, this is one of those ideas that’s strange that anyone says with a straight face, at least if they’ve spent more than a few days living as a human being. Because if you have any experience of living as a human being, this is just obviously false. And there’s a super-obvious thing which disproves both: dessert.
Observe any normal people eating dinner and they will eat until they are full and don’t want to eat anymore. Then bring out some tasty treats like pie, ice cream, etc. and suddenly they have room in their stomach after all. This simple experiment, which virtually all people have participated in themselves in one form or another, irrefutably disproves both of those hypotheses.
You can also easily see this if you have any experience of animals which actually do eat all food that’s available until they physically can’t, such as the cichlid fish called the Oscar.
You feed oscars feeder fish, and they will keep eating them until there is no more room left in their stomach, throat, and mouth. They, literally, only stop eating once their mouths are full and fit nothing more in them. They then swim around with several tails sticking out of their mouth until their stomach makes room and they can move everything down.
That’s what a hunger signal with no feedback mechanism to stop because the creature evolved in a food-scarce environment looks like. (Oscars who are fed a lot grow extremely rapidly and very large.)
But you can also disprove this from the other direction. Yes, lots of people are fat, but they’re not fat-mouse fat.
Fat mouse was created by lesioning the part of the brain responsible for satiety. Fat mouse then kept eating and eating, without stop, rapidly ballooning into nearly being spherical. (Incidentally, are we to believe that normal mice eat have a satiety limit to their eating because mice evolved in a food-rich environment? When you look at field mice, is “abundant food” really the first thing that comes to mind?)
Now, it’s possible to attempt to save the food-scarce-environment hypothesis by modifying it, saying that we’re genetically predisposed to being fat and unhealthy because that worked out in a food-scarce environment, but not too fat, for whatever reason. This suffers from being arbitrary, but then it is the prerogative of evolution to be arbitrary (obviously nothing needs to make any sense if you’re an atheist, but for the rest of us the influence of fallen angels on evolution, within the limits God permits them to work, has the same result—that’s one of the things that confuses atheists).
Of course, the problem with even this modified hypothesis is that there are plenty of naturally thin people and if you talk to them they’re not constantly hungry and denying themselves the food needed for satiety at every moment.
There’s also the problem of the timing of the rapid fattening of the population. Yes, it took place at a time when food was abundant, but there have been sections of the population for whom food is abundant as far back as there is recorded history. They were not all obese. More recently, in the 1800s, upper middle class and rich people could easily afford enough food to get fat on, yet they were not all obese. And in much of history, when food was scarce, people’s preferences in women were for plump women. Just look up paintings of Venus:
Which makes sense in that context—when people mostly don’t have enough food, women who manage to be plump in this environment are healthier, can have more children, survive the rigors of pregnancy, take care of the children, etc. Hence when painting a goddess of beauty, they painted her to the standards of their day and made her plump. But they didn’t make her obese.
But this dates to a time (30,000 years ago) from which food was supposed to be scarce and—so the hypothesis goes—no one actually looked like that because they were in the environment their constant food cravings were adapted to.
Ultimately, what I find so odd about the programmed-to-overeat hypothesis of modern obesity is not that it’s obviously false. It’s that it’s obviously false and the people who push it have clearly never considered the evidence against it.
You don’t see this with, for example, Young Earth Creationists. They have explanations for why radio-isotope dating doesn’t work and how geology is all wrong and fossil records are being misinterpreted because the dinosaurs were all animals that didn’t make it onto the Ark, etc. etc. etc. Say what you want about Young Earth Creationists, they at least take their ideas seriously.
As far as I can tell, the people saying that we’re programmed to overeat are just saying things.
The Red-Headed League is, justly, one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories. But while it is mostly known for the cleverness of the plot, I really appreciate that its structure shows how thieves are often their own worst enemies.
The most notable quality of a thief is that they are not willing to do the just work to get what they want. Outside of a highly developed economy this mostly means that they are not willing to build, or husband animals, or plant crops, or spin or weave or whatever it takes to get what they want. Within a developed economy this means that they’re not willing to pay for what they want with money that they have earned. And while most of the time this means that they take money from others, it also means that they are not above getting people to do work and then not paying them. And this was the downfall of the Red-Headed League.
The reason that Sherlock Holmes foiled the bank robbery for which the Red-Headed League was set up is that Mr. Jabez Wilson came to him to find out what the Red-Headed League was about. The reason that Mr. Jabez Wilson came to Sherlock Holmes was because the Red-Headed League was summarily dissolved and all efforts to try to contact the representative of the Red-Headed League showed that something underhanded had taken place. The reason that the Red-Headed League was dissolved was because the tunnel that they were digging into the bank had been completed. They no longer needed Mr. Wilson out of the way so they invested no more time or money in him. I think it is not coincidence that this took place on the day that Mr. Wilson was to be paid for the previous week’s work. Had Mr “Duncan Ross” of the Red-Headed League showed up and paid Mr. Jabez Wilson the four pounds, Mr. Wilson would have gone home happy that Saturday and not contacted Holmes.
Saving four pounds cost the thieves £30,000.
On its face this might sound stupid but the brilliant part of the story is that it is stupid in exactly the sort of way that thieves often are. It’s not that they didn’t think of this at all; they did and just thought it sufficient for Vincent Spaulding to tell Mr. Wilson to wait for a letter in the mail. That is, they trusted that instead of spending money (and thereby doing work) they could instead trick Mr. Wilson into doing what they wanted.
This is excellent symbolic structure in the story because the fundamental problem with stealing is that it does not actually work; stealing is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If only the criminals had been a bit more diligent, they would have gotten away with it… means, in the end, that they would have succeeded if they were not the sort of people who are thieves.
(There are always exceptions; the world is only ever partially fallen because, to be completely fallen, it would have to not exist. You will occasionally find people who are oddly virtuous in pursuit of some vice, but it is always a temporary thing. Vice is a degenerative disease because virtue is only ever maintained through constant renewal, and the renewal comes from aiming at something higher. When someone gives up on the higher aim to the point of becoming a career criminal, they have abandoned the source of renewal that will maintain their virtue. And so they will degenerate.)
Dr. John Watson, the celebrated friend and biographer of Sherlock Holmes, has been portrayed and regarded in many ways, though rarely have they been flattering. The attitude may, perhaps, have been best summed up in one of Fr. Ronald Knox’s ten commandments for detective fiction:
The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
This conception of Watson as a “stupid friend” may have reached its climax in the portrayal of Dr. Watson by Nigel Bruce, who played the character opposite to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes.
This description by Loren Estleman of Nigel Bruce’s Watson, which I saw quoted on Wikipedia, is an exaggeration, but not a great exaggeration:
If a mop bucket appeared in a scene, his foot would be inside it, and if by some sardonic twist of fate and the whim of director Roy William Neill he managed to stumble upon an important clue, he could be depended upon to blow his nose on it and throw it away.
But neither of these are really true to the character of Watson. This can be seen most clearly, I think, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, which shows Watson at his finest. Watson actively investigates, in Holmes’ absence, with intelligence and confidence. He finds useful clues. All of which makes sense, because Watson is a doctor.
If you consider what a doctor does, you will quickly see that it is very similar to what a detective does. People come to the doctor with their problems. They have a few clues as to what has gone wrong, though these are normally called by the medical jargon, “symptoms.” The doctor will then interrogate the patient about things things which have happened—things which may seem to the patient irrelevant or unimportant. He may probe the patient’s body to gain further evidence. He then uses his imagination to think of what might be wrong that caused these symptoms and gather further, more directed evidence, to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Once he is confident, he or the patient or both will act on this and—if he was right—bring a resolution to the problem, or at least as much of a resolution as the situation allows. This is also a description of what a consulting detective does.
Holmes is more intelligent than Watson; he has also developed quite a good deal more specialized knowledge than Watson, and for these reasons can solve problems which are impenetrable to Watson. But he is not completely unlike Watson. Indeed, it is this similarity, though in different fields of application, which allows Watson to appreciate Holmes’ genius. Most people were irritated by Holmes, but Watson could follow Holmes’ explanations, once he gave them, and appreciate how he could have done it if he had only done a better job. That is to say, the thing which allowed Watson to appreciate Holmes was the fact that Watson was, himself, a detective of middle-rate skill. Which is no small thing.
The modern world is so accustomed, because of the cheapness of digital reproduction, to having the best that we have lost sight of the value of anything but the best. This has gotten so bad we often turn our nose up at the second-best and treat third-best as if it meant third-rate. When we look at the Olympics we care who won the gold medal and sometimes give a thought to who won the silver medal, but often look at the bronze medal as if it was a consolation prize or participation trophy. And yet, for most groups of Olympic medalists, if you were to re-run the event ten times on ten different days, all three of the competitors would probably win gold at least once and all three would take bronze at least once. No one is so outstanding that he does not have a bad day and everyone near the top occasionally has good days. And, more to the point, the bronze medalist would, on any normal day, be able to beat virtually anyone you put him up against. That is to say, he may have taken third place, but he’s still first-rate.
This is where people go wrong with Watson, I think. Watson was not Holmes’ stupid friend. Watson was Holmes’ intelligent friend. So much so that in Watson’s area of specialization—medicine—Holmes always deferred to Watson’s judgement. Watson did not come close to the heights that Holmes could reach, within Holmes’ area of specialization, but there is a very good reason why Holmes confided in Watson and not in other men. Watson was intelligent enough, and enough of a detective, that he could appreciate Holmes.
Indeed, this is what made Watson such an excellent biographer of Sherlock Holmes. He was low enough that he could make Holmes relatable to the common man but high enough that he could understand Holmes when he explained himself—unlike the common man. Watson does not appear in a good light when standing next to Holmes, but when he was on his own many people came to Watson with their troubles and through his own intelligence and knowledge he helped them.
Recently, I’ve been watching both the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes as well as the David Suchet Hercule Poirot series and it was really born in upon me what an enormous leap in technology there was from the 1890s to the 1920s. These hit more in the TV shows than in the stories, I think, because the TV shows add in all of the clothing and set decoration which is visually necessary but which prose does not need to describe. But of course the differences in the prose description are immense, too.
Perhaps the biggest difference is the ubiquity of the telephone in Poirot. People do pay calls on each other, of course, but they also call each other on the telephone quite frequently. There were, in Holmes’ day, telegrams, and the mail was picked up and delivered several times a day such that in some cases a letter written in the morning might, under favorable circumstances, find its way to its recipient by the evening, but quite often by the morning of the following day. But as fast as these things were, the telephone is enormously faster. This speed shrinks the world—which is to say that Sherlock Holmes lived in a bigger world than did Hercule Poirot.
You can also see this in the ordinary manner of transportation: Sherlock Holmes took horse-drawn cabs within London and trains to everywhere else. Hercule Poirot mostly took cars and only occasionally took trains. But Poirot also flew on airplanes and took steam ships.
That last part probably needs a little elaboration, since ships have sailed since before the birth of Christ and in Sherlock Holmes’ time there were plenty of passenger ships sailing and sometimes steaming around. But the thing is, you very rarely see Holmes take any of these, for the excellent reason that ships were, at that time, still dangerous. By Poirot’s time, the quality of ships and of navigation had improved significantly; taking a vacation on a ship was a much more reasonable thing for a gentleman to do in the 1920s and 1930s than in the 1890s.
Steam ships are a bit of an oddity among these methods of transportation, as they are somewhat analogous to moving islands. But cars and aeroplanes also shrink the world.
Consider this bit from The Copper Beeches:
By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely.
“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
“You horrify me!”
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.
The flaw in the argument is that people in cities are, for the most part, indifferent to the sufferings of their neighbors. People rarely call the police and do not want to get involved. And cities attract people who want to find participants in their favorite vices, while no one goes out to the country to find people with whom to take their favorite recreational drugs and engage in sexual practices with strangers. This is all quite beside the point, though. Holmes is quite right that, in his day, the houses in the country were quite isolated. But this ceases to be true in the age of the telephone. Hercule Poirot lives in a smaller world than does Sherlock Holmes.
These are very half-formed thoughts and I have no strong conclusion. But this interests me greatly, and I think it’s worth paying attention to.
On the seventeenth day of March in the year of our Lord 1985 the eighteenth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set just outside of Cabot Cove, it was titled Murder Takes the Bus. (Last week’s episode was Footnote to Murder.)
The episode actually begins with Jessica and Amos discussing their travel plans to some kind of meeting of the Maine Sheriff’s Association. Since the car isn’t working and they’ll have to take the bus, they’re likely to miss the hors d’oeuvres, which disappoints Amos greatly.
But they should be there in time for the drawing—they’re giving away a big screen TV—and Amos feels that it’s his lucky night. (At the time, a “big screen TV” would have been a large, heavy cathode ray tube TV whose screen measured around thirty inches, or perhaps a little bigger. There were projection televisions of the time that might measure up to sixty inches, but they were extremely uncommon, especially because they had pretty poor picture quality, even by the standards of the day.)
At the bus stop we meet a few characters. Here’s Cyrus Leffingwell. He’s got a thick Maine accent and likes local busses because you can sit back and enjoy yourself.
Also, from the smell of the air (and the occasional bit of thunder that we can hear) he predicts that it will be raining in twenty minutes.
A moment later the bus comes and people begin to board. Jessica is surprised to see a new bus driver, as a fellow named Andy Reardon normally runs this route. The bus driver explains that Andy has the flu.
There are not a great many people on the bus, but we get a look at a few of them.
This is Kent and Miriam Radford. Kent is a professor. Miriam recognizes Jessica—she’s a fan.
Sure enough, the storm overtakes the bus and it begins to rain hard before long.
Also, probably not entirely by coincidence, but unusual for Murder, She Wrote, the first shot we get of the bus driver’s face coincides with the guest star credit for the actor playing him.
As the bus makes its way through the stormy night, it comes up to the state prison, where a man who has been standing in the rain hails the bus. We know it’s the state prison because of an establishing shot of a helpful sign:
The man gets on looks around, noticing something that gives him pause.
He’s going to Portland and doesn’t have a ticket, but apparently on this bus line you can pay the fair in cash. Which he does. After receiving his change, he silently walks to an available seat and sits down.
Jessica notices the book he’s holding.
The original shot was very dark and I could barely make out the title, so I edited it to increase the exposure. It’s a well-worn copy of The Night the Hangman Sang. (So far as I can tell, that’s not a real book.)
A bit later, they run into an obstruction. A man in a yellow raincoat boards the bus for a moment to explain that powerlines are down and while they can get through, they need to be very careful. There is also a fair amount of flooding. The road is open, but the guy doesn’t know for how long it will remain so.
Quite unusually for Murder, She Wrote, we’re about five minutes into the episode and still getting the occasional credit. This is quite the slow opening, though the suspensful music helps by letting us know that it is going somewhere.
After a while of the bus continuing on its journey, Miriam gets up from her seat and sits in one behind Jessica and introduces herself. She’s a huge fan and tells Jessica that she’s in Miriam’s top ten most stolen list—Miriam is a librarian. They’ve had to replace Jessica’s books dozens of times over the years.
Some time later, a man who just got out of a broken-down car hails the bus. He gets on and inquires the fair to Portland.
The bus driver asks if he was the one following the bus for quite some time and he replies that he was—he thought it would be safer with the bus taking the brunt of the storm. He adds that he’s now sorry that he passed the bus and finds a seat.
As he puts his coat into the overhead compartment, he inadvertently reveals that he’s carrying a gun.
Jessica notices, and some sinister music plays.
Some time later, the bus pulls up to a diner. The bus driver calls back to the passengers that they seem to be having some engine trouble. They’re welcome to get out and stretch their legs while he checks it out.
As the passengers shuffle off the bus, Jessica notices the name of the bus driver.
Inside the diner, as the people from the bus file in, we get some characterization. The owner of the diner is surprised to see them—he heard on the radio that the road was closed—but friendly. The professor (Kent) says some extremely nerdy things which confirm his professorhood. There’s also a little bit of bickering, which helps to establish how much people would rather get to their destination than be inconvenienced.
When Amos gets up to look at the menu, Jessica notices something in the bus out the window.
I’ve upped the brightness in the dark areas a bit, but even so, you can’t really tell who those people are. They do seem to be having a bit of an argument, though—there are some angry gestures.
A while later, after Jessica and Amos finished the pie that they ordered shortly after coming in, the bus driver comes in and says that they’re not leaving soon, he just needs to rest for a bit. Amos goes to a payphone outside to call Portland and let them know what’s up—it turns out Jessica is supposed to give a speech at the event—and Jessica goes out to the bus to get the book she was reading and forgot to bring in with her.
On the bus there is only the man who was picked up just outside of the prison, apparently asleep. When Jessica tries to wake him for some reason, his head lolls over and it turns out that he’s dead.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back from commercial break, Jessica has brought Amos and they’re examining the body. He suggests notifying the bus driver and not moving anything until the coroner arrives. Jessica convinces Amos to at least do a little investigating, even though he’s out of his jurisdiction, because the killer had to be one of the people on the bus and it will be some time until the authorities arrive.
Amos consents and checks the corpse’s pockets, but there’s nothing in them.
Jessica remarks that it’s ironic that the man should be killed the very day he’s released from prison. I don’t see how it’s ironic in any way, but they had to work in that he was recently released from prison somehow. Anyway, Amos objects that he could have been a visitor or a weekend guard. Jessica doubts it, though. He’s wearing a new suit, he has on new shoes, and paid for his bus fair with crisp new bills.
Looking around, they find his wallet on the floor. It contains the man’s release paper—his name turns out to be Gilbert Stoner—some money, an out-of-date driver’s license, and a photograph. Jessica concludes that someone was looking for something. Then she notices that Gilbert’s suitcase is missing.
She then looks down at the body and in a flash of lightning she notices some smudge marks on his neck and on the collar of his shirt.
Just then Miriam comes onto the bus to get a book. She then sees the corpse, screams, and nearly faints.
The scene then shifts to some time later with Kent comforting his wife and her crying about how awful it was. Cyrus then walks in and says that he tried to call the police but the phone line appears to be dead.
The owner of the store brings out some coffee for everyone and tells them that it’s on the house (an expression meaning that the store is paying for and there’s no charge to the people receiving it).
Amos then gets up and introduces himself. While he has no jurisdiction here, he has an obligation to assume authority until the local police arrive, and he hopes that they will cooperate.
Jessica then remembers where she heard the name “Gilbert Stoner” before. It was during some research she did for a book. He was involved in a robbery in a bank in Augusta. (Augusta is a town in Maine, about fifty miles north-east of Portland.) This rings a bell for Amos—the Danvers Trust Company.
The owner of the diner speaks up, saying that he remembers that being all over the TV for weeks…
…about fifteen years ago.
Kent then rattles off some information about it. Three men pulled it off but were apprehended. Cyrus concurs, though he says, “at least one of them was.”
At Jessica’s prompting, Amos then asks for everyone’s names, why they were on the bus, and where they were at the time of the killing. There is some grumbling at this and someone remarks that, “Obviously, he thinks that one of us killed him.”
Amos replies, “I think ‘obvious’ is the right word, sir. Unless, of course, this Stoner fellow somehow managed to reach up behind his head and stab himself in the back of the neck with a 10-inch screwdriver.”
Amos sometimes has a way with words.
Kent and Miriam introduce themselves—he’s an associate professor of Mathematics and she’s a college librarian (the head librarian, she points out). They’re on their way to Boston to do some research. Kent says that he was in the “video alcove” playing “Road Hog.”
Cyrus says that Kent is telling the truth—he heard Kent playing the game while he (Cyrus) was in the gift shop. Why a diner would have a gift shop, no one says. Cyrus mentions that he’s from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is a retired mailman, and has no idea who the poor dead fellow is.
We then meet a young couple who have been on the bus and occasionally bickered in terms sufficiently suspicious-sounding that I was immediately convinced that they’re red herrings.
He’s Steve Pascal and the woman is his wife. Her name is Jane. He’s a computer engineer and they’re on their way to Portland. She was inside the whole time and he was outside trying to use the public phone. He couldn’t get through and eventually the line went dead.
Jessica interrupts to say that she saw him through the window having a heated discussion with Stoner on the bus. Pascal replies that it wasn’t heated at all—they just exchanged a few words, no more.
We then meet Joe Downing.
He’s captain of the fishing trawler MarySue, out of Gloucester. (Somebody had fun with the names, here.) He’s going back to his boat after having visited family, and like Cyrus, had never heard of Stoner before. He was in the bar, having a drink. (Earlier, he asked the owner of the diner if it was possible to get a drink and the diner owner said yes, but he’d need a few minutes to open the bar. This diner has a remarkable number of amenities.)
We then meet the guy who got on the bus after his car broke down. His name is Carey Drayson. He was in the men’s room drying off his clothes on the radiator. He adds that if his car hadn’t skidded off of the road, he wouldn’t have been there.
Jessica asks why he’s carrying a gun and in response he shows Amos his permit to carry a concealed weapon. He’s a jewelry salesman and needs to protect himself since he carries valuable jewels in the case he keeps with him.
The Sheriff then asks the bus driver about the screwdriver. He replies that he left the toolbox open in the front of the bus and anybody could have taken the screwdriver out. He was working on the engine the entire time so he wouldn’t have seen. He thought he heard some people get on and off the bus, and he heard some raised voices, but he didn’t pay attention.
Jessica then questions Steve Pascal. She says that he was lying about his conversation with the victim being peaceful. She further says that his resemblance to one of the people in the photograph that the victim was carrying is probably more than coincidental.
Without saying anything Steve gets up and takes a look at the photo.
I can’t say that I see the resemblance.
He looks for a bit, then says that he doesn’t have to answer Jessica’s questions, or anybody else’s either and walks off.
Jane (his wife) comes and looks at the photo. She protests that she knows that Steve didn’t kill Stoner. Amos asks who the man in the photograph is—he doesn’t specify which of the three he means—and she replies that “he” was Steve’s father. He was killed in the Danvers robbery along with an innocent bystander. The innocent bystander was a woman, but she doesn’t know more than that. Stoner and the other man got away, but they caught stoner three days later. They never caught the other man and never recovered the money from the robbery.
Jessica goes to investigate and we get some shots of various parts of the diner.
Jessica ascertains that the Road Hog video game makes plenty of noises as if one is playing even while no one is there—that was fairly common for arcade games of the time.
We also see a bit of what I assume is the gift shop:
Down at the end of the hallway is a door leading to the outside:
Amos counts it up and nearly every area anyone was in at the time of the killing has a door to the outside (the bar and kitchen do as well). Which means that anyone could have done it. They then decide to check outside.
In the bus, Amos notices a light on that concerns him. It suggests that a “damper switch” is on. (Amos mentions that he worked as a bus driver for a summer before he joined the police force.) Jessica then goes around checking the doors and finds that the door to the kitchen is unlocked. She checks the next door (the one to the hallway) but before she can open it she notices some clothing on the ground. As she investigates the door open and Steve is there, glaring at her and looking as ominous and menacing as humanly possible.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back from commercial Steve says that he wanted to talk to Jessica and she replies that she thought he might. He apologizes for losing his temper but he didn’t kill Stoner. She doesn’t acknowledge this but instead asks him to help her get the suitcase inside—it is Stoner’s, and getting wetter by the minute.
Inside, she and Amos inspect the clothing while Steve and his wife watch. After they don’t find anything, Jessica asks what the argument was about.
Steve said that the bank robbery ruined his life—he was in junior high when his father died and from that moment on he was the son of a thief—and he took the bus because he wanted to meet Stoner and demand his father’s share of the money. But when he met Stoner, he found that he was a wreck of a man. The robbery destroyed Stoner’s life as it had Steve’s father’s, and he (Steve) decided then and there that he wasn’t going to let it destroy his, so he just walked away.
Jessica asks how Steve knew that Stoner would be released today. In reply, Steve pulls out the newspaper clipping that announced it. Amos reads the clipping aloud, as it gives some more details. The innocent bystander who was killed was Julie Gibbons, who was 16.
The coincidence of the girl’s last name and the bus driver’s last name is not lost on anyone. And Amos tells Jessica that he had figured out who did it half an hour ago—presumably a reference to what he found out when he investigated the bus.
Back in the main part of the diner, Amos makes a citizen’s arrest of Ben Gibbons. He explains that he noticed that the damper switch was thrown—and explains that the damper switch is to be used only in an emergency of the engine running away. Once it is thrown, the engine cannot be restarted until the damper switch is reset by hand. The damper switch reset is way in the back of the bus and cannot be reached except by some kind of tool like a very long screwdriver. Which Amos takes to mean that the bus driver needed to take the screwdriver out himself and so no one else took it because he had it the whole time.
There are some flaws in this logic. While the damper switch being thrown does suggest that Ben threw it in order to waylay the bus, if the damper switch had not yet been reset by the time Amos inspected it, that means that Ben did not reset the damper switch and so there was no reason to conclude that he must have had the screwdriver. Also, Ben wearing a rain coat suggests that he was working outside the bus, and Amos seemed to go outside when he saw the damper switch light and excused himself to go look at something. So to murder Stoner inside the bus, Ben would have had to take out the long screwdriver then go inside the bus to murder Stoner then leave the screwdriver there for some reason. All quite possible, but none of that is an obvious conclusion from Ben having sabotaged the bus.
Anyway, Jessica interrupts to ask Ben a question about the Danvers case—she points out the last name of the girl who was killed. He admits that Julie Gibbons was his daughter. He dreamed about revenge every day since she died. When he heard about Stoner’s release he switched routes with the regular bus driver and did fake the breakdown. He worked on the damper until Stoner was alone. Then when he went back in the bus, Stoner was sleeping like a baby. This enraged him so much that he stabbed Stoner in the neck with the screwdriver.
When Cyrus says thanks God that this ordeal is over, Jessica gives him the bad news that it isn’t. Ben may be convinced that he killed Stoner, but Stoner wasn’t sleeping when Ben stabbed him. He was already dead. There was very little blood on the screwdriver and around the wound because he had been dead at least fifteen or twenty minutes already and the blood had begun to settle in the lower parts of the body. She’s convinced that the coroner’s report will show that Stoner died of strangulation.
After Amos goes outside to try the pay phone again (the line is still out) the Diner owner remembers that his son has a CB radio in the back room. He has no idea how to use it but if anyone here does, they’re welcome to try. Carey Drayson, the jewel seller, says that he knows. He, Amos, and the owner of the diner go off to try. Jessica notices that Carey left his briefcase on the table.
Some time later, when Carey is alone in the room trying to hale someone on the CB, Jessica comes in and remarks that he’s awfully careless with his jewels, if indeed there are any in his briefcase, which she doubts. When she asks if Sheriff Tupper can take a look in it, he says not to bother and hands her his real business card.
This diner has an amazing variety of rooms in it.
He’s an investigator for the company which insured the Danvers Trust robbery. He was assigned to follow Stoner in the hopes of being led to the money. That’s been made more difficult, but he holds out hope that if they find the killer it might lead to the money. Jessica, however, isn’t so sure that it’s that simple.
Back in the main room Jessica and Amos discuss the case over coffee. Clearly, somebody was looking for something in Stoner’s briefcase, but did they find it? And where was the overcoat and the book? Why weren’t they with the suitcase?
On a hunch, Jessica says that they need to go back to the bus. There, Jessica realizes that Stoner’s body isn’t in the seat he was sitting in on the trip. He had been sitting several rows back. In that seat, Jessica finds the overcoat and the book.
Back inside, Jessica examines the book. She finds it very strange that while the dust jacket is in tatters, some of the pages aren’t even cut. (Books printed in print runs, as all of the books back in the 1980s were, use extremely large sheets of paper that are then folded up into signatures and cut. This cutting process is occasionally imprecise and leaves a folded edge intact, requiring the reader to cut it himself. By the 1980s this kind of manufacturing defect was rare, but not unheard of. I can recall having to cut a page, once.)
The power then fails. The owner of the diner tells everyone to not worry—he has a generator out back. He and Amos go together to get it started. In the dark, someone leaves the room but we can’t see who. Moments later, a shot rings out and Jessica says that it came from the office where Mr. Drayson is. The power comes back on as she gets to the office. As Amos arrives, we see Jessica examining a wound in Mr. Drayson’s arm.
This has to be the most spacious storage closet a diner has ever had.
As others come in, the diner owner notices that someone smashed up the CB radio.
Jessica adds that whoever it is now has the gun. And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, Amos searches each person but no one has the gun.
As Jessica is bandaging up Casey, Captain Downing takes over the work when Casey complains of pain, explaining that a sailor needs to know how to care for himself and his mates, since when you’re at sea you’re an island unto yourself, so to speak. Jessica admires his work. I can’t help but think that this means that he’s the culprit and gave himself away by tying a landlubber’s knot rather than a seaman’s knot, or something like that, but Jessica doesn’t say.
She then notices that Stoner’s book has disappeared. After a bit of discussion, Jessica accuses Miriam of stealing it because it was rare and she knew its value. (Miriam has made small talk more than once about how little money she and her husband have.) Insulted, Kent dumps Miriam’s knitting bag out on the table to prove Jessica wrong, only to prove her right.
Miriam took it because it’s extremely rare and worth nearly $2,000. It would be worth more but the dust jacket and binding are in terrible condition.
Jessica finds the part about the binding interesting because Stoner clearly didn’t buy the book to read it. She examines the binding and finds that a safe deposit key had been stashed in it.
Jessica then asks Captain Downing if that’s what he had been looking for. She then adds, “Or should I say Mr. Downing, or whatever your name really is. I think you can drop the pretense of being a sailor. A real sailor would have tied a square not, not a granny, as you did.”
(Square knots and granny knots are very similar, but the square knot reverses the direction of the second wrap-over from the first and results in a more secure knot.)
Captain Downing then pulls the gun out of Amos’ overcoat—Amos exclaims at this and Captain Downing replies that he figured Amos wouldn’t look in his own pocket. A gust of wind blows open the door, distracting Downing, and Amos and Steve, working together, manage to overpower him.
When the situation is resolved, Downing exclaims that they won’t be able to pin Stoner’s murder on him. Stoner was already dead when he searched his things for the key. He admits to being the third partner, but Stoner double-crossed him and hid the money. He protests that it is absurd to think that he killed Stoner under these circumstances, though, when he’s stuck here like a rat in a cage. All the authorities needed to do was find out who he was and his motive would put him away.
Jessica then figures it out. She says that Downing is telling the truth and Amos was right all along. It was Ben Gibbons who killed Stoner. She thinks he didn’t mean to kill Stoner, but it can be proved. There were grease marks on Stoner’s collar—which never would have been there if Ben had merely stabbed Stoner, as he said.
Ben sits down and confesses. He hadn’t originally meant to kill Stoner. He just wanted him to know how much hurt he had caused. But Stoner was cold. He said he didn’t care about some dumb kid that got in the way and he’d done his time and there was nothing anybody could do. This enraged Ben so much he grabbed Stoner by the neck and didn’t let go until Stoner was dead. When the rage passed he realized what he had done and that he was no better than Stoner had been. When he saw the Captain get on the bus he figured he was a goner, but to his amazement the captain only rifled through Stoner’s things and stole his suitcase. After a few minutes of wondering what to do, he realized that he needed to stab Stoner with the screwdriver. The coroner would figure out that wasn’t how Stoner died, so that was the only way to escape, since the police would surely look into people’s backgrounds and prior relationships.
The next day, in better weather, the local police take Ben into custody. Cyrus Leffingwell remarks to Jessica that he feels sorry for Ben. Jessica concurs, saying that a good lawyer may be able to make the case of temporary insanity, and that perhaps it would be justified. Leffingwell asks if she and Sheriff Tupper will be joining them on the bus but she informs him that they’re going back to Cabot Cove so he bids her a fond farewell and she says that the pleasure of their acquaintance was all hers.
Amos then comes up and fills her in on what they missed in Portland. When Jessica didn’t show up one of the Sheirffs who loves the sound of his own voice ad-libbed a speech for over an hour. And he knew that they should have been there for the drawing for the big-screen TV. When Jessica tells him that she’s sorry for him, but he’ll survive without it, he replies that it wasn’t his name which came up, it was hers.
And on Jessica’s reaction to that we go to credits.
I really liked this episode. I mean, how do you not love a mystery set on a dark and stormy night?
Actually, it’s not that hard, given that plenty of bad mysteries have been set on dark and stormy nights, but none the less it is a great element to a story. And the broken down bus at the diner really cements the isolation and gives us the fun of a very limited cast of characters and short windows of opportunity. It even has a minor flavor of Murder on the Orient Express to it, in how many characters turn out to be related to the dead man.
The downside to the great setting with the tight constraints that really increase the intrigue is that it makes the writer’s job much harder, and they were at the limits of their ability. For example, why did the bus driver wait until Stoner was alone? There was no great likelihood of him ever being alone. It was established that Stoner was afraid of his former partner and the best way to avoid being alone with his former partner was to avoid being alone. Now, there was no way for the bus driver to know that Stoner’s former partner would be on the bus, but people in storms don’t usually try to isolate themselves.
I do think that this can be worked out, though. If the bus driver had done research and found out that this diner was the world’s largest diner with a maze of rooms, after enough hours waiting it would have been reasonable for him to take breaks from working on the engine and people will eventually find some way to entertain themselves, so he could probably have eventually found a way to get at Stoner that at least wasn’t too likely to be overheard, even if just because everyone had drifted to different places and nowhere had more than a few people in it. Which should have been sufficient for his purposes, if he really only wanted to tell Stoner how much pain he had caused and wasn’t originally planning to kill him.
But why did Stoner remain alone on the bus? He had no reason to and significant motivation to not do that. Speaking of people who probably shouldn’t have been on the bus, why did Steve bring his heavily pregnant wife on the bus to confront Stoner? Also, why did he wait until the bus broke down? He’d have had no way to know that the bus would brake down and it would be far more natural to go sit next to Stoner shortly after he got on the bus. That would have prevented Stoner from getting away, while waiting for a bus station would have made it easy for Stoner to refuse to talk to Steve.
The safe deposit box key is also a problem. Safe deposit boxes require the regular payment of a fee to maintain them. There are grace periods and such, but there’s no way that Stoner was able to pay them from prison for fifteen years. Among other things, if he tried, the authorities would have found out about the safe deposit box and issued a warrant for it. And while there are grace periods for abandoned safe deposit boxes, after fifteen years the contents of the box would have been long-ago escheated to the state. Even before that, the bank would have opened and inventoried the abandoned safe deposit box. Since that would have been only a year or so after a notorious bank robbery, there’s a good chance they’d take a look for obvious things like consecutive serial numbers and contacted the police to check. Banks are required to report transactions over $10,000, so the discovery of $500,000 in cash would certainly raise a few eyebrows. This last part is pretty fixable, though—instead of a key to a safe deposit box Jessica could have found a map to where the money was wrapped in several layers of sealed plastic bags and buried in a chest. That would have been a lot more fun, too.
Which brings me to the question of who killed Stoner. I think that it was a pity that it turned out that the bus driver actually killed Stoner. It would have been more fun if it had been the Captain. A simple revenge killing isn’t properly the subject of a murder mystery. A proper murder mystery is based on the misuse of reason towards some end that should be thwarted. (Revenge for a killing that the criminal justice system will never address is enough of a grey area to make it less fun.) Had the captain been the murderer, it would have been more fitting in this regard. And despite the captain’s protestations, it would not have been stupid to have killed Stoner at the diner. No one knew that there was any connection between them—that’s the whole reason that the captain was never caught. He could also have had a double-motive: he could have been reasonably prosperous and afraid of Stoner blackmailing him. The statute of limitations would have been up but it coming out that he had been part of a bank robbery gang that got an innocent girl killed would have cost him quite a lot—respectable people would have wanted nothing to do with him. Some people will do a lot to avoid losing social status.
One final nit I have to pick is the question of how did everyone know that Stoner would take this bus? They established that it was made public when Stoner would be released, but in 1985 it would not have been easy to find out that the only thing someone released from that prison can do is to take the bus and that there’s only one bus which comes through in the evening. Which is, itself, a bit odd, since prison releases usually happen in the morning and one could reasonably expect some kind of regular transportation to and from the prison for staff and visitors. Those would mostly be local busses, of course, so this could probably be fixed by having people in the know aware that Stoner needed to get to Portland as fast as possible and so would wait for the one bus coming through that would take him there. I do understand why, for brevity, they didn’t address this—I like to describe Murder, She Wrote as a sketch of a murder mystery—but even under the best of conditions it is a bit of a problem.
Speaking of it being a sketch of a murder mystery, they never explained Stoner’s relationship to Julie Gibbons’ death. Jane describes it as, “[Steve’s father] was killed during the Danvers robbery. Along with an innocent bystander. A woman.” The newspaper article that talks about Stoner’s release says, “During the thieves’ escape attempt, an innocent bystander, Julie Gibbons, 16, was killed, along with one of the criminals, Everett Pascal.” They’re both rather conspicuously in the passive voice, but it sounds more like Julie was shot by the police when they were shooting at the robbers, not like the robbers killed her. Which would still make the robbers morally responsible for her death, but probably wouldn’t make them responsible for it in their eyes, making Stoner’s provocative response unlikely. “Hey, I’m sorry about your daughter’s death, but I wasn’t the one who shot her—the people who shot her were shooting at me, and I really wish she hadn’t been near us. She seemed like a good kid.” That kind of thing can go a long way to making an angry father less dangerous, and Stoner certainly gave the impression of a coward. Plus, had he actually directly killed the girl during an armed bank robbery, he probably would not have gotten out of prison after just fifteen years.
Setting the plot aside, there were a number of good characters in this episode. Cyrus Leffingwell was a lot of fun. It’s always nice to have an imperturbable character with sense in a murder mystery (other than the detective). Steve was played a bit too angry for my taste, but I very much liked his character arc. Carey Drayson had the beginnings of a good character, though after establishing him the episode mostly just uses him as a plot point and nothing more. The characters of Kent and Miriam were also interesting—they were big characters full of personality, but who had nothing to do with the murder. It’s helpful to have some counterpoint characters in a story. It’s both good for the story and also serves the practical point of not making the murderer obvious by being the only character. Of course, the temptation for the writer is often in the opposite direction—of making the murderer barely a character at all. Which is closer to what we got here—Ben Gibbons didn’t have much of a personality, though Michael Constantine did convey a lot of anguish non-verbally.
On the tenth day of March in the year of our Lord 1985, the seventeenth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in New York City, it was titled Footnote to Murder. (Last week’s episode was Sudden Death.)
After some establishing shots of New York City while wistful piano music plays, we then come to a small diner where a poet is composing a poem:
Why go on alone, rejected… with Cupid’s turgid rights neglected?
He then pulls out a gun and Jessica, walking in, says, “You’re going to kill yourself, Horace. Those cigarettes will be the death of you.” (The gun is revealed to be a souvenir lighter.)
It turns out that they’ve both been nominated for literary awards (Horace for poetry, Jessica for mystery), which is why they’re in town. He also asks after some women and Jessica replies that he left Cabot Cove strewn with broken hearts last summer.
After a bit of establishing that he’s got no money, they head off to the award ceremony.
Before we get there, though, we get an scene of a blue collar schlub who just came home…
…and sees something in the newspaper which upsets him. (To set the mood, the establishing shot was from outside, through his rain-covered window.) He puts the newspaper down, visibly angry, and grabs his keys. As he’s leaving, the camera zooms in on the newspaper article which so upset him:
If you look very closely, you can see that under the picture of the man are the words “Hemsley Post” and “Master of Ceremonies”. We can’t make anything else out, so that must be what upset him. That said, I don’t think that anyone would have been able to read this on broadcast television during the moment it was on the screen, so it couldn’t be too important.
We then meet another character, who is doing pushups. Or rather, half-pushups. (He doesn’t get lower than his elbows.) He manages seven before a knock on his door interrupts him. The camera then switches to an establishing shot through his window, and we hear thunder.
They are establishing the heck out of the rain. Perhaps someone’s umbrella is going to be significant in the episode?
The person at the door turns out to be Tiffany Harrow, the assistant awards coordinator.
Stills don’t do justice to how happy she is to meet him.
His name, by the way, is Hemsley Post. The picture of him in the newspaper must be several years old.
You can see him admiring her shoulder pads
In addition to the detail that, upon hearing the knock at the door he skipped from seven to twenty in his count (and raised the volume at which he said “twenty”), we get a sense of his character from the enthusiastic way he helps her out of her coat, unasked.
She thanks him for being the master of ceremonies and remarks that it’s a pity that he’s not up for an award himself. He replies that even the mighty oak must let a little light fall on the saplings. (This is probably the writers’ way of letting us know that he’s a washed-up literary titan who hasn’t written anything of importance for years.)
After he offers her a drink and she declines, her gaze falls on something that might well be the manuscript to a novel. We get a closeup of it, so we know it’s important:
These closeups are always interesting, but a bit conflicting. On the one hand, they mark the important clues out with no subtlety. On the other hand, they are careful to try to give us no context, so there is still something to figure out. It was necessary, given what broadcast TV was like. Don’t get me wrong; the quality of the image of broadcast TV was often pretty good, given the low resolution of TVs of the day. But it could also be fairly bad, especially if weather was unfavorable and the viewer had an cheap, old, or especially a cheap and old TV.
I tried to re-create an example of how bad it could get, going from memory:
Sometimes it wasn’t this good.
She then remarks that everyone is talking about his new, unpublished novel. He replies that it’s quite the best thing he’s ever done. It’s the definitive novel on the Vietnam war. (He puts it back in the briefcase and closes the briefcase as he says this.) When she says that she’d love to read it, he replies that no one has read it, not even his publisher. This is, in fact, the only copy.
But then his tone changes and tender music starts playing and he says that perhaps if she came back tonight, after the party, he could read some of it to her. She replies, in a seductive voice, that she finds great literature stimulating.
Then his wife knocks at the door.
He greets her by saying, “Alexis, my darling. I wasn’t expecting you.”
To which she cooly replies, “Obviously not.”
Tiffany is delighted to meet her, then leaves. Alexis doesn’t seem to care but gets straight to the point: she heard that he got a six figure advance on his new book and she’d like to discuss the $264,000 she’s lent him over the last six years. (She wants it immediately; her lawyers have drawn up a contract.)
They reminisce a bit about old times—he brings up a safari in Kenya—but she rebuffs his invitation to come back for a drink, and leaves on a threat to have her lawyers eviscerate him in court if he doesn’t sign the contract.
The scene then shifts to the lobby of a hotel, where we meet Adrian Winslow, though only after another establishing shot of the pouring rain outside.
That’s not academic garb, it’s just a flashy scarf and a dark overcoat.
He’s being interviewed by a reporter asking whether his latest book, Pericles at Parnasses, is a metaphor for the communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s. (To be fair to them, before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the number and extent of communist spies in the USA, particularly in the 1930s through 1950s, was not well known in the USA.) Anyway, he rebuffs this idea, having already stated that “history as literature” is a challenge suitable for his talents. A young woman comes up and asks for his autograph then asks if he’d read a short story of hers, but he declines, saying that his attorney will not let him read unsolicited manuscripts.
As a fun fact, Adrian is played by Robert Reed, who is best known for playing Mr. Brady on the show The Brady Bunch (which ran from 1969 through 1974). The way Mr. Reed plays Adrian is quite interesting. It’s hard to convey in words, but take the most pompous, full-of-himself person you know, at 50% more pomposity, and you’ll possibly imagine Adrian in his more modest moments.
The scene then shifts to the men’s room, where Hemsley is combing his hair in the bathroom mirror. The blue collar schlub from earlier walks in and tells Hemsley that he wants to speak with him. Hemsley is contemptuous until the sclub mentions that his name is Frank Lapinski. There’s a bit of a physical altercation where Lapinski proves to be far more adept at hand-to-hand combat than Hemsley is.
As he’s holding Hemsley in a painful arm-lock and reciting his complaint—that he’s waited four months for some kind of answer then suddenly reads that Hemsley has a new novel and should probably kill Hemsley and likely will if he can prove that Hemsley stole his book—a stranger walks in to the men’s room. Hemsley calls out to get security because he’s being robbed. Lapinski gets in one more threat, deftly deals with the security guard who walks in, then makes his getaway. (As an interesting detail, Hemsley detains the security guard from giving chase, explaining that he’s fine and the guy didn’t get anything. Ostensibly, it’s not worth the security guard risking his safety, though clearly Hemsley doesn’t want the guy caught.)
The scene shifts to Horace and Jessica walking in the lobby of the hotel where the conference is going on (the same lobby we saw Adrian in). The same woman who asked Adrian for his autograph approaches them, recognizes Jessica, and asks for her autograph, too.
She also asks Jessica to read her short story. Jessica is a little reluctant, but accepts. She gives Jessica the manuscript—her name and address are on the cover. Jessica reads her name, Debbie Delancy, and says that it has a certain ring to it. She replies that she thought it sounded literary when she made it up.
Jessica and Horace then make their way to a reception for the authors before the main event, and we start off seeing this through a rain-covered window, too.
There is thunder, as well. While in other shows it might just be cool atmosphere—storms are perfect for murder mysteries because they tend to isolate people—Murder, She Wrote usually doesn’t usually waste something like atmosphere when it comes to clues. The storm must be a clue.
That said, it is interesting atmosphere, too.
Anyway, we get the dialog from Adrian with the woman he’s talking to. He is congratulating her on her tenth week on the best seller list.
Her name is Lucinda Lark. We also learn that the name of her book is Woman Unleashed and it’s apparently a (somewhat) high-brow romance novel. Adrian can’t keep the politeness up for long, though, and when she says that her next book is going to be more literary, he scoffs and she, offended, excuses herself.
We then see Jessica and Horace run into Tiffany Harrow. Horace offers her a drink, calling it an offering on the altar of beauty, and she accepts it. When Jessica says that it’s nice for writers to get to meet each other like this, she explains that she’s not a writer—writers mostly starve, while the real power is in publishing. She correctly identifies Jessica as being in mystery and Horace as being in poetry, then excuses herself, handing the drink back to Horace.
We then see Hemsley, saying that the greatest novels have always been about war.
Those are amazingly gothic windows.
I find it interesting how much taller he is than everyone else. I don’t know that it means anything, but at the same time they chose their camera angle to emphasize it.
Anyway, Adrian hears him talking and comes over, asking him what the new book is about. When Hemsley says that it’s the definitive novel on the Vietnamese war, Adrian replies that this is remarkable since Hemsley only spent a week in Vietnam as a correspondent for Playboy. (Playboy was a pornographic magazine which was either widely regarded for its articles or else many people were willing to pretend that its articles were great in order to explain why they purchased it. I cannot say which it was from my own knowledge, but for whatever it is worth, I did not hear this claim made about other pornographic magazines of the time.)
Anyway, Hemsley is not one to take this lightly. He replies, “At least it’s not that prissy drivel you write, Adrian. Greek boys, mincing about.”
After a few more barbs traded, Hemsley tells Adrian that he gave him a good trashing ten years ago and is willing to do it again. Adrian replies that ten years ago he (Adrian) didn’t have a black belt. Presumably he means the rank of black belt in Karate, rather than owning an item-of-clothing belt which is black, since most dress belts at the time were black and this minor bit of fashion trivia would not have been interesting.
After a bit of protracted staring, Hemsley merely says “Hmph” and walks away.
He walks over to the bar, where Horace is making up poetry for Lucinda, who seems enraptured.
Is her dress made from window curtains? And where are the shoulder pads?
When she asks what it means, Horace replies that he has no idea.
To be fair, that accurately represents a lot of poetry from the 1900s.
Hemsley then interrupts and tries to engage Lucinda in conversation, which Horace doesn’t take well. He insults Hemsley’s most recent (published) novel as having bad grammar, so Hemsley punches Horace. After another visual gag of Horace lighting a cigarette with his novelty lighter than looks like a handgun and Hemsley fearing for his life, only to become more angry when he realizes the gun isn’t real, Jessica scolds Horace and Hemsley until they stop fighting.
The scene then transitions to the next day with a vertical wipe, and after an establishing shot of the hotel, we see Jessica walk up to a door carrying an umbrella and knock. The person who opens the door doesn’t seem too happy to see her.
Jessica apologizes saying that she thought that this was Mr. Post’s room. The man says that it is, and Jessica explains that she thinks she picked up Mr. Post’s umbrella the previous night, after the party. She was hoping that he had her umbrella. I guess this is why they established the heck out of it being raining the night before.
The man says that perhaps he does, and invites her to come in.
That’s when we discover that Hemsley Post is no more.
We then get a close-up shot of the murder weapon:
I could be mistaken, but that looks like a sword-handle to an umbrella. I wonder if one of the suspects—perhaps Horace—had a sword-umbrella.
Then after a reaction shot from Jessica, we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back, we get another establishing shot of the building:
These establishing shots are quite interesting. They gave viewers time to run back from whatever they were doing during the commercial break, of course, but they also give a lot of feel for the location. Most episodes set in New York City could really have been set anywhere, and it’s mostly in establishing shots that we get the sense that we’re in New York City. (That and whatever actors do a New York accent—Murder, She Wrote was rarely consistent with accents.)
Anyway, the man who opened the door turns out to be Melvin Comstock, an assistant district attorney. He asks Jessica if the sword stuck in the victim is her umbrella. She tells him, sourly, that it isn’t. Anyway, he’s taking personal charge of the case, but he introduces the homicide detective who would otherwise have been in charge.
Here, his name is Lt. Meyer. Of course, if you ever watched Murder, She Wrote after the fourth season, you’ll recognize him as Sheriff Metzger, who replaced Amos after Amos retired. Given that Metzger was a cop in New York City before coming to Cabot Cove, I wonder why they didn’t just keep the character he already played. Perhaps “Meyer” didn’t have the right sound to it.
Jessica asks about the manuscript to Post’s latest novel, but it’s not in the room. In looking for it, Lt. Meyer does find a key, however. It’s to room 2441, which is in some other hotel because there’s no twenty fourth floor in this one. Jessica also notices a smudge of lipstick on the pillow on the bed, and a copy of Woman Unleashed, signed by the author, on the nightstand. (The message, “To the old master from his humble disciple, Lucinda Lark” was dated the day before, that is, the day of the awards ceremony and, presumably, the day of the murder. I don’t think that dating inscriptions is at all a common practice and Lucinda certainly didn’t seem to be the type to know what the date even was, but I doubt that this really matters.)
Jessica then finds a pair of glasses in the bed, saying that she wondered what Hemsley was reading, since there was no book in evidence. Comstock is spending most of his time on the phone arranging publicity and is uninterested in this discovery. He’s equally uninterested in the threatening letter on Hemsley’s desk from Frank Lapinski. Keeping this letter is a bit of an odd thing to do and bringing it with him on this trip—Lapinski couldn’t possibly have known the hotel that Hemsley was staying at to send it to him at the hotel—was even stranger. I can’t imagine Hemsley intended to write back, and the other possible motives for bringing this letter are even less plausible. I suppose he brought it because murder mysteries need clues, which was uncharacteristically selfless of him.
Anyway, Comstock gets tired of Jessica being around and collects her things—inadvertently putting the glasses Jessica found into her purse—and shoves her out the door. The scene then changes to Horace being interrogate in Comstock’s office. The odd thing is that we get an establishing shot of a building that I really doubt that Comstock’s office is in:
For reference, here’s the google maps view of One Hogan Plaza, which is where the NYC district attorney’s office is:
You’ll notice that it’s a wide building, with no more than five or six floors, not a skyscraper with forty or fifty floors. I suppose that there was no stock footage available of this building.
Anyway, it turns out that the sword umbrella belonged to Horace—he bought it at an antique store on second avenue because it was raining. His accounting for his whereabouts is a bit vague—he went to the hotel bar after the ceremony and then everything was blank until he woke up at noon.
Jessica then tells Comstock that it’s obvious that someone took Horace’s umbrella by mistake.
After some haranguing by Jessica, Comstock asks Meyer whose room the key was to and it turns out to be Tiffany Harrow. She’s waiting outside, so they bring her in. She gave Hemsley the key so he’d remember her room number—he’d offered to show her the manuscript and she didn’t want to go to his room. He never showed up, though. She waited, then ended up going to dinner with Adrian Winslow.
After she leaves, Comstock grills Horace and asks him whether he did or did not kill Hemsley Post. Horace replies that, to be strictly honest, he doesn’t remember. Comstock says that’s good enough for him and has Meyer book Horace on Murder One (that is, murder in the first degree).
After insulting Comstock a bit and vowing to find the real killer, Jessica follows Meyer and Horace out to the elevator and discusses the case. Meyer tells her that everyone knows that Comstock is a real jerk but he is in charge. Unfortunately, Horace had gotten into the elevator and Meyer didn’t, and the elevator closes. Meyer then notices this and runs for the stairs.
And on that bombshell, we go to commercial.
When we come back, Horace wanders out of the elevator and sees a uniformed officer, who he tells that he’s not sure he belongs here. The officer tells him to tell it to the judge and to get back in line—a line that turns out to be for some kind of prostitution bust, but they drew a judge who doesn’t want the customers, only the prostitutes. So the men are dismissed and this includes Horace—over his protests. But the officer tells him to go, so he goes.
In the next scene Jessica is in a phone booth at her hotel, leaving a message for Horace at his hotel, then she spies Tiffany Harrow. Jessica manages to get Tiffany to tell her about we saw in the opening scenes with Tiffany, Hemsley, and Hemsley’s wife (mostly off camera, but not entirely, since TV shows in their second half hour need to recap for people who were watching something else during the first half hour).
Jessica then goes to visit Hemsley’s wife. This is one of those cases where Jessica is oddly confrontational and accusatory. It’s especially odd as her intelligence of Mrs. Post visiting her husband was that she visited him before the ceremony—and he was obviously quite alive at the ceremony. Anyway, Jessica asks if she was the woman whose intimate company Hemsley had shortly before his death and she replies that writing wasn’t the only thing that Hemsley couldn’t do lately, though it didn’t stop him from trying.
Back at her hotel Jessica runs into Horace in the revolving door and there’s a comedy bit where they both revolve several times before finally ending up in the same place. He tells her that they let him go and Jessica pays no attention, saying that he’s got to go turn himself in right away.
At Mr. Comstock’s office, he’s interviewing Lucinda Lark. Jessica and Horace walk in on Comstock asking Lucinda to sign his copy of Woman Unleashed. After clearing up that Horace didn’t escape, he was lost, Jessica begins haranguing Comstock about beginning a real investigation. For example, what about the inscription in Lucinda’s book?
Lucinda explains that this was a mistake. She had signed it before and just wrote the wrong date—she’s not very good with numbers. She then adds that, while she’s sure no one would suspect her, in any event she has an alibi—she spent the evening and the entire night with Horace.
In the hallway, as Jessica and Horace are leaving, after Horace laments having spent the night with Lucinda and not being able to remember, Jessica tells Horace that Lucinda might have made up their tryst just to give herself an alibi. If so, it’s not much of an alibi since he doesn’t remember it. But it does serve to give Horace an alibi. Anyway, Jessica is off to Brooklyn.
In Brooklyn, she tracks down Frank Lapinski. After some chitchat in which he denies knowing Hemsley Post, Jessica asks him why, if he never knew Post, he was sending him threatening letters. Frank says that she has him mixed up with someone else and excuses himself.
Jessica then runs into someone who asks her if she needs help and he turns out to be an acquaintance of Frank’s. From him, Jessica learns that Frank wrote a book about Vietnam. She then asks if she can get a cab around here and the man laughs. He directs her to a phone booth. Jessica thanks him and goes to the phone book as ominous music plays.
Superman would have found this telephone booth useless.
As she looks for some coins in her purse with which to place a phone call, she notices the pair of glasses that Comstock shoved into her purse that morning and remarks that they’re not hers.
Anyway, her first phone call is to Comstock, who isn’t very impressed, but listens. The scene then shifts to Jessica walking into a bookstore and the music shifts from ominous to cheerful, with nothing having happened. We then see why Jessica went to this bookstore:
I love the headshot of Robert Reed back in the 1970s.
This is an interesting way of conveying that his books are not very popular.
She doesn’t even bother to buy his book; she just asks where he had dinner and confirms that it was not with Tiffany Harrow. (He explained that he had dinner at the Four Seasons and the young man with him was a newspaper reporter.) When he deduces that she’s trying to solve the case herself, he begins discussing it with her and says that Alexis Post is a much better suspect than Horace. Contrary to what she says, Hemsley dumped her, not the other way around. Which is why she gave him so much money.
It also comes up that Adrian used to be Hemsley’s private secretary. He’s then called away by someone who actually wants to buy a book and the scene ends.
Back her hotel Jessica runs into Debbie Delancy. She asks what Jessica thought of her story.
That’s a nice sweater.
Jessica apologizes, saying that she’s been frightfully busy, and besides Debbie only gave it to her yesterday. She promises that she will read it, though.
Jessica then goes to see Tiffany Harrow, who’s reading a manuscript in her room. Jessica pushes in, past Tiffany’s protests, and asks if she has Jessica’s umbrella. Interestingly, while she doesn’t, she does have someone else’s umbrella. Jessica then confronts Tiffany with Adrian’s denial of having dinner together. Oddly, Tiffany says that she was worried about her key being found at the murder scene and that Adrian said he would tell everyone that they would have dinner together. This seems unlikely, since Adrian was surprised that Tiffany said she’d had dinner with him, but Jessica lets it go and instead asks about the manuscript she was reading.
Tiffany then shows it to her. It’s an autobiography of an old movie star. (Tiffany is considering going out on her own and representing it herself.)
Jessica then asks what Tiffany was actually doing the night before and Tiffany said that when Hemsley didn’t show up, she took some sleeping pills and went to bed. “Life in the fast lane can be a little lonely.”
The scene then shifts to Frank Lapinski’s apartment, where Comstock and Lt. Meyer show up with a search warrant. Lapinkski slams the door in their face, grabs a briefcase, then goes out the fire escape. He doesn’t make it far, though, as uniformed police offers box him in and arrest him. The briefcase contains Hemsley’s manuscript and Lapinski confesses to killing Post.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial we get an establishing shot of the New York city streets, we follow one car, then cut to rear projection of Jessica and Horace in a driverless cab.
Maybe the Cabbie is just missing the right half of his body.
Horace is saying that stealing someone’s novel is a dastardly thing to do and he doesn’t blame Lapinski one bit. Jessica says that, despite Lapinski’s confession, something is wrong. There are too many other people with motives covering their tracks.
Horace then asks about the manuscript that “that girl” (Debbie Delancie) gave Jessica. Is it any good, or should he not ask?
Jessica replies that it’s not bad. It’s a beginner’s story about a teenage girl remembering how she felt about her brother going off to the war. (That doesn’t sound like much of a plot, but it’s really here to draw our attention to the brother going off to war—since a novel about Vietnam has been central to much of what has happened.)
Jessica then notices the glasses that are still in her purse. She remarks that she can’t imagine how they got into her bag, but she should give them back to Mr. Comstock. She suspects that they belonged to Hemsley.
Horace takes them and looks at them, then says he doubts that. He then puts them on…
Horace is right. These are quite girly.
And says that if Hemsley Post had bought glasses, he would expect him to buy something more macho.
Jessica then realizes what she wasn’t able to put her finger on and asks the cabbie to stop the car. She gets out, gives Horace cab money, then goes to see an optometrist.
After some minor humor about her previous optometrist learning his craft at the Braille Institute—Jessica is pretending that the glasses are hers—Jessica asks him to mount the lenses in new frames. She then hurries off.
We then see who she went to meet—this late in the episode, there’s a 98% chance that it’s the killer—and it turns out to be Debbie Delancie. There’s a contrivance where Jessica swaps the glasses in the new frame for Debbie’s glasses and she doesn’t notice at all, confirming that the glasses at Post’s room were Debbie’s.
Jessica then confronts Debbie with the fact that Frank was arrested the night before for killing Hemsley Post—Debbie had been at a Cabin the day before and hadn’t seen any newspapers since she got back—and Debbie becomes distraught. Frank Lapinski is her brother—the brother the story is about. After Jessica reveals the deception about the glasses, Debbie tells her what happened.
She didn’t mean to kill Post. He had seen her approaching other writers about his story and so he approached her. He asked her up to his hotel room after the party. She knew what he had in mind; she wasn’t sure what she was going to do—talk to him, or just grab the manuscript and run—but she wasn’t prepared for the way that he just jumped on her like an animal. He apparently took Horace’s sword-umbrella by mistake. In the scuffle she grabbed it and tried to use it to defend herself, but when he tried to pull it away from her all he got was the umbrella part, thus unsheathing the blade. She fell back on the couch, holding it in front of her…
If you look very closely you can kind of see the sword.
…then he walked forward and impaled himself on it.
After he fell over, dead, she took the manuscript and gave it to Frank. Hemsley had stolen the novel almost word-for-word.
She then says that she has to go to the police—she can’t let Frank lie for her. Jessica replies that she should tell them everything that happened and that Jessica thinks that she has a strong case for self-defense.
Jessica takes Debbie’s hand to comfort her, then the scene shifts to the awards ceremony—which I thought must have already happened since they had the pre-ceremony reception the day before—and Horace and Jessica leave the room together, both having won in their categories. Horace laments that the award is brass and wood, making it unhockable (that is, unsellable at a pawn shop).
They then go to a concession stand and Horace pulls out his souvenir pistol lighter to light his cigarette and the woman at the concession stand screams, ducks, and presses an alarm button. Jessica tells Horace that he should probably give up smoking and we go to credits.
This was a fun episode. Not only was there a lot of comedy, but most of it landed. They took the idea of a gathering of literary gods on publishing’s Mount Olympus and had fun with it. I do suspect that when I first saw this episode as a young child I took all of this seriously, as an adult I can see that they leaned into the absurdity.
To be fair, while the literary world was never as much like the golden age of Hollywood stars as it is made out to be, there was a lot more money and prestige in it back in the 1980s—and in the decades preceding it, which many viewers of Murder, She Wrote in the 1980s would remember. When Hemsley said that his new novel was going to be the definitive novel on the Vietnam war, he was referring to something real. There is a sense in which Catch-22 was the definitive novel on the Vietnam war (in spite of the fact that it was set in World War 2 and published before the USA became involved in Vietnam). It shaped how people thought about the Vietnam war and gave people a language to talk about the Vietnam war through references to it.
To be fair, there aren’t really definitive novels of things as complex as wars, but there are sometimes novels that are influential enough that one might at least talk about them in this way without being ridiculous. All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, constitutes much of what many people know about the first World War—even if they haven’t actually read it and only saw parts of the movie.
And this is the sort of thing that Footnote to Murder alludes to. It’s especially interesting in this context because it has many of the hallmarks of the classic great house dinner party mystery. We have a number of important people who are mostly strangers to each other who have temporarily gathered. There is money there, though in this case it comes from whatever publisher or trade association is hosting the event. And we even get a storm, though its only purpose seems to be to establish a reason for everyone to have an umbrella.
As far as the mystery goes, I think that the choice of Debbie Delancy as the killer was interesting. On the one hand, they did a good job of making her present and unobtrusive—always there, but you don’t really think of her as a suspect. But the problem is that they didn’t connect her to the story other than by being there. Nothing happens where she knows more than she should about something related to her motivation. She never shows up to something that wouldn’t be strictly necessary for her cover story but is for her real purpose. There was never anything more to her than met the eye. To be fair, her glasses do change on the second day, but that’s a clue, not a connection.
Her actual motivation was solid. It makes sense that, Post having stolen her brother’s novel, she thought that she might have a better chance of getting it back than he did. Even if she was wrong, she could easily have believed herself more clever than him and also more capable of deceiving Hemsley Post with her feminine wiles.
While the overall story and the characters were reasonably solid, the details weren’t. About the only clue that actually makes sense were Debbie’s glasses, which Jessica found in Hemsley’s bed with no reading material around. I’ve already mentioned that it doesn’t make sense for Hemsley to have carried Frank Lapinski’s threatening letter with him and it there’s no plausible way for it to have been delivered to Hemsley’s hotel room—and a man with creditors and no income is not overly likely to have his mail forwarded to him. This is more than a little problem since without the letter, there would have been no way to find out about Frank Lapinski.
The umbrella is another problem with the story. I know that they established the heck out of it raining that night, justifying why everyone at the reception had an umbrella. So far, so good. Except for Horace’s umbrella. According to his story he bought the umbrella from an antique shop because it was raining. While this would not be impossible, and Horace is quite impulsive, he’s not the sort of person to be shopping in an antique shop and notice that it’s raining, and he’s also not the kind of person who could afford an umbrella in an antique store anyway. They were careful to establish that he had no money—he said he’d buy Jessica a cup of coffee but couldn’t afford to. Later in the episode there’s a gag where Jessica gives Horace money for cab fare and he uses it to stop at a liquor store rather than go to his destination.
There were also a number of threads which were simply never addressed, one way or another. For one thing, it seems that no one took their own umbrella home the night of the reception but no one’s umbrella was ever returned to them. That’s not critical, obviously, but it would have been nice for at least someone to get their umbrella back, or at the very least find out where it went, since it was so pivotal to the plot.
It’s also an issue that the solution to the case did nothing to satisfy Jessica’s problem with accepting Frank Lapinski’s confession. She said that it bothered her that there were so many other people with motives to kill Hemsley Post who are covering their tracks. Which is fair enough, though unless the solution was a Murder On the Orient Express style conspiracy, that objection would still apply to everyone except the killer. But with Debbie as the killer, it applies with full force—all of the people with motives who were covering their tracks had nothing to do with the death of Hemsley Post. That is a flaw with this episode in microcosm: there were a lot of threads, but they were only next to each other, not connected.
Having said that, this episode was a lot of fun to watch. It had good characters in an enjoyable setting. The premise supported the cast of interesting characters. There were also a lot of jokes, many of which landed. It wasn’t perfect, but I’d definitely put it in the top 20% of episodes.
Women commonly say that confidence is very attractive in a man and young men frequently misunderstand this because they think by “confidence” the women mean “believing that there is a high probability of success at what one is currently attempting.” Starting from this mistaken premise, they go on to notice that the people who most believe that their current endeavors are certain to succeed are swaggering fools. From this they they either conclude that women are self-destructive idiots, or are just completely confused. The problem, of course, is that this is not at all what the women mean. (There’s also a secondary problem that damaged women who were raised very badly tend to be attracted to men who were raised badly, and these cases supply evidence that this mistaken interpretation is correct. I’m not going to address that further, though.)
What women actually mean when they say that confidence is attractive in a man is that it is attractive when a man is rationally pursuing good goals, and both halves of that are intelligible to the woman. That requires some explanation, though, because the word “rationally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That’s for a good reason—wisdom and virtue are not easy in this fallen world. But it is, none the less, in need of elaboration.
The first and easiest thing to distinguish the rational pursuit of good goals from something that is obviously not confidence—desperation. Or, as Adam Lane Smith likes to put it, trying to get adopted like a puppy at the pound. There are different ways at arriving at this error, but they broadly fall into not having a good goal—usually, merely wanting someone to like you—or having a good goal but not rationally pursuing it: wanting a wife with whom to raise a family but snatching at any opportunity without regard to whether the woman would be a good wife, and not giving her any opportunity to find out if one would be a good father. I don’t think it needs much explanation why desperation does not come off as confident, but it will be helpful to look at the reverse: why does rationally pursuing the goal of finding a wife come off as confident?
Consider what the rational pursuit of that goal entails: the man needs to get to know the woman and to assess things like her wisdom, prudence, temperance, fortitude, patience, etc. At the same time, she will need to evaluate the same of him, and so he should be helping her to do that accurately. This will necessarily entail holding off from prematurely forming emotional bonds—it would be imprudent to become attached to a woman he may want to separate himself from, and it would be uncharitable to encourage her to become attached to him when he may wish to separate himself. Actually doing this requires willpower, but even more importantly, it requires conviction that the world is organized in such a way that the rational pursuit of these goals can actually lead to success. If the man is a Nihilist and believes that the world is merely chaotic randomness, it would not make sense to follow such a plan. But neither would it make sense to follow any other plan; if the world is unintelligible to human beings, if we are merely the playthings of evil gods, then following through on such a plan of action, with the restraint it entails, makes no sense. But here’s the thing: whether we are merely the playthings of evil gods in an unintelligible world or whether God is in his heaven and though his mills grind slowly yet they grind exceeding small, the only people who ever have long-term success are the people who follow rational plans. The people who treat the world like an unintelligible chaos always flame out after a while and usually flame out immediately. So if you want a life-partner and co-ancestor for your descendants to raise them with you, you really want someone who acts according to the conviction that rational plans are worth following. This is confidence.
Of course, confidence is evaluated according to many more pursuits of many more goals than just the pursuit of the woman herself, but especially in the beginning, that is probably the most obvious one to the woman. However, she will pretty quickly discover what other goals the man she’s evaluating as a potential husband is pursuing, and in what manner he’s pursuing them.
For example, how does he earn his living? While it is possible to approach that question in a mercenary way, it is a highly relevant question even to an ascetic who owns only two saris, as the nuns in Mother Theresa’s order do (two so that she can be clothed while she washes the other). Feeding and clothing oneself is not the highest good, but it is an important good and a noble and dignified pursuit, and one very much worth doing well. Even if a man is just a subsistence farmer, does he care for his fields or does he let them go to ruin? The answer to that question tells you quite a bit about the man and his convictions.
Does the man find anything in the world interesting in a manner worthy of an adult? To find something interesting takes work. This is related to an aphorism by G.K. Chesterton:
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
If a man finds nothing interesting besides games—which were made to interest him without effort on his part—it means that he has not taken the trouble to find interesting anything which was made for a reason other than to please him. Such a man will be a very dull conversationalist, and even more important, what kind of father can he be? If he has taken no trouble to learn about anything which exists for its own sake, how can he possibly know anything worth teaching to his children? How much will he even take the trouble to learn about his children?
I would not have the space to explain all of the possible things to learn about a man even if I were writing a book and not a blog post, but I hope that this has at least sketched out what is meant when (healthy) women say that confidence is appealing in a man.
I’ve heard that AI, or more properly, Large Language Models (LLMs), are a disaster for colleges and universities. Many people take this to be an indictment of the students, and there is some truth to that, but they’re missing the degree to which this is a damning indictment of Academia. If your tests give excellent grades to statistical text generators, you weren’t testing what you thought you were and the grades you gave didn’t mean what you thought they meant.
Of course, it’s been an open secret that grades have meant less and less over the years. The quality of both students and professors has been going down, though no one wants to admit it. This is, however, a simple consequence of the number of students and professors growing so much over the last 50 or so years. In the USA, something like 60% of people over the age of 25 have attended college with close to 40% of them having a degree. 60% of people can’t all be in the top 1%. 40% of people also can’t all be in the top 1%. At most, in fact, 1% of people can be in the top 1%. When a thing becomes widespread, it must trend toward mediocrity.
So this really isn’t a surprise. Nor, frankly, is it a surprise that Universities held on to prestige for so much longer than they deserved it—very few human beings have the honesty to give up the good opinion of others that they don’t deserve, and the more people who pile onto a ponzi scheme, the more people have a strong interest in trying to keep up the pretence.
Which is probably why Academics are reacting so desperately and so foolishly to the existence of chatGPT and other LLMs. They’re desperately trying to prevent people from using the tools in the hope that this will keep up their social status. But this is a doomed enterprise. The mere fact that the statistical text generator can get excellent grades means that the grades are no longer worth more than the statistical text generator. And to be clear: this is not a blow for humanity, only for grades.
To explain what I mean, let me tell you about my recent experiences with using LLM-powered tools for writing software. (For those who don’t know, my day job is being head of the programming department at a small company.) I’ve been using several, mostly preferring GitHub Co-Pilot for inline suggestions and Aider using DeepSeek V3 0324 for larger amounts of code generation. They’re extremely useful tools, but also extremely limited. Kind of in the way that a back hoe can dig an enormous amount of dirt compared to a shovel, but it still needs an operator to decide what to dig.
What I and all of my programmer friends who have been trying LLM-powered tools have found is that “vibe coding,” where you just tell the LLM what you want and it designs it, tends to be an unmaintainable disaster above a low level of complexity. However, where it shines is in implementing the “leaf nodes” of a decision tree. A decision tree is a name for how human beings handle complex problems: we can’t actually solve complex problems, but we can break them down into a series of simpler problems that, when they’re all solved, solve the complex problem. But usually these simpler problems are still complex, and so they need to be broken down into yet-simpler problems. And this process of breaking each sub-problem down eventually ends in problems simple enough that any (competent) idiot can just directly solve it. These are the leaf nodes of the decision tree. And these simple problems are what LLMs are actually good at.
This is because what LLMs actually do is transforms in highly multi-dimensional spaces, or in less technical language, they reproduce patterns that existed in their training data. They excel at any problem which can be modeled as taking input and turning it into a pattern that existed in its training data, but with the details of the input substituted for the details in the training data. This is why they’re so good at solving the problems that any competent idiot can solve—solutions to those problems were abundant in its training data.
The LLMs will, of course, produce code for more complex things for which the solution did not already exist in its training data, but the quality of these solutions usually range from terrible to not-even-a-solution. (There are lots of people who will take your money and promise you more than this; there are always people who will use hype to try to separate people from their money. I’ve yet to hear of the case where they are not best ignored.)
Now, I’ve encountered the exact problem of a test being rendered obsolete by LLMs. In hiring programmers, I’ve had excellent results making the first interview a programming sample specification that people had 5 business days to complete. (To prove good faith, I’d give them my implementation to it right after they submitted theirs.) It was a single page, fairly detailed specification, but it left room for creativity, too. However, you can throw it into any high-end LLM these days and get a perfectly workmanlike result. This is obviously not useful as a first interview anymore.
One possible response would be to try to prevent the use of LLMs, such as by asking people to write it in front of me (e.g. during a video call with a shared screen). But what would be the point of that? If we hired the person, I’d expect them to use LLMs as a tool at work. (Used properly, they increase productivity and decrease stress.)
It only took a minute or two of thinking about this to realize that the problem is not that LLMs can implement the programming sample, but that the programming sample was only slightly getting at what I wanted to find out about the person. What I want to know is whether they can design good software, not whether they can rapidly implement the same kind of code that everyone (competent) has written ten times at least.
So I came up with a different first interview sample. Instead of having people do something which is 10% what I want to see and 90% detail work, I have switched to asking the candidates to write a data format for our products, focusing on size efficiency balanced with robustness and future expansion based on where they think our products might go in the future. This actually gets at what I want to know—what is the person’s judgement like—and uses very little of their time doing anything an LLM could do faster.
I haven’t hired anyone since making this change, so I’m not in a position to say how well this particular solution to the problem works. I’m only bringing it up to show the kind of thinking that is necessary—asking yourself what it is that you are actually trying to get at, rather than just assuming that your approach is getting at that. (In my defense, it did work quite a lot better for the intended purpose than FizzBuzz, which we had used before. So it was very much a step in the right direction.)
That Academia’s response to LLMs is to try to just get rid of them, rather than to use them to figure out what the weakness in their testing have been, tells you quite a lot about what a hollow shell Academia has become.
Dietary saturated fat has been blamed for all manner of health problems, but the evidence for this ranges from low quality to complete garbage. That the evidence quality is low is not surprising, since there are good reasons to believe that saturated fat is healthy for humans.
The first and most important reason is that saturated fat is the kind of fat that humans make if they have extra carbohydrates or proteins around and need to store the energy. And that’s going to be a large fraction of the carbs we eat. And when I say a large fraction, I do mean large. A 200 pound athlete would be able to store about 500 grams of glycogen in his muscles and another 100 grams in his liver. (And less than 10g of glucose in his bloodstream, which tends to be nearly constant anyway, so we can ignore this.) But the thing is: these are very rarely empty, especially if one regularly eats carbs. And if you’re following any kind of normal American diet, you’re eating a lot of carbs. If you follow the USDA food pyramid and eat a 2000 Calorie diet (which is the Calorie requirements of a small person who isn’t very active) you’re probably eating at least 250 grams of carbohydrate per day. So your glycogen stores will start off mostly full, and while your body will try to get rid of the glucose by using it in muscles, in your brain, etc., it can’t do that very quickly and needs to get rid of the glucose very quickly, so the overwhelming majority of it will get converted to fat. (This is less true for people who spend most of the day moving, such as people who work some kinds of manual labor jobs, but that’s not typical. And humans love to rest after eating.)
(Whether a large fraction of the protein one eats gets converted to fat depends on whether one gets an unusually high amount of protein in one’s diet. Most people can’t use more than about 1 gram of protein per pound of lean bodymass per day, but most people also eat less than that in protein.)
Oh, I should mention that it’s actually very normal for the human body to use fat as fuel. When insulin isn’t high to try to make cells take up glucose, and in that process suppressing the fat cells from putting fatty acids into the blood, our fat cells regularly break fat (which is insoluble in water) down into fatty acids (which are soluble in water) and put them in our bloodstream so we have a constant, dependable supply of energy. Like anything which can be said about biology in human language this is a massive oversimplification, but at its level of generality it’s correct and important.
Anyway, the primary output of denovo lipogenesis (making fat from scratch) is palmitic acid, which is a saturated fatty acid. This can be converted into other fatty acids such as stearic acid (another saturated fat) and oleic acid (an omega-9 unsaturated fat) and many others, but human beings—and mammals in general—tend to leave it as palmitic acid, then take three of them and attach them to a glycerin spine, making them fat. We do this because it allows them to store very compactly without needing any water around them, which is extremely weight-efficient. This is important for animals because moving weight requires energy, so the lighter we can store the energy the more efficient it is. Saturated fats pack together especially well, which is why animals with very high energy needs like mammals prefer them.
So believing that saturated fat is bad for us requires believing that our bodies turn most of the carbohydrates we take in into something that’s bad for us.
Incidentally, this all happens in the liver. Since fats are insoluble in water (they don’t form a solution; this is why oil floats at the top of water rather than dissolving in it like salt), the liver can’t get these fats to the rest of the body by just sticking them in the bloodstream. That would be a disaster. So it creates transport crates for the fats called “lipoproteins”. These start out as VLDL—Very Low Density Lipoprotein. They’re very low density because they’re crammed full of fats, which is less dense than water. These transport crates are then dumped into the bloodstream where the proteins on the outside enable it to interact nicely with the water in our blood and move about without causing problems. These transport crates do something which can be analogized to docking at cells and then the cells take some of the fats inside. As this process happens the lipoproteins shrink and their density goes up. Thus they eventually turn into plain old “LDL” (low density lipoprotein). Interestingly, High Density Lipoprotein (HDL) is not caused by them becoming depleted; instead HDL is made empty in the liver and sent out to collect cholesterol and related molecules.
Interestingly, dietary fats get transported by a different system. The intestines create a similar but larger kind of lipoprotein transport crate called a chylomicron. These shuttle dietary fats from the intestines through the blood to our cells.
In both cases, you can see that idea that “saturated fat congeals and clogs your arteries” is nonsense, even apart from saturated fat congealing at room temperature, not body temperature. The most liquid fat in the world would be terrible to have in one’s blood since it doesn’t mix with water, and the human body doesn’t do that. The fats don’t matter at all as they’re being transported.
Where they can matter is once they’ve been added to fat cells and the fat cells break them down into fatty acids and put those into the blood. (This is a tightly regulated process to make sure that energy is available at all time.) That’s because these fatty acids, in addition to being an energy source, also are precursors for hormones and also can interact with various receptors. (This is where things like omega-3 versus omega-6 come in.)
This is also why you see claims that eating large amounts of saturated fat induces insulin resistance in rats. Now, before we proceed, I do want to mention that it’s important to remember that, while animal models can be useful, rats aren’t humans and their exact dietary requirements are a bad guide for the ideal diet for human beings. You shouldn’t feed bears, pigs, dogs, or cats like rats for optimal health, and there’s no reason to believe should feed us like rats (or bears, pigs, dogs, or cats), either. (You can’t feed us like cows—we’re not build to get a meaningful number of Calories from fibrous plant matter.) So these studies on rats are, at best, interesting. That very large grain of salt taken, what the studies find is that various kinds of fats which are pro-inflammatory, when taken in large quantities, promote inflammation which can induce insulin resistance. The study I linked to found that the effect went away for saturated fat if the rats were fed about 10% of their fat as fish oil, which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids like DHA and EPA, which are anti-inflammatory. That is, it’s all about the net effect of the entire diet, not one particular component and not about the fact that the fats are fats. (Again, in rats; how pro- or anti-inflammatory the various fatty acids are in humans may be similar or very different, on a per-molecule basis. And there’s probably significant individual variation, too.)
Inflammation, by the way, is not at all bad. Inflammation is a very useful reaction; it’s how our bodies deal with damage such as clotting in a cut, immune responses to foreign invaders, muscle damage from exercise, and so forth. The problem is when pro-inflammation factors dominate to produce more inflammation than is necessary for the circumstances. Quite a few problems happen when a balanced system becomes imbalanced.
Incidentally, while palmitic acid (the dominant fatty acid in mammal-produced fat) seems to be mildly pro-inflammatory, omega-6 fatty acids may be significantly more pro-inflammatory. And they’ve been making up a much larger proportion of western diets—especially of American diets—since the introduction of corn oil and other heavily processed seed oils.
On the third day of March in the year of our Lord 1985, the sixteenth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set someplace that isn’t Cabot Cove—they don’t specify where—it’s titled Sudden Death. (Last week’s episode was Tough Guys Don’t Die.)
The episode actually starts, not at the football stadium, but at a funeral home, where a bunch of people, mostly elderly, file out as mournful music plays.
I love the name “Home of Eternal Rest.” I don’t know if anyone ever named their funeral homes like this; certainly all the ones I ever saw had less on-the-nose names. Most were just a family name; undertaking, as a profession, descended from carpenters, which had mostly been a family business.
Anyway, Jessica is among the mourners, and the funeral turns out to be for her Uncle Cyrus. As she walks out, she’s approached by a man by the name of Bradford Lockwood.
It turns out that Uncle Cyrus left Jessica some shares in a local football team called the Leopards. He tries to get Jessica to sign them away, but she wants to know what she’s selling before she’ll make any decisions, so she goes to see this team she is now part-owner of.
Which is when we get to the title screen.
The stadium in this episode is interesting. At a guess, it’s actually a high school football stadium; that would be much cheaper to film at than renting an actual NFL stadium would be. To compare, here’s Jessica in the bleachers of this stadium:
And here’s a picture of Sullivan Stadium, from about the same time, which was the stadium at which the New England Patriots (the closest team to Maine) played:
As you can see, there’s a bit of a size difference, there. Now, to be fair, NFL teams usually practice somewhere other than their home stadium, but (my understanding is that) those places don’t have bleechers. And like football stadiums, their grass isn’t mostly brown and patchy.
After various shots of people practicing football while peppy football music plays, Jessica is nearly run over by an oversided helmet on wheels.
The passenger gets out and, after asking Jessica if she’s OK, introduces himself. He’s Zak Farrell.
He introduces his daughter, Jill, who was the one driving the helmet:
She’s deaf. She reads lips very well, and only speaks in sign language. A few bits of conversation later, Zak’s wife, Cathy, shows up:
I’ve got no idea who these people are or why we’re meeting them, but Murder, She Wrote never spends this much time on introducing people unless they’re important in the episode. Usually character introductions are a bit less random than this, though.
The scene then changes to inside of an office, possibly at the football stadium:
The man’s name is Phil Kreuger and he’s demanding to know from Lockwood (whose back is to us) where the proxies are. He replies that it was awkward at the funeral but he can promise them to Phil by the next morning. Phil threatens to terminate Lockwood’s “fat retainer” if he doesn’t make good on that.
Phil then goes on to berate Pat Patillo, who is the coach (they seem to have only one).
When the berating fails to have the desired effect, Phil threatens to fire Patillo if there’s one more loss.
We then meet Grover Dillon, who is in charge of equipment.
He comments that morale is pretty low on the team. Phil is unmoved by this, possibly because he likes morale to be low for some reason. It certainly seems to be his management style.
Then Tank Mason, the defensive captain, chimes in.
He has to speak up for the guys; there’s a lot of talk of the team leaving town, which “the commissioner” says can’t happen. Phil chews Tank out in an unpleasant manner, and is interrupted by Jessica coming in.
Before I continue, though, I just want to take a moment to note that Tank is played by Dick Butkus, who was a famous linebacker in the 1970s and at the time of this episode a sports commentator and sometimes actor. Which means that this episode has an actual former professional football player in it.
Anyway, Jessica asks if there’s a “Mr. Kreuger” here and he yells at her to get out. Then Lockwood identifies Jessica and Phil apologizes and starts being nice to her.
I really hope Phil is the one who gets murdered.
He concludes the meeting then takes Jessica on a tour.
The shot has the team practicing in the background on the field, which makes me even more suspicious that this is a high school stadium:
Even back in the 1980s, professional stadiums had bleachers on both sides of the field. (Also, they didn’t tend to have a running track around the field, which we’ve seen in other shots.)
Anyway, he invites her to a party for the team that evening as his guest and Jessica accepts. Also, he offers to buy her out. Jessica doesn’t have any idea what her shares are worth and he says that they last time any of the stock traded it was at $6 per share, so with 4,000 shares it would be $24,000 so he’ll offer her $30,000. Jessica says that she’ll think it over.
This is, of course, suspicious. Why does he want to buy her out? It’s a bit odd to give no motive, which suggests his motive isn’t great. Also that he’s potentially lowballing his offer.
Anyway, Jessica leaves and the scene shifts to the Farrell home, where Cathy is taking an anonymous phone call from a male voice saying that it’s not a threat, just friendly advice, that her husband should quit the team before “it comes out about your little girl,” whatever that might mean. She tells him that she’s going to call the police if he doesn’t stop calling.
Zak and Jill come in and in the small talk it comes out that he’s recovering from a shoulder injury, which he believes is a career-ending injury. He also asks who called and when she doesn’t want to say, he concludes it was another anonymous phone call. He believes that Phil is behind them, but Cathy says that they don’t know it for sure. Zak says that he’s going to put an end to it.
Back at Jessica’s hotel, Coach Pattillo is waiting for Jessica in the lobby and asks if he can talk to her. He wants to buy her out, and offers her $60,000. Jessica asks why everyone’s so eager to get her shares. He explains that Kreuger owns 48% and a rival group of investors owns 48% and her uncle Cyrus owned the other 4%. Lockwood had voting proxies for her Uncle Cyrus and threw the balance of power towards Kreuger. He wants to buy her shares so he can move it the other way, since Kreuger wants to move the team to a bigger city, while he wants to keep it here since it’s his home.
At the party Kreuger and Jessica negotiate in his car. When he learns that she’s been offered more than $40,000, his final offer is $150,000. He adds a threat, saying that football is a dangerous game and sometimes people get hurt.
Then they go in to the party where Phil introduces Jessica to Webb:
He introduces him as “he collects Leopards,” which I suppose makes him a recruiter—which I believe are called “talent scouts” in the NFL.
After saying that he’s going home to make some phone calls, Phil spots the commissioner across the room:
The commissioner’s name is Talmadge. After expressing his disdain for Talmadge, Phil leaves. Webb tells Jessica that Phil will be back, as he only lives a block away. Which makes me think that Phil is going to be the murder victim because this puts quite a few suspects in easy walking distance of where Phil will probably be killed.
Later that evening, after some raucous partying, Zak shows up, angry, looking for Kreuger. When he finds out Kreuger isn’t there he uses a phone at the bar to call Kreuger at his house and tell him that he wants to talk to him now and he’s going to settle this tonight. Kreuger says something and Zak responds that he’ll see Kreuger at 9:00.
If you look at the clock behind Zak, you can see that it’s currently 8:15.
Later, Jessica runs into Talmadge, who introduces himself because, since she’s now an owner, they have things to talk about. He lets her know that he’s not going to let Kreuger move the team. Jessica is anxious to get out of this conversation, which is strange because he can probably provide her a lot of valuable information.
That said, she gets out of it pretty quickly and tries to find Zak. She finds out from one of the waiters that he just left, and the camera zooms in on the clock on the wall.
Over at Kreuger’s place Zak shows up at the door while very tense music plays. He bangs on the front door to no avail, but then finds a note taped to it, which he rips off the door.
We then get an establishing shot of the house, which is quite impressive:
Zak walks off, and back at the party, at 9:05, Jessica is Dancing with Tank…
…when Webb cuts in. Jessica says that it’s a wonderful party, which is mildly surprising because it doesn’t much seem her style. Tank then talks about what a great party it is and asks where Kreuger is because he’s missing a great party. He says he will go over and get him, and Webb says that he will go with him, though he doesn’t give a reason why. Jessica runs into Mr. Dillon, who is just leaving because he has work to do in the morning.
After Jessica remarks that it’s a wonderful party and Dillon unenthusiastically agrees, the scene fades to the foodball stadium in the morning where Dillon comes in to do that work. He hears some running water, though, and goes to investage, where he finds Phil dead in some kind of pool:
The scene fades to black and we cut to commercial break.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we get back, we meet the detective in charge of the case:
Lt. Clyde Pace is a bit of an odd homicide detective, as Murder, She Wrote goes. He’s tough, but very willing to work with Jessica and also quite into sports gambling. We actually meet him on the phone, talking to his bookie, and saying to give him $500 against the Leopards winning the upcoming game on Sunday.
He calls in a security guard who says that he didn’t see Phil come in the night before because he’s in the front while Mr. Kreuger has his own private entrance with his own key. He did see Zak Farrell coming around, angry and looking for Phil.
Jessica wanders over and looks at the pool in which Phil was found and notices something. When she calls the Lt. he says that she shouldn’t be there, but she responds that it’s OK, she’s one of the owners. Lt. Pace warms up to her instantly and comes to her summons. She points out something in the tank and he takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeve and reaches in and gets it. It’s a watch with a smashed crystal, the time stopped at 9:04, and it’s engraved on the back with Zak Farrell’s name. Jessica doesn’t believe Zak could be a killer, but Lt. Pace is less sure. He gives instructions to have Zak picked up on suspicion of first degree murder.
The scene then shifts to the police station. I always love Murder, She Wrote‘s establishing shots, and this is no exception:
I still have no idea where in the country we are supposed to be, but this gives a small-city feel to it, which goes with the general idea that Phil Kreuger wanted to move to a bigger city.
Inside, Lt. Pace says that they may be able to reduce the charger to second degree murder, but Zak says that he didn’t do it. Lt. Pace then explains that he figures that it’s OK for Jessica to be at this interrogation because she’s one of the owners of the football team and seems to think that he didn’t do it. Zak doesn’t question this bonkers logic and the interrogation proceeds. Jessica asks him what happened after the party and, basically, he found a typed note on Kreuger’s door saying to meet him at the stadium. Zak went to the stadium but Kreuger wasn’t there, so he went home and got drunk. Zak adds that it’s lucky Kreuger wasn’t there or he might have killed him. Also, he last saw the watch days ago—he left it in his locker.
(The typewritten note is a pretty clear indication that Kreuger was already dead when Zak got there. So much so that Jessica confirms with Zak that it was typewritten.)
There’s also a bit where Jessica asks what he was trying to have out with Kreuger and the Lt. says that Zak had a no-cut contract that Kreuger was trying to break. Zak denies that was the reason, saying only that it was personal. (We were shown him talking with his wife about the anonymous calls concerning their daughter so I’m not sure why the writers are playing this like it’s a mystery.)
The scene shifts to Las Vegas where Phil Kreuger’s widow is on the phone with Bradford Lockwood (the team lawyer) who’s telling her that she might inherit everything from Phil because he died intestate and their divorce wasn’t finalized.
She is going to catch the first plane in to wherever this episode is set.
Back at Jessica’s hotel she runs into Cathy (Zak’s wife). Cathy asks her to help Zak—it would destroy Jill if Zak were sent to prison for something he didn’t do—and Jessica says that she’ll try. I’m not sure what the purpose of this scene is. Perhaps it’s to introduce the information that Jessica has been known to help solve crimes before? We’re still in the first season, so the writers might expect people to still be giving the show a try for the first time.
Jessica then visits the football stadium and there’s a wacky scene where she distracts Tank during a play and he gets injured. She and the coach then step over Tank lying on the ground and move off so they can talk. He asks if she’s going to sell her shares to him and she says she hasn’t decided. She’s here to find out what a no-cut contract is. It turns out to be a contract where he can’t be cut. (That is, he gets paid whether he plays or not, and he’s currently not playing because of his injured shoulder. But he’ll be in breach of contract if he’s in prison for murder.)
Jessica then goes into the locker room and talks with Grover Dillon.
She thinks she saw him at the funeral for Uncle Cyrus and he said that he was there—he and Cyrus go a long way back. Then there’s a comedic bit where he tells her that she’s not supposed to be in the men’s locker room right after practice but he phrases it too generally and she doesn’t understand, saying that’s fine that she’s here because she’s one of the owners.
They sit down together and Grover gives some backstory. A long time ago, Cyrus was equipment manager and Grover was a player. Times were lean, then, and sometimes they paid people in stock rather than money. Grover sold his stock to Kreuger ten years ago for $500. Cyrus was simply too ornery to sell.
I’d like to point out that if you’re giving away stock rather than money, at 4% ownership per person you could afford to pay at most 25 people if you were willing to give away 100% of the company. It’s a good attempt at backstory, but the numbers don’t add up. It would be easily fixed by making Cyrus special in some way, like being one of the few people who accepted stock in lieu of pay.
Jessica then accidentally accuses Grover of having stolen Zak’s watch and Grover angrily replies that in twenty years he’s never been accused of theft and any fool could open one of these lockers with a coat hanger (coat hangers were frequently made of metal wire, back then, and could be bent into shapes useful for other purposes).
Then the naked men walk in from the showers and Jessica is oblivious for far longer than makes any sense.
“Are you sure you’re alright? You’ve got a strange expression on your face.”
When Tank finally makes this clear to her, Jessica says, embarrassed, “Oh, would you look at the time, I have to get going.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial we’re on Web’s estate, where he, the police lieutenant, and the football commisioner are shooting skeet:
Murder, She Wrote absolutely loved trap shooting as a rich man’s activity. In real life it requires many acres of land to be able to safely fire shotguns into the air. On a TV set, where blanks will do just fine for the actors and you don’t need to actually load the clay pigeon thrower because the camera won’t capture the clay pigeon anyway, it’s far less demanding and the requirements for props are quite modest.
Jessica shows up and interrupts them. She asks the Lt. about the medical report and we find out that the time of death was around 9pm and there was a small bruise on the forehead but the cause of death was definitely drowning. The Lt. mentions that Web posted bail for him this afternoon and Web explains that Zak is a good man—innocent until proven otherwise.
There’s a bit of discussion about why Mrs. Fletcher doubts that Zak did it and it comes up that there was only one key made to the back door and it was in Kreuger’s pocket. This is an extraordinarily weak objection since the killer could easily have taken the key out of Kreuger’s pocket to unlock the back door, dragged the body in, then put the key back. But for some reason they seem to be assuming that Kreuger was killed in the office, in the pool he was found in. (While it’s not impossible that he was killed in the office, it makes more sense for him to have been killed elsewhere and moved to the office late at night when there was no chance of being seen.)
Jessica then leaves and Web remarks on the commissioner leaving the party early. This is probably meant to spread suspicion around but I refuse to believe the commissioner is any kind of suspect—as commissioner he has autocratic power over the teams, which means he can have no possible motive.
We then get an establishing shot of the stadium at night.
Jessica is wandering around inside. She makes sure that it’s possible to sneak past the security guard, which it is, then she wanders around the locker room. She tests how easy it is to pull open Zak’s locker and it’s ridiculously easy, to the point where I wonder why they bothered with locks. She hears a noise and decides to hide in the steam room.
Well, I say “steam room” but here’s the exterior:
And here’s the interior:
This looks like more of a door into a hallway to me. Anyway, while she’s exploring the steam room, someone locks her in:
I’ve got no idea what the other side of that bar is resting on. Perhaps the water fountain? The length doesn’t look right, but maybe it’s long enough.
Anyway, the figure in black then adjusts the temperature on the steam room control:
I really love this control, including its placement outside the steam room for convenient access for murderers. The figure in black turns the nob on the lower right, which immediately moves the needle on the temperature gauge. The figure turns it all the way, so that the needle on the temperature gauges maxes out the danger setting. I can’t make out the label on point between normal and danger, but looking closely the separation between normal and cold seems to be 120 and the top end of danger is 200. I wonder what the guy who designed the steam room thought the value of having a danger zone as large as the normal zone was. (A large danger zone would make sense if this were just a temperature gauge, but it’s a thermostat control—it moves synchronously with the nob the figure in black turns and before steam starts coming out of the vents.)
Anyway, the figure leaves and Jessica bangs on the door for a bit until Grover Dillon shows up and lets her out. On the way home (he gives her a ride) Grover cautions her that football can be dangerous off the field as well as on. She thinks that someone is just trying to scare her off—which she takes as a positive sign that she’s on the right track.
She also asks about his limp, and it turns out that it started as a football injury. At the time, Kreuger was the coach of the team and put Grover back in before it was healed. He’s lucky he can still walk. When Jessica notes that he didn’t like Kreuger very much, he points out that her stock is worth more if Zak Farrell is convicted of the murder since he’s the highest paid man on the team and is just dead weight right now.
The next morning Jessica talks with Tank on the field at the stadium. I find it amusing to note that there are only eleven people total on the field, including Tank, who is stretching off to the side. This is just the wrong scale for a football team. I understand that actors cost money, but would it have been that expensive to have two dozen extras in football-looking clothes off on the other end of the field?
Anyway, Jessica learns that something is up at Zak’s home, probably involving his child. (Tank is a friend of Zak’s.)
Jessica then goes to Zak’s home and after some bits of learning sign language with Jill which are supposed to be cute but I find more cringe-inducing, she runs off to play and Zak explains what the deal is. Jill was adopted. It was a private adoption, arranged by an attorney. They paid the mother a lot of money and the transaction may not have been entirely legal. Zak also explains about the anonymous phone calls and that he believes they were Kreuger.
Jessica asks if the attorney was, by any chance, Brad Lockwood. Zak, surprised, says that it was and wondered how she knew.
Bradford Lockwood is a weird character, since he seems to have been the attorney for everyone in the area and also on the side of anyone who wanted to do something underhanded.
Back at her hotel, at night, Jessica is on the phone with Amos. (This is a neat device to help connect Jessica to Cabot Cove without having to set anything there or even have Tom Bosley in the episode.) She then hears that the bathtub is almost full and says goodbye to him to run and turn the water off before it overflows. While bending over the tub to reach the handles, she notices something:
She notices an earring at the bottom of the tub. She had been wondering where it went. Right as she pulls it out, she hears a knock on her door. When she answers it, it turns out to bet the football commissioner. He called but the line was busy, and since he was flying to New York the next day, he dropped by. As commissioner, it’s part of his job to get to know the owners.
He then discusses her willingness to sell her stock—he knows of an investor who wants to keep the club where it is. Jessica asks if that’s Web McCord, but the commissioner is unwilling to say. Why, he doesn’t explain, because there’s no reason for it to be secret. There’s then some discussion about Kreuger, the commissioner says that Zak Farrel was the only one who could have killed him because it’s 45 minutes to the stadium and back, but Jessica points out that the commissioner left early. I don’t get why this matters to anyone, since he’s clearly not a real suspect. Jessica then asks him to leave so she can take her bath and he mentions, apropos of nothing, that Mrs. Kreuger is going to inherit Phil’s shares, letting Jessica know that there is a Mrs. Kreuger.
Jessica then goes and investigates Kreuger’s house. The front door is ajar and no one answers to Jessica’s calls, so she enters and walks upstairs to investigate the master bathroom. There she discovers that the floor is wet next to the bathtub. Then the camera pans up we see the shadow of someone holding a gun by the open door…
…and we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back, the shadow advances and turns out to be Phil Kreuger’s widow. Wearing clothes, this time:
This is an interesting mourning outfit but I suppose it’s the best she could come up with on short notice.
After a bit of chit-chat, Mrs. Kreuger says that she’s going to call the police and Jessica encourages her to do so, and to request Lt. Pace.
When Pace arrives, Jessica shows him the wet floor. He doesn’t connect this with the murder, so Jessica spells it out for him: Kreuger was probably murdered here and then brought to the stadium and put in the whirlpool later. Pace says that it’s an interesting theory and it opens up the field. But who did it? Jessica replies that part may be hard to prove.
The scene then shifts to the football stadium. Inside the lockerroom, the coach gives a speech with rousing football music playing in the background (for us, not diagetically).
Alright you guys. Listen up. I’m gonna make this short. You all know what happened this week but that doesn’t mean a damn things once we get on that field. Everybody’s figuring us for a bunch of losers and maybe we are. You guys are gonna have to decide that for yourselves. That’s all I got to say.
The music then changes to a funeral march and the players start walking out to the field. Lt Pace calls his bookie and says to put him down for his limit. On his way out, Tank tells Mrs. Fletcher that they’re going to win this one for her.
After the players leave, Jessica looks at a board full of photos that Tank took at the party the night Phil was killed. She then pulls two down and compared them:
The problem is that they’ve under-exposed the photographs and so we can’t really see anything here. I’ve tried to enhance this by upping the exposure, but there’s just no detail in the darks:
It looks like Web McCord is wearing a tie with dots on it in the photo on the left and a solid tie in the photo on the right, though that could just be lighting. Presumably this is meant to show that he changed clothing between the two photographs, indicating that he is the killer.
Up in a private box, Web and the commissioner a bunch of other people are watching the game. During the rare times they cut to the game, they use footage from a real football game, btw:
Web gets a phone call from “Sylvia down at the cleaners” who is clearly Jessica slightly disguising her voice. She says that the jacket he brought in has one brass button missing. She wants to make sure he knows that they didn’t lose it; it was in that condition when he brought it in.
Web thanks her for the call, then goes to the crime scene to see if he lost it in the drain of the bathtub where he drowned Kreuger. (He’s fishing down the drain with the kind of tool has extensible claws inside of a coiled spring wrapper that’s good at picking things up in places too tight to get hands in.)
Jessica interrupts him and explains how she tricked him. In turn, he explains why he did it. He had quietly bought up the other 48% of the club but Kreuger wouldn’t sell, so he killed him to take over the club. He goes into a bit of detail; he had originally planned to kill Kreuger after the party but when Kreuger went home early he moved his plan up. Which was actually to his benefit, as it left him with a tighter alibi. “You have to take advantage of the turnovers.” He also mentions that he had to type the note he left for Zak twice since the first one got wet.
He asks how Jessica figured it out and she explains that she figured you couldn’t drown someone in a bathtub without getting wet and Web changed his blazer. She says that he was wearing a single-breasted blazer earlier in the night and a double-breasted blazer later on. Perhaps this is true; I can’t see it in the photos and they don’t really show it in the episode, either. His blazers always just look black when they’re buttoned, and mostly we can’t see the bottom half (which is where single-vs-double breasted blazers differ).
After a brief discussion of how Web plans to get rid of Jessica’s body, Lt. Pace comes in and arrests Web. After Web is taken off by a uniformed officer, Pace complains that Jessica yapped for far longer than necessary and they’ve missed most of the game. He turns on the TV in the room to watch the end of the game but it’s already over; the Leopards managed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat in the last two minutes, coming back from being down 21-7. Jessica is delighted while Pace can think only of how much money he just lost.
There’s a final scene with Jessica and Zak and family where he says that he’s throwing in with Patillo to buy Mrs. Kreuger’s stock and Jessica reveals that she’s putting her stock in trust for Jill. Jessica explains this to Jill, who hugs Jessica and we go to credits.
This was a very silly episode. Murder, She Wrote rarely gets anything right when it comes to settings like business or sports but it at least often limits itself to superficially plausible errors that you need to know something about the subject to realize are wrong. Here it gets a ton wrong about football and I barely know anything at all about football! It’s especially a problem that the things it gets wrong are so dissonant. The Leopards are a failing team, but there’s a lot of money involved.
Speaking of money, if we throw the $150,000 Jessica was offered into an inflation calculator, that comes out to $447,204.93 in 2025 dollars. That’s an offer for 4% of the outstanding shares so that would make the entire team worth $3,750,000 ($11,180,123.25 in 2025 dollars). This seems a bit off; a bit of quick searching turned up the New England Patriots being sold for $70,000,000 in 1985. (It is true that Donald Trump bought a USFL team in 1985 for $9M, but the USFL was a much less successful startup competitor to the NFL that only began in 1983, so the Leopards couldn’t have been a USFL team.)
And yet, in spite of the numbers being way too low, they’re also far too high—for the team’s training grounds to be a high school, to have a single coach, a single janitor, and only eleven people on the team in total.
The murder also hinges on an extremely improbable event: Zak barging in to the party demanding to talk to Kreuger now, this very moment, then happily accepting an appointment for forty five minutes later and hanging around at the party for half an hour. This may be why they emphasize this so little that I originally thought that Zak immediately left for Kreuger’s house and concluded that there wasn’t time for anyone to kill Kreuger first. (I only realized that Zak hung around at the party for half an hour when I was re-watching the scene to see if I could spot where Web changed his clothes.)
Speaking of improbable: I know that the motives in Murder, She Wrote are usually a bit thin, which is fine because this is all for fun and people do occasionally do murder in real life for reasons which are no better. But even so, Web’s motive for killing Kreuger would be fine if it weren’t for the central premise of the episode—that Jessica owns a controlling share of the Leopards which she is willing to sell. Even worse for Web’s motive, Jessica would almost certainly have preferred him to Kreuger and been willing to sell him her shares, which would have given him a controlling interest in the team. This could have been mitigated somewhat by Web not knowing about Jessica since she had only shown up that day and no one had a motive to tell Web about Jessica, but he must have known that Cyrus owned shares in the Leopards and that he died recently and so the shares might well be available for purchase.
Incidentally, it’s kind of strange that Web got his blazer wet in the murder. The normal thing to do, when doing any kind of strenuous work at all, is to take your jacket off. This part doesn’t bother me very much, though, since it could easily have been Web’s tie that got wet, and it would not be as normal to take a tie off. (And even if he had, it could potentially be seen to be re-tied in the photograph.) That said, I do wonder about why drowning Kreuger was so messy. Surely he had been knocked unconscious before being drowned, and an unconscious man would not cause any great mess. A conscious man would be nearly impossible to drown in a bathtub, at least for a single man of roughly similar size.
I think part of my problem is that most of the characters didn’t land for me. I think that Jill was supposed to be a major center of sympathy within the episode but about the sum total of her personality was being deaf. I think this was more special at the time because it was extremely rare to have deaf people on TV—and it probably still is—but 1980s virtue signaling isn’t more interesting than 2020s virtue signaling. Any emotional resonance which Zak and his wife have are derived from being Jill’s parents, and we find out that they might be her parents by having illegal bought her because they were impatient, which isn’t a great basis for sympathy. Tank and Grover Dillon are the only other two major characters. Tank is likable, but mostly untouched by anything that happens in the episode. Grover is also likable, but a bit under-used and not much more affected than Tank. Oh, and there’s coach Padillo. He’s not very likable and for some reason was never much of a suspect. Truth to tell, I found him a bit forgettable. Oh, there was also Talmadge, the commissioner. He simply made no sense, since he was treated like a suspect but couldn’t have been. And Jessica had an antipathy to him which made no sense, especially given her general love for authority figures. And I suppose that there was Lt. Pace, but he was almost a comic relief character.
The only other major character in the story was Web McCord. They actually did a good job of making him always present but never noticed, which is a great characteristic for a murderer to have. So much so that I want to quote an important section from an essay G.K. Chesterton (who wrote the popular Father Brown mysteries) wrote about the subject:
The criminal should be in the foreground, not in the capacity of criminal, but in some other capacity which nevertheless gives him a natural right to be in the foreground. I will take as a convenient case the one I have already quoted; the story of Silver Blaze. Sherlock Holmes is as familiar as Shakespeare; so there is no injustice by this time in letting out the secret of one of the first of these famous tales. News is brought to Sherlock Holmes that a valuable race-horse has been stolen, and the trainer guarding him murdered by the thief. Various people, of course, are plausibly suspected of the theft and murder; and everybody concentrates on the serious police problem of who can have killed the trainer. The simple truth is that the horse killed him. Now I take that as a model because the truth is so very simple. The truth really is so very obvious.
At any rate, the point is that the horse is very obvious. The story is named after the horse; it is all about the horse; the horse is in the foreground all the time, but always in another capacity. As a thing of great value he remains for the reader the Favourite; it is only as a criminal that he is a dark horse. It is a story of theft in which the horse plays the part of the jewel until we forget that the jewel can also play the part of the weapon. That is one of the first rules I would suggest, if I had to make rules for this form of composition. Generally speaking, the agent should be a familiar figure in an unfamiliar function. The thing that we realize must be a thing that we recognize; that is it must be something previously known, and it ought to be something prominently displayed. Otherwise there is no surprise in mere novelty. It is useless for a thing to be unexpected if it was not worth expecting. But it should be prominent for one reason and responsible for another. A great part of the craft or trick of writing mystery stories consists in finding a convincing but misleading reason for the prominence of the criminal, over and above his legitimate business of committing the crime. Many mysteries fail merely by leaving him at loose ends in the story, with apparently nothing to do except to commit the crime. He is generally well off, or our just and equal law would probably have him arrested as a vagrant long before he was arrested as a murderer. We reach the stage of suspecting such a character by a very rapid if unconscious process of elimination. Generally we suspect him merely because he has not been suspected. The art of narrative consists in convincing the reader for a time, not only that the character might have come on the premises with no intention to commit a felony, but that the author has put him there with some intention that is not felonious. For the detective story is only a game; and in that game the reader is not really wrestling with the criminal but with the author.
What the writer has to remember, in this sort of game, is that the reader will not say, as he sometimes might of a serious or realistic study: “Why did the surveyor in green spectacles climb the tree to look into the lady doctor’s back garden?” He will insensibly and inevitably say, “Why did the author make the surveyor climb a tree, or introduce any surveyor at all?” The reader may admit that the town would in any case need a surveyor, without admitting that the tale would in any case need one. It is necessary to explain his presence in the tale (and the tree) not only by suggesting why the town council put him there, but why the author put him there. Over and above any little crimes he may intend to indulge in, in the inner chamber of the story, he must have already some other justification as a character in a story and not only as a mere miserable material person in real life. The instinct of the reader, playing hide-and-seek with the writer, who is his real enemy, is always to say with suspicion, Yes, I know a surveyor might climb a tree; I am quite aware that there are trees and that there are surveyors, but what are you doing with them? Why did you make this particular surveyor climb this particular tree in this particular tale, you cunning and evil-minded man?”
This I should call the fourth principle to be remembered, as in the other cases, people probably will not realize that it is practical, because the principles on which it rests sound theoretical. It rests on the fact that in the classification of the arts, mysterious murders belong to the grand and joyful company of the things called jokes. The story is a fancy; an avowedly fictitious fiction. We may say if we like that it is a very artificial form of art. I should prefer to say that it is professedly a toy, a thing that children ‘pretend’ wish. From this it follows that the reader, who is a simple child and therefore very wide awake, is conscious not only of the toy but of the invisible playmate who is the maker of the toy, and the author of the trick. The innocent child is very sharp and not a little suspicious. And one of the first rules I repeat, for the maker of a tale that shall be a trick, is to remember that the masked murderer must have an artistic right to be on the scene and not merely a realistic right to be in the world. He must not only come to the house on business, but on the business of the story; it is not only a question of the motive of the visitor but of the motive of the author. The ideal mystery story is one in which he is such a character as the author would have created for his own sake, or for the sake of making the story move in other necessary matters, and then be found to be present there, not for the obvious and sufficient reason, but for a second and a secret one.
I think that the writers did an excellent job of this with Web McCord. In every scene he was in, he was there for a very practical reason, so much so that you never really noticed him. The only problem is that never really noticing him makes him an uninteresting character—at least until the reveal. Which would have been fine if there were some other interesting characters in the story before the reveal.
Kanye West (now going by “Ye,” I believe) recently came out with a song called “Nigga Heil Hitler” which has that as a refrain in it. Jonathan Pageau has a very interesting video where he talks about it in the context of the breakdown of the post-WW2 concensus:
It’s very worth watching, but the basic point is that all foundational narratives made by men contain a contradiction in them and the post-WW2 narrative of good-vs-evil necessarily exculpated Stalin, who was in reality just as bad as Hitler, in order to make the WW2 narrative good-vs-evil.
He doesn’t focus on this aspect of it in the video because he’s more concerned with other things, but this very much explains why it was that the socialism of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is ignored by most people. This is why people pretend that they weren’t real socialists or they maybe started out as real socialists but then abandoned it once they gained power, etc. etc. They needed to explain the Nazis as a unique evil different from the evil of anyone on the Allies’ side. And since there’s not actually very much that distinguishes the Nazis from the Communists—in the 1930s people would flip flop between them to the point where the Nazis had an insult “beefsteak Nazi” meaning someone brown on the outside but red on the inside—what people came up with was the Nazis being racist. Well, that and nationalist. Sort of.
Regarding the racism, it’s not like the communists weren’t racists—they were—but racism wasn’t central to their socialism while it was central to the socialism of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. So this one is at least a difference. And while you could find plenty of racism in 1930s/1940s America, it was, at least, a different kind of racism. And especially after the civil rights movement of the 1950s, this ceased to be such a problem.
The nationalism of the Nazis is a curious issue because it is true it’s a major distinction between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis were national socialists while the communists were international socialists. But that meant, in practice, that Hitler only wanted to conquer most of Europe while Stalin wanted to conquer the world. That’s not really the kind of distinction that was desired, though, so people tended to pretend that Hitler wanted to conquer the world. Certainly that was what I was taught when I was a child.
This is a very interesting point and explains a lot of the modern world.
Chris Lansdown 
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