When it comes to the monotheism of the Jews, one hears some amazingly stupid things from atheists. So much so that it’s hard to even rank them. Sometimes it’s not even the conclusion that’s so bad, it’s just the argument for it. In this latter category I rank things like atheists breathlessly saying that the Jews were not originally monotheists and believed that other gods besides Yahweh existed. Yeah, no kidding. But the thing is, they don’t get this from just reading the Torah and noting where it explicitly says this over and over—often as a complaint. Instead, they point to the most untrustworthy records one can image.
I was talking with an atheist the other day who cited the argument he read that there were trading partners who wrote down a few things about the Jews, of which we have a few shards, and they don’t mention the Jews as being strict monotheists. I would have a difficult time imagining worse evidence for something so obviously true. Leaving off that absence in fragmentary records—and all records from the ancient world are incomplete—is not dispositive, these are the records of people I’d never in a thousand years considering going to for an authoritative report on the theology of the Jews. This would be like concluding that not all physicists believe the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics by citing the diary of a used car salesman who sold cars to a few physicists. How does anybody cite this kind of thing with a straight face?
And even weirder, why would anyone cite the diary of a used car salesman that not all physicists believe in the Copenhagen interpretation when one can cite actual physicists saying that they don’t all believe it?
Another weird part of this lunacy is often the claim that Yahweh was originally just a local god who “won.”
That’s not a thing that happens in polytheism. Sure, the gods fight with each other, but that’s to achieve some goal or other, or to punish each other for infidelity, or prettymuch anything else that makes a cool story. They don’t supplant each other like paganism is some kind of version of Highlander where eventually one god cuts off the heads of all the others and gains their powers and in the end there can be only one. That just doesn’t even begin to make sense. It’s like explaining that temperature was thought to be the average kinetic energy of molecules because kinetic energy won out over temperature, but electro-magnetism hasn’t beaten kinetic energy yet, which is why we still have those two. That’s just not how it works at all. Most things in life aren’t a winner-takes-all elimination competition. There’s one president of the United States because he used to be a governor, but then Washington DC conquered the states and killed all the governors and the governor of Washington DC became President! Not how it happened, but at least that kind of thing can happen. Eventually the personification of rain came to supplant the personification of the sea so that people stopped believing in the sea—that’s just not how things work.
Then there’s the version where Yahweh was a purely local god who the Jews still worshipped during the Babylonian captivity so they had to explain why they’re still worshipping him even though they’re now hundreds of miles away from where he lives so they claimed he’s the uncreated creator of all that is and so is universal.
Right.
The sky god was universal. And the earth goddess. And the sea god. There were lots of universal (or at least non-local) gods in the ancient world. And wouldn’t it have been a little simpler for Yahweh to… walk to Babylon? Why universalize him rather than just… move him?
What’s weird to me is how absurd these theories are. I’m not saying that one cannot come up with a plausible secular story, but it’s really weird to me how often the secular stories atheists propose are preposterously dumb.
For the last thirty years or so, I’ve been watching people complain about the progressive capture of institutions, turning them from what they had been into instruments of progressive propaganda. Newspapers became instruments of progressive propganda before I was born, and Universities turned into it while I was a child, but it became especially noticeable perhaps thirty years ago. We’ve seen similar things with comic books and movies. And these have all declined tremendously in their cultural significance. And consistently, people have tended to reverse the order of causality there.
If you look at parasitic infestations in the real world, they’re almost never of healthy organisms. There are a few exceptions, like the wasps who paralyze caterpillars and then lay their eggs inside the caterpillar, but this is a direct attack by a larger and powerful foe. The eggs—which are the actual parasite—would have no chance without their parent attacking the caterpillar. Malarial parasites are like this too—they hitch a ride on a much larger and more powerful creature (a mosquito). But if you look at parasites to make their own way into a host, you’ll notice that by and large they can only attack weakened hosts. Fungi, for example, can only decompose dead trees, they can’t do anything with living trees.
And if you look at how progressive institutional capture goes, with some exceptions having to do with Soviet and/or Chinese funding, which act a bit more like the parasitic wasps or the mosquitoes, it’s usually quite a lot like how fungus takes over dead trees which haven’t fallen over yet. In trees, once the tree no longer has vitality left, it stops being able to heal the incredibly minor wounds caused by insects. Then funguses, which have the ability to digest the lignins which make wood strong, move in and the tree doesn’t have the strength to fight them off, so they start spreading within the tree, digesting it from the inside. Eventually, the tree no longer has the strength to stand, and so it falls. The fungi keep digesting it until it turns into dirt, and the fungi die off.
If you really look into the institutions which have been captured by progressives and worn like a skinsuit in the effort to spread progressivism, you can usually notice that the vitality left a while before. It’s often, in fact, when the organizations transitioned from an organization with a mission into an institution. The source of vitality had been the mission; once the organization no longer has the mission it becomes just a structure with nothing animating it. This is very easy to see within academic institutions. They ceased to be about the pursuit and transmission of truth somewhere around the 1700s, as Protestantism entered its late stages and turned into Modern Philosophy. This took time to work itself out. A lot of things in this world take time for their effects to be visible—if you’ve ever chopped a branch off of a tree, you’ll notice it can take days for the leaves to wilt. By the 1900s, Universities were in no small part finishing schools for the children of the rich and so they had no defenses against parasitic infestation. But because rot usually happens from the inside out, it took the rest of us a long time to notice. In many ways it was only because progressive institutional capture is so brazen and shameless that we tend to notice it. But if you look at what Universities were actually publishing, the quality has been pretty bad for a long time.
Comic books took a massive turn toward anti-heroes and away from real heroes in the 1990s. It was after a decade or two of this that we started to see social justice messaging in comic books. Movies largely lost their cultural relevance in the 1990s, and it was in the 2010s that we saw them going woke. But they lost their moral compass in the 1970s with the death of the Hays code in 1968, and we saw this working itself out in the 1970s and 1980s. It wasn’t a straight line; there was a rebellion against the nihilistic cynicism of 1970s movies in the 1980s, before largely falling back to it in the 1990s. And there were, certainly, exceptions. Star Wars was vibrant and alive with its defiantly hopeful message of life having a meaning and good being worth fighting for.
I am, of course, painting with an extremely broad brush, because I’m only trying to give an outline of something to look for in history, I’m not trying to write an actual history of any of these fields. But the general pattern in life is: mushrooms sprout in dead things, not in living ones. Though sometimes they sprout in dying things.
Disney Star Wars is an endlessly fascinating thing not because it is such a colossal failure, but because it was such a predictable colossal failure that managed to be even worse than one would have expected it to be. (If you want to laugh at part of it, consider reading my review of the second film, The Least Jedi.) The aspect of this failure I want to discuss today is the issue that the sequel trilogy intrinsically needed to pass on the torch, and how they snuffed it out instead.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea that the sequel trilogy should have passed on the torch from the original characters, who are now in their sixties and seventies, to the next generation. This was necessary from a purely practical perspective for keeping the franchise going, but the good news for Disney, as far as this goes, is that passing on the torch is an intrinsic human activity. We’re all here only for a while, and then we’re gone, so we’re all eventually replaced. Passing the torch on to the next generation is a very human thing to do and part of our natural lifecycle. Indeed, as we grow older, healthy human beings begin to want to pass the torch on as befits our stage in life. And there’s the rub. Healthy human beings want to do that. Hollywood’s problem is that it’s filled with utterly broken people who wouldn’t know healthy if they were handed a textbook on it.
This is related to the reason Why Moderns Always Modernize Stories. Because, at base, they are will-worshippers, they cannot have real community. The will must be subservient to the intellect in order to have real community, because the intellect is the way one will can communicate with another; intellect is the thing which allows one self to know another, because of the shared reality that neither created. Because the modern worships the will, they can only love what they create, which means that they cannot love other human beings. So they must necessarily be radical individualists, and this makes it impossible for them to engage in the human activity of passing on the torch. In a Nietzschean struggle of will, at most one can win. When human beings pass on the torch, they both win, because both gives up a portion of themselves to the other.
A mentor does not want to make a protege a carbon-copy of himself, but neither does he want his protege to be completely independent. What he wants is to give the best of himself that his protege is capable of accepting to his protege. He wants the protege to accept this and incorporate it into how the protege acts, but not to replace himself, but to build the two together, so that the protege is more than either of the two of them would have been alone. SImilarly, the protege does not want to be a slave to his mentor, but neither does he want to be completely free of his mentor. He wants to honor his mentor, incorporating the best of his mentor into himself. Thus each man, in his turn, is both himself and a summation of those who came before. The past does not dominate the future, nor the future dominate the past, but the two co-operate. This is the way healthy human beings pass on the torch.
Moderns, however, being will-worshippers, can only exist in a war of all-against-all. They cannot love, because that entails giving up a part of themselves to something they didn’t create, which they can only understand as death. This is actually a universal weakness of will-worship; anything which is not imposing one’s will is the same thing as death to the will-worshipper. Thus it is not possible for someone’s work to be completed and it now to be time to pass on the torch. Thus for the modern to understand passing on the torch, the legacy character must be broken and then die. The new character can’t learn from the legacy character because then he would be dominated and, to the degree the teaching worked, killed, by the legacy character. The new character can’t love and wish to honor the legacy character because love is a lie and only the desire to dominate is real. (Hence the modern aphorism, “everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power.”)
So it was inevitable that the sequel trilogy would fail to establish new characters, since they had to be enemies of the beloved legacy characters, and how can you love the people who killed off the legacy characters you love?
Of course, Hollywood knows that it can’t tell passing-the-torch stories, but it does believe it can tell bait-and-switch stories. The idea was something like people nostalgic for the legacy characters would drag children and others who didn’t care about the legacy characters to the theater, who would then love the new characters while not caring about the broken legacy characters who died off. Which is where the sequel trilogy managed to be an even more colossal disaster than one would have predicted. It takes rare skill to make so many completely unlikable new characters.
Anyone who pays attention to the stupid things said by actors these days is aware that actors saying stupid things has far less effect on how movies perform than they used to. These days all sorts of awful things barely make a splash. Even when they do, as in the case of Rachel Zegler with Snow White 2025, it’s highly questionable whether her offensive remarks had any effect beyond revealing what the movie actually was prior to its opening weekend. One interpretation of this is that audiences have grown jaded. I’d like to propose a contrary interpretation: stupid things said by actors don’t make a splash anymore because stars don’t exist anymore.
The studio system during the golden age of Hollywood, which very carefully controlled all public appearances by actors and made sure that stars were presented to the public only in very flattering ways, is often interpreted as being primarily about avoiding scandal. It is my belief that this interpretation is backwards. To coin a phrase, it’s putting the cart before the horse. The careful management of stars didn’t exist to avoid scandal. It existed in order to create stars. Lead actors are not naturally stars—they’re just people. As one member of the stage crew in a college theatrical troupe I was in put it: actors are just props with lines. That’s really the natural state of things. The careful management of the publicity of actors that the studio system was able to pull off for a few decades was what turned them into stars.
One of the main tools that the publicists during the golden age of Hollywood used was what used to be called mystique, but which might these days be called artificial scarcity. By keeping the appearances of actors—people who are frequently desperate for attention, hence the acting—rare, people tend to value them more. Plus, this hooks into the assumption people usually make that if someone keeps something a secret, it’s because it’s valuable. Thus actors were made to seem like they’re interesting by keeping their private lives (and their private thoughts) secret. This was paired with manufacturing occasional public appearances which were carefully controlled. This did not mean appearances where there was no chance of the actor saying something stupid, though. It meant appearances where the people the actors were with would help them to look impressive. There was an odd fad for “gotcha journalism” during the 2000s and 2010s, but for most of the time when there was such a thing as a public interview, a good interviewer is someone who knows how to ask questions which make his guest look good. Publicity agents know who the good interviewers were and would get stars interviews with the good interviewers. Other public appearances would be done with hosts or co-hosts who could make the stars look good. And, of course, the stars were also coached on what to do and say to get people to like them.
All of this intertwined with movie magic, of course. It won’t do a ton of good for a plumber to get a skilled publicist. Movies were magical things during the golden age of Hollywood and actors being visibly involved with this magic gave the publicists a lot to work with. And, of course, this secrecy and artificial scarcity helped to accomplish its primary purpose—it sold movie tickets. When people were obsessed with stars, who they didn’t see much of, the stars’ next movie was a way to see an hour and a half of them. (Movies back then were shorter.)
As I said, I don’t think that stupid things said by actors have no effect because people are jaded. I think it’s that stupid things said by actors don’t matter because nobody cared about the actors in the first place, so there was nothing to lose. No one was ever going to see the movie because the actor was in it to begin with, so they can’t decide that they won’t go see it because the actor was in it after all. There probably still is some minor ability for actors to hurt a movie in terms of making people who would have gone to the movie decide to not go after all because the actor is so distasteful, but I doubt there’s actually much capacity for that until you get into really extreme things like running a terrorist cell or a child grooming gang or something like that. We’re already ignoring the actor and pretending that they’re the character anyway.
In my post about people who think LLMs are intelligent, I said that I think that these people are like the people who trust TV news commentators or newspapers. But people who actually trust those are largely people who hate “AI” and want to destroy it, datacenters, 5G, and frequently Republicans. These are not at all the people claiming that LLMs are intelligent and humans are obsolete. So how do I reconcile this?
I think it’s useful to distinguish between a fundamental mistake and the expression of it. A fundamental mistake is something like blindly trusting an authority. The expression of it is which authority is blindly trusted.
To give an example of what I mean, take people who unquestioningly trusted mainstream doctors until they were completely failed by mainstream medicine, who then became devotes of alternative medicine. They haven’t really changed their attitude—they are still unquestioningly trusting an authority—they’ve just switched which authority they unquestioningly trust.
You can also see this same phenomenon fairly often in people who reject mainstream news media only to assume everything some new media outlet tells them must be true. You can also see it in people who bounce from one love affair to another, always sure that this time they’ve found “the one”.
It’s not that the people who think LLMs are intelligent also blindly trust news commentators. In fact, they’re highly like to not, because you can only serve one master. They’re just the kind of person who, under different circumstances, would blindly trust news commentators.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the things which are often called by the marketing term “AI.” To oversimplify, they consist a of a collection of enormous matrices and some ways of turning text into matrices and matrices into text. They are enormously useful tools for many applications, but the idea that they are intelligent is simply a category error.
“Come see our artificial bird!” “Impressive, but that’s a tower.” [Later]”What about this bird?” “A fine tower.” [Later]”This one reaches the stratosphere, higher than any bird.” “Still a tower, not a bird.” “Bah! Stop moving the goalposts! How high must it reach convince you?”
Now, I want to highlight again that LLMs are extraordinarily useful tools. They have a variety of uses (such as being the best machine translation between languages available) but in the correct software harnesses (such as openCode) they are enormously helpful tools when programming. Speaking as a professional programmer, I think that they’re as big a step forward in programming as the introduction of the compiler was. (As a side note: “vibe coding” a way to write fragile, unmaintainable code that can’t grow past a certain low level of complexity. Programming with LLM coding agents still involves designing the program and making all of the important decisions; the enormous productivity boost comes from how you can have the LLM do the stuff that is just following commonly available examples and doesn’t require judgment. The enormous productivity enhancement comes from that having made up most of the code that people used to write by hand.)
But it’s the very fact that I’ve used LLMs extensively and even written several programs that use LLMs to do tasks that makes me wonder about the sanity of people who use LLMs and claim that they’re intelligent. They’re incredibly powerful tools, but if you actually try to use them to get work done, it becomes painfully obvious very quickly that they are tools that you have to learn how to use and are not intelligent at all. So this should be obvious even to people who aren’t used to thinking abstractly and have never asked themselves what intelligence actually is.
But then it occurred to me that there are people who never notice when people who use “big words” are idiots—TV news commentators, for example. (Really, of course, it’s not big words. It’s people who use speech patterns typical of universities.) TV news commentators can be wrong constantly, and some kinds of people just don’t care and still treat them as respectable.
You can see the same thing in the way some people respect newspapers, which seems related to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
There seems to be a sort of person who simply ignores how often someone is wrong, and only pays attention to how authoritative they sound. And I’m strongly wondering whether this is the sort of person who claims that LLMs are intelligent.
On the twentieth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the fourth episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled A School for Scandal, it’s set at Crenshaw College in Vermont. (Last week’s episode was Murder In The Afternoon.)
It opens with a man solemnly reading from a book:
Clothilde watched the dying rays of sunset fade on the boats that had been beached on the sand and marveled at the colors that defied the onslaught of night. It was a sight worthy of van Gogh at Sainte-Marie’s and she shivered slightly, though the air was warm and no breeze stirred. It was then that she sensed his presence. She turned and felt the power of Jean-Paul’s hard, sinewy arms pulling her against him. Her arms moved to encircle and hold him, her mouth seeking his, speaking urgently in hungry tongues of rippling desire.
The camera pans down as we hear this and we find out who is reading:
It’s a college professor in the English department, reading to his class. (His name is Ron Mercer.)
He then asks for comments and a student volunteers that it’s garbage. Ron challenges them, but not very effectively. In the ensuing discussion we find out that the author of this romance novel, Daphne Clover, is the daughter of the head of the English department at the university. One student heard that Professor Laird (Daphne’s mother) tried to get her daughters’ books banned from the campus bookstore, but Ron replies that the student heard wrong.
And then he concludes, “Now, let’s get back to James Joyce,” as if it had been the students who changed the subject from James Joyce, rather than him who read the trashy romance novel in class.
The scene then shifts to Jessica standing at what is supposed to be a train station.
Here’s another angle on the train station:
(Those are friends of Jessica’s here to pick her up; she’s going to get an honorary degree and give a commencement speech at the local university. He’s Henry Hayward and is the president of the university; Beryl is his wife.) Those do look like metal rails on the ground, but I don’t know what to make of there being no railroad ties underneath them. Also, this isn’t an elevated platform. Which, of course, is not strictly required for trains.
We get another shot of the train station station from the outside:
I wonder what this building really was.
Oh, and we get the news that Jocelyn Laird, head of the English department, is holding a party in Jessica’s honor tonight.
We then meet the head of the English department whom we’ve heard so much about.
We also meet Alger, another English professor.
His sweater tells you most of what you need to know about the character. And yes, that’s Roddy McDowell playing him.
Then they ever-so-subtly hint that there’s something going on between Ron Mercer and Jocelyn Laird when he helps her get a bowl for punch.
He then asks if they can talk about the position of assistant department head. She replies that they’ve already discussed it and she can’t promote him if he doesn’t publish. He replies by arguing that the academic publication system is stupid; they’re supposed to be teaching, not writing articles no one reads.
This may possibly be one of the most realistic exchanges to have ever happened in Murder, She Wrote. Far more realistic than many of the exchanges which happen when Hollywood screenwriters are involved, which one would assume the writers of Murder, She Wrote would know something about. This makes me wonder if the realism was an accident. But, as the saying goes, truth is truth, even when spoken by a fool, and in error. I actually witnessed just such an argument between a professor and the department head when I was in grad school (for Math).
Shortly afterwards, the doorbell rings, and it turns out to be Daphne.
Jocelyn isn’t happy to see her and Daphne seems to enjoy the discomfort she brings. She kisses Alger on the cheek, much to his chagrin, and greets Ron as “Mom’s cute protegé”. Then she introduces her boyfriend, Nick, who came with her.
They’re here to spend the weekend to get away from all of the work of being a huge celebrity in New York City. The good news, given Jocelyn’s party, is that they will spend most of their time in her guest house.
The scene then shifts to the party that night. There’s various incredibly pretentious small talk, then we pan over to Jessica talking with Jocelyn. Jessica remarks, “That is such a beautiful table. It has to be an original Duncan Phyfe.”
Jocelyn delightedly replies, “You have very discerning taste, Mrs. Fletcher.”
I looked this up and Duncan Phyfe was a furniture maker who worked primarily in the first half of the 1800s (he was born in 1768 and died 1854). He was a furniture maker who interpreted European fashions in a neoclassical style and his work was widely admired and often copied.
I wonder when Jessica became an expert in furniture, to be able to spot an original from across a room.
Anyway, she says that Jocelyn obviously loves beautiful things, and call her Jessica. Jocelyn replies that she loves Jessica’s books; Jessica says this is high praise coming from a scholar of her stature. She adds that she enjoyed Jocelyn’s book Walt Witman’s Life and Times.
Jocelyn is then interrupted by Ron Mercer’s wife telling her that they need more cucumber sandwiches, and after she leaves Alger comes over and introduces himself. This includes volunteering that he loves her books and he writes about seven articles per year on Elizabeth Browning, his first love, but doesn’t expect to write any the next year because he will be taking on the duties of assistant department head.
He’s then distracted by seeing Jocelyn talk to Ron Mercer.
This is interrupted by the sound of splashing outside and the voice of Nick saying “that ought to cool you off.” The guests all rush outside and Daphne is swimming naked in the pool while Nick is standing next to the pool, shirtless, with a bottle of wine in his hand. One of the professor’s wives comments in a scandalized voice that Daphne isn’t wearing any clothes and Jessica agrees in a tone of mild amusement.
Back inside, President Hayward and his wife explain to Jessica that the young man, Nick Fulton, used to be a student at the university and left under a terrible cloud.
Then Nick and Daphne come into the party, with Daphne in a fur coat. Nick goes around (still without a shirt) offering people champagne from the bottle he brought while Daphne introduces herself to Jessica. She tells Jessica she loves her books, and Jessica replies that she thinks that Daphne writes well—she has a very real talent for setting a scene. “You create very evocative word pictures, like beautiful paintings. It’s a talent that I wish that I had.”
Daphne’s reply is curiously air-headed. She mentions that “art is where it’s at” and that her business manager bought her some paintings so she could keep her money where she could see it, and she hears that Picasso is really hot. Jessica replies that his paintings may be, but she’s heard that Picasso is dead. (Pablo Picasso died in 1973, so only 12 years before.)
This odd conversation is interrupted by Nick trying to drag Ron Mercer’s wife out of the party. This is interrupted by Ron Mercer, who pulls his wife away from Nick, who then punches Ron, knocking him down into a table on which a precious vase was precarious perched, shattering it when it hits the floor. Oddly, or perhaps realistically given that these are college professors, everyone just stares awkwardly.
Alger goes over to Daphne and, after inquiring as to whether she has no decency at all, asks her to please just leave. Daphne agrees, calls Nick over, and, right before leaving, turns and wishes everyone a good night while opening her coat to display her nakedness.
One of the sophisticated women from the party gasps, indicating how demure the gathering is. (I really can’t decide whether that’s realistic or not; mature women do tend to take a dim view of young women being sexually unrestrained, especially in male company, but on the other hand the naked female form isn’t intrinsically shocking to a woman and unlike the naked male form it’s not threatening, either.)
After a few reaction shots, we cut to that night, where Joscelyn is sitting in front of a mirror in a nightgown in her room. We hear a loud bang and Nick and Daphne shouting at each other.
Nick: Yeah, well maybe I’m pushing the wrong lady Daphne: What happened to what I gave you last week? Nick: It’s not enough. Daphne: It’s never enough. Nick: Is that any way to treat a partner? Daphne: It’s over, Nick. Get out! Nick: It’s over when I say it’s over, and don’t you forget that. Daphne: You know what you are, don’t you, Nick? Nick: Me? What about you? Daphne: You’re disgusting. You don’t care about me. You’re just using me. One of these days you’re gonna push me too far, Nicky! Nick: I told you. I got debts. I need it. Daphne: No. No more money, Nick. Nick: Look, honey. What I get from you, I earn. And don’t you forget it.
During this argument Joscelyn comes out of her room and looks across the pool into the guest house, whose door is open. At one point Nick pulls Daphne’s hair.
This doesn’t really intimidate her, though. Right after the exchange above, she slaps him, and he slaps her back, and harder, knocking her onto the bed. He walks off and she gets up and screams after him, “You touch me again, I’ll kill you!”
I think we’ve just learned who the victim in this episode is and also one person who certainly didn’t do it.
Joscelyn goes back into her room and closes the door (her bedroom has a door that opens to the outside). A few moments later, Nick knocks on it. For some reason Joscelyn opens the door and Nick comes in. Neither of them says anything, but Joscelyn gives him quite a look.
The scene then cuts to Jessica on her early morning jog. These early morning jogs are perfect for finding corpses before anyone else is awake, not only because they’re early, but because jogging covers so much distance, which increases the odds of running into the corpse (sometimes literally). Perhaps that’s why Jessica is so into them.
Jessica gets a rock in her shoe and stops to get it out. As she is putting the shoe back on, she happens to notice a hand amongst some construction debris.
Jessica gets up to examine it more closely, and it turns out to be Nick.
I’d feel bad for the actor’s knee if I didn’t think that was just an empty sneaker.
We then get a dismayed reaction shot from Jessica, who then looks up at a window at the nearby building:
I suppose the idea is to suggest that he somehow fell out of the window. I can’t say that looks very plausible.
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 come back, the police are examining the body. Jessica then gets introduced to Chief Griffin, the head of the local police department. He isn’t used to dealing with major crimes.
Jessica seems to sense this and tells him that this may not have been an accident. The room from which he is supposed to have fallen has a floor covered in plaster dust (she just examined it) and the soles of his shoes are clearly clean.
When he finds out who Jessica is, he’s delighted to meet her. This will be his first murder case and he’s only in the middle of a correspondence course on criminology and would love any help Jessica can give him. Since the writers consider the most important thing to be Jessica contradicting whatever the episode’s police detective says about how much help he wants Jessica to give, she replies that she doesn’t want to interfere. However, she relents quickly and tells him that she heard from a student that he was driving by late last night and saw a light-colored station wagon parked very close to where the body is now.
She’s being such a big help, and since she seems to know everyone around here, would she do the investigation for him tag along and help him out. Jessica agrees, but asks for a few minutes to get changed out of her jogging outfit.
The first person they interview is Daphne, who’s rather surprised to hear that Nick was murdered. Chief Griffin loses no time in asking her where she was after the party in a manner that strongly suggests he suspects her of the crime.
Daphne’s alibi isn’t great. She came back to the guest house. She was tired, took a few sleeping pills, and went straight to bed. Nick was here with her when she fell asleep.
Interestingly, he calls her “Miss Laird” when he denies having accused her of the crime, and she corrects him to “Clover.” I guess that suggests that her mother didn’t take her father’s name, or else remarried. It’s weird that they make a big deal of this but don’t tell us why.
Daphne also gives the back-story on Nick. She knew him vaguely from the campus and ran into him in a disco in New York City. A week later he moved into her townhouse. When asked what she’s doing in Crenshaw, she replies that she sometimes comes here to escape the Big Apple and write in peace, especially when she’s been inspired by a hunk like Nick Fulton.
She then asks them to leave and they do.
Jessica tells the chief to go ahead without her, she wants to pay her respects to professor Laird.
She has tea with Joscelyn, who claims to have known Nick Fulton only very slightly. Jessica assures her that Daphne isn’t too seriously under suspicion, then politely excuses herself to go work on her speech that she’ll give the next day. (She really should have had that written already, but I guess that doesn’t matter.)
Jessica’s next stop is President Hayward’s house. President Hayward is deeply upset as Alger is giving him the news that there’s been a murder on campus and it’s all anyone can talk about. Jessica asks about him having been away and Alger explains that he was visiting his ailing mother and had to take the late train to Boston last night after the party.
Usually the only reason someone in a Murder, She Wrote episode volunteers this kind of information is because it’s a lie, so presumably he didn’t actually take the late train. Also, what are the odds that there’s a train to Boston that late at night in a tiny little station like this? In England during the time of Sherlock Holmes, perhaps. But in Vermont in the 1980s? There’s no real chance of it. That said, it’s an absurd thing to lie about since it’s so easily checked, so there’s a very slight chance he’s actually telling the truth.
Alger then excuses himself because he should call his mother now (she’s not doing at all well).
Which, of course, raises the question of what good he could possibly have done her by showing up well past midnight then leaving again so quickly that he was back here before lunchtime. No part of Vermont is close to Boston. The old girl would almost certainly have been asleep. Or did she need him to pick something up off the floor for her?
Anyway, as Alger is leaving Chief Griffin comes in to ask President Hayward some questions. When he sees Jessica, though, he first gives her some facts. According to the Coroner’s Report, the time of death was about 1:00 in the morning. The cause of death was a massive skull fracture with a blunt instrument (not the ground).
In the ensuing discussion, Beryl mentions that she saw Ron Mercer at about 1:00 in the morning, walking towards Joscelyn’s house. A phone call then comes in for Chief Griffin. It’s an anonymous tip about Daphne Clover.
Chief Griffin, a deputy, and Jessica go to Joscelyn’s guest room and find what the tip said would be there—a blackmail note demanding $10,000 dollars (about $30,800 in 2026 dollars). The tip also said that there’d be a murder weapon, and they would find a candlestick on the mantle with blood on it.
Possibly the world’s stupidest hiding place for an uncleaned murder weapon.
At this point Daphne comes in and asks to know what’s going on, whereupon Chief Griffin arrests her for the murder. Jessica tries to stop him because this is such an obvious setup, but he doesn’t listen to her because we’re almost at a commercial break and we really need something dramatic to end on. In this case, it’s Daphne shaking her head and saying, “No. No.”
And on that note, we go to commercial break.
When we come back, Jessica goes to Joscelyn’s house where she finds the mate to the bloodstained candlestick.
The scene then shifts to Chief Griffin’s office with Jessica, Daphne, and Joscelyn.
I love this office. It’s got no ceiling and is separated from the stairs and a head-high information desk by a few feet. One of its main tables is a portable table with folding legs and two different kinds of chairs that one often finds in school buildings.
Anyway, Jessica points out that the candlestick was taken from the main room and planted in Daphne’s room. When Jessica points out that anyone could have taken the candlestick, Chief Griffin remarks that anyone includes Daphne. Jessica replies that she doubts that—a candlestick couldn’t be hidden in the pocket of a fur coat and Daphne graphically demonstrated that there was nothing underneath the coat.
Chief Griffin is inclined to grant this, but wants an explanation for the blackmail note. Jessica asks to see the note and Chief Griffin hands it to her (it’s in a plastic bag).
Jessica notes that it’s been typed on a machine with a slightly bent ‘e’.
Jessica then points out the obvious: given that Daphne and Nick were sharing a bed, why on earth would he type up a blackmail note rather than just tell her the demand? Jessica then points out the painfully obvious: the candlestick and note were almost certainly planted in the guesthouse by the person who phoned in the anonymous tip. After thinking about it, Chief Griffin relents and releases Daphne.
Chief Griffin then drives Jessica to the train station. On the way, she asks about Nick Fulton’s background and Griffin tells her that Nick was arrested twice for assault but charges were never pressed.
He then tells Jessica that in spite of her “fancy talk” Daphne is the killer, he just has to prove it. “Anybody who’d write scuzzy books the way she does doesn’t have the same moral code the rest of us do.” When Jessica asks if he’s actually read any of them, he replies, “Oh sure. All of them.”
At the train station, she checks connections to Cabot Cove via Boston. The trains to Boston leave every hour on the quarter hour until 20:15 (8:15pm). Jessica notices that the schedule says that there are later trains, but the clerk at the info desk tells her that the schedule changed two weeks ago. (Which explains why Alger thought the lie would not be so obvious.)
On her way to walk back to the college, Ron Mercer’s wife Trish gives Jessica a lift for some reason.
This gives Jessica a convenient opportunity to interrogate Trish, who admits that she did know Nick Fulton from before. Nick was on an athletic scholarship and would come over to the house for tutoring, and then he started coming over to the house when Ron wasn’t home. Trish then tries to alibi Ron but Jessica tells her that someone saw Ron near the time of the murder and someone else saw their station wagon parked near the body at the time the body was moved.
Trish breaks down and admits that she thinks that Ron may have been seeing another woman.
Jessica then goes to see the other woman (Joscelyn). During the conversation, she admires Joscelyn’s house as she walks around it. She noticed the word processor, which Joscelyn says that the university got for her but she’s never learned to use.
I wonder why the word processor has an integrated telephone.
Jessica then wanders over to the typewriter and says that she just got a flash for her speech and asks if she can use Joscelyn’s typewriter. Joscelyn replies that if she had typed the blackmail note, she would have been smart enough to get rid of the typewriter she used. (I’d have used someone else’s typewriter, myself, but each to their own.)
Jessica laughs and admits that her ploy was a bit obvious. Which is understating how obvious it was by two orders of magnitude.
The conversation then awkwardly transitions to Jessica letting Joscelyn know that she knows that Joscelyn writes the romance novels and Daphne just pretends to be the author. Joscelyn then launches into a monologue about her Walt Witman biography barely earned enough money to pay off a second-hand car. What the public really wants is sordid sex. While she was one of the proper paupers of the literary world, hacks with a third-rate vocabulary were living like royalty, so she decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. She wrote the first novel in six weeks. She asked Daphne to submit it to a publisher under her name since Joscelyn couldn’t use her own and, apparently, she’s never heard of pen names.
Jessica prompts her to continue by saying that Nick found out about the arrangement.
Joscelyn then confesses to killing Nick in self defense.
At the police station, Daphne rushes in and snatches the typed confession from her mother before she has a chance to sign it, declaring that she, Daphne, killed Nick Fulton in self defense.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, Chief Griffin is telling Jessica that two people confessing was the damndest thing he ever saw. And we get a look at the back of Chief Griffin’s office:
This is quite the office Chief Griffin has. It almost looks like a repurposed school cafeteria.
Anyway, Jessica points out that obviously one is lying to protect the other, then remembers she has a speech to go make and says she has to leave.
On her way out, Jessica points out that it’s unlikely that either Daphne or her mother could have carried Nick Fulton’s body up the stairs to the third floor unaided.
Over at the Hayward residence everyone is preparing for the commencement when Beryl hands her husband a letter from Alger. He can’t find his glasses so he asks Jessica to read it to him.
President Hayward is astonished that Alger is resigning but Beryl thinks it’s obvious—Alger is is madly in love with Joscelyn and is resigning because Joscelyn gave the assistant department head job to Ron Mercer.
This bit of news enables Jessica to figure out who did it. Jessica asks how long until the commencement and when she’s told it’s about an hour she replies, “good, I have a couple of phone calls to make. Then, can I borrow your bicycle?”
The scene then cuts to Jessica walking into a room with Alger Kenyon, who says he doesn’t have much time because he has a lot of packing to do. It turns out to probably be the English department, as Ron Mercer and his wife are there too. The episode a bit light on extras, though, or else this is a three-professor department and the job of assistant head of the English department isn’t very prestigious.
Anyway, Jessica explains that she couldn’t just stand by while Joscelyn and Daphne confess to something that they didn’t do. Had Joscelyn done it, she wouldn’t have framed Daphne with the bloody candlestick. And Daphne would never have left it on her own mantel. She then explains to Trish that the woman Ron was having an affair with was Joscelyn, in order to get the position of assistant department head. She invited him back after the party and he knew what she had in mind, but Nick was already dead when he got there.
This begins a flashback.
(I love the visual imagery used for flashbacks—wavy distortion combined with fading to the other scene.)
Joscelyn explained the dead body to Ron by saying that there had been a terrible accident and she would give Ron the job of assistant department head if he would move the body and make it look like the terrible accident happened somewhere else.
After the flashback is over, Ron assures Trish that making love to Joscelyn wasn’t his idea, he only did it to get the job.
Hearing about Joscelyn using her position of power to bribe/pressure Ron into fornicating with her is too much for Alger, who loudly protests. This can’t be true. He and Joscelyn were very close. Never physical, of course, because their relationship didn’t need that. But they loved each other.
Jessica replies, “You may not really understand Jocelyn, Alger.”
Given that he thought of her as a morally pure intellectual while she in fact wrote pornography and sold academic positions to unqualified men in exchange for sexual favors, I’d say that Jessica is on very safe ground, here. Oddly, Jessica says it in a manner that suggests Alger doesn’t realize that old women have voracious sexual appetites, which seems to me to miss the mark a bit.
Anyway, she adds, “but I think you love her too much to let her take the blame for something you did.”
Alger initially denies it, but then Jessica points out that the blackmail note was typed on the same typewriter which typed Alger’s letter of resignation—the one with the bent ‘e’. This makes Alger one of the stupider murderers in the history of detective fiction, but c’est la vie.
The thing which gets him to confess is asking why he framed Daphne. Of course, the answer is quite predictable: everything was Daphne’s fault. (I’m guessing he’s supposed to not know that Joscelyn actually wrote the books, which makes the blackmail note a little strange.)
It turns out that while their friendship was discrete, Joscelyn had given Alger a key. He came back later that night to cheer Joscelyn up. He heard her voice from the bedroom and she sounded frightened. He grabbed a candlestick and got closer. He only heard a little bit of the conversation but caught that Nick Fulton was demanding money. Joscelyn went to another room to get her checkbook and Alger snuck up and struck Nick on the back of the head while he waited for Joscelyn. After killing Nick, Alger went out through the door before Joscelyn came back.
Jessica calls Chief Griffin then runs off to give her speech because she’s late.
As Jessica rides her borrowed bicycle over to the commencement, we freeze frame and go to credits.
This episode combined a really fun setting with a very strange plot. Universities make great places for a murder mystery for two primary reasons that work together:
They are a normally peaceful place where it is incredible difficult to see through surface appearances.
They are complex places with a lot of history where many things are mysterious but have explanations
Or, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it in the foreword to Gaudy Night:
It would be idle to deny that the City and University of Oxford (in aeternum floreant) do actually exist, and contian a number of colleges and other buildings, some of which are mentioned by name in this book. It is therefore the more necessary to affirm emphatically that none of the characters which I have placed upon this public stage has any counterpart in real life. In particular, Shrewsbury College, with its dons, students and scouts, is entirely imaginary; nor are the distressing events described as taking place within its walls founded upon any events that have ever occurred anywhere. Detective-story writers are obliged by their disagreeable profession to invent startling and unpleasant incidents and people, and are (I presume) at liberty to imagine what might happen if such incidents and people were to intrude upon the life of an innocent and well-ordered community; but in so doing they must not be supposed to suggest that any such disturbance ever has occurred or is ever likely to occur in any community in real life.
So, I repeat, it was a good setting.
But the plot suffers from what is often a problem in Murder, She Wrote—who the sympathetic characters are supposed to be. The writers of Murder, She Wrote only ever held three sins to be bad:
Direct violence
Making a lot of money
Being the antagonist of an episode
Since Joscelyn Laird was none of these things, her being a lying pornographess who abused her position of power to force a married man to adulterate his marriage in order to satisfy her lust didn’t affect how sympathetic she was in any way.
Indeed, one of the really strange parts of the character of Jessica Fletcher, after the first few episodes of Season 1, was how she was New York socialite living in Cabot Cove, Maine. She spent most of her time hobnobbing with the rich and famous and to her the greatest virtue was sophistication and the greatest sin was harshing people’s buzz, though of course she would have phrased it in the language of the New York socialite—being uncouth. Jocelyn Laird was extremely couth, so of course Jessica loved her to death and considered everything she did wrong to be the most minor of peccadilloes. I mean, whomst among us hasn’t used a servant to scratch an itch during a dry spell? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that, what?
(I slipped into 1920s British foppery at the end there because I do find it interesting how the stereotypical New York socialite and the 1920s British fop actually have a lot in common. They’re both extremely well educated and highly polished nihilists trying to escape their existential dread through pleasure, habit, and social collaboration. So there may actually be something of an homage to golden age detective stories in Jessica turning into a New York socialite.)
As for the plot… I tend to think that it’s a bit of a problem that the crux of the entire episode is that an English professor has never heard of the concept of a pen name.That blackmail is necessary to the plot and it is necessary for the blackmail to be possible that the books actually be published under Daphne’s name, but this just makes no sense. It makes even less sense for Daphne to be living the life of a socialite author when she’s really neither a socialite nor an author. It also makes no sense why she’s so antagonistic toward her mother when they’re secretly working together. One could justify this public antagonism by being a ruse to protect Dr. Laird’s reputation, but that only works if there’s some reason she has to risk her mother’s reputation by visiting. But there really isn’t. Also, flashing everyone while she’s naked is really committing to the bit far beyond any possible need to commit; but if Daphne is actually antagonizing her mother for fun and exposing herself to strangers for fun, why on earth did her mother trust her to publish the romance novels? Not only has Joscelyn Laird never heard of a pen name, she’s either a horrible judge of character or has no sense of self preservation.
Also, we’re never actually told why Daphne comes to visit; all we get is the cover story that she’s here to write, which Jessica easily disproves. But we’re not given the real reason that she came because, presumably, there isn’t a real reason. At least, I cannot imagine what that real reason could be. If she needed to talk to her mother, she could just call her on the phone. If her mother needed to send her the text of the next novel, she could just mail it to her. Being in the same place at the same time served no purpose that couldn’t be accomplished more conveniently by less dangerous means. There was no possible reason for the visit, and since Daphne and her mother were working together, unless it was an emergency there was no reason for the visit at such an inconvenient time.
Speaking of things that there was no reason for, why on earth did Joscelyn give Alger a key to her house? I would think that the last thing she’d want would be for Alger to come inside her house without having to knock.
I suppose the actual murder should be considered, but I think it’s a problem that the main thing to say about it is: what is there to say about it? It’s a little weird that, on the spur of the moment, Alger decided to assassinate Nick and then run away, but if they had made Alger more of a character I think it could actually be workable. First, there would have to be his silent rage during the party as he saw Joscelyn being treated as she was by Nick and Daphne. I think he’d need to misunderstand Nick’s demand for money as being a threat to Joscelyn rather than blackmail for something Joscelyn didn’t want to come out. Then something snaps in him and he decides the world would be better off without Nick. That could work, but it wouldn’t work with Alger just running away at that point. If he had the kind of grit to kill Nick like a rabid dog that needed killing, he wouldn’t have just panicked and abandoned Joscelyn. I really don’t see any way of him not taking Joscelyn into his confidence, with the possible exception of him having removed the body immediately. That could still have left some blood stains he didn’t notice, or something like that, allowing the rest of the plot to happen (with Daphne and Joscelyn protecting each other). It would have meant we couldn’t have the subplot with Ron Mercer having been an accomplice, but since that accomplished nothing, I think that would be a very small sacrifice.
Oh well. Next week we’re in London, England for Sing a Song of Murder.
I’ve now heard of several SciFi stories which feature an “all male” race. The first was Seth McFarlane’s Star Trek show The Orville. The second is the new Supergirl movie. How on earth does anything think this even means anything, let alone is clever?
For a species to be entirely one sex, they must either reproduce asexually or else they must be hermaphrodites. There simply are no other options. “Sexes” are simply a description for how members of a species produce new members of their species. In the case of Moclans in The Orville, the species is clearly hermaphroditic since any two Moclans can reproduce with each other and either can fertilize the other and the other lay eggs. Looking at a species and deciding that if some are bigger than others they are the “males” is simply nonsensical anthropomorphizing. It is true that in most mammal species the males are larger than the females, but when you go outside of mammals nearly any set of relative sizes can be found. In many species, males are larger. In many species, females are larger. In many species, males and females are the same size. And when I’m talking about species where females are larger, I’m not talking about obscure or docile species. This is true in great white sharks, in pythons, in birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons—it’s quite common for females to be larger than males in the animal kingdom here on earth.
In Moclans, the “female” Moclans are actually just smaller, weaker, more fragile Moclans. They can’t do anything that the “male” Moclans can do. From what I’ve read, it’s implied that they lack half of the genitalia which the “male” Moclans possess, so it’s not clear that they’re actually fertile but unlike “male” Moclans they certainly can’t reproduce on their own, so a colony of “female” Moclans would naturally die out without replacement, while “male” Moclans can sustain themselves indefinitely with no “females”. If there was a genetic condition in humans which made them smaller, weaker, more fragile, and significantly reduced their fertility, we would naturally consider it a birth defect, and aside from a few wackos (there are always wackos) a medical intervention at birth which would allow the child to develop naturally with full function would be completely uncontroversial.
What these shows play on in order to trick people into thinking that they’re not completely stupid is largely their casting. They cast male humans to play “male” Moclans and female humans to play “female” Moclans, and so our innate knowledge that in humans male and female are complementary kicks in and does the work the writer won’t do himself because he can’t. If you changed the casting to be all-male and had the “females” played by pre-pubescent male actors, but changed not a single word of the script, no one would think this deep in the least.
I suspect that this is why, if this ever showed up in a novel (and it probably has because everything has shown up in a novel at least once), it made no splash. Without smuggling in human male and female via actors, the fact that you’re just talking about hermaphrodites who treat a birth defect with a life-improving medical intervention would be too obvious.
I also suspect that this use of human actors to smuggle in human male/female complementarity is why defining “female” Moclans by being small and weak and fragile isn’t generally taken as being insulting to human women, even though it should be. Yes, human females are, statistically, smaller, weaker, and more fragile than human males. (Technically, it’s overlapping normal distributions, but it is certainly true that the averages are not right next to each other.) But this is not the point of female biology. If someone looks at a smaller, weaker, more fragile version of something and thinks “female!” they’ve completely missed the point of human femaleness. Human females have abilities which human males lack—that’s the point. The point is not the tradeoffs that biology generally makes for the sake of those extra abilities.
I assume that the “all male” species in Supergirl was even stupider.
While it is true and important that ideas have consequences, I think a lot of people misunderstand the history of the 20th century because they forget that context has consequences, too. For example: Karl Marx’s ideas had profound consequences. But original Marxism—if you actually read Marx, anyway—is profoundly stupid and can only be appealing in certain contexts. Modern Marxism is, if you examine it, merely related to original Marxism, because it has adapted.
Modern Marxism/socialism (in the USA) is primarily an answer to a mass of people who were tricked into selling themselves into indentured servitude for a lottery ticket to the upper classes with a fraudulent representation of the odds of winning. This indentured servitude comes in the form of high-interest student loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and it’s important to note that in 2010 the US federal government became the issuer of all student loans, so these loans are no longer a matter between private parties.
A fuller picture of the context that makes Marxism/socialism appealing in the USA also has to do with the general history of it involving an upper class of bureaucrats who get to tell everyone what to do, and how much this appeals to the kind of people who desperately want to tell everyone else what to do.
This context of widespread indentured servitude is why it’s probably for the best to allow students to return their degrees in exchange for cancelling their debt. Given that the issuer of the debt is the same as the government which makes it uncancelable in bankruptcy and also the government which has, through its impact on compulsory lower education created a system of indoctrination of the importance of going to college, the moral hazard really runs just as much towards keeping the loans as it does toward allowing people to cancel them. People should, in general, pay their honest debts. Student loans are not really honest debts. (And I say this as a person who never took out even $1 in college loans, so I have no personal stake in this.) I think it would make a certain amount of sense to liquidate the endowments of prestigious universities to partially pay for this cancellation and for the federal government to eat the rest of the debt as restitution for having perpetrated or at least cooperated in fraud.
Changing the context in this way will make Marxism unappealing in contemporary America in a way that better education never will in a fallen world where most men’s beliefs are at least as influenced by their passions as by their reason. (The best solution is both good education and fixing the context.)
This importance of context is also why conservatives need to put a great deal of effort into adapting the principles that were true in centuries past to modern conditions. We no longer have an agrarian society and we never will again for the simple reason that industrial society produces industrial warfare, and industrial warfare is so much more effective and pre-industrial warfare that if we ever became an agrarian society, it would only last a few years until an industrial society conquered us and turned us into an industrial vassal state with crushing taxation to fund their own standard of living.
Fundamentally, economic productivity enables people to make more and better weapons, and the warlike nature of fallen humanity means that we must make these. We must, therefore, figure out how to achieve maximal human dignity in a way that produces at least extremely high productivity. Merely yearning for contexts which will not come back in which this was a (mostly) solved problem is not a strategy.
Ideas matter, but so does context, and people somewhat naturally prefer bad answers to non-answers.
On the thirteenth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the third episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Murder in the Afternoon, it’s set in New York City. (Last week’s episode was Joshua Peabody Died Here… Possibly.
The scene opens with Felix, sitting at his desk, writing. After a few moments, a woman walks in.
She walks over as seductive music plays and complains that he’s taking too long. When he says he just needs to finish the page he’s working on, she whispers something in his ear and slinks off, shutting the door behind her.
As he’s finishing, the door opens again and a mysterious figure dressed all in black creeps in.
As Flex begs for his life, the figure takes aim and shoots.
He clutches his arm and sinks to the floor.
We then hear someone yell “cut!” and a director storms over to ask him why he did the scene wrong—he was supposed to be shot in the stomach. It turns out that he’s an actor named Martin Grattop and this is a soap opera. And he did it wrong because he refuses to cooperate with being killed off.
The show runner, Joyce Holleran, then comes in.
She’s new to the show and has created the “Pittsfield Avenger,” who has been killing off characters from the show, which has boosted ratings significantly, earning her the appreciation of the Network.
Into this argument, Julian Tenley—an actor who has been on the show for decades—sticks his nose and tells Joyce that changes like these should be woven in over the course of months.
No one listens to him, though they are polite to him.
Joyce then storms back to her office where she complains to one of the writers—or perhaps the only writer, Carol.
Joyce tells her how Martin intentionally ruined the take and refuses to play the scene as written, so they’ll need to redo the hospital scene, but keep the new character—the orderly. It was a terrific introductory scene that the Carol wrote.
Another actor on the show, Todd, comes in on the end of the conversation (right after Joyce asked if she’d left her keys in Carol’s office).
Unlike everyone else, he wants to leave the show because he’s getting extremely good offers from Hollywood.
Joyce, of course, doesn’t care, and won’t let him out of his contract.
We then meet the reason that Jessica is going to be in this episode: her niece, Nita Cochrane.
She’s asking Joyce for assurance that she won’t be removed from the show. (While Joyce hasn’t decided who the Pittsfield Avenger will be, Nita has been playing the character, whose face has never been visible.) She explains that she needs the money from steady employment to take care of her ill mother.
Which is a bit absurd—acting is not the profession to enter if you want steady employment or have dependents. It’s an incredibly volatile business, full of ups and downs, and to paraphrase one of the great Robin Hood movies: sometimes the ups outnumber the downs, but not in Tinseltown. Not for the overwhelming majority of actors, anyway.
In the middle of this, Joyce, who isn’t paying much attention, finds her keys:
She even remarks, “Here they are. How in the world did they get here?” (I assume this means that someone took them for a while to have them copied and this will be revealed in the last 10 minutes of the episode.)
Joyce is unmoved by Nita’s speech and (correctly) points out that if Nita wants job security she’s in the wrong business. Then Joyce leaves.
We then cut to a nursing home:
As we get this establishing shot, we hear a woman’s voice say, “Making my sweet little Nita the Pittsfield Avenger would be utter folly.”
Then we meet the owner of the voice.
Her name is Agnes and she fills Jessica in on the various ways in which Joyce is ruining the show Nita is in. She also describes who some of the characters are by recounting the absurd plotlines they’ve been in. (Absurd plotlines are a staple of daytime soap operas.)
Nita then comes in saying that she swears she could kill Joyce. We then find out Agnes is her grandmother while Jessica is her aunt. Since Anges is, presumably, not Jessica’s mother, I guess she must be the mother of whichever parent isn’t related to Jessica. We don’t actually get this explained, or why Jessica is visiting her, though.
After a bit more conversation, Nita walks Jessica somewhere and explains that she’s worried because if she turns out to be the avenger, she’ll eventually be written out of the show. She doesn’t explain why, though. Soap operas are famous for their convoluted plots that constantly bring characters back from the dead; it would hardly be impossible for someone who turned out to be a mass murderer to show up again.
And, of course, the writers can always write in an identical twin. From what I’ve heard, the number of identical twins in soap operas is extraordinary.
Anyway, Nita brings Jessica to the set of the show, for some reason. There, we meet two of the actors, Herbert Upton (left) and Bibi Hartman (center), and Joyce’s husband, Larry Hollaran (right):
In the small talk we discover that Herb plays a detective on the show and is so far into character that last year, when Larry shot a burglar in his apartment, Herb wanted to handle the case himself. Herb also turns out to be yet another person who’s read all of Jessica’s books.
Larry excuses himself and asks Bibi to come with him, and the firearms manager comes and takes the gun which Herb is wearing to go lock it in the prop cabinet since they won’t be using it any more today. It’s a little strange that they let him wander around with it, but maybe firearms were dealt with more casually on sets in the mid 1980s.
Jessica and Nita wander around a bit and Jessica tells Nita that she came into some money she didn’t expect from foreign sales of her books and wants to dedicate this to Agnes’ care. Nita refuses, saying she wants to pay for it herself. Then Julian comes over and Nita introduces them. They talk a bit and he expresses tremendous affection for the whole cast, calling them his family. After he excuses himself because he’ll be no good for surgery the next day if he doesn’t get some sleep, Nita explains that he’s been the heart of the show for thirty years, and the only concession to his age is the teleprompters, and he’s so good you’d never know he was reading his lines.
Later that night, we get an establishing shot of a building:
Then we seeJoyce is at her typewriter in her apartment.
Her husband walks in and tries to interest her in spending time with him, but she only wants to work. She suggests he gives Bibi a call if he’s bored—Bibi could break the monotony for him. He tries to tell her that she’s the only one for him, but she’s not interested. He says that he’ll go to the Friar’s club and she suggests that he does.
As he walks off she adds that he better be there because she may call him later and if he’s not there she may be forced to cut his allowance off.
He walks off without replying.
Then the Pittsfield Avenger comes in…
…and shoots Joyce.
The avenger then steals some papers off of Joyce’s desk and leaves.
Then we 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, after an establishing shot of a building in the day…
…we see Jessica getting ready to leave her apartment.
I mention these establishing shots because, though it’s easy to ignore them, they’re so important to the atmosphere of Murder, She Wrote. They give us a sense of where in the world we are. If all we got were interior shots, we could manage, but would probably feel a bit lost. Consider Joyce shortly before she was murdered:
Without the exterior shot, the first thing we’d wonder when we saw this is, “where is this?” As we try to figure it out, and possibly get that wrong and correct our idea when we see more of the room and realize, “oh, that’s not an office,” we’d be missing the stuff that the scene is here to show us.
Anyway, as Jessica tries to leave she runs into a policeman. His name is Sergeant Kaplan of the homicide division (21st Precinct) and he’s here looking for Nita. He’s got a warrant for Nita’s arrest, and checks the hotel room in case Nita is hiding out there.
We then cut to the police station where we meet the Lieutenant in charge of the case:
His name is Lt. Antonelli and he’s questioning Larry (Joyce’s husband) about his whereabouts at the time of the killing.
Larry didn’t end up going to the Friar’s club because he was annoyed at Joyce and wanted to give her something to think about if she did call him there. Instead, he went bar hopping and doesn’t remember where. He doesn’t even remember checking into the hotel he woke up in. He then asks if he can go because he’s hung over and just found out his wife was murdered, and the Lt. tells him OK, go, but be someplace reachable.
Right after he leaves, Jessica arrives in the company of Sgt. Kaplan. She and the Lieutenant have a weird exchange where she says that Nita didn’t do it, Antonelli says that he doesn’t read her books, and Jessica says that he’s being grossly overpaid. Antonelli then shows her a photograph of the Pittsfield Avenger and Jessica points out that the entire point is that it’s a disguise and could have been anyone—and everyone had a motive. (Also, since Nita was the only one who wore the costume, it would have been a really stupid disguise for her to choose—which is a fair point.)
We also get from this conversation that the thing that Joyce was writing, which the Avenger took after shooting her, was a new series bible. (A “series bible” is a document containing the basic facts of a show.) Also, at 9:40pm, some guy by the name of Gordon LaMonica got a telephone call from Joyce that Nita was trying to kill her. The line then went dead and he called the police, who showed up ten minutes later. They found the telephone cord ripped from the wall, obviously caught up in the body when she fell down.
We then get a discussion between Gordon Lamonica, who has been promoted to producer now that Joyce is dead…
…and Carol (the writer) who has been promoted to head writer now that Joyce is dead.
They discuss some things related to the show—they’ll have to shut down production for the day of Joyce’s funeral, the network wants him to continue in the direction Joyce had been going, he’ll just edit around the guy pretending to be shot in the arm, and neither of them will miss most of the cast.
We then cut to Jessica and Agnes talking. Agnes figures that Martin is lying about the phone call to cover up his own guilt, but Jessica says that the killer was seen at 9:35 and police squad cars arrived at Joyce’s apartment and Gordon’s place less than ten minutes later. Agnes’ protestations that Nita didn’t do it no matter what the evidence suggests are cut short by the phone ringing—it’s Nita.
Jessica rushes over to where Nita says that she is in time to see Nita being arrested. Lt. Antonelli tells Jessica that he figured she might forget to tell him if Nita called so he ordered up some phone taps. Jessica tells him that they’re both looking for the same thing but Antonelli says he’s found what he’s looking for. He gets in his car and Jessica gets into the passenger seat, informing Antonelli that she’s riding with him to headquarters. Antonelli accepts this and drives off. We then get an establishing shot of the police station:
As Murder, She Wrote police stations go, this one is remarkably low-effort. There’s one sign saying “21st PRECINCT”, two flags, and two police cars. And you can’t actually read the sign saying “21st PRECINCT” on the DVD version. It’s visible in the blu-ray, but that’s not what people would have seen when the show aired on TV.
To be fair to Murder, She Wrote, though, the real 21st Precinct police station is not much higher effort. Here it is from Google Maps:
Anyway, we then go inside where Jessica is interrogating Nita, for some reason.
Nita tells the story of what happened, which wasn’t much. There were some new script pages messengered over (to where, we’re not told) and the way they read, they made it clear that Nita’s character would turn out to be the avenger. She she went to Joyce’s apartment to have it out with her. But while she was standing in front of the building gathering her courage, she saw the Pittsfield Avenger come out of the building. She had an awful premonition and went inside, but only got as far as the elevator before chickening out. Then she decided to call Joyce and went outside to look for a telephone. Then she heard sirens and saw an ambulance and realized something terrible had happened. She went back to her apartment. When she saw the police waiting for her there, she drove away and ended up driving half the night.
On her way out of the police station, Jessica runs into Herb and Bibi. They ask after Nita, then after the new script pages that had (apparently) been messengered to Nita, and whether they mentioned any other characters. Jessica coldly replies that Nita didn’t say and leaves. They follow her and Jessica tells them that Nita didn’t do it, so they give her their alibis. Herb was directing a little theater group at the time and Bibi was driving to visit her sister on Long Island, but her sister wasn’t home so she can’t prove it.
As Jessica leaves, Bibi tells her that she can believe what she wants, but everyone liked Nita. And she can believe what she wants, but everyone hated Joyce.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, we’re at the studio. Julian walks down a medical-looking hall in his doctor’s outfit. He finds Gordon and tries to ask him about the scene where Nita confesses to being the Pittsfield Avenger, but Gordon doesn’t have time.
Julian then runs into Martin (the guy who plays Felix—the guy who got shot and ruined the shot by grabbing his arm instead of his stomach). It turns out that the TV series he was supposed to star in fell through and he has some ideas about how to keep his character alive. Julian wishes him luck but bitterly adds that Joyce’s pernicious influence seems to linger on.
The scene then shifts to an apartment building where Larry Holleran (Joyce’s husband) is looking for a taxi. Jessica happens to pull up in a taxi at just that moment and interrogates him about having said that he left the apartment at 9:30. She knows he didn’t—not unless he was dressed as the Pittsfield Avenger. She then offers to give him a ride to where he’s going and they can talk on the way, and Larry accepts.
Larry explains that he was with Bibi Hartman until three in the morning. He’s got a friend in the building who has an apartment and travels a lot, so he lets Larry use it. Jessica accuses him of the murder a few times and he denies it a few times, then he decides he should tell the police about where he really was before Jessica can and asks the cab driver to go to the “Manhattan Police Precinct.”
The scene then shifts to Carol’s office.
As the scene opens Todd is complaining to Carol that she can’t get him out of the show and she apologizes that Gordon is running things and he won’t let Todd out. As he storms off, Jessica walks in. She observes that it’s a strange situation—those who want to leave must stay, and those who want to stay must leave.
Carol figures that Jessica is there to find someone to give to the police in exchange for Nita. She admits to having a motive, but says that she didn’t do it. “Success isn’t all that great that I’m gonna climb over somebody else’s bones to get there.” (I like that line.)
Jessica has only 1 question—who did Joyce discuss her changes with? Carol says that Joyce never discussed her plans with her and also never consulted with the network. Jessica concludes that it must have been Gordon.
She finds Gordon and somehow guilts him into meeting with her to answer her questions. They arrange for that night at 8pm at “Barney’s on 49th Street” which is one of the show’s hangouts.
We then see Lt. Antonelli and Sgt. Kaplan walking up the stairs with a note they received:
It reads, “Nita Cochran didn’t kill Joyce Holleran. I did. And it had nothing to do with the show. Catch me if you can.” Antonelli doesn’t take it very seriously.
That night at Barney’s, Jessica comes to wait for Gordon and Bibi spots her. Bibi’s not happy with Jessica because she spent half the afternoon at the police station explaining that while Joyce Holleran was being killed, she was warming the sheets with Joyce’s husband in an apartment four stories down.
Jessica asks if she saw Gorden recently and she said that yes, they just had some drinks together, but Gordon got a phone call about more actor trouble and rushed off to the studio. Upon hearing this, Jessica rushes off to the studio, too.
At the studio, as Gordon is walking around the empty halls in the pitch dark, he hears voices. It turns out to be a recording of a conversation between most of the actors about how Gordon won’t change anything and they need to get rid of him. Then as Jessica shows up to the front and is stopped by a security guard, the Pittsfield avenger shows up and shoots Gordon. Jessica and the security guard rush in and find him clutching his arm.
And on that, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, we get an establishing shot of what I assume is meant to be a hospital, though it looks more like a fancy apartment building.
Inside the building Todd is in Gordon’s hospital room explaining how he meant something other than murder when he said that they needed to get rid of Gordon. Also present, it turns out, are Lt. Antonelli and Jessica:
I love how to prevent bare walls there are a bunch of framed paintings hanging up.
Just the kind of thing you’d find in hospital rooms.
Jessica interrupts to point out that if Todd had wanted to kill Gordon, he’d probably have actually killed him instead of shooting him in the arm then running away. The shooter had ample time for a second or even a third shot.
This is actually rather specious; nervous people are notoriously inaccurate with handguns even at close range. And they’re also fairly likely to assume they actually did hit their target, especially if they see the target act like he was just shot.
By contrast, playing a tape of himself threatening to kill the victim does sound remarkably unlikely if Todd was the shooter, and leaving it there after shooting Gordon sounds even less likely. For some reason Jessica doesn’t mention this.
Antonelli then gets a phone call from Kaplan and is informed that ballistics confirms that the bullet they dug out of Gordon’s arm matches the bullet that killed Joyce Holleran. As he tells Jessica this, he happens to mention that it’s a .38 caliber bullet. This startles Jessica, since the publicity still of the Pittsfield Avenger showed her holding a .45 automatic. The bullets, however, were from a “.38 police special”. (The actual round is called the .38 special; it happened to be commonly used by police but was also widely popular in the civilian population as well.)
Anyway, this causes Jessica to think:
Jessica says that this changes everything, and asks Lt. Antonelli to come back with him to the studio.
At the studio they inspect the prop guns with the prop master. The Avenger’s .45 automatic has been fired since it was last cleaned, which it was after the last scene shot with the Avenger. Also, its magazine (which they call a clip) is missing one blank. Also, the .38 that Herb’s character uses is missing.
Jessica then has an idea to trap the murderer where she works with Carol to queue some special lines up into the teleprompter. Then, during the taping of the next episode, Nita, in her character of Courtney, comes in the door from the storm “outside”.
She tells some story about escaping from the police in a laundry truck. She protests, “Dr. Goodman, I didn’t kill Felix. I didn’t! I don’t know where else to turn. Please help me.”
Dr. Goodman (Julian) then says that he won’t let the police prosecute Courtney (Nita) for something she didn’t do. He goes on to say that Felix deserved to die for what he did to her career, and then his speech starts melding into reality, talking about how Joyce was ruining everything. But the thing is, he’s reading off a teleprompter.
He goes on reading it, passionately explaining about it, and we get a bunch of reaction shots of people who seem to accept this as a confession. Except that even at the end, he’s still reading off the teleprompter.
After they cut, Julian asks, “Was that alright, Gordon? I could do it better.”
Jessica comes up with everyone else and casually asks Julian how he got into Joyce’s apartment since the front door was locked. Julian is completely unsurprised by this and explains that he made copies of Joyce’s keys—he took them in the morning and returned them in the afternoon. (Thus explaining why Joyce discovered her keys on her desk early on in the episode.)
She then asks him if he used the avenger’s gun to kill Joyce (she holds it up) and he confirms that he did. Jessica then explains that he didn’t actually kill her, because this wasn’t the gun that did it. This gun was filled with blanks. And, moreover, Joyce w as killed with a .38 police special, while the Avenger’s gun was a .45.
The real murderer—Larry Holleran—saw Julian enter the penthouse apartment disguised as the Pittsfield Avenger and followed him. When Julian pulled the trigger and the gun fired, Joyce wasn’t hit, she just fainted from shock. He got his gun while she was reviving. Once she called gordon and said that Nita had tried to kill her, Larry yanked the telephone cord and shot her. After she was dead, he wrapped the telephone cord around her to make it look like she pulled it when she fell.
When Larry objects that she has no proof, Jessica replies that it should be proof enough when the police compare the bullets from Joyce’s body and Gordon’s arm with the one from the burglar Larry shot last year.
Some uniformed officers come in and take Larry away. Lt. Antonelli then tells Jessica that was pretty slick and asks her how she knew that Larry used the same gun as on the burglar. Jessica replies that she doesn’t, but once he makes the comparisons they’ll know for sure. Antonelli then tells Jessica that the bullet from the burglary would have been thrown away months ago. Jessica replies that in that case, since Larry Holleran doesn’t know that, she suggests that he get Larry to confess as quickly as possible.
And on that, we freeze frame and go to credits.
This was something of a mixed episode. On the one hand, the setting—a daytime soap opera—is fun. On the other hand, a lot of things don’t make much sense in this episode. For example, why is Nita an actress if she needs steady income to support her grandmother? Acting is incredibly unreliable as a means of supporting dependents. And why doesn’t she know this? And what on earth is the family tree here? Why do we have no idea what Jessica’s relationship to Agnes is? Why do we have no idea why Nita has a South-African accent? All of this is left dangling and makes things a little confusing. To tell the truth, I’m not even sure why Agnes is in the story at all. The actress is fun, but it’s not a big part and doesn’t really add much to the story.
There are some other significantly loose ends, too. For example, why on earth are Joyce and Larry married when Joyce doesn’t even seem to like Larry? Why is Bibi with Larry? How does she even know him? Sure, the husband of a new show runner might visit the set once or twice, but that won’t give much of an opportunity for kindling a romance and besides, what’s Bibi’s motivation? Sleeping with your boss’s husband isn’t a way to help your career, so are we to assume that Bibi and Larry just have an amazing emotional connection? Is he supposed to be irresistibly attractive? But if so, why does no other woman act like he’s attractive?
The character of Julian is a bit weird, too. Most of the time he seems so addlepated that he almost feels senile. (The actor, Llyod Nolan, was 83 at the time of filming and actually died a few weeks before this episode aired, so it’s not clear how much of this was acting.) But he also seems to have executed some relatively complex plans. He stole Joyce’s keys and returned them without being noticed, and he also managed to get into the locked gun closet. Also, he stole and returned the Avengers costume without being noticed. This seems a bit complex for a guy who often barely knows where he is.
And then there’s the issue of how both Julian and Nita know Joyce’s home address. It wouldn’t be impossible to find it out, but it would certainly take some work and is the kind of thing that really needs an explanation. Especially for Nita, who would have had no reason to find it out.
Another open question is how on earth Larry got the tape of the cast discussing the need to eliminate Gordon since he’s no better than Joyce. It’s a bit weird that the cast had a meeting to discuss Gordon since they didn’t seem to generally talk with each other, and it’s even weirder that it happened in a way where Larry was able to record it with decent sound quality for all of the people speaking. Also, why did he do this? Why did he shoot Gordon? Was that merely as mis-direction? And why shoot Gordon in the arm rather than the heart? And why did he keep the murder weapon when it would link him to the crime?
Also, the timing of the events of the murder is a bit weird. It’s natural enough that Larry would notice Julian coming into his apartment dressed as the Pittsfield avenger right after he left Joyce’s room, but how did he even come close to having an alibi with Bibi? There’s no way she would have thought he was with her before Joyce was killed. I suppose she might not have cared—giving him an alibi also gave her an alibi—but this really should have been dealt with. And waiting for someone to meet you at a particular time is the kind of thing where you tend to check your watch. On the other hand, why was Bibi waiting for him? Moments before Julian came in Larry was trying to seduce Joyce. What was he planning to do if he succeeded? Or did he know he would fail and he just thought it was good to keep up appearances? But Joyce didn’t believe him so what did that matter?
Also, why did Bibi go home at 3am? At that point, it would have been way more convenient to just sleep in Larry’s friend’s apartment, and it’s not like the friend was coming back and they needed to vacate it in time. And where did Larry go? Did he in fact go to a hotel at 3 in the morning? If so, why? In theory, he didn’t know Joyce was dead so wouldn’t going home have been the natural thing to do?
Also, when did Larry decide to kill Joyce? Right up until Joyce happened to tell Gordon that Nita tried to kill her, nothing about what happened made Larry any less likely to get caught. The Pittsfield Avenger was only a mildly conspicuous character and at this time of night, the odds of him being noticed sufficiently close to the apartment building downstairs weren’t very high. Without that, there was no physical evidence of the Pittsfield Avenger having shown up, in which case all the police would have to go on is the wife being shot with the same caliber bullet as the gun the husband owns and the husband having no alibi. It’s not like Larry could have told the police the Pittsfield Avenger came into their apartment and shot Joyce with a blank.
Incidentally, why did Joyce collapse from being shot with a blank? I would imagine thinking you’re getting shot is traumatic, but what would be the mechanism of collapsing unconscious? It’s hard to imagine that the illusion of having been shot would last more than a second or so. Instead of fainting, wouldn’t the normal reaction be to indignantly ask if this is some kind of sick joke?
Also, what was up with the weird note to the police made from cut-and-paste latters? Who sent that? The obvious person would be Julian, since he was the only person with a motive (other than Jessica). But it’s a bit weird that nothing came of it and it was only mentioned again once, in an off-hand way with no significance.
Curiously, the most glaring plot hole turned out to not be one: the teleprompted confession of Julian. It was very strange, watching the various people around the studio reacting as if Julian was actually confessing. And then Jessica asking Julian about how he got into Joyce’s apartment as if he had actually just confessed when clearly he hadn’t—his asking Gordon how his delivery was and saying he could do it better made it clear he thought of it as reading lines. But this does bring up the question of why, when Jessica asked him how he got into Joyce’s apartment, Julian confessed to what he thought was the murder at that point. Was he doing it to protect Nita? But why decide that in this moment rather than before (or after)?
Whatever the answer to that question, when Jessica revealed that Julian didn’t actually kill Joyce, it did make her part make more sense (she was only pretending that she thought it was a confession). Though, now that I say that, what was the point of the charade? Normally, this kind of charade is there to trick the real murderer into confessing. In this case, all it did was trick the real murderer into being accused and still denying it. Jessica could have done that anywhere, at any time.
And now that I say that, it occurs to me to ask why Larry Holleran was there at all. This was, so far as most people knew, a taping of an ordinary episode. Larry had no connection to the show whatever, now. So why was he there?
To be clear, it’s not that I expect the writers to completely rewrite the scene to be someplace else it makes more sense for Larry to be. What I expect is some kind of explanation given for why he’s there. It would only take a sentence. Something about him being there because this is Joyce’s last script and they want him to see it for her. It doesn’t need to be super-plausible, since they would be setting him up, it would just need to be awkward for him to say no to.
Also, the thing with Julian “confessing” really should have tied into Larry making some kind of slip-up. That’s the whole point of deliberately accusing the wrong person, after all—to trap them by making them so eager to blame the wrong person that they reveal something they shouldn’t. It serves no purpose to go through with it then say “nevermind” and proceed as if nothing had happened.
Well, that’s the plot. When it comes to characters, this episode is also a very mixed bag. On the one hand, it had some very vivid characters. Bibi Hartman and Bert Upton particularly come to mind. Carol the new writer was another stand-out character. This was more in moments and in no small part up to the actors, so it may not have come through in my summary, but they were interesting.
The problem was that none of the characters had a motive for anything that they did. Though I need to clarify that, since I mean it in the literary, rather than the detective, sense.
The detective sense of “motive” is an answer to “cui bono” (who benefits?). Plenty of people in this episode acted according to their rational self-interest in this episode, and so had motives in the dective sense.
The literary sense of “motive” is related, but focuses primarily on the goals of the character. Real life is indescribably complex; in every moment there are many things a person might be doing and in choosing one they are rejecting all of the others. Thus the goods which might be achieved by the other actions are being sacrificed to the good which may be achieved by the action actually chosen. This is part of the meaning of “you have to serve somebody.”
To do anything is to trade almost limitless potential for very limited actuality, and this choice intrinsically elevates the actuality chosen against the potentiality which has been left unchosen. If you spend an hour learning French, you are giving up spending that hour learning Latin, Greek, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, or how to do an around-the-world loop with a yoyo. Every action may or may not achieve its goal, but it certainly does not achieve most possible goals. Every action is, whatever else it may be, an act of sacrifice. And every act of sacrifice enshrines a hierarchy of values. To learn the word for “teapot” in Russian is to declare to the world that, in this moment, it is better for you to learn the word “чайник” than to learn the words “茶壶”, “τσαγιέρα”, “주전자”, or “théière”. Also that you learning the word “чайник” in this moment is more important than having lunch, knitting a sweater, riding a motorcycle, or teaching your prize-winning flea to jump through a tiny hoop.
So, for any human being, to understand what they’re doing, one must know the answer to the question: what do they want? What they want does not merely explain what they do, but also—and sometimes more importantly—what they don’t do. Not just why did they do this, but why did they give that up?
This is the literary sense of motive, and this is what none of the characters had.
Oh well. Next week we’re in a university in Vermont in School for Scandal.
Agatha Christie is widely—and justly—regarded as a master of plotting mysteries. She does not, perhaps, get as much credit as she deserves for her characters—she was, without question, a master of characters, too. But, be that as it may, as I re-read her first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, it is the issue of plot which really occupies my attention. Specifically, that unlike her later novels, this one has several plot holes. (note: spoilers ahead.)
The biggest plot hole, that I simply can’t figure out how to explain, is why Alfred Inglethorp decided that he had to hide his letter in the spills before escaping through Cynthia’s room. That would make a certain amount of sense if he had no chance of escape and thought himself certain to be searched when he was found in the room, but he was not certain to be caught—as evidenced by the fact that not only was he not caught, it did not involve any luck that he was not caught. It would have made vastly more sense, and been far more natural, for him to simply take the letter and leave. Hurriedly ripping it up and hiding it amongst the spills took precious seconds, and I have no idea why he thought that time was worth it. On any rational (or even irrational) calculation, it made him more likely to be caught, not less.
Further, I also can’t imagine how he would have gotten enough warning of Poirot, Hastings, John Cavendish, and the lawyer coming to the room in order to decide to quickly rip up the letter and place it in the spills. Unless they were shouting and stamping their feet, they’d have had to have been fairly close to be audible, and it just doesn’t take much time to walk down a hallway.
I suspect that this reflects that Agatha Christie was in her late teens when she wrote this—a teenager has less life experience of what is plausible.
I also suspect that it may reflect her familiarity with detective fiction prior to her own influence on it. From what I can tell from the reasonably large amount of detective fiction I’ve read which was published between the start of Sherlock Holmes in 1888 and The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, strict plausibility was not a requirement of the genre1. The common goal seems to have been something more like a logical connection between the evidence and the conclusion. Thus “he hid the letter in the spills” was evaluated on the basis of the evidence:
someone had been in the room and forced the despatch case
that person couldn’t have had much time
it would have been bad if he had been caught with the letter
spills are used to move fire around, so their use destroys them
no one ever looks at spills because they were already deemed useless
the spills were disturbed
Considered in that light, I have to admit that the conclusion that the murderer hid the incriminating letter among the spills is clever.
I still maintain that it’s a plot hole. But it is a very clever plot hole.
Even after it became a requirement of the genre, it was an ideal that was rarely achieved. There are a few authors—not my favorite—who even seemed to think it a custom more honored in the breech than the observance. ↩︎
Authenticity is all the rage these days, at least on the internet, but while most people have at least a reasonable grasp on what inauthenticity is, I think that the concept of authenticity is often misunderstood. The most common way I see people misunderstand authenticity is by taking it to be the simple opposite of inauthenticity. This has the same problem of trying to figure out what real money is by assuming it’s the opposite of monopoly money.
Since most inauthenticity, at least on the internet, involves acting in a manner to try to please another person in order to achieve a result, the erroneous conclusion I often see is that authenticity must involve not caring what people think, and therefore putting no thought into how one’s words will be taken by others.
This is, of course, often tempered by practicality since being “authentic” by not giving any thought to how one’s words will be perceived borders on sociopathy and is too self-destructive to last, even if someone is more committed to this version of authenticity than they are to self-preservation.
But, as I said, this is going about things all wrong. Rather than asking what inauthenticity isn’t, one should ask what authenticity is. And surely authenticity must be acting with all of the parts of oneself in total harmony. Since human beings are rational creatures, this must involve the use of reason. Since human beings are relational creatures, this must involve the use of reason to consider how one’s words will be understood. What makes this authentic is what one does with the conclusions of that rational thought. And here, I think a line from Pride & Prejudice will illustrate what I mean very well. After Mr. Collins told Elizabeth how great Lady Catherine De Bourg was and how fortunate he was to be connected with her, the narrator says:
Words were insufficient for the elevation of his feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.
That, I think, is the key to authenticity—to unite civility and truth.
Another way to look at this is via a quote I saw many years ago, and have never been able to trace the source of (or even to find again):
A polite man never offends without intending to. A nice man never intends to offend.
The polite man, in this quote, is actually much closer to authenticity. There is something wrong with a man who never intends to offend anyone—no one is so fortunate as to always be among people who are always perfect, and so a man who never intends to offend anyone must necessarily lack a backbone. Rarely? Sure, that’s often the right balance. But never? There’s something wrong with that man. Just ask yourself, what would Jesus do?
At a technical level, the difference is really about what effect in others one is concerned with. It is very much a thing one should care about that one’s words are understood correctly. The thing one should not be so concerned with is what effect will happen after one’s words are correctly understood. In authenticity is generally attempting to control the effect, and so does not concern itself nearly so much with being understood correctly. Inauthenticity is concerned with civility, but not with truth. It does not follow that authenticity is concerned with truth but not with civility; rather, authenticity is trying to unite them. Authenticity is just willing to deal with the consequences if civility united with truth still offends.
On the seventh day of January in the year of our Lord 1990, the twelfth episode of the sixth season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Good-Bye, Charlie, it is Jessica telling us the plot of her latest book. And, oh my, is it bad. It’s so bad. It’s how-is-she-a-famous-author bad.
I’ll get to the beginning of the novel in a moment, but first I just want to mention the framing story:
Well, it’s not really a story. It’s Jessica just talking directly to us, the audience. She begins with, “Oh, hello,” after looking up from her typewriter. The basic idea is that the TV is actually a magic portal into Jessica’s house, because that’s the only thing that would explain her being surprised by its appearance. There’s no possible way to be surprised by a TV camera—they’re enormous things, and the various lights to get professional lighting can’t be snuck in either. For reference, here’s a TV camera from another episode:
Can you imagine that thing being wheeled in by a crew so discreetly Jessica don’t notice it until she looked up? Neither can I. Which makes me wonder why she’s not surprised by the magic portal that just appeared in her kitchen. Does it follow her around in the regular episodes, too, and she just pretends that it’s not there?
Anyway, Jessica tells us that every novel is an adventure and when she begins she has no idea what it will be like. Some are pure agony. Others just flow from the typewriter like sap from a maple tree. (Which is an odd metaphor because it would mean very slowly, only in early spring, and still mostly water that needs to be boiled down considerably before it can be sold.) That’s how it was with Goodbye, Charlie. She wishes that they were all this much fun to write.
This is an interesting setup because it offers the viewer a bit of a taste of what it’s like to write a novel without any of the work. It is, certainly, true that novels can be fun to write, but the odd thing here is that it’s a really bad novel (just trust me on this part right now—it will become obvious soon enough). In fact, it feels a bit like a lesser NaNoWriMo novel—if you’re not familiar, National Novel Writing Month is where one writes a 50,000 word novel in a month, and the (for most) break-neck speed means that one pushes on no matter how bad it is at the moment in order to get a first draft done by the end of the month. (The month is November, by the way.) While it’s a bad way to get a finished draft, it’s actually a really good writing exercise that I highly recommend for people who find writing a novel alluring but intimidating, and have no objection to hard work. I also recommend the book No Plot, No Problem by Chris Baty as an introduction to it. But while NaNoWriMo is a great way to write a first draft, especially when you don’t have the discipline to write a first draft without community support, it’s a horrible way to write a finished novel. And Goodbye, Charlie is supposed to be a finished novel.
Anyway, back to the novel: it begins with an establishing shot of the Hollywood sign…
…and then it pans down to the car in the title screen driving along, as an instrumental version of the song Hooray for Hollywood plays in the background. But I’d like to pause a moment on that song. It comes from a 1937 movie called Hollywood Hotel.
It’s a comedy about a musician who goes to Hollywood and falls in love with a woman who doubles as a famous actress, and the various strange things that happen as he ends up doing the singing for the actress’s boyfriend and eventually gets recognized in his own right. I don’t know that anyone actually cares about the movie, but the song has had tremendous sticking power. It’s mostly played as an instrumental, but the lyrics are a lot of fun:
Hooray for Hollywood That screwy ballyhooey Hollywood Where any office boy or young mechanic Can be a panic With just a good looking pan And any barmaid Can be a star maid If she dances with or without a fan
Hooray for Hollywood Where you’re terrific if you’re even good Where anyone at all from Shirley Temple To Aimee Semple Is equally understood Go out and try your luck You might be Donald Duck Hooray for Hollywood
Hooray for Hollywood That phoney super-Coney Hollywood They come from Chillicothes and Paducas With their bazookas To get their names up in lights All armed with photos From local rotos With their hair in ribbon and legs in tights
Hooray for Hollywood You may be homely in your neighborhood But if you think that you can be an actor See Mr. Factor He’ll make a monkey look good Within a half an hour You’ll look like Tyrone Power Hooray for Hollywood
The lyrics did a good job of capturing the insanity of the movie business; I would not be surprised if this is part of why the song caught on.
What I’m not sure of is why it’s in this episode. The episode does, technically, begin in Hollywood, but it quickly moves to a small town in Nevada and nothing in the episode has anything to do with show business. The main character is an incompetent private detective.
How incompetent is he?
When he photographs the husband of his client cheating, he runs up to the man and his mistress and takes the photo from eight feet away…
… and then stands there while the much older man walks over, beats him up, and takes the camera.
He then goes back to his apartment with a torn shirt and bloody lip, where he finds his wife talking with a lawyer:
The lawyer is there to find out about the private detective’s uncle, Charlie, but the detective (I’m going to call him Bill after the actor, Bill Maher, even though the character does technically have a name) hears some cheesy dialog meant to sound like the lawyer and Bill’s wife are having sex. It’s not convincing; it doesn’t even really plausibly sound like they’re having sex. Really, it’s just a dumb joke but for some reason Bill calls out like he might be interrupting something inappropriate.
Sunny (Bill’s wife) cheerfully tells him to come into their room and explains she was showing the lawyer some of their memorabilia of his uncle Charlie. The lawyer then explains that an old girlfriend of Uncle Charlie’s left him her entire fortune, which is considerable. As an executor of the will, he’s trying to locate Charlie.
Unfortunately, Bill has no idea where he was. About five years ago, Uncle Charlie dropped in for a weekend and stayed for three years, without contributing anything to the household budget. About two years ago Bill gave Uncle Charlie $100 and put him on a bus to Nevada and hasn’t heard from him since. They got a couple of Christmas cards from him, the last one with a return address in Reno, but when Sunny sent him a card it came back with “Not Known At This Address”.
When Bill says that for all they know Uncle Charlie is dead by now the lawyer replies that it’s a pity that he can’t prove it, since as Charlie’s only living relative he’d inherit the fortune. On that, he leaves and Bill starts laughing. Sunny asks him why he’s laughing and we go back to Jessica, who explains the joke: for three years they supported Uncle Charlie and now he’s rich and they’re facing repossession and eviction.
Perhaps “explains,” was a bit strong. Jessica said some words which were, if looked at in the right way, related to what we just saw.
Anyway, Jessica also tells us that Bill’s client didn’t fire him, so we cut back to Bill sitting in his car, staking out the same motel, when he notices something in his newspaper:
Then Bill got an idea. An awful idea. Bill got a wonderful, awful idea.
He also gets spotted by the person he’s supposed to be following, and as the guy is about to beat him up again, blinds him with a flash photograph and drives off.
Now, the thing is, you don’t get the full picture (no pun intended) of how stupid this is without seeing the frame immediately before this:
There are, of course, less appropriate cameras he could have brought to this stakeout. He could have used one of those old-timey cameras where the photographer put a cloth over his head and manually ignited flash powder, for example. Or a pinhole camera made from a shoebox. Or he could have forgone the camera entirely and brought along a sketch pad.
But short of something like that, this is about the least appropriate camera to bring to a stakeout during the day one could imagine. It has a tiny lens for taking wide-angle shots and an absolutely enormous flash with a parabolic collector dish to focus the light onto a subject. At the time, he’d have been able to buy a used camera with a used telephoto lens for under $200 ($492 in 2025 dollars). That’s significantly less than the fees he’d have paid to become a private investigator, and a camera with a good telephoto lens is the primary tool of his trade.
However, you still don’t get just how stupid this is until you look at the frame immediately after the one with the flash, which shows the picture he took:
He didn’t even get the woman in frame.
Bill then drives off, tires squealing, and the scene shifts to him showing his wife the newspaper article about the unclaimed body. The body was found in Huckabee, Nevada, which is about fifty miles east of Reno, where Uncle Charlie’s last Christmas card was from. Bill doesn’t think this actually was Uncle Charlie, of course, but since no one has come forward to claim the body, this is a great opportunity to claim it as Uncle Charlie, which would make Uncle Charlie legally dead, and then they can inherit the money which Uncle Charlie recently inherited. Sun (Bill’s wife) is reluctant, but Bill eventually talks her into it with some specious arguments about how this is somehow honoring the real Uncle Charlie, wherever he (presumably? maybe? technically it’s not impossible that he?) dropped dead.
In the framing story, back in the beginning, Jessica said, “Our hero… Well, now let me see, is Hero the right word? Maybe not. I promise you, he’s not very heroic.” She sure wasn’t kidding!
Truth to tell, I’m really not sure why we’re reading about Bill at all. So far, he has no redeeming characteristics that make him interesting, and the only way for him to not fail is by the author giving him plot armor. And he deserves to fail, so I resent Jessica giving him plot armor. It makes the story (even) less enjoyable.
There’s then a small fakeout where we think that Bill and Sun have gone to Huckabee, Nevada:
Except inside we meet this character (his name is Lon Ainsley; he’s the coroner’s assistant):
and hear the phone ring.
It turns out that Bill and Sun are taking turns making calls, pretending to be various people, to “try” to identify the body over the phone. In reality, they’re collecting information about it (height, weight, eye color, etc) with each wrong guess because the coroner’s assistant tells them what they got wrong on each attempt. This is the one (marginally) clever thing which happens in this episode.
After a bunch of physical characteristics about the body and a variety of regional accents from Bill and Sunny, we finally conclude with a description that was pretty accurate and when Bill asks Sunny how she got such a good description of the corpse, she replies, “I was describing Uncle Charlie.” And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1990, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back, we see Jessica at her typewriter again.
She explains that, having pumped the coroner’s office dry, Bill and Sunny head off to claim the corpse. Though with the ominous warning, in Jessica’s words, “unaware that they were about to lock horns with Huckabee’s unique version of law and order.” (The Sheriff’s name is Ed Ten Eyck, and in spite of this warning, he seems to be the best character in the episode.)
There’s some interesting banter where Bill has a crick in his back from having slept in the car because the motel was closed. The Sheriff laughs and says that ol’ Roscoe believes in “early to bed, early to rise” because anyone sneaking into town at night is up to no good. He’s clearly suspicious of them as he should be, because Bill is as believable as three-dollar bill.
He then tells them that their identification of the corpse was excellent. The Sheriff asks them why “he”Uncle Charlie” was near the train tracks in Huckabee and Bill spins a story about how Uncle Charlie became a hobo during the great depression and went back to his old way of life, but in his old age he couldn’t hop into freight trains as well as he could in his youth and it cost him his life.
The Sheriff asks some questions about why the guy who died didn’t have identification, or in fact anything at all in his pockets. “A man usually has something in his pockets.” He obviously doesn’t believe them, which shows good sense on his part since they’re obviously lying. Sunny seems uncomfortable but Bill just brazens it out, making him even more despicable.
When they try to get going, they find out that they’re not the first people to lay claim to John Doe. Nor the second, in fact. They’re the third.
The scene then shifts tot he Huckabee Motel:
We stay on this sign a while in order to facilitate a joke: Bill moans lines like “Oh! oh, Sunny, that is so good.” and “Oh, yeah, right there. Oh, don’t stop! Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.”
She is, of course, giving him a massage.
Which was a joke so obvious that it was actually a bit painful.
Anyway, Sunny suggests that they just go home but Bill is determined to see it through. His logic is that, since at least one of the other people who have identified the body must be wrong, the odds are that both of them are wrong. Or, rather, he says that they’re both lying—he doesn’t explain the stretch from wrong to lying. On the other hand, liars normally assume everyone else is lying, too, so this is at least realistic, even if it’s not very sensible.
Bill then goes to a bar to see a man whose name he read upside-down on the sheriff’s desk.
His name is Bart Mahoney and he’s a sleazy lawyer who’s representing one of the claimants—Marcia Mae. She’s the daughter of Ole Roper, who Bart identified the corpse as. Somehow he concludes that Bill—who identified himself as a private investigator—is working for the railroad and explains how he is intending to sue because a railroad crossing light was out. For no discernible reason Bill plays along and claims that there was a bell as well as the light, but Bart counters that Roper was deaf from an old rodeo injury.
I really have no idea why any of this is happening. It’s not meant to be funny, but it’s also not useful information since we know that the corpse is almost certainly not, in fact, Ole Roper. And if it was Ole Roper, this would be pointlessly sleazy behavior on Bill’s part.
Back at the hotel, Bill tries to whine about Bart Mahoney but Sunny tells him that he needs a “nap” and starts kissing him. Just as she pulls him down on top of her, the phone rings and for some reason Bill picks it up. It’s the Sheriff. Bart called him—we’re not told why on earth he Bart called him—and the Sheriff, who doesn’t seem all that happy with Bill, wants him to come down to his office in 10 minutes because, “I want you to meet a little lady that might be a kin of yours.”
The potential “kin” is Tilly Bascomb:
Tilly identified the corpse as her husband Mort. Which, if these are the same person, would make her Bill’s Aunt Tilly. Which I don’t think has the slightest bit of plausibility, but then I don’t think the Sheriff believes any of the claimants to the corpse and is a wee bit annoyed that everyone is lying to him.
In fact, this reminds me of the refrain in the theme song of much later (comedic) detective TV show called Psych, in which a detective who is very good at observation and deduction pretends to be a psychic to get the police to take him seriously (he named his pyschic consulting business, whose services the police sometimes employ, Psych):
I know, you know, that I’m not telling the truth. I know, you know, they just don’t have any proof.
The Sheriff then asks them to pull out photos of their respective loved ones, which they then compare. First we see Tilly’s husband Mort…
…who looks way too old to be Tilly’s husband.
Then we see Uncle Charlie…
…from thirty years ago, and blurry.
I’ve got no idea what the point of this comparison was.
They then bicker for a while until Tilly suggests that her husband would have had his wallet while going on a midnight walk to deal with his insomnia and perhaps the train knocked the wallet out of his pocket. Bill then suggests that they comb the area to see if they can find the wallet and the Sheriff then says his Deputy already has and didn’t find anything. He can’t spare the manpower to search again.
Bill then asks if Huckabee has a “pony league baseball team” and suggests employing them to do the search.
(“Pony League” is a youth baseball and softball league—PONY is actually an acronym which stands for Protect Our Nation’s Youth. They cover ages 4 through 23 in 2-year age brackets.)
The Sheriff seems to like this suggestion and says that he’ll have the kids turn out and sunup.
Bill and Sunny then go at night and plant a bunch of Uncle Charlie’s stuff along the railroad tracks. This is so stupid and obvious that I’m surprised that the Sheriff didn’t turn up to catch them. I blame Jessica for that not happening.
Anyway, we then fade to black and go to commercial.
When we get back, Jessica is fixing something she typed with her pencil.
Jessica’s description of where we are in the plot is:
Well, having salted the railroad tracks with Uncle Charlie’s last few remaining possessions, Frank approached the following morning’s search with ill-concealed enthusiasm. His joy was short-lived. The Huckabee Hornets had problems hitting the curve ball and the fastball, and they weren’t all that good at judging pop-ups. They were definitely not very good at finding the obvious.
Here, by the way, is them searching next to the railroad tracks:
Shortly after this, some guy who is very familiar with Tilly drives up and tries to convince her to go home.
Bill asks the Sheriff who he is and the Sheriff identifies him as her cousin, Jerry Wilbur. He works for her husband’s microchip company.
After a shot of the sun to establish the passage of time and the heat of Nevada, the lawer, Bart Mahoney drives up and objects to the search. His client then gets out of the car. We start with her feet as some sexy saxophone music plays, then the camera slowly pans up her legs:
I’d love to know how Jessica described this in her book.
Slowly, a woman’s legs come out of the car. They’re not wearing much besides four inch stiletto heels in blue velvet and bobby socks. A few feet up from the bobby socks is a tall drink of whiskey in a short skirt.
That’s about the only thing that would match the saxophone music and slow camera work.
However Jessica described it, the camera eventually gets to her face and we finally meet little Marcia Mae.
Sure, why not.
And then the young baseball players finally find something. Or, rather, several things all at once.
Back at the Sheriff’s office the Sheriff examines the stuff with Uncle Charlie’s initials. Also the dog tags with his name on them.
The Sheriff then examines the stuff in his own pockets, details each item to Bill and Sunny, and explains, “I was just wondering how many things I had in my pockets with my initials on them. The answer is none.”
After pointing out again that it’s funny that his deputies didn’t find any of this stuff when they looked, he shakes his head and tells them to go to Jack Yomoto, the coroner, to claim the body. Which they do.
I do enjoy the magazine which Sunny glanced at while waiting as Bill signed some paperwork:
I think that my favorite is “angosteric myanthesis.” It sounds convincingly like real medical words. (It’s completely fake, there’s no such thing as “angosteric myanthesis.”)
On their way out, the death certificate in hand, they run into the Sheriff. He got a call from the Sheriff in a neighboring town who brought in a vagrant the night before. It seems that the vagrant had found an expensive-looking wallet with $200 in it. He says he found it hear the railroad track near Huckabee right after the accident. The driver’s license inside was for Mort Bascomb.
The Sheriff then arrests Bill. (I cheered.)
In the cell in the Sheriff’s office, Bill meets a man who’s stuffing paper into a new pair of white shoes:
The man’s name is Clarence, and you can tell from the way he speaks he’s not quite all there in the head, if you know what I mean.
The stuffing paper into his shoes makes Bill think about the body and he gets an idea, which he excitedly tells the Sheriff. Bill’s idea is that had the corpse been knocked out of his shoes, they’d have been 100 yards down the track, not laying beside him. Presumably, the shoes were left next to him to make it look like he was walking down the track and weren’t put on the body because they didn’t fit. (He is guessing that the man was killed elsewhere and placed on the track shortly before the train came, which was when the killer noticed that the victim was in bare feet and so tried to put his own shoes on the victim.)
The Sheriff considers this plausible enough to try, so he goes to the morgue, where they try the shoes on the corpse.
Yamoto says, “He’s right. The shoe’s too small. It was murder.”
And on that bombshell, we go to commercial.
When we get back, Bill has been released from jail for some reason and is interviewing the bartender in the bar where he (Bill) first met Bart Mahoney. It turns out that tending bar is not the only thing that the bartender does. He also owns himself a little grocery store, and Marcia Mae does herself all her shopping there.
And it turns out that Marcia Mae always bought Mexican beer and chewing tobacco for her daddy, in addition to the food she would buy for them, and just yesterday she came in and bought just as much as ever. (Strongly suggesting that Roper is as alive as he always was.)
Bill takes this information to the Sheriff (along with an over-sized receipt from the grocery store for what Marcia Mae bought that includes her charge number, signature, and probably a notarized sworn statement from a dozen witnesses). The Sheriff points out that if he finds Ole Roper Bailey in little Marcia Mae’s attic, it means she had no reason to kill John Doe. Bill agrees and says that it leaves the widow Bascomb.
Bill suggests that Tilly and her husband weren’t getting along and she would lose too much in a divorce settlement, so she and her cousin may have done him in. The Sheriff thinks this is sufficiently plausible that he goes to see Tilly at her house, along with his two deputies, and Bill and Sunny for some reason that is never explained, probably because it couldn’t possibly be explained, just like why Bill isn’t still in jail because falsifying evidence to support a fraudulent claim to a corpse doesn’t cease to be a crime just because the corpse became a corpse by murder rather than accidentally death.
Anyway, they all bust into Tilly’s bedroom.
When she orders the sheriff to leave her bedroom, she wakes her cousin, who was sleeping beside her.
When the Sheriff asks them whose idea murdering Tilly’s husband was, the cousin shakes his head and says, “I told you we wouldn’t get away with this! Didn’t I tell you that?”
Unfortunately for the investigation of John Doe, it turns out that they buried Mort in the back yard.
Back at the Sheriff’s office, the Sheriff tells Bill that Bill is the only claimant left and he’s sick and tired of John Doe, so if Bill wants him, he can have him. He’s still got strong doubts that it’s actually their uncle Charlie, but they did give the best description and it will save the county the expense of a burial.
Bill, ever the man of principle, immediately accepts.
The Sheriff adds that he suggests a brief ceremony and a quick departure, and that they should be sure to shut the door on their way out.
Back at their apartment, they of course run into their Uncle Charlie, who already found out about his inheritance and is now wearing fancy clothes and is in the company of a fluzie.
Her name is Doreen and she’s actually his wife.
We then go back to Jessica for an epilogue, since the mystery of who John Doe actually was is still completely unresolved.
Jessica explains that, three days later, an ad appeared in local newspapers all over the country. It was offering a reward of $100,000:
…for information regarding the whereabouts of Jason T. Rucker, President of Santa Carmela Savings and Loan, who disappeared on June 4th, one day prior to a scheduled audit by state banking officials. Rucker was 66 years old, grey haired, heavyset, about 5’10”, last seen wearing a brown windbreaker, tan slacks, and white oxford shoes. Also wanted for questioning is the man Rucker was last seen with, identified as a freight-train hopping hobo named Clarence Dobkin.
The Sheriff (who read this aloud for us) then sits back in his chair, laughs, and we go to credits.
Well… that sure was an episode.
It is really hard to believe that Jessica is a famous author if this is the kind of book she writes. Murder in a Minor Key was bad enough, but at least it was a murder mystery and had a few likable characters. This had no likable characters and wasn’t even a murder mystery!
The problems start from the very beginning. Jessica tells us that the novel is set in Hollywood, but it isn’t. It’s actually set in Huckabee, Nevada. We get a bunch of setup of Hollywood for no reason.
The worst has got to be Bill Mahr’s character, though. This is just an awful character. He’s dishonest, incompetent, unlikable, and not bright. The one moment of insight that he has is way too late and also mostly wrong. Jessica is even upfront that he’s not a hero. But he’s not an anti-hero, either. He’s just a schmuck who we’re following for no discernible reason. Why on earth are we supposed to care about the stupid scam that a stupid man is pulling incompetently and without anything amusing like extreme luck?
I will get into specifics soon, but the biggest problem is that there’s absolutely nothing good about this story. There’s no reason to sit through any of the bad parts. So the rest is kind of academic. But, I’m going to go through it anyway, because somehow this was actually made into a TV episode and shown to millions of people, and to my knowledge no one resigned in shame or ritually disemboweled themselves to apologize for it.
If I really had to guess, this premise is supposed to be funny. But the problem is that watching an idiot be an idiot isn’t funny. Worse, there are only stakes in the episode if we care about the idiot succeeding at his immoral quest for money because he’s worse at his job than he has any right to be. This means that we’re supposed to be rooting for an unsatisfying ending—because a satisfying ending would involve the main character getting what he deserves, which in this case means the idiot suffering for his idiocy.
It’s actually quite hard to analyze the plot of this episode because it’s really just a series of events. It’s reminds me a lot of the famous talk on plotting by Trey Parker and Matt Stone:
The tl;dw is that if you write out the beats of your story, the connecting words should be either “therefore” or “but”, never “and then”. In this episode, the connecting words were usually, “and then”.
Bill Mahr is incompetent at his job, and then a lawyer walks in and says he will inherit money if his uncle Charlie is dead. And then Bill spots a news article about an unclaimed corpse. And then he decided to pretend it’s his uncle Charlie. And then he calls the coroner a hundred times and gets a good description of the body. And then they go to claim the body. But there are other claimants. And then Bill goes and talks to one of them. And then the Sheriff introduces Bill to another. And then Bill decides to plant evidence that it was his uncle Charlie, therefore he proposes having the pony league baseball team search for the clues he will plant. And then they find the clues and then Bill gets the corpse and then a wallet is found and then Bill is arrested and then Bill gets an idea about shoes, therefore they test the idea and it turns out the shoes don’t fit and then Bill is let out of jail for some reason and then Bill is told that Roper Bailey isn’t dead and then Bill suggests that maybe Tilly killed her husband and then the Sheriff and half the town barge into Tilly’s bedroom and then Tilly’s cousin is there and then Tilly’s cousin confesses to an unrelated murder and then they get the body and then Uncle charlie is still alive and then Jessica remembers that there was a mystery in the story therefore she tells us some story about a random guy we’ve never heard of who ran away from someplace we’ve never heard of for a reason completely unrelated to the story, and then it turns out that the shoes didn’t fit the dead guy because they actually belonged to a hobo who had stolen the dead man’s shoes after the train him him.
(And I think a few of those “therefores” were generous.)
Every mystery series will naturally have uneven quality—none of us are perfect, so we can’t always produce our best work—but this one is just outright baffling. It’s outright terrible. And it only has a murder in the most trivial sense—the murder and the solution are discovered in the same sentence.
I think I’d have preferred a clip-job episode.
And something I really can’t figure out is why the writers put the least work into the episodes which featured stories that Jessica supposedly wrote. I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for the characters in other episodes who tell Jessica that her books were bad. It turns out, those are the people with decent taste of a modicum of sound judgement.
This is particularly baffling because the format of Jessica telling us about her book would allow the writers to make her books seem way better than they actually were. This format would allow Jessica to give us a highlight reel, and to skip over difficult-to-write sections with a general description of them. Things like “a bit of smooth talking allowed him to find out that…” is so much easier to write than the actual smooth-talking. A bunch of pain-staking finding of clues that is not easy to make interesting on the page can be summarized with a list of the clues and a mention of how difficult it was to find them.
The general rule in fiction is “show, don’t tell” but the one major exception one gets to that, as a writer, is when people are giving summaries because there’s too much to tell. If you can say, as Inigo Montoya did, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up,” then you can get away with telling instead of showing, and the audience will be inclined to take you at your word. Then you just have to make damn sure that everything you do show is compatible with what you told, and the emotional impact will be similar. It can’t be the same, but it can be a heck of a lot more than you can achieve in a regular episode.
Telling an awful story, instead, is such a wasted opportunity.
Scooby-Doo is a devastating commentary on the prejudices of the Moderns. In their single-minded, one might almost say fanatical, desire to unmask all supernatural phenomena as the products of cranks and criminals, the Gang blinds all they encounter, and are indeed blinded themselves, to the supreme supernatural phenomenon which their enterprise – in point of fact, their collective ontology as such- is actually predicated upon: they are in the company of a talking dog.
This is both hilarious and true of moderns. The only thing is, it’s not actually true of Scooby Doo and the gang. At least in the original show—Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!—the gang always accepted the supernatural explanation at first, and only changed their mind once they were presented with evidence which made the supernatural explanation impossible, or at least highly improbable. “Wait a minute, what does a ghost need with…” was the response to more than a few clues.
The only real exceptions to this are the episodes in which the alleged phenomenon was entirely natural, such as the ape man in Never Ape an Ape Man or the beast in The Beast Is Awake In Bottomless Lake.
I’ve watched all of the episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! at least a half-dozen times in the last ten years with my children, and I must confess I’m not sure why people remember it as being out to inculcate naturalism or to debunk the super-natural. Yes, the explanations always turned out to be something that a detective could detect, but everyone in the episode always took it for granted that the explanation could have turned out to be a ghost, or a phantom, or a mummy, or a headless specter, or whatever the creature was. It just turned out to not be, this time. But the gang always took a very reasonable attitude—just because the last 23 ghosts turned out to be fake doesn’t mean that this one is fake. Every one of those ghosts was fake in a different way.
I can only think of one instance where anyone doubts the existence of ghosts, which is in Haunted House Hangup:
Shaggy, the nonmaterial embodiment, or essence or organism that’s seen as a specter, wraith, or apparition has been scientifically proven to be a sheer myth. In other words, ghosts don’t exist!
Of course, Shaggy immediately replies:
Yeah, but does the ghost know that?
And about two minutes later, Velma is running away with the rest of the gang from a ghostly floating candle and before the halfway point Velma exclaims, “Yikes! There is a headless specter!” before running away from it, too.
There’s an interesting book, published in 1930, called Masters of Mystery. An overview of detective fiction until that point, it made the interesting observation of Hercule Poirot:
Presumably for the benefit of the stupid Captain Hastings, Poirot talks in broken English—the broken English of the music-hall Frenchman… Moreover, should this music-hall Frenchman interpserse his lines with a few phrases of his own tongue, the supports of M. Hugo (the Correspondence King) expereince a superiority complex: while the embarrassed monoglots captivated by the flavour of the genuine are compelled in self-defense to join in the laugh… Poirot talks atrocious English: he cannot hold a candle to Hanaud. But it is comic: it does help the caricature. And as regards the [French phrases], Mrs. Christie has been wise enough not to expect more from her readers than a public-school smattering of the French idiom.
I’ve come to appreciate this more as I’ve been playing a mobile game, which has a built-in translator, with people from around the world. As I’ve begun picking up a few words of several different languages, I’ve come to appreciate that Poirot says in French only those words which are the first ones that anyone learns of another language if one is learning by exposure rather than in a classroom. “Hello,” “Good morning,” “thank you,” “my friend.”
It is ironic that the only things Poirot says in French are exactly the things that a French speaker would begin to say in English after two days of living in England. But there is an excellent reason for this irony: they are also exactly the things that the average Englishman has a hope of knowing in French, so that the lack of translation is not a problem for the reader.
You can contrast this with Dorothy L. Sayers who will have Lord Peter and Harriet Vane say entire sentences in French without translation, and most of us need to simply guess at the meaning, shrug our shoulders, and move on. (She’ll do the same with Latin, too.) The way that Poirot uses a few recognizable French words and a bit of French grammar or literally-translated idioms may be unrealistic, but it does a much better job, I think, of getting across how foreign he is while keeping him intelligible.
There is a popular view on the subject of trying to reduce the amount of fat on one’s body, which is that the first law of thermodynamics states that if you eat fewer Calories than you burn, you must lose weight. This is, of course, false, since the laws of thermodynamics have to do with energy, not with weight. What is true is that if you consume fewer Calories than you expend, the total energy in your body must go down. But the laws of physics say nothing whatever about where that reduction in energy will come from.
As far as the laws of physics are concerned, it’s entirely possible that the total energy reduction will come from your glycogen stores, your muscles, and your internal organs. Heck, as far as the laws of thermodynamics are concerned, you can actually increase your fat stores on a Calorie deficit, so long as the energy added to them comes from someplace else in your body. Indeed, I’ve read about some interesting experiments on hibernating ground squirrels where after surgically removing fat, the squirrels (who were eating nothing because they were hibernating) added to their now-depleted fat stores.
The problem, I think, is that the people who love to talk about Calories-in-Calories-out or the laws of thermodynamics have an extremely mechanical view of the human body—by which I mean they think of it as if it’s the kind of machine that human beings build. They think of fat stores like the gasoline tank in a car. When human beings build a machine, we tend to have only one place where energy comes from because that makes it much easier to build. Though even in truth, even our more complicated machines have multiple energy storage sites. The typical car has the mechanical system driven by the engine and also an electrical system driven by the car’s battery. And the two systems are linked because the battery is recharged (and the electrical system can be partially powered by) the alternator (a kind of generator) which is powered by the engine.
So to be more accurate, the people who talk about thermodynamics tend to talk about the human body as if it’s the kind of machine that they would design, if they knew enough about machines to design them. It never occurs to them that the human body can break down every part of itself and will if it deems it necessary. It also never occurs to them that it can significantly down-regulate its metabolism. It never occurs to them how many forms down-regulating the metabolism can take, from feeling colder at the same temperature to reducing the amount of exercise taken with a feeling of lethargy, to reducing immune function, to slowing down healing, and still other things.
It also, I think, never occurs to these people the degree to which the body will abandon almost everything in the pursuit of food if it feels that it’s starving, and that includes things like sleeping more than four hours a night and being able to carry on a modern job.
That all this never occurs to them makes it much easier, I think, to talk about the laws of thermodynamics in the context of reducing the amount of fat on the body.
Mobile games—the kind played primarily on phones, though also on tablets—have a very, very strange property that they allow an effectively unlimited amount of money to be spent on them, and a few people—perhaps one in 100—do spend extraordinary amounts of money on them. There are people who will spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on a mobile game.
To put this into perspective, until recently, the fanciest games with the best graphics and hundreds of hours of gameplay with stories and voice acting and so-on could be bought for a one-time price of around $70. Many feature free online play, but those that required monthly subscriptions (servers aren’t free to run) would cost $10-$20 per month. I said “until recently” because the big game studios are starting to notice the business model of mobile games and are trying to emulate it.
What is particularly strange about the “whale” phenomenon is that the things bought are generally small advantages in the game. This is why the whales spend so much money—to get a significant advantage, they need to spend extraordinary amounts of money in order for these small advantages to add up. To put it more bluntly, they’re paying substantial amounts of money for slightly bigger numbers in a database and in some cases slightly different artwork to show how upgraded an item is. To be fair, if their slightly bigger number is greater than that of someone who they fight, the game says that they win instead of the other guy winning.
I really don’t understand this phenomenon. I don’t mean that I’m critical of the whales. As C.S. Lewis said in a different context:
I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs.
But one thing I think worth talking about is that I suspect that the whale phenomenon is really an expression of (admittedly predatory) developers discovering a need that some people have. Or, more properly, a set of needs with a key characteristic in common. People do not accidentally spend a thousand dollars a month for many months in a row. Whatever exactly it’s doing for them, it’s clearly doing something quite significant, because these people are not all the wealthy children of billionaires. And where there is a need that people with money have, someone will eventually take their money in order to fulfill that need.
Which makes me wonder what they had been spending this money on before mobile games showed up.
First off, meta-analyses can be quite useful, but they have a tendency to sound far more authoritative than they actually are. They are only ever one particular way of looking at the published results that they are analyzing. For this reason, like most of science are far more useful in the positive than in the negative. (If you aren’t familiar: a meta-analysis is a paper that looks at multiple previously published papers and presents some kind of analysis of all of the data taken together.) To give a less-silly-than-it-should-be example which is extremely clear: if I do a meta-analysis on papers published about experiments that gave a test group and a control group vitamins for six months and then measured their wasteline, apply statistical methods to aggregate the results, and conclude “interventions were not shown to reduce hair loss” this would be technically true. The problem is that—if you understand what the meta-analysis is actually doing—it’s completely uninteresting.
The problem that we run into is that modern Science is all about reputation. It’s about publishing, and prestige, and citation counts—and also about funding, which is based on those things. These are the primary motivations for a great many people in science. Even for the people for whom they are not primary motivations, they’re concerns which no scientist can ignore and survive. The result is exactly what you would expect—there’s an enormous amount of what can probably best be called “salesmanship” in scientific papers.
A good example is the paper which motivated this post. If you look at the way they present the analysis, it sounds quite good:
Statin product labels (eg, Summaries of Product Characteristics [SmPCs]) list certain adverse outcomes as potential treatment-related effects based mainly on non-randomised and non-blinded studies, which might be subject to bias. We aimed to assess the evidence for such undesirable effects more reliably through a meta-analysis of individual participant data from large double-blind trials of statin therapy.
Sounds great. But what did they actually do?
Aye, there’s the rub.
The first and most obvious problem is that they took studies on five different drugs that are all in the class “statin” and then summed up all of their side-effects1. The problem is that, while different drugs in a class share at least one mechanism of action, they are still different drugs. They work differently in different people and have different side-effects. Aspirin works better for some people, ibuprofen (Motrin) for others and naproxen (Alleve) for still others. They all reduce pain and inflammation by being COX inhibitors and are, for that reason, classed as NSAIDs. But they’re not the same drug. In the same way, the five different statin drugs they looked at (atorvastatin, fluvastatin, pravastatin, rosuvastatin, and simvastatin) are not the same drug. You wouldn’t expect them to have the same side-effects. In fact, what is extremely common in drugs that are alternatives to each other is that each one has its own side-effects, and patients try them in turn to figure out which—if any—works for them with the least-bad side-effects. By design, this meta-analysis isn’t showing that there exists a statin that one can take without side-effects, it’s only showing, at best, that there is no particular side-effect that a person is guaranteed to get if they’re considering taking a drug from the entire class called “statins”. But you cannot take a generic class of drugs, you must take a particular drug. Just as you are a particular person in a particular place, not an abstraction of the platonic ideal of “a patient,” you must take an actual pill with an actual chemical in it, and cannot take the platonic ideal of “a statin.” And this problem is baked into the approach.
(Worse, the reason that it was baked into the approach is almost certainly that without doing this obviously invalid step, they wouldn’t have had the statistical power necessary to reach their conclusion. Whether they knew that or not, though, I have no guess.)
Which brings us to the main problem: their approach was to test all of of the possible side-effects ever reported anywhere as a group, using a statistical method meant to prevent people doing post-hoc subgroup analysis from finding spurious results. The statistical method (a modified Bonferroni correction called the Mehrotra and Adewale double false discovery rate (FDR) method) prevents “false discoveries” by raising the amount of evidence required to conclude something based on the total number of things being tested. This is important when you’re doing a single study because it’s very tempting to just measure everything you possibly can in the hopes that something will have a statistically significant correlation with what you were testing. If you measure 100 things at a 5% confidence level, you expect 5 statistically significant results by pure chance; corrections like the Bonferroni correction filter this kind of thing out so you can’t report statistically significant findings, only indicate possible directions for further research. (Every scientific paper says that more research is needed; of course, the dairy counsel wants you to drink more milk, too.)
The problem is that they are taking a method that tries to keep scientists honest by throwing out most of the conclusions that they wish that they could keep and using it to throw out all of the conclusions that they want to get rid of. Every scientist knows that Bonferroni corrections (and its relatives like the one used in this paper) punish, to varying degrees, including junk. They thus discourage the approach of “throw everything against the wall and see what sitcks.” This is good; we don’t want scientists generating meaningless results and we want to encourage them to be careful and only measure and report things that there’s a reason to.
But while this tradeoff makes sense—we punish the individual scientist who finds something useful they didn’t expect in order to keep all scientists honest—the incentives are exactly backwards when it comes to throwing out conclusions we don’t want to believe. I haven’t actually run the numbers, but if you throw out the fantastical p-values generated by the improper use of probability (Fisher’s exact test being applied to retrospective studies), it’s very likely that you could use this approach to conclude that the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer isn’t good enough. All you have to do is include enough other stuff and the statistical power in the controlled, prospective studies that clearly demonstrate smoking’s link to lung cancer wouldn’t meet the incredibly stringent threshold this method would set2.
As I said, I haven’t run the numbers, so that might not quite be true. But if it isn’t, it’s pretty close, and in any event it does serve to illustrate how the approach works. If we place lung cancer on an even footing with every other possible cancer and re-test all the clinical evidence as equal, this raises the bar that the evidence has to clear very considerably.
The only reason this is considered acceptable (by some) is that they like the conclusion.
Full disclaimer: adding the side-effect reports of all 5 drugs is only what they said they did in the methods section; I didn’t actually dig into the meat of the paper to confirm this; that said, they’d have had to report their findings very differently if it’s not what they did, so I strongly suspect that their methods section was accurate. ↩︎
The Mehrotra and Adewale double FDR method would require one to be a little more careful in exactly what was added in, since it does filter out adding in pure junk—variables which were known in the original experiment to be unrelated. So it would filter out, for example, adding in genetic diseases. This only means that a little care is required in selecting the data added to weaken the power of the evidence one wishes to deny. There are a lot of different kinds of cancer, and a lot of different possible infarctions, and perhaps smoking triggers one of the many kinds of autoimmune diseases… ↩︎
I recently came across something I had no idea existed: on what looks to be a Christmas episode of a variety show, Werner Klemperer and John Banner performed Silent Night. Or, since they’re singing it in the original German, perhaps I should say, Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.
For those who don’t know, Klemperer and Banner are best known for playing Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz on the TV show Hogan’s Heroes. (In real life Klemperer was a German Jew whose family left Germany in the 1930s and Banner was an Austrian Jew who left Austria and came to America when Germany annexed Austria.)
I knew that Werner Klemperer sang, but I didn’t know that John Banner did. Their voices work well together; Klemperer is a tenor while Banner seems to be a bass. It’s quite pretty.
(After this performance, Robert Clary, who played the French POW Louis LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes, sings a French Christmas Carol, which is interesting, though I don’t find it as interesting as the duet.)
I recently bought some archival-quality bookbinder’s glue (amazon link) and some navy blue polyester satin ribbon and started adding bookmark ribbons to some of my hardcover books that didn’t come with them. As the saying goes: it turns out that you can just do things.
It turned out to be quite easy to do. There was a slight learning curve, and I did make myself an applicator for the ribbon which is just a thin strip of cardboard (the thin kind from cereal boxes) wrapped in packing tape so glue won’t stick to it. This is useful for making sure that I only glue the ribbon to the spine of the book and not to the cover as well, so the two stay independent of each other.
The glue (from LINECO, who makes many kinds of archival-quality bookbinding supplies) is a PVA glue, like the Elmer’s glue used in kindergartens or the yellow wood glue used for woodworking. However, not all PVA glues are the same. This one is more viscous than most other PVA glues I’ve worked with. It has a much shorter working time and a much quicker holding time—a usefully fast holding time. In fact, for the ribbon on the second book I did (the larger, lighter blue one in the picture) instead of clamping it overnight I just pressed the ribbon against the spine for about thirty seconds then left it unstressed overnight and in the morning the bond was perfectly strong.
I’m currently looking at other books that I have which could use bookmark ribbons… this is really tremendous fun. For so long, only the fanciest books came with ribbons and for almost all of my books I had to use bookmarks that could fall out. No more!
On some level I know that it’s silly for me to be so excited about this, but I love physical books so much that I don’t care that it’s silly.
Now I just have to figure out how to attack ribbons to soft cover books…
I’m just putting this here so I can find it again, I don’t have anything to say on it yet, though it is quite interesting:
She nodded understanding, visibly bracing herself again towards a world of shrewd daily business which had not ceased with the ending of a life. “Be so kind as to tell him,” she said, “to continue trading for the three days of the fair, as though his master still presided. My uncle would scorn to go aside from his regular ways for any danger or loss, and so will I in his name.” And suddenly, as freely and as simply as a small child, she burst into tears at last.
When Hugh was gone about his business, and Constance had withdrawn at Aline’s nod, the two women sat quietly until Emma had ceased to weep, which she did as suddenly as she had begun. She wept, as some women have the gift of doing, without in the least defacing her own prettiness and without caring whether she did or no. Most lose the faculty, after the end of childhood. She dried her eyes, and looked up straightly at Aline, who was looking back at her just as steadily, with a serenity which offered comfort without pressing it.
This is from the end of the first chapter of The First Day of the Fair, from Saint Peter’s Fair, by Ellis Peters.
I’ve finally started reading Miguel de Cervantes’ famous novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. I’m reading it in translation because my Spanish is nowhere near up to the task, but from the little I was able to compare (reading the dictionary more than the Spanish version), the translation I got from Penguin Classics is very good. (Amazon link.) I’m only a few chapters in but there’s something very interesting right in the first few chapters. Though before getting into it, I want to mention that, at least so far, it is absolutely hilarious. The humor is just amazing. Cervantes really is a master.
In case, dear reader, you are like me some weeks ago and have read none of Don Quixote, I’ll just give an extremely brief summary of the plot so far: Alonso Quixano (Quixano is pronounced “key hano”) is a gentleman with a small farm who spends almost all of his money to buy books of chivalry and almost all of his time reading them. The books become his life to the point where he confuses them for reality. He then decides that he will live out the books for himself and become a knight errant, winning glory for himself and improving the world through his mighty deeds. He pulls out an antique suit of armor still in his family’s possession, renames himself to Don Quixote de La Mancha (La Mancha is the area where he lives), and sallies forth into the world riding his farm horse who he renamed Rocinante and who he has convinced himself is a mighty war-horse.
In his first real adventure (after he has been knighted by an inn-keeper) he comes across a farmer who is beating a boy who works for him. Don Quixote intervenes and the boy says that he is not so negligent as the farmer claims and that, moreover, the farmer owes him money. Don Quixote takes the side of the boy and demands of the farmer that he stop beating the boy and moreover that he pay the boy what he owes him. The farmer, intimidated by Don Quixote’s armor and lance, promises that he will. Don Quixote accepts this promise in spite of the boy’s protestations that the farmer will just go back to beating him as soon as Don Quixote is out of sight, assures the boy that everything will be fine, and rides off. As he rides off, Don Quixote thinks no more of the boy but only about the great deed which he just performed. And just as the boy predicted, as soon as Don Quixote was out of sight and earshot, the farmer goes back to beating the him.
Alonso Quixano’s goal of helping people is a noble one but his method is all too common among people who are trying to be good: they do easy things that they think should help rather than hard things that actually will help. What this amounts to is that they want to be good on their own terms. But being good is something that we cannot do on our own terms, because being good means conforming ourselves to reality.
Don Quixote takes this to an absurd extreme, of course, because this is a comedy, but it’s a thing that can be seen all the time in real life. For example: consider nagging. Nagging consists of asking a person to do something many times, the goal being that they will eventually do the thing out of irritation so that they will no longer have to suffer being asked. Of course, if the goal is only to achieve the result for one’s own sake, this may simply be a safer means than hitting the person until they do the thing desired, but no one considers this to be a good deed. The kind of nagging people consider to be a good deed is usually when the thing is to the other person’s benefit. And, again, if the only thing that’s required is that the person do something once, then nagging may possibly be a reasonably way to achieve it. If someone really needs to get around to repairing the leak in the gas pipe in their basement, almost any means of making them do it is probably justifiable. But very few things in life are like this; most things that a person needs to do that someone might nag them about are things they will need to do well, or else will need to do again in the future when the nagger isn’t around. Both of those require a person to see the good of what they’re doing and will to do that good. Nagging a person will not encourage them to do that; if anything, it tends to discourage it since their attention is focused on eliminating the irritation. Nagging, in this case, is a way for a person to feel like they’re making the world a better place while actually making the world a worse place.
It’s not hard to find other examples of this kind of thing. Consider people who give unsolicited advice. It’s very easy to tell someone what to do; the less you know of their circumstances the easier it is. It’s also the case that the less you know of their circumstances, the less useful the advice will be (except by accident, of course). Giving them unsolicited advice can thus seem like doing a good deed, but it’s very unlikely to do any good. This is, incidentally, related to how it’s very unlikely to be taken; the person receiving the unsolicited advice is very likely to see the mismatch between the advice and their circumstances—the mismatch the person giving it hasn’t taken the trouble to find out about. For very little investment of effort and only a little investment of imagination, a person giving unsolicited advice can feel very virtuous while doing no one any good.
We’re each given a great deal of good to do in the world but we often find it unsatisfying because the good that we’re given to do is only a part of what produces a visible result. There’s a common expression when trying to help someone that perhaps one at least planted a seed, but “planting a seed” is, often, far closer to a visible effect that what we’re actually given to do. Sometimes we’re given to till the soil so that someone else will be able to plant the seed. Sometimes our job is to remove rocks so that someone else may till the soil so that a third person can plant the seed. Probably more often, what we’re given to do is to remove two or three of the rocks, and the rest are given to others to remove, so that, later, several people can each till part of the soil.
Doing only the part we’ve been given to do requires trusting God that once we’ve done what we can, that’s enough, for whatever the overarching purposes that we can’t even know, is. The common mistake, which Don Quixote so humorously exemplifies, is to not be content with trusting, and to try to pretend that we’ve actually been given the whole thing. To do the good we’re given to do requires becoming familiar with reality as far as we can, and the more we learn the more we become aware of how limited our role is. This is why, to really do good, we must give up trying to get the glory from it. This is why there is the extremely practical, if mildly hyperbolic, saying: there’s no limit to what a man can achieve so long as he doesn’t care who gets the credit for it.
Today my daughter showed me a humorous meme which said that one must be 18 to vote and 21 to buy liquor, but then it showed a ouija board and said that at 8 you can talk with demons for low price of $14.99. (If you’re not familiar, the Ouija board has the letters and numbers printed on it, as well as “yes” and “no” and sometimes other things, and participants use a planchette with their hands on it that moves over the letters and is supposedly used for communicating with the spirits of the dead.) The meme is funny as a joke, of course, but it does bring up the curious subject that people who object to ouija boards being a means of (accidentally) talking with demons usually object to them for the wrong reasons.
In my experience, at least, the people who object to Ouija boards usually object as if they are magical items that allow a person to talk to demons in a way that they couldn’t without the board. They’re never explicit, but it’s as if they think the demon would say to the person who is open to talking with them, “True, I am a spirit of much greater intelligence than you who, because I hate God and his creation, wishes to lead you to misery and destruction, but you’re only trying to talk to me without a planchette, so I will say nothing to you.”
The problem with Ouija boards is not that it is a special device which has the power to attract demons or give them any special access to a person. If you take the idea of demons seriously even slightly, they’re always around and trying to talk to us, often by things like stirring up feelings or suggesting memories to us at inopportune times.
The problem with Ouija boards is that the human being is listening.
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.
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.
Chris Lansdown 
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