On the seventh day of October in the year of our Lord 1984 the first regular episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Unlike the pilot episode of the series, it was set in Cabot Cove and was called Deadly Lady.

The lady to which the title is referring is a hurricane as the giant wave in the overly dark opening scene suggests. (My guess is that it’s so dark in order to disguise a model set; the coastline of Cabot Cove was played by Mendocino, California and it would probably be difficult to get a hurricane at a convenient time in California, since they don’t occur on the west coast of the USA. (To be fair, they can get cyclones, which are basically the same thing, but waiting around for one would be impractical and getting helicopter photography during one would be of dubious safety.))

After the establishing shot and opening credits we go to Jessica typing on her typewriter.

The lights flicker, then go out. As Jessica gets some matches and an oil lamp, we hear knocking and a male voice. Jessica goes to the door and opens it. It turns out to be a friend of hers named Ethan. She upbraids him that he shouldn’t be out of doors on a night like this.

He replies, “I know that, woman. You think I’m a nitwit?” She replies that he shouldn’t ask questions he doesn’t want answered, and after a bit of banter we find out that he’s here to check on Jessica and provide some exposition. It’s a real bad hurricane and the coast guard is picking up signals from some fools in a yacht. No one can get out to them before the storm clears, so they’re on their own.

His exposition delivered, he bids Jessica a good night and leaves to go to his own bed.

The next scene opens with clear blue skies and Jessica taking a morning jog along the docks. She meets a fisherman sorting through something who tells her that Ethan went out about an hour ago to see if he could help the people on the yacht. He couldn’t say what happened to them because he lost radio contact with them. Jessica asks him to have Ethan call her when he gets back.

She then jogs home to find a strange man trimming her hedges.

She tries to explain to him that her yard is private property but he only remonstrates with her about having let weeds get a toe-hold in her garden. His name is Ralph and he’s mighty hungry but doesn’t believe in taking handouts, so he’ll happily work for his breakfast. After a bit of discussion, they agree and Jessica cooks him some eggs and bacon after he finishes with the hedges.

As they sit down to eat Ralph claims to have been hoboing around for about as long as he can remember, but he’s not a bum, he works for what he gets. He then recognizes her from a book on her counter, saying that he read it and it was a good book.

Jessica tells him to sit down to breakfast as she points out the problems with his story. First, the book is a pre-publication copy and not available to the public yet. Second, his clothes may be faded but they are exquisitely tailored. Third, the term is “boin'” not “hoboing.” Fourth, there’s an imprint on his wrist from where a wristwatch used to be. She asks where he has it stashed.

He grins and pulls the watch out. It’s rather expensive looking. He says that he didn’t steal it and Jessica replies that she didn’t think that he did.

Ralph comes clean or makes up a more plausible story, we’ll find out later. He has been hoboing, just not for very long. He was just forced into retirement and decided that he wanted to see America “from the ground up.”

He asks if Jessica is mad and she replies that she’s willing to stick to their arrangement if he wants to do work around the house. They’re then interrupted by a call from Amos Tupper. Ethan just came in with the yacht and something peculiar has happened. Murder, peculiar. Jessica says she’ll be right there. Ralph is surprised to hear about a murder in this town. Jessica excuses herself and Ralph says that he’ll keep busy outside, but watches her go out of her window and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get outside.

Jessica gets down to the dock and after a bit of pointless bickering between Ethan and Amos, Amos explains to Jessica what’s up. Some rich fellow, by the name of Steven Earl—he sells cosmetics and Jessica recognizes the name, “Mark of Earl”—was out sailing with his four daughters and last night, during the storm when… Ethan interrupts him demanding that the “girls” tell their story and Jessica concurs.

Amos agrees and introduces Jessica to the “girls” and asks them to tell Jessica their story, but Jessica insists on meeting them first.

First is Nancy Earl, who goes by Nan.

Jessica admires her sweater and asks if she knitted it herself. She didn’t, but she did design it. Jessica thinks it’s lovely. Next Maggie Earl comes forward and introduces herself.

She’s read Jessica’s latest book and it was a hoot. Jessica thanks her, saying that it was a hoot to write. Then comes Lisa Earl Shelby. Her husband has been notified and is on his way.

Jessica thinks this is nice. And finally there’s Grace Earl Lamont.

Her husband hasn’t been notified and isn’t coming. She last saw him four years ago.

Which rounds out the lot. Jessica then suggests that they would be more comfortable “inside,” I presume because it’s cheaper to film indoors than on a dock.

Anyway, they left Bridgeport (I assume, Connecticut) four days ago. They thought surely the storm would blow out to sea, this far north, but when they realized their mistake it was too late. Around midnight they were huddled in the cabin in their boat when they realized that their father was still topside. Lisa was the first one up, then Grace after her. Lisa was almost to her father when Grace saw a huge wave come over the boat and knock their father off.

It then turns out that we’re here because Grace asked the Sheriff how soon they could expect a coroner’s inquest, which he thought a mite suspicious. Given the suspicious circumstances, he’s not very inclined to hold an inquest until he has a body. Ethan says that, given the tides, the body should show up within a day or so.

The four daughters walk off. Amos asks Jessica what she thinks and she says that she doubts that any of them will be wearing black for long. Amos asks about the death—one hundred million dollars is a whale of a motive. Ethan accuses him of reading too many of Jessica’s books, but Amos retorts that he hasn’t read any of them.

Jessica leaves them to invite the four women to stay at her house, but they decline as they already have hotel reservations. Most of them walk off but Jessica gets a moment with Grace. She extends her condolences and Grace says that none of them will miss their father. He broke up her marriage and has prevented Nan from getting into any relationships, and turned Maggie into “a dull hausfrau.” There’s really no love lost between any of them. She then excuses herself.

Jessica watches her go with a look of perplexity.

And we go to commercial break.

When we get back, Jessica comes home on her bicycle and goes into her house. She calls to Ralph but he’s not inside. A phone call comes in and it’s Latisha from the phone company letting Jessica know the charges for her call to Paris. She finds Ralph outside resting in her hammock and listening to Mozart on his walkman since the weeding was done and there’s not much else he can do without supplies. She asks him about the call. At $9.97, it must have been a short call to France, she says. He clarifies that it’s Paris, Kentucky—he has a friend who is a horse breeder down there, and he will take care of the charges.

He then takes her to look at some rotten wood on the inside of the house which needs some putty and paint. He can fix it but it will take $10-$15 in supplies. Jessica says it’s a bargain and goes to get the money. While she does this, Ralph admires a pipe that was sitting out on a table. It belonged to Frank—Jessica’s husband who died years ago. He remarks, pensively, “I guess besides a good meal, the thing I enjoy most is a good pipe.” After confirming that it was her husband’s, he compliments Frank’s taste in pipes. It’s an excellent Meerschaum.

Jessica then offers it to him, perhaps because she was touched by the sappy background music which has been playing since Ralph started looking at the pipe. He tries to refuse but she presses him. “I want you to have it. Better you should smoke it than it should sit there gathering dust.” She looks like she’s about to cry and hurries off.

Ralph puts it in his pocket and the scene then shifts to a helicopter landing in a grassy field. Lisa runs up to it and greets her husband. They proceed immediately to the Sheriff’s office.

His concern is that the death of Steven Earl could throw Mark of Earl cosmetics into a financial tail-spin. He wants an immediate inquest so that the reins of leadership can smoothly pass on to Steven Earl’s successor.

This attitude—that corporations are like feudal baronies on the borderlands and that stability comes from the loyalty of the soldiers to the individual under whose banner they will fight—is something we’re going to see a fair amount of on Murder, She Wrote. I don’t know how much the writers actually believed it and how much it was just an excuse to move the plot along because they need dramatic tension. In reality, large profitable companies do not live by their day-to-day stock prices and those stock prices can’t lose 99% of their value from a few days or even a few weeks of uncertainty in who the CEO is. Companies—and especially large, established companies—take a long time to develop their products and marketing campaigns. It is possible for an army to get a significant advantage over another because uncertainty in leadership causes one to stay where it is rather than repositioning itself when the one with active leadership moves, but there’s nothing that can happen to a large cosmetics company that requires a response within hours or it could be devastated. It’s just not a thing.

Anyway, Amos stands on his insistence that there will be no inquest until they have a body, and we go back to Jessica talking with Ralph.

Ralph tells Jessica about how he lost his wife years ago, and for a long time couldn’t bear to think about it. He asks if she has children and she replies that she and Frank were never blessed that way. He repeats the word blessed and chuckles. He then gets up and leaves because he has things to do, bidding Jessica a good night. After he leaves she goes to do the dishes and after unplugging the drain in her sink sees the water swirling down the drain and gets an inspiration. She runs over to the docks where she finds Ethan. She needs his help and advice. The help seems to largely consist of letting her have a map and a compass, which she uses to draw a circle on the map.

Ethan’s advice seems to primarily consist of saying, “Well, I’ll be a skinned lizard” and then asking Jessica how she knew. Her answer is, “Didn’t it seem strange to you that those girls knew exactly where they were in the middle of a storm?”

A call to Amos Tupper and a trip over to the local hotel later and Jessica confronts the four sisters with the fact that at midnight, in the location they said they were at (3 miles due east of Monhegan Island), they would have been in the eye of the hurricane and there would have been no waves to sweep anyone over. Lisa makes the extremely obvious statement that they must have been mistaken as to their location but Maggie won’t have it. She confesses to murdering her father.

Their father didn’t die the night before, but rather two nights before. Maggie and her father were alone on deck, he was drunk, and they fought as usual. She has a gun in her purse she keeps for protection and when he came at her she fired, twice. When the sisters got up on deck there was blood everywhere and his pipe was still warm, but he wasn’t there. Amos arrests her.

Amos, as we will get to know about him, will arrest anyone at the drop of a hat. That said, this time it seems pretty justified.

Jessica isn’t satisfied but can’t explain it. Then a newspaperman comes it with a fresh edition about the millionaire who drowned. Jessica looks in it and sees the photo of Steven Earl—an old photo, taken from the dusk jacket of his autobiography called Grease Paint Millionaire about how he started as an actor and got into makeup almost by accident. Jessica asks if the book was old and the newspaperman says perhaps twenty years out of print.

Jessica goes to her house (with Ethan) looking for Ralph but can’t find him. Some comedic misunderstandings later, Jessica explains to Ethan that Ralph is Steven Earl. Ethan thinks that she’s batty, but agrees to help her look around Cabot Cove for him.

Unfortunately, Ralph/Steven Earl is found by some kids the next morning.

And with the reveal of the body we go to the midpoint commercial break.

When we get back Nan and Lisa identify the body with Amos Tupper. Then Jessica arrives  as they’re leaving the chapel where the body is. Then a car screams up and parks. A man gets out who Nan recognizes as “Terry.” He says that he just heard the news in Kentucky and flew right in. Lisa explains to Jessica that he isn’t a relative but would like to be—about a year ago he and Nan were engaged and then he just walked out of her life.

Jessica goes inside and identifies the body as Ralph. This angers her and she swears vengeance in her folksy way.

Then there’s an unpleasant scene between Lisa and her Husband in their hotel room which doesn’t really advance the plot but is there to make them both seem like suspects.

Then we go to the Sheriff’s station and he brings Maggie out to interview her with Jessica present. He tells her that the body was found, shot twice in the chest, just as she described. She’s shocked and says that it’s impossible. He can’t be dead. He left the yacht on an inflatable raft he hid away before they left. It—the trip, everything—was all a scheme to unmask a fortune hunter named Terry Jones.

A year ago he paid Terry half a million dollars to disappear but after suffering a heart attack six months ago he was afraid Terry would show up again when he was dead. So they cooked up this scheme in order to lure Terry out of the woods so Steven could prove to Nan what a terrible guy Terry is. How, Maggie does not say, because I can see no plausible way for that to work, especially without revealing how Steven paid him to leave, which he wanted to keep from Nan. “My beloved daughter, I faked my death, causing you tremendous grief, in order to lure your former fiance to come back to you, which he did. Don’t you see how this proves he is the one who doesn’t really love you?” He could try to gussy that up, but it does not seem plausibly persuasive. Nor loving.

Anyway, Amos isn’t buying any of it but Jessica is, and leaves Amos to wait for the coroner to tell him what Jessica already knows. She bicycles over to the hotel to look for Terry Jones but he and Nan went to the church about twenty minutes ago. As Jessica leaves she encounters Maggie, who was released because the shots that killed her father didn’t come from her gun. Lisa’s husband tries to tell Jessica to butt out of a family affair, but Jessica retorts that Steven Earl was no stranger to her. She wishes him a good day in a way that makes it clear that she very much hopes he will have a bad day—somewhere far away from her.

We then see Terry talking with Nan in a cemetery. He claims to her that he left because her father threatened to ruin him if he didn’t. She’s not buying it.

He proposes to her and she doesn’t know what she wants to do. She says she needs to be alone and walks off.

As she does, Jessica rides up on her bicycle and greets Terry. With little formality, she tells him that he lied when he said he heard about the death this morning. In reality, he heard it from a phone call yesterday from Steven Earl. He replies that the guy on the phone said he was a reporter, but it might have been Earl—he was a good actor. Terry explains that he flew into Portland last night and to his surprise found Nan waiting for him. Maggie had told her about their father’s plan to trap Terry. He says that some people, like Maggie, secretly believe in him. He and Nan spent the night together at a hotel near the airport. She left early in the morning, he slept in. When he heard the news of Steven Earl’s real death, he immediately came to be by Nan’s side.

Jessica then goes to the Sheriff’s office but Amos isn’t there. She overhears a conversation with one of his deputies and someone else on the radio that Amos is down at Cotter’s Beach with a search party because he got an anonymous note shoved in the mailbox which said that there were funny goings-on at about 10pm the night before.

Jessica goes down to Cotter’s Beach and asks Amos to see the note, which he shows her, but the camera does not show us. Then one of the searchers runs up because he found a pair of new-looking pink high-heel shoes half-buried in the sand. One had a heel broken off of it. Jessica remarks that half-buried means half-exposed and scampers off. After a few moments of searching next to where the shoes were, she finds the missing heel.

Amos praises Jessica for finding it and says that all they have to do now is to find to whom the shoes belong. Jessica says that without doubt they belong to Nan and we go to commercial break.

When we come back from commercial break, Jessica and Amos are in Nan’s room as Nan is searching for the shoes. She never unpacked them and yet is somehow certain that they were here last night. Amos shows her the shoes and she identifies them as hers—she designed them and had them custom made.

Jessica asks Nan to try them on. Nan doesn’t understand, but complies. Presumably this is so that Jessica can get a look at the bottom of Nan’s foot (the shoe fits, but we knew that before she tried it on):

I assume that the thing Jessica was looking for are scratches or something like that, since if Nan was there and broke a heel and lost both of her shoes she’d have had to scramble over the rocks barefoot and she’s a city slicker with, presumably, tender feet. Let’s zoom in:

I can’t see any sign of scrambling over cliffs, though the resolution really isn’t wonderful for that. Presumably Jessica will confirm this soon. Anyway, Amos takes the fact that the shoe fits to mean that he has to arrest her for the murder of her father. Jessica objects saying that Nan isn’t guilty, then gets an idea and advises Amos to take Nan into custody. Jessica then asks Amos and Nan to keep the evidence absolutely confidential.

The scene then shifts to the Sheriff’s office, where Terry Jones shows up, angry that Nan has been arrested. He protests that there’s no way Nan could have killed her father because she was with him. Amos suggests that perhaps they were in it together. The Portland hotel desk clerk saw them check in but didn’t see either of them leave. They easily could have snuck back to Cabot Cove and committed the murder together. Terry starts to panic and says that he didn’t have anything to do with Steven Earl’s death, but if Nan did kill him before she came to Terry, he would have no idea. Amos says that he better not, since in Maine being an accessory to murder is about as bad as being the murderer. But as long as he’s here, Amos sees no reason why Terry can’t see Nan. Terry then excuses himself, saying that he has business to take care of, and beats a hasty retreat.

Amos then goes to the door to the jail cells, which this conversation took place next to, opens it, and asks Nan (who walks out) whether she heard it. Finally disillusioned about Terry, Nan replies, “Yeah. I heard it.”

The scene then shifts to the hotel, where Lisa, her husband, Maggie, and Grace come back, all of them laughing and perhaps a bit drunk. Lisa’s husband is shouting in jubilation. They’ve all been celebrating Maggie’s exoneration. Jessica breaks the news about Nan’s arrest. When asked why, Jessica lies and tells them that the Sheriff found a heel from a shoe, which Nan admitted was hers, on the beech very near where the body of their father was found, but the shoes are missing. Jessica then says she knows how sisters are, and how they trade clothes, and asks if it’s possible if one of them wore those shoes.

Lisa asks if Jessica wants to search their rooms and Jessica says, “something like that.” Lisa replies not without a warrant, and not by Jessica, then leaves with her husband. Grace says that she has nothing to hide and so Jessica can search her room if she wants. Maggie says that Jessica can search her room, too, but she and Nan are different shoe sizes and besides, she doesn’t wear pink.

Later, Maggie walks Jessica out of the hotel and Jessica tells Maggie that she’s exhausted and will sleep in late. She also says that the Sheriff will be over later and asks Maggie to give the Sheriff a bag that she was holding (we were not shown what was in it).

The scene then shifts to Jessica’s house where a gloved hand breaks the window to Jessica’s door, reaches through, and opens it. The dark figure who belongs to the gloved hand then slowly and softly walks in and starts walking upstairs but stops when it hears creaking. It reverses course and then Jessica calls out, “that wasn’t very thoughtful.”

The figure walks up and we see who it is.

I like the TV burglar outfit Maggie is wearing. Also, this turns the title of the episode into a curious pun.

She asks, “You were expecting me, weren’t you?”

Jessica replies, “You know I was.”

In fact, Maggie wasn’t sure. But she looked inside of the bag and found a blue heel to a shoe and figured that it was a message. She asks if she slipped and Jessica points out that she said that she doesn’t wear pink, but Jessica never mentioned the color of the shoes.

Jessica adds that if it makes Maggie feel any better, she knew Maggie was guilty because everything pointed to an obvious framing of Nan. Maggie objects that it wasn’t obvious; Nan and Terry could have done it. Jessica points out that the shoes prove that she didn’t; had she lost her shoes her feet would have been scratched, which she found they were not when she asked Nan to try on the shoes.

Anyway, once it was clear that Nan was being framed, it was also clear who did it: the only person with the requisite knowledge to set up the frame by telling Nan about Terry Jones’ arrival at Portland.

Maggie tells Jessica that she’s very clever but Jessica demurs. She was merely logical; Maggie was the clever one. Confessing to the murder knowing that the police investigation would exonerate her was brilliant.

Maggie then explains her motive. She spent her whole life taking care of her father, making a home for him, keeping the peace, and for what? The only one who her father actually loved was Nan. After a bit of crying, she apologizes to Jessica for having to murder her in order to get away with the murder of her father. She explains her plan: it will look like she surprised a burglar who killed her in a struggle.

Jessica chides her for this plan. For one thing, they don’t have burglars in Cabot Cove. Second, and perhaps more to the point, the moment the back window was broken she called Sheriff Tupper, who has been listening in to the whole conversation. Jessica then moves some dead flowers in a wicker basket to reveal the phone off its hook.

I must confess, given how low they were speaking, Amos couldn’t have heard much, but this is enough to dissuade Maggie from murdering Jessica. Jessica picks up the phone and says that Maggie wants to give herself up, then hands Maggie the phone so she can confirm this with him.

The scene shifts to the next morning, at the hotel, where Nan and Jessica are talking as Nan goes to her taxi. She tells Jessica that she understands how her sisters feel but her father was actually a decent man. Jessica concurs, reminding Nan that she did know him, if only for a short time. Jessica summarizes, saying that in her experience if you give love, that’s what you get back. Nan laughs and says, “Not always.” She then considers that her father was right about Terry and she didn’t see it, but Jessica tells her not to be too hard on herself. Terry was a very clever young man and she pities whoever gets him next.

Nan bids her farewell and gets in her taxi, then Ethan pulls up in his pickup truck and offers to take Jessica out to fish for sea bass, as he’s heard that they’re biting. Jessica accepts and tells Ethan that she’s going to teach him some of the finer points of deep-sea angling. As the pickup drives off, Ethan asks if that means that she’s going to want him to bait her hooks, too, and she replies, “Of course. You always do, don’t you?”

Then we go to credits.

This was a very interesting episode. While there was also a pilot episode that aired the week before, this was still very much an introductory episode. More, perhaps, than the pilot, since this episode took place in Cabot Cove while the pilot took place in New York City. That is arguable, since most Murder, She Wrote episodes don’t take place in Cabot Cove (in most seasons it’s between a quarter and a third), but still something to consider. Another sense in which this is an introductory episode is that it’s the first regular-length episode, so it’s the first time we’re seeing what the show is really going to be like. It’s also quite likely to be the first time many people saw the show since there are all sorts of reasons to not see the pilot. (Among other things, people would take their guesses as to what they would like when a new TV seasons rolled round but they might be disappointed and try other shows. Plus there would be recommendations from people who did watch the pilot, etc.)

This being an introductory episode manifests itself in all sorts of ways, but part of it is that they put a lot of effort into showing how clever Jessica is. In particular, she shows off her deductive skill far more than she would come to later. For example, before the first commercial break she tells Ralph why he’s “full of clam chowder” with a four-point list of observations. She sees through the sisters’ story about their father being washed away in the storm by plotting their location on a map with a compass. She rushes off and finds the missing heel from the shoes and off-handedly knows that they belong to Nan. And all this is well before she solves the mystery. In later episodes Jessica will do a fair amount of investigation, but it’s rare that the next bit of investigation comes from clever deduction from the previous piece of investigation. In this episode each step follows from Jessica having been clever in a way we can clearly see. I suspect that this faded in no small part because it’s hard to write, but that’s a pity because it’s a lot of fun.

There’s another interesting aspect to this being an introductory episode, which is that they’re trying to paint Jessica’s personality. I think you can really see the influence of Miss Marple on the initial conception of Jessica in this episode.

(This is probably a subject that merits its own post, but if you’re not aware: Miss Marple was one of the main inspirations for Jessica Fletcher. The creators acknowledge this if you watch the special features, but even without that, it would be obvious. Miss Marple was both an old woman who lived in a small, obscure village solving crimes and also an extremely popular detective. The last Miss Marple novel was published in 1976, a mere eight years before Murder, She Wrote first aired. There’s also an interesting connection with the title of Murder, She Wrote. There was a 1961 movie based upon the Miss Marple novel The 4:50 From Paddington which did not use the book’s title. Instead, it used the title: Murder, She Said.)

In contrast with later episodes, Jessica seems far more embedded in the Cabot Cove community. This is not so much about people knowing her, but rather that she seems to be a part of it, and more importantly, it seems to be a part of her.

Another interesting thing is that she seems to have small-town manners. Small town manners tend to be more oriented around building relationships because in a small town you’re fairly likely to see people again. Plus you meet few enough people you have the time and energy to spend on them. Cosmopolitan manners, by contrast, tend to assume more between people but at the same time have an emotional distance that is maintained because actually getting to know people or forming relationships is work that is quite likely to not pay off since for any given person you’re not very likely to ever see them again. Before too long, Jessica would have cosmopolitan manners, but in this episode she had small-town manners. You can see this in the way she insisted on being introduced to the four sisters before hearing their story. You can also see this—to some degree—in the way she related to Ralph. She had neither  cosmopolitan easiness nor cosmopolitan coldness.

When we come to the episode itself, it’s something of a mixed bag. The plot is interesting, though the events which form the mystery don’t hold together overly well. Starting with the boat trip: how did Steven Earl convince all four of his daughters to go on a boat trip with him? Nan might be willing to do it out of affection and Maggie did it as part of the plan to murder her father, but why on earth did Lisa or Grace consent to the trip?

Then we come to the faked death. I can’t help but ask why Steven Earl thought that faking his death was a good idea. In theory this was to draw Terry out of cover, but I can see no possible purpose drawing Terry out of cover would actually serve. Steven knew where Terry was—he had this phone number—so it wasn’t about finding Terry. And I don’t see any way this could possibly convince Nan that Terry was a bad guy. About the only possible good this could serve was proving to Steven that he still had to worry about Terry, but that’s really more about how Nan feels about Terry rather than whether Terry is interested in Nan. Further, the right way to handle that would be to set up something with his lawyers where Terry would get periodic payments, made by the lawyers, if he stayed away from Nan, so this could carry on after Steven’s death.

But if we pass over this and just accept that he wanted to fake his death, I can see no possible explanation for the faking of his death being done by pretending that Maggie shot him. Unless, of course, that wasn’t his plan but Maggie’s. She did this faking long after he had rowed away. It is possible that she was supposed to say that he had fallen overboard or something like that. He was long gone so she could say anything she wanted and since this was premeditated she could have brought the fake blood and then staged it as she described to Amos. The question is never asked, though Steven’s reaction to hearing that the supposed murder was actually just an accident makes this seem like it was not what was intended.

The character of Ralph/Steven Earl is another issue within this episode. Ralph was interesting, though that is limited by how much of what he said was lies. There’s the further problem that it’s hard to make the parent of bad children out to be sympathetic. Children are their own people, of course, and one bad child may be misfortune. Several bad children sounds like bad parenting. Especially when the children seem to have bad principles and worse manners. Basically, spoiled children have to be spoiled by someone, and there’s no way for that to happen which lets the father off the hook.

The murder itself was clever, and there were a decent number of twists and turns. They did a pretty good job of making Maggie the least likely suspect without making her being the murderer seem completely unbelievable. I’m not sure that Maggie hating her father made all that much sense, and I especially think that they never justified Grace thinking that their father ruined Maggie’s life. She told Jessica that he turned Maggie into a “Hausfrau” but I don’t see how he could have. It is not believable that Steven Earl was such a regular homebody that he was constantly around to dominate Maggie’s time, or that he kept an elaborate home which he made her constantly clean because he was too cheap to hire any help. It would make more sense that she tried to earn his love by being a “hausfrau” and it didn’t work and she resented him for it. To some degree they did hint at this in Maggie’s confession, though her saying, “I hated him for what he did to me” undermined that.

I think that this was less of a big deal here than it might be in later episodes because this episode was more about the investigation than it was about the murder.

The character of Amos Tupper is also curiously inconsistent in this episode. For most of it he seems annoyed by Jessica’s interference. This is hard to reconcile with the fact that Jessica is involved because he asked for her help. Even more, he told the sisters that Jessica is there because she’s a “good friend of mine who from time to time I like to look to for advice.”

Ethan is also a curious character. Clearly a long-time friend of Jessica’s, he’s got a great voice but it is annoying how much he bickers with everyone, especially Amos. To a great degree this was just the nature of television at the time. Conflict makes people less likely to change the channel, which was the all-pervading fear of TV writers.

One thing I think a pity is that Jessica didn’t have any female friends. I suspect that this was because male-female interactions always have a bit of electricity to them, even where they are completely non-sexual, in a way that male-male and female-female interactions don’t. That ever-present fear of the viewer changing the channel probably meant that the energy always needed to be turned up to 11.

That said, it’s possible that this hits differently, now, watching the episodes via DVD where I’m extremely unlikely to change the channel and there isn’t just one family TV that someone might want to change the channel on “just for a minute”. That makes for a different viewing environment, too. The overall more stressful environment of the one family TV in the living room was more stressful, and so the energy on everything being turned up probably seemed less unnecessarily high-energy. Oh well.

All told, as a first episode, I think that Deadly Lady was pretty good. Next week we’re going to San Francisco for Birds of a Feather where one of Jessica’s many nieces is going to get married.