On the twenty eighth day in October of the year of our Lord 1984, the third episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Hooray for Homicide, it is mostly set in Los Angeles but begins in Cabot Cove. (Last week’s episode was Birds of a Feather.)

After a few scenes of waves breaking on the rocks and an establishing shot of Jessica’s house, we then see a figure rocking in a rocking chair, looking out the window. A stealthy figure holding a rope in its hands creeps up behind the rocking chair and the music turns ominous.

Suddenly, the figure throws the rope around the neck of the figure and begins to strangle it. The music hits hard and then the camera angle shifts so we can see who the murder is, and it’s Jessica! The figure is only a few pillows, a sheet, and a hat.

She considers for a moment, then is disappointed and shake’s her head. Walking back to her kitchen, she calls out that she’s decided to go back to the bayonet because it’s cleaner. The camera pans enough and reveals Ethan working on the pipes under Jessica’s sink. Jessica then sits down at her table and types on her typewriter. She’s not at it long before the phone rings. It’s someone named Agnes, who tells her that one of her books is being talked about on television. Jessica, accordingly, turns the TV on and watches. A producer is being interviewed about his newest movie, a film adaptation of Jessica’s book The Corpse Danced at Midnight. When asked if this will be another hit, the producer says that the movie will have everything that young audiences want: music, sex, and violence. When asked if it’s too much violence—he names a scene where a psychotic killer uses a flame thrower on a group of brake dancers—Jessica can take no more and rushes to the phone to call her publisher, saying that she’s going to put a stop to this nonsense even if she has to fly out to Hollywood. We jump cut, of course, to an airplane landing on a runway.

This is an interesting approach to starting the episode. It takes about three minutes and gives us a bit of Jessica in Cabot Cove and also Jessica as a mystery writer. We didn’t get any of that in last week’s episode, so it’s nice to refresh it, even though we’re going to spend the remaining 44 minutes in Hollywood. I also suspect it was necessary because the main thrust of the episode is Jessica’s old fashioned small-town values vs. the modern world. It’s a nice theme, even if in most episodes Jessica doesn’t have old fashioned or small-town values.

Jessica’s first stop in Hollywood is at her lawyer’s office. They are Carr, Strindberg & Roth. The lawyer to whom she’s speaking is Mr. Strindberg and he tells her that the film is box office magic.

It’s a combination of Porky’s, Halloween, and Flashdance. His advice is that she should follow it up quickly. She’s not very receptive to this advice and just wants to know what her legal rights to stop the producer are. He’s got no idea because he only makes deals, he doesn’t remember what deals he made in the past, so he’ll assign someone to dig up her contract and they’ll be in touch.

I love the idea that their filing system is so bad that they cannot readily find active contracts.

Jessica accepts this flimsy excuse to move the plot along and goes to the movie studio itself. As she’s arguing with the guard at the gate who won’t let her in without a pass, a Miss Marta Quintessa, who is coming into the lot, overhears the argument and tells the guard to put Mrs. Fletcher down as her guest. Amidst Jessica’s thanks we find out that Marta is the costume designer for The Corpse Danced at Midnight.

The scene then shifts to the dressing room of the lead actress.

Her name is Eve Crystal. The producer, Jerry Lydecker, is there to confront her about lying to him and not telling him that she canceled her lessons with her drama coach. She meant to tell him, honest. He tells her that he knows that she’s seeing some guy, and he wants her to stop. He lays great emphasis on how important he is to her career and how she’ll have no time for anyone else when she’s a big star.

Then we go to Marta Quintessa telling Jessica how much she loved her book…

…and how little she loved the screenplay. When Jessica said that she never saw it, Marta gives her a spare copy which she has in her large purse.

Then the scene shifts to introduce the screenwriter.

He asks why Jerry doesn’t return his calls and Jerry replies that it’s nothing personal, he doesn’t return anyone’s calls. After appreciating that line, the screenwriter gets to why he’s there: the contract came through and the points that he was supposed to get for writing the screenplay on the cheap weren’t in it. (Points are a percentage of profits.) What happened?

Lydecker explains how he wasn’t worth the points because of his backstory: he had an oscar nomination when he was twenty five but is an aging wunderkind who burned out on booze and pills by the time he was thirty. The screenwriter admits to being a recovering alcoholic, but he’s also a damn good screenwriter. Lydecker counters that he had to do a page-one rewrite, and the screenwriter counters that it was to remove every line that required acting talent so he could cast his playmate as the star. At this, Lydecker tells him to get off studio grounds. As he leaves, the screenwriter tells him “Remember: the picture’s not over till the credits roll.”

At this point I think that we can tell that Lydecker is going to get killed as we’ve already got two potential suspects set up. The scene with the screenwriter is a bit… weird. Normally, a screenwriter doesn’t write a screenplay before he has a contract. It is possible to write a spec script, of course—”spec” is short for “speculation” and means that the screenwriter writes it and then tries to sell it. But the key part, there, is that they sell it. Before the movie company does anything with it. A movie company never starts filming before they have a contract which secures the right to use a screenplay. They need this to protect themselves. It would not be hard for a screenwriter to find a lawyer to take on the copyright infringement lawsuit that would result from filming a movie based on someone’s screenplay without an agreement to let them do it. It would be trivial to register the copyright ahead of time, too, in which case there are presumptive triple damages. Trying to use copyrighted material without an agreement which permits this is so dumb no one in Hollywood even considers trying to do it. So yeah, the screenwriter has a grievance, but it makes no sense. And it’s not like it would have been hard to come up with a real grievance. People get shafted all the time in Hollywood.

Anyway, Marta and Jessica walk onto the tail end of the scene and after some painfully insincere pleasantries from Marta to Lydecker, she introduces Jessica. Jessica asks to talk to him and they make an appointment for after lunch.

Jessica then sneaks into the sound stage where filming is going to happen and sees the director coaching Eve about the scene they’re about to do.

She’s not sure why her character’s boyfriend wants to have sex in a cemetery. The director explains that it’s an act of defiance. His friends have just been brutally murdered and he wants to defy death with an act of joy. As far as people pretending that smut is art goes, that’s top notch.

Also, yes, that is John Astin who played Gomez in The Adams Family.

The male lead comes in, also in a bathrobe. Unlike Eve, he has no questions so they clear the set for the nude scene and start filming.

Jessica leaves, incredulous, and we go to her meeting with Lydecker, who is arguing that nudity is necessary for the story. It reveals Jenny’s character. Jessica objects that in her story, “Jenny” was “Johnny,” the ten year old son of a Presbyterian minister.

Some arguing later, Lydecker reveals that he bought the rights to the book, not for the book itself or because it was a best-seller, but just for the title. To be fair to him, it’s a great title. A much better title to a murder mystery than to a horror film, I think it needs to be said, but a great title. Anyway, Lydecker points out that he bought all of the rights and can do whatever he wants. Jessica then tells him she’ll do whatever she has to do in order to stop the picture from being made, though of course her phrasing is such that the police will take it to have been a threat to kill him.

Incidentally, Jessica uses an interesting phrase to say that she doesn’t accept the situation: “Just because the Almighty gave people a taste for lobsters doesn’t mean that He gave lobsters a taste for being boiled alive.” It almost sounds like an old Downeast (a slang term for Maine) saying, but it’s just too wordy. Angela Lansbury does yeoman’s work making it sound natural, but let’s just say that when you google this phrase, the only things which turn up are quotations from this episode.

In the next scene, the low-level person from Carr, Strindberg & Roth shows up.

He’s Norman Lester, a junior member with the firm. He’s brought a copy of the contract with the publisher. Jessica reads it, in spite of Norman’s protests that it’s in legalese, and is chagrined to learn that Mr. Lydecker was right and she signed away all rights to interfere with the film. Jessica concludes that there’s nothing to do but to give Lydecker an apology.

There’s no explanation given as to why Jessica signed this contract. All they do is hang a lampshade on it by having Jessica say, “I can’t believe I signed this.” Yeah, that makes two of us. I suppose that’s the screenwriter asking us for a gimme, and what else are we going to do?

So Jessica goes to see Mr. Lydecker, but he’s not in. The secretary tells her to call Lydecker tomorrow, but Jessica replies, ominously, “What I must do cannot be done on the telephone.” I wonder who they’re going to suspect when Lydecker turns up dead?

Jessica goes looking for Lydecker on the sound stage and it looks interesting.

Other than light through a blue filter I don’t know what could be casting that blue light in and the ominous fog is just as unlikely. Also, I’m unclear on why she’s continuing to look around here since it’s obviously deserted. She wasn’t told that Lydecker was here and normally when you’re looking for a live person and come into a place that obviously doesn’t contain a living soul you look elsewhere rather than investigate every nook and cranny.

Fortunately for the plot, though, Jessica looks around to see if Lydecker is hiding.

When she gets near the “cemetery,” she finds him:

TK insert picture

And we go to commercial break.

When we get back, Jessica spots a clue…

…then runs into a security guard as she’s going for help. Literally. She bounces off a bit. He then asks her what she’s doing and she says, in the most guiltily unconvincing voice possible, that she was going to try to find the police because there’s been a dreadful accident on the stage.

The security guard, understandably, doesn’t believe her—I think he suspects her of being a thief—and brings her by the arm to go investigate the accident. Jessica points out Lydecker’s body and tells the guard that she thinks Lydecker was hit on the head with a heavy urn right next to him. The security guard uses his radio to call in the murder, then grabs Jessica and adds that he thinks he’s got the killer.

In the next scene police Lt. Mike Hernandez is examining the body. I guess the guard let her go when the police arrived without actually putting her in their custody, because after a few moments Jessica walks in and begins examining the crime scene.

The music is appropriately comedic. Lt Hernandez asks her whether she’s lost something and she tells him about the gold button. It’s not there now, though. Jessica doesn’t understand it because she was only gone for thirty seconds. She speculates that the killer was hiding behind the set, saw her find it, then retrieved it while she was going for help.

When Lt Hernandez asks who she is and she introduces herself, he recognized her name from the book the movie is based on, though he had mistakenly thought that J.B. Fletcher was a man. Jessica explains that the ‘B’ is for ‘Beatrice.’

Just as an aside, while male authors sometimes don’t like their first names and use initials, such as Clive Staples Lewis or Gilbert Keith Chesterton, when it comes to murder mysteries I’ve gotten the impression that women are more likely to go with initials than men are. In her autobiography, Agatha Christie mentions that she wanted to do that (or use a pseudonym, I forget which) because she didn’t think the books would sell with a woman’s name on them. Her publisher (A) thought that they would and (B) thought that “Agatha Christie” was a great name for an author. In retrospect, she admitted that the publisher was right and she was wrong.

Anyway, it turns out that Lt. Hernandez is thrilled to meet her—he’s a writer himself, though he hasn’t sold anything yet, but there is interest in his screenplay for a TV movie—and he asks her if she has any theories. Jessica then says that she leaves theories to the experts and she’s only a mystery writer, not a detective.

This is basically a bald-faced lie that she contradicted with looking for the button and will soon be contradicting again, so I’ve no idea why she said it. I guess the idea is to try to reluctantly draw her into the investigation, but that’s a bit silly after the previous two episodes we’ve seen. I’d say that it might be early days and they haven’t figured the character out, but they will occasionally, if rarely, do this throughout the rest of the show.

Anyway, Marta and the director come in. They had been in the women’s wardrobe discussing costumes and don’t know what happened—which they find out fairly directly. Marta is very affected and nearly faints. When Lt. Hernandez asks if either of them would know of someone with a motive to kill Lydecker, the director replies, “Anyone? Try everyone. Would the suspects please form a double line.”

The director then asks whether Eve shouldn’t be told. She left right after filming wrapped. He’d tell her but he has to talk to the studio executives. Marta says that there was no love lost between her and Eve, so it would probably be worse if she told Eve. Lt. Hernandez assigns the task to Jessica, which seems ludicrous, but she agrees.

Eve lives at Jerry’s beach house and the police give Jessica a ride there.

When she gets there, Jessica finds Eve drunk. After Jessica explains who she is and turns down several offers of alcohol and various kinds of recreational drugs, she asks where Jerry is and Jessica almost breaks the news to her but then decides that Eve needs to sober up first so she’ll understand. So she gives Eve a cold shower and some coffee, then breaks the news of Lydecker’s death. Eve is reluctant to believe it and takes it hard. She finally asks what happened, an accident or what, and Jessica tells her that somebody killed him. She’s devastated and hugs Jessica, who holds her as we fade to commercial break.

When we come back, Jessica is mobbed by reporters as she’s going back to her hotel room. Lt. Hernandez is with her and comes into her hotel room. He remarks on how nice it is, and she concurs.

As well she should; this is palatial. That said, I think it’s best to let this one go because small sets are very difficult to light without casting harsh shadows. It’s doable, but it requires effort, which is expensive. It’s the sort of thing that’s more worth it on movies.

He has some questions, one of which is whether she touched the urn. Someone went to the trouble of wiping the finger prints off of it, which an ordinary killer in a hurry wouldn’t think to do, but a mystery writer might. This isn’t his idea, mind. His Captain doesn’t have his writer’s mind and keen insight. He just sees that she had motive, means, and was caught leaving the scene of the crime. Jessica admits that when it’s put this way, she does sound like a suspect. He tells her that if she has any ideas, now is the time to share them.

She tells him, quite firmly, that she has no intention of trying to help him solve this murder. Quite a tone change from the previous two episodes, and again, this is basically a bald-faced lie. I don’t see how she expects him to believe it since she met Lt. Hernandez while she was trying to help solve the murder by finding an important clue (the button). Anyway, she is leaving tomorrow on the noon flight, unless that’s no longer an option.

Lt. Hernandez doesn’t directly answer that but instead said that he thought she’d want to stick around to see what Ross (the director, now also the new producer) does with the movie. That plus a look with a lot of subtext convinces Jessica to stick around.

The next day she is on the studio lot and meets the writer. He loved her book and is sorry he couldn’t have put more of it into his screenplay. (Ross invited the writer back, which is why he’s here.) The writer dishes on Ross; he’d spent a long time with no project until this one and he was originally the producer. Then Lydecker horned in, installed Eve, and forced Ross to withdraw as producer.

Lydecker’s death was a stroke of good luck for everyone. With this movie, they can now make it big. He takes her into the sound stage to show her.

Oh my. (Some pop/rock and roll music is playing, and there’s dancing.)

I looked it up and the music video to Michael Jackson’s Thriller was shown for the first time on MTV in December of 1983, less than a year before this episode aired. It seems a stretch to suggest it, I know, but it might have been an influence.

If you’ve never seen it, btw, it’s a bit long but definitely part of the cultural landscape which influenced this episode:

Anyway, Jessica runs into Marta, who remarks that Jessica looks bewildered. Jessica merely remarks that she thought that there was supposed to be a high school marching band parade and Marta says that the schedule has been changed since Eve said that her costume wasn’t ready. There was nothing actually wrong with it, though, she just likes to make Marta’s life difficult. The implication is that Eve is a prima donna, though it is also possible that the real reason she complained was that her uniform was missing a gold button. They are the sort of thing you find on high school marching band uniforms.

Jessica remarks that Marta said that there was no love lost between Marta and Eve, and Eve starts to give examples. On the first day of shooting, in a scene in which she was supposed to be drinking, someone put real vodka into her glass. Eve turned bright red and accused Marta of doing it. Why her? Because, before Eve wiggled her way into Lydecker’s heart, Marta used to live at Lydecker’s beach house. Jessica is enlightened.

Lt. Hernandez then comes in with Lydecker’s secretary and asks her to point out who threatened Lydecker in front of her and she identifies Jessica. She then repeats both of Jessica’s incriminating lines (about doing whatever needs to be done, and how what she needs to do cannot be done over the telephone). Lt. Hernandez then arrests Jessica, who is very surprised.

At the station he reveals that he isn’t actually arresting her, this was just a charade to throw off the real killer and give Jessica a chance to “do her thing.” Well, not a charade, exactly. On the secretary’s testimony she’s been upgraded to the prime suspect by the DA, but Lt. Hernandez still has faith that she’ll find the real killer and clear herself. This finally convinces Jessica to start solving the murder.

In the next scene, Norman the lawyer shows up at Jessica’s hotel and she puts him to work doing research on Eve’s medical history, the screenwriter’s alcoholism, the director’s financial status, and Marta’s relationship with Jerry Lydecker. While he does that research, Jessica has some stuff to do at the studio.

Since Norman mentioned that she’s been banned from the studio lot as a disruptive influence, she sneaks in on a tour bus, wearing a big hat. She finds Norman’s uncle who happens to be a camera operator in one of the small private theaters on the studio (people do have odd connections all over the place in Hollywood) and she watches what Mr. Lydecker was watching shortly before he was killed. It contains a scene with Eve in it where she is making out the lead actor. The scene is called (for some reason, with a snap board, which is only used for sound synchronization) and they continue to make out. Even after someone walks up asking them to stop because they need to move on.

Jessica has what she needs and leaves. She finds the male lead on the movie, which I think may be the same guy that Eve was making out with in the footage that Jessica just watched. Jessica tells him that she was just watching some rushes and he was wonderful. The buttering up works wonderfully and he offers to give Jessica a signed picture of himself to take back to Vermont with her. Jessica gratefully accepts. She then probes and finds out that he and Eve are, indeed, an item.

Jessica then goes to the wardrobe department.

She runs into a plump middle-aged woman named Eleanor, who is working on a costume. A little gossip later, she finds out that Marta and the director left the wardrobe department, on the day of the murder, before the police sirens. Also, Marta left first, they didn’t leave together. Jessica then gets a look at the old costumes and notes that there’s no drum majorette’s costume. Eleanor knows who took it and didn’t bring it back. (She may tell Jessica but if so it’s not on camera.)

We next see Jessica investigating Eve’s trailer when her repeated knock doesn’t bring anyone to the door. As she’s snooping around, the director bursts out of some of the clothes, knocks Jessica down as he rushes past her, and runs away. As Jessica gets out of the trailer and calls out, “Stop that man!” we go to commercial.

When we get back, Norman happens to round a corner in front of the director, hears Jessica’s call, and tackles him. Lt. Hernandez and another police officer arrive on the scene. They search the director and find the gold button in the director’s pocket. Lt. Hernandez takes this to mean that Ross was planting the gold button in Eve’s trailer. He arrests Ross and takes him away.

Norman congratulates Jessica on finding the real killer and clearing herself, but she still wants the information she sent him to find. He did find it, so he gives it to her. Ross was over-extended including a mortgage on his house. The screenwriter successfully kicked drugs but still has an alcohol problem. Eve has diabetis mellitus and takes oral medication. Marta used to be Lydecker’s mistress and once threatened to turn him into shish kabob for fooling around with younger women.

Norman suggests that they have a party for her solving the case and Jessica says that a party is a great idea. The next scene is at the beach house with all of the suspects (except for Ross, of course, who is in police custody).

I can’t imagine how they’d all agree to come to this party, so it’s probably a good thing that they didn’t try to explain. Various people propose toasts, and Jessica’s toast is to Ross, who was wrongfully accused of murder. Marta and the screenwriter then excuse themselves. Next Scott (the male lead) makes his excuses and leaves, insincerely saying that he’ll call her.

That leaves just Jessica and Eve.

Jessica tells her that (according to his confession) while Jessica was busy with the guard, Ross came onto the scene by another entrance, knew at once who killed Lydecker, took the button, polished the urn, and left as he came in.

Jessica tells Eve that there’s still time to tell her story to Lt Hernandez. Lydecker caught on that she was having an affair with her co-star, right before he went to the set to discuss the costumes she didn’t like, which was why she was wearing the drum majorette costume at the time.

Eve starts talking.

Lydecker wanted to drop Scott from the movie. Moreover, he was going to try to ruin Scott’s career by spreading it around that he was fired for not learning his lines, not showing up on time, etc. So she had to do something; she hit him with the urn. She didn’t know she’d lost a button, she drove to the beach house in the costume.

Jessica says that this was why Ross couldn’t find the costume in her dressing room. He was trying to put the button back on it when Jessica walked in on him. It wasn’t to protect Eve so much as to protect the picture. He desperately needed a success and couldn’t afford to have his star arrested for murder.

Jessica admits that Eve’s pretending to be drunk fooled Jessica. She adds that people don’t give Eve enough credit as an actress. She only thought about it later and realized that real drinkers don’t mix scotch whiskey with diet cola. And then there was the story about her turning red from vodka—there’s a diabetic medication which will do that. Jessica realized Eve was just faking being drunk to give herself an alibi.

When Jessica asks if Eve wants to make the phone call to the police or wants Jessica to do it, Eve gets pensive and replies, “It’s funny. I never wanted to be a movie star. That was Jerry’s idea. I’d have done anything for him. Jerry. Scott. I sure know how to pick ’em, don’t I, Mrs. Fletcher?”

And with that, we go to credits.

It’s often the case that the writers of a TV show don’t really know what the show wants to be at first and Murder, She Wrote certainly seems to be no exception to that. This episode is quite at odds with the previous two as far as Jessica wanting to investigate the murder. Frankly, I can’t imagine why the writers ever thought it would be interesting to have the main character keep wanting to not do what we want to see her do. It’s not like in an action film where there are moral reasons for the hero to try everything else before using violence.

The episode is also quite comedic in nature, almost to the point where you can’t take it seriously. Approximately everything about the movie is satire that pushes well past the point of plausibility. In the 1980s, slasher films were low budget films. They could be popular enough and certainly could be profitable—Halloween grossed $70M on a budget of $300K—but they weren’t prestigious and generally weren’t shot on sound stages or had hundreds of custom-made costumes by workers in a costume department. (In Halloween, many of the actors wore their own clothes.)

I’m not sure how much the things the episode gets wrong about movies would impact its satire/plausible balance among the average viewer. For example, the interview with Lydecker that gets Jessica onto a plane makes no sense. The interviewer asks Lydecker about the scene in which the psychopath uses a flame thrower on a gang of break dancers. There was no way for him to know that since it wasn’t in the book and movies don’t hand their scripts out to the public and B-movie producers don’t give national TV interviews about specific scenes in a movie which is only partway through principal photography. The scene is funny, but so detached from reality that to me it only registers as parody.

Now, it may well have been meant as parody. I kind of think that it was. But that’s a bit strange coming after the previous two episodes, which certainly had moments of humor but were serious. And then, given how much of this episode was a parody, it ended on a serious note rather than with a joke.

It’s also curious to see that when we get to something that the writers (presumably) know a lot about—Hollywood—the episode is no more realistic than it’s about things that they almost certainly know nothing about. Big business, for example. And it’s not just a case of sacrificing realism for the demands of the plot. They just don’t care. There are all sorts of things which would have been no harder to make realistic. To give an example: Lydecker could have broken promises he assured the screenwriter didn’t need to be in the contract, rather than a contract coming through after principle photography already started and it being talked about as if the screenwriter had no choice about whether to accept it.

The mystery was also a little bit thin in this episode. There was a single clue—the button—and it was never explained how this clue got where it was. Yes, they established it was from the costume that Eve was wearing, but how did it come off? There was no struggle and Eve just hit Lydecker with the nearest object to hand and he went down immediately. Nothing there would have ripped a button off of her costume. And the thing is, a clue like a button should have some relationship to the crime. This is just an artistic thing—buttons do sometimes randomly fall off for no observable reason—but random events are far less satisfying. A button randomly falling off is better than the murderer accidentally leaving his wallet at the scene of the crime, but they’re both towards the bottom of the barrel.

Actually, I’m being a bit unfair when I say that was the only clue—there was also the clue that Eve never drunk alcohol. And, I suppose, there was the clue that Eve was having an affair with her co-star. That last one came quite late, though.

I’m not sure what to make of Norman reporting that Eve has diabetes. On the one hand, diabetics shouldn’t drink a lot of alcohol, but on the other hand plenty of diabetics do things which aren’t great for their health. And either way, how on earth did Norman find this out? Even in the 1980s doctors didn’t just give out medical information on their patients to random strangers. And how was he supposed to get that information? Call up every doctor in the county and ask if she’s their patient? This isn’t an insuperable problem, but it does feel more than a little far-fetched.

Eve’s character is a bit weird in this episode, too. She seems to want to be a good actress, but then at the end she says that she never wanted to be an actress—that was Lydecker’s idea. She would have done anything for him. Except for not publicly cheat on him with her co-star, apparently. Be that last part as it may, why on earth did Lydecker take a non-actress girlfriend and turn her into an actress? And in films with sex scenes? For a jealous man, this is an obviously counter-productive thing to do. I find his speech about how, when she’s a big star, she won’t have time for anyone but him. Why did he get her into acting? Had she just been his wife, she’d have had a lot more time to be around him and be put into the arms of younger men quite a bit less.

I also can’t help but comment on her motive for murder. I usually don’t do this in Murder, She Wrote because limiting murder mysteries to to realistic motives for murder would tend to make them monotonous and predictable (at least if by “realistic” we mean “common”). However, hearing that her lover intended to ruin the career of her other lover has a much safer solution than murder: she could have threatened to leave Lydecker if he spread rumors about Scott. On any realistic appraisal, being fired from a low budget slasher film wouldn’t hurt anyone’s career if Lydecker left it at that. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t have Lydecker attack her in a rage and she strike him in fear. That would be more common for later Murder, She Wrote episodes and would explain the button better.

Oh well.

Looking at things that worked, I do think that the humor worked as humor, if not always as the setup for a murder mystery.

I enjoyed the character of Lt. Hernandez. I’m conflicted over whether he was a simple character or a Colombo-style clever man pretending to be simple. I’d far prefer him to be the latter, though the way that he needed Jessica to point out his grounds for searching the director makes me fear it might be the former. All the talk about what his Captain and the DA think would have worked very well as a Colombo-style ruse. The way he answered Jessica asking if she was free to go home with his sly answer of thinking she’d want to see what was going on which worked some intriguing clues into his reasoning felt Colombo-like. The problem with my preferred theory was that it had no payoff—no moment where the mask was dropped. I think that’s a real pity.

It might be objected that if the police are smart there’s nothing for Jessica to do and it’s Murder, She Wrote not Murder, Somebody Else Solved. While the point about the titles is correct, it’s not actually a problem to have an intelligent police officer as long as Jessica has access to some clues which he doesn’t have. It would also give Jessica an opportunity to have an intelligent conversation with someone, which would be a nice change of pace.

Another strong point of the episode are the characters of Marta Quintessa and the screenwriter. They were both likable. They had personalities which felt real. I appreciated that they got good send-offs which made them feel like characters with a future.

I also liked the beginning of the episode. It was nice to have Jessica start out at home. I appreciate the grounding that provides. I also appreciated the episode showing her working on the plot to one of her books. A big part of the fun of murder mysteries is thinking about them and it was nice to see Jessica thinking about her plot and not merely typing away at her typewriter.

Next week’s episode brings us to the south for It’s a Dog’s Life.