On the twenty fifth day of November in the year of our Lord 1984, the sixth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Hit, Run, and Homicide, it’s set in Cabot Cove. (Last week’s episode was Lovers and Other Killers.)

After some pretty establishing shots of the California coast we’re pretending are the coast of Maine, the camera zooms in on Jessica riding her bicycle along the coast road into town. In town she nearly runs into another person on a bicycle who isn’t looking where he’s going. Jessica has to ring her bicycle bell and call out to him to avoid a collision. Despite having seen him coming from like fifty feet away and there being almost no one on the road.

The camera angles are cut very tight to ensure we don’t notice how easily Jessica could have avoided him. Anyway, his name is Daniel and he’s an inventor. He wasn’t looking where he was going because he has a ridiculous device in his bicycle which monitors his heart rate and blood pressure and tells him how fast he’s going. Unfortunately, it says 22 miles per hour while he’s stopped, so it’s not working.

We learn from this that he’s an absent-minded brilliant inventor. And from the ensuing conversation that the founder’s day picnic is coming up because actual founder’s day (which was last week) was rained out. Jessica wants him to come, but he has a house guest.

The scene shifts to the picnic. There’s various talk, including Jessica talking to someone about how the founder of Cabot Cove, Captain Joshua Wayne, was a pirate who fought on the side of the British during the revolutionary war.

This discussion is interrupted by some guy who runs up to the field shouting for help as a car chases him. He eventually tries to climb up a chainlink fence but the car drives into it (gently) and he falls onto the car’s hood. The car then drives off. A closeup allows us to see that it has no driver.

In the next scene, Captain Ethan Craig tells Sheriff Amos Tupper that there was no one driving the car but Amos thinks that Ethan was drunk. When Ethan asks if everyone at the founder’s day picnic was drunk, Amos responds that it was mass hysteria. Amos then goes into the Cabot Cove Hospital to see the victim and we meet the man who was chased.

His name is Charles Woodley and he came up from Boston to meet an old friend, Daniel O’Brian (the absent-minded inventor). According to the doctor he has no broken bones but he’s in traction for some reason. Anyway, Daniel used to work for his company, Wompco Electronics. Daniel invited Charles and his former partner up to visit. When he got to Daniel’s house Daniel wasn’t there and his cab had left, so we walked into town and a kid told him about the picnic.

In the next scene Jessica stops by Daniel’s house with a pie.

The woman’s name is Katie Simmons and she’s Daniel’s house guest.

We then meet two more characters:

His name is Tony. Her name is Leslie Alder. They just got in a few days ago, which is why Jessica didn’t know that he was in town. They’re going to get married and Leslie has read Jessica’s books and is a fan.

I love the size of her shoulder pads.

Leslie has some stops to make in Portland—she’s in sales—and will drop Tony off somewhere on her way. (They’re staying in town at the old Hanset place.)

As Jessica and Katie go into Daniel’s workshop, we get a view of it.

It’s interesting to consider what a high tech workshop looked like in 1984. Truth to tell, not that radically different from what it would look like now, at least by TV standards. Cathode ray tubes instead of LCDs in some places, and fewer circuit boards, but people still prototype with the kinds of stuff that they did back in the 1980s. Advances in electronics have tended to concentrate in production rather than in prototyping, though I don’t want to oversell this. Someone with money these days would have a high end oscilloscope and a computer-connected multimeter, not to mention small single-board computers lying about.

In the conversation that ensues we learn that Tony met Leslie a month ago and it’s been a whirlwind courtship. Given that there’s probably money in the family, this is, of course, suspicious.

Katie’s here to recruit Daniel for a job in Memphis, Tennessee. The topic shifts to the odd happenings earlier in the day and it comes out that Daniel hates Woodley and his partner Merrill. In his words, the only thing he’d invite them to was a hanging party, and only then if he had charge of the ropes. He storms out and when Jessica asks Katie what all that was about, we cut to another scene.

In this new scene, a man who we presume is Merrill shows up by a chartered boat and asks Ethan for directions to a taxi.

He’s got a southern accent and is looking for the hospital. Ethan helpfully points in the direction of the hospital, which is only a mile away (as opposed to the train station, where the taxis are, which is two miles away). I hadn’t realized that Cabot Cove was so big before, but, truth to tell, it probably won’t be so big again. This episode just wants Merrill to have to walk a long distance.

As Merill walks along the deserted road on the way to the hospital he sees the station wagon which attacked the founder’s day picnic. Once he’s sufficiently ahead of it, the driverless car starts chasing Merrill down at low speed and finally runs him over. Well, it’s about to when we fade to black and go to commercial. This is, of course, more sanitary and shows no blood, but I can’t help thinking that it’s convenient that it also requires no special effects.

When we come back from commercial, Ethan brings Jessica the news of Merrill’s death. No one saw it happen but later a kid saw the driverless car going north on a nearby road. Ethan asks Jessica to go help Amos and she agrees.

Jessica goes and talks to Amos and suggests some questions to ask in a round-about, manipulative way. (Though you could interpret this as helping Amos to save face.) She also points out that Woodley is into electronics and probably knows a lot about remote control, which is the only way that a driverless car could be operated.

(Of course, back in the early 1980s the TV showing the remote operator what the car saw so it would be possible to steer it would probably have been big enough to be seen, but I’m guessing the writers didn’t think of that.)

Also interesting to consider is that if Woodley is the killer, it means he had to have an accomplice when he had the car attack him. My top pick would be Katie, though Leslie is a definite possibility as well.

Anyway, Amos invites Jessica to join him in interrogating Woodley and Jessica agrees.

Back at the hospital, the nurse chides Woodley for having lowered his tension again.

I’m guessing that this is supposed to be him having his leg in traction. Why, I have no idea, since the doctor clearly said that he had no broken bones. That said, this isn’t at all how traction works, so I guess that kind of balances it out.

(Traction used weights on pulleys to pull on the limb on both sides of a broken bone in order to balance out the muscles contracting so that the parts of the bone, which were likely to be sharp, don’t get shoved into stuff that isn’t supposed to have sharp bone shoved into them.)

What they’ve got on Woodley is basically just a leg rest; all it’s doing is elevating his leg in the same way a stack of pillows would. If he had some sort of bruise or swelling, elevation might help (a little) to promote healing. I think that the actual purpose is just to make it look like a hospital room since there’s not much in the way of other props to convey that. Though why Woodley is even in a hospital room is a bit under-specified. Even in the 1980s I don’t think that they’d be very likely to keep someone overnight who has no injuries and just has some (unspecified) pain. I was going to say that they’d just give him Tylenol and send him home, but back then they probably would have given him opiates. They were still handing those out like candy in the 1980s.

The conversation doesn’t really turn up anything useful except that the technology for a remote control car has existed for years and in fact Daniel once built a remote control car for Woodley.

After Jessica and Amos leave, the nurse comes in. Woodley unpleasantly remarks, “Here comes little mammy sunshine,” whereupon the nurse pulls on the cord elevating Woodley’s leg further and he screams in pain. I’m guessing he has a pulled hamstring. Why he’s hospitalized for a pulled hamstring, I cannot say. I can’t even say for a story reason. Perhaps he’s the murderer and trying to distract us by giving himself an alibi. Except with a remote control car, being in a particular location isn’t an alibi.

The scene then shifts to another cookout, this time at Daniel’s house. According to Daniel, he designed a remote control car a dozen years ago. The discussion makes this sound like it’s actually an autonomous car, but I doubt it’s meant to be that. Katie remembers the car Daniel designed and it was great. Even had a built-in protection system against collisions. (Clearly the car that killed Merrill didn’t have that.)

In the next scene, Jessica talks to Letitia, who runs the local phone company, and gets Daniel’s confidential phone records (by asking Letitia to break confidentiality because trust me). Jessica then goes to confront Daniel. Instead she finds Katie and tells her about the phone records. In the last week Daniel’s house made two calls to Boston. One is just to a bank, the other was to Charles Woodley’s private office. Katie recognizes the number because she used to work for Woodley. Katie seems crestfallen that Daniel lied, but Jessica points out they only know that the calls came from the house.

Jessica then asks why Daniel was fired, and the explanation was that he was a futuristic genius. That’s not much of a cause for firing someone, but there can’t really be much of a cause that preserves Daniel as a successful genius. When he was fired, they tried to take all of his designs and Daniel hired a lawyer and lost most of his money suing to get his designs back. Katie then goes on about how Daniel couldn’t hurt a fly. To prove this point, Daniel brings out his latest invention—an ultrasonic bug deafener which is supposed to drive aphids into other people’s yards in order to protect his roses.

For some reason this ultrasonic noise makes a bunch of dogs run up and start digging around the roses, which is played for comic effect.

Later, Tony and Leslie are over at Jessica’s place for dinner with Ethan. They discuss the days’ activities, which was a large, fruitless search for the car which covered most of the area around Cabot Cove. Amos thinks that the car was smuggled out of the area in a moving truck. Jessica asks if they checked the stretch of woods just east of the old Gentry farm. Ethan is dismissive because it’s so overgrown you couldn’t hide a tricycle in it, but Jessica says that she jogs every morning and knows that there are at least a dozen ways in and out of it.

The next morning Jessica shows up at Amos’s office to argue over looking there. Amos is being a world-class idiot and refuses to investigate. Jessica decides to investigate on her own. Of course, she finds the car. In fact, she finds it riding in on a bicycle. Oddly, she’s signaled to the location by someone with a black glove using a mirror to catch Jessica’s eye.

(This screenshot was taken a moment after a blinding flash of light.)

The path Jessica is riding her bicycle on is wide enough to fit two cars side-by-side, so I have no idea what Ethan said that this area would be inaccessible even to a tricycle. Anyway, Jessica finds the car in a large clearing.

I think that this is meant to look like an artistic shot but I suspect it’s the best way to disguise that wherever this was actually shot was not an overgrown wood. As Jessica goes up to investigate, we see a black van pull up along some other, presumably nearby, road. Foolishly, Jessica gets in the murder car.

A mysterious figure with a black glove flips the “door” switch which closes the door.

I love TV control panels. This is a ridiculous user interface unless it was specifically designed to trap Jessica, in which case I wonder why it has separate door and lock switches. Anyway, the figure locks the car, Jessica finds she can’t get out, and the car starts up and begins to drive. The van follows like fifty feet behind. Jessica tries to overpower the wheel but fails. The car drives mostly at about fifteen miles per hour but we get tons of screeching tire sounds like it’s going sixty.

As Jessica is being driven through town Ethan spots her as he’s driving by in his truck, turns around, and begins pursuit. Eventually they come out the other end of town and are on the coast road.

At some point the car Jessica’s in starts driving off the road and towards the cliff by the light house. Suddenly, right as the car is about to drive off the cliff and the music has us at a fever pitch, the gloved hand in the black van flicks the brakes switch and the car stops. The gloved figure in the van turns everything off and they can open the car. The van drives off, but not before Ethan sees it.

At Sheriff Tupper’s office, Amos says that the remote control device is a lot like the one Daniel invented. They also found a bunch of Daniel’s papers in the back of the station wagon. Amos is afraid this obviously planted evidence means that he’s going to have to bring Daniel in for accusing questioning.

Back at Daniel’s house, he’s going through his files looking for the papers they found in the back of the station wagon. Jessica asks Tony if he and Leslie went directly home last night and they didn’t. They stopped off at Daniel’s house and saw Daniel and Katie. Jessica asks if they happened to mention Jessica’s idea about the location of the driverless car and he says that he did.

Daniel then finds the papers, which means that Amos has to bring him in because the device in the car looks exactly like Daniel’s designs. As Amos takes Daniel in and sad music plays, Leslie drives up.

That night Leslie tells Tony that Daniel has been acting strangely. She thinks they should arrange to have a psychiatrist examine him.

I’m really starting to think that she’s in league with Woodley and Katie is a misdirection by the writers. Leslie’s sales business is so vague it could easily be a pretense, but the problem is that the writers would be this vague even if it’s real so we can’t tell whether that’s a clue or just the writers being lazy. If she is in league with Woodley, pretending the clue is actually the writers’ laziness is pretty cheesy.

The next day Jessica discusses Daniel with Katie. We find out that Woodley and Merrill were in a 50/50 partnership where Merrill provided the money and Woodley ran the company. Now Woodley gets everything, though there are rumors that the company is in financial trouble.

Jessica visits Daniel in jail and they talk about Daniel’s troubles. Tony got him a lawyer who wants a psychiatric evaluation to try for a plea of temporary insanity. Also, they lay the grounds for a romantic sub-plot between Daniel and Katie.

In the next scene Jessica is walking her bicycle (which has a flat tire) along murder road (i.e. the same road Merrill was killed on) when Tony picks her up. They discuss the case a little, but then we get the real reason for this scene: Tony has to stop for gasoline. The gauge has been unreliable and he doesn’t know how much gasoline he has and with Leslie going back and forth to Portland, it might not be much. The gasoline only costs $7.08, which with a national average gasoline price in 1984 of $1.13 and the vehicle they’re in probably getting around 20 miles to the gallon, means that the car’s only been driven around 125 miles since it was last fueled up.

This could mean anything or nothing since Leslie might have refueled anywhere along the trip, but I think this is a clue against her and I suspect that Jessica thinks so too because she suddenly “has something in her eye” and asks if there’s a tissue in the glove box. This allows Jessica to look at the rental slip which has the mileage the car was rented at written on it.

Jessica then takes a tissue and pretends to get the pretend thing out of her eye.

Back at home Daniel looks over his workshop as sad music plays. Then Tony shows up to take Daniel to the psychiatric evaluation. Katie weeps as if he’s going off to be executed, and as they drive off we fade to black and go to commercial break.

When we get back from commercial break Jessica is buying groceries at the local grocery store. I can still remember when there were little grocery stores which looked like this:

It’s a distant memory and I far prefer modern supermarkets with their vastly better selection, but this does bring back memories of when I was a tiny child.

Anyway, there’s an arcade game in back which Ethan is playing and his loud complaining attracts Jessica’s attention. Jessica talks to Ethan as he plays and it comes up that the same van was seen at the picnic. By who, I don’t know—certainly not by us. Jessica works out that it’s the control van. I’m not sure why they have Jessica work this out so much later than we are shown it, but obviously Jessica is correct.

They then get in an argument over the video game and Jessica plays it. We see this from the perspective from the inside of the video game screen, which is a great shot:

They bicker like an old married couple as they always do. When Ethan says that Jessica should ease off the speed until she has the hang of it, she suddenly realizes the solution to the mystery and leaves.

In the next scene Tony and Leslie pull up in their rental car and ask the Sheriff “what’s this all about?” The this is explained to be a reconstruction of the events of the picnic. Mr. Woodley has agreed to help in the reconstruction. Leslie asks about this and Amos points out who he is—the guy with the cane.

Apparently they take hamstring pulls very seriously in Cabot Cove.

Anyway, the goal is to jog people’s memories and Amos thought that Tony should be here since he’s Daniel’s nephew (and Daniel is suspected of the crime). As Tony goes to talk to Jessica, the black van drives up and ominous music plays.

There’s a bit of chitchat then Amos and Woodley, who are walking over to take their places, are surprised by the driverless car coming onto the field and chasing Woodley again. He throws away his cane and runs as fast as he can away from the car, just as he did on the founder’s day picnic.

Leslie looks at the black van, then decides that she has to do something and runs over to it as Woodley is calling out to her to stop it. When she looks inside, Jessica signals to Ethan to stop the driverless car.

Jessica then asks Leslie why she rushed over to the car and Leslie said that she thought she might drive it onto the field and in the way of the driverless car to protect Woodley. She chose this one because it’s bigger than her own car. Jessica replies that it certainly is bigger, but probably doesn’t get the gas mileage of her car. Jessica then points out that she never went to Portland—the car mileage proves that.

Leslie begins to blame Woodley, who tells her to shut up because the Sheriff doesn’t have any evidence against them and they should keep it that way (he’s not quite so explicit). Leslie protests that if she goes, then Woodley goes too.

That night at dinner with Ethan, Daniel, and Katie, Jessica explains how she figured it out from the video game. She kept crashing into everything, even when she slowed down. Then she thought about the speed of the driverless car and how slow it went. Had the person remotely driving it wanted to kill Woodley, it would have overtaken him easily. While it is true that Leslie drove the car slowly so as to not hurt Woodley, Jessica’s experience with the video game actually suggested the opposite—that the driver went slow because it’s hard to drive a car remotely, not because they wanted to spare Woodley. All’s well that ends well, I guess.

Anyway, it was a simple plan motivated by money. Woodley would control the entire company with Merrill out of the way and Leslie would, as Tony’s wife, control Daniel’s estate once he was ruled insane for killing Merrill. While Daniel didn’t think the estate was worth much, there were designs in it which were the key to a multi-million dollar contract Woodley had just signed and he needed control of them. Also, it was Leslie who made the phone call to Woodley’s number in order to frame Daniel.

With everything explain, Daniel proposes marriage to Katie as Ethan and Jessica excuse themselves to go play the video game. There’s a tournament on and Ethan, as the reigning champion, feels obliged to defend his title. Jessica asks if she can join in, and warns Ethan that she’s been practicing. He asks how much practicing and we go to credits.

I really can’t tell why this feels like a stupid episode. The basic bones of it are decent—Daniel has a treasure he doesn’t know he has and Woodley and Leslie are acting in concert on a plan to get it. That’s a decent murder mystery plot worthy of a golden age mystery. I suspect that it’s the remote control car which is at the center of the story. I’m not entirely sure why, though.

I think part of it is just the high-tech nature of it doesn’t feel right. Murder mysteries are supposed to be about human nature, which doesn’t change over time. By introducing a high tech component, it breaks the feeling of universality. But I think that another part of it is that the technology wouldn’t have worked back in the day.

It’s not the remote control part—that was, in fact, doable in 1984. It would have been expensive, but it would have been doable. It would have been nearly impossible in the way that they portrayed, though, since what they showed was remotely driving a car just by looking at it from a distance. Translating vectors to frames of reference you’re not in is an incredibly difficult skill to master, especially in unfamiliar circumstances (very few people can drive toy remote control cars, which use that kind of control, without tons of practice). I seriously doubt that any normal person could accomplish it while driving their own car, as would have had to have happened when Jessica was being driven around. It’s almost a detail that it would be basically impossible to do when you can’t see the car you’re controlling because it’s around a bend, as we saw happening during parts of the scene in which Jessica is driven, or as had to have happened during the founder’s day picnic since the van certainly wasn’t following the car then.

Fun fact: at roughly the same time on TV there was a show called Knight Rider about Michael Knight and his intelligent, self-driving car Kit. The special effect for Kit driving himself around with no driver was accomplished, not with remote control, but by having a special version of the trans am they were using for Kit that had no driver’s seat and a stunt man driving the car leaning back and wearing a trans am seat cover. These days it’s really obvious on the Knight Rider blu-ray but back in the early 1980s TVs weren’t high-res or clear enough to tell. I have a suspicion that they did something similar for this episode.

I asked my teenage son why this premise seems so ridiculous, and I think he made a good point: buying a car where the license plate and registration aren’t traceable to you, getting it to Cabot Cove, and setting it up to be driven by remote control (to say nothing of sufficiently practicing controlling it) would be expensive and time-consuming. If you have this kind of time and money to commit murder, there are many better, more reliable methods. Even if you take into account the desire to frame an inventor, this should still shouldn’t crack the top ten on the murderer’s list of possible means.

Leaving that aside, there are, of course, some loose ends. How did Woodley and Leslie know each other? This plan required quite a lot on Leslie’s end—she had to marry Tony for years as well as murder Merrill. That’s a heck of a plan for two people to enter into. Woodley is the one who had the requisite knowledge to come up with it, while Leslie did approximately all of the work. I feel like it should come out that she’s actually Woodley’s daughter, or something like that. They needed some kind of strong connection in order to cooperate like this, and a romantic connection feels wrong for several reasons.

Another loose end is the question of how Leslie and Woodley knew the area well enough to hide the driverless car in a location that only Jessica knew was accessible, and only because of her jogging habits. This is so glaring a problem that it really should have been a clue. For example, Leslie having been around a lot since getting to know Tony could have explained how it wasn’t only Daniel who could have known about the hiding place. Or else that Woodley couldn’t have been acting alone, since he didn’t have time to find that hiding spot.

Their plan to kill Merrill was also a bit… improbable. I mean that even if we set aside the driverless car. The plan involved persuading Merrill to take a chartered boat into Cabot Cove and then waiting in ambush along a deserted road from the docks to the hospital. Had Merrill been able to find a taxi or even just gotten a lift from someone, they wouldn’t have been able to kill him. Again, I’m forced to wonder how they knew Cabot Cove so well.

Here, by the way, is the front of the Cabot Cove hospital:

There is about twenty five feet of building to the left of the door. This is established with a shot that follows Ethan and Amos as they walk-and-talk. This screenshot from a moment earlier might help to show this:

The bush (or small evergreen tree) you can see on the right in this screenshot is the same as the one you can see to the left of Amos in the shot with the door. It’s clearly not a big building. The way that they frame it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually a single-story building and they’re trying to pretend that it’s a multi-story building. That blue thing on the left is a postal drop box. Here, by the way, is the very beginning of the scene, right before Ethan and Amos round the corner of the building:

I love the sign saying “NO PARKING DOCTORS ONLY” in front of some gravel.

I don’t really know why this hospital would be located a mile away from the docks, which seem to be the center of Cabot Cove. I suppose that this is just part of how the size of Cabot Cove changes radically depending on the needs of the episode. Sometimes it’s a small town where everyone knows each other and sometimes it’s big enough to support a high school with a full football team. In this episode they put the hospital a mile out of town along a deserted road; I expect that in some episodes the nearest hospital is going to be in another, larger own.

Another loose end is why Leslie lured Jessica into the car only in order to drive her to the edge of a cliff then stop. I can’t see how this benefited her at all and—though no one remarked on it—it probably gave Daniel an alibi since he was likely with Katie. For that matter, Katie could probably give him an alibi for the founder’s day picnic and the murder of Merrill, too, since they were constantly spending time together. Until it was revealed that there was a control van which had to be nearby, that probably didn’t matter much, but once that was revealed, that kind of alibi would be significant.

Technically it’s a loose end that they never so much as mentioned who the vehicle or license plate was registered to. On the other hand, I assume that Woodley and Leslie took the elementary precaution of not using their own vehicle for this, or at least not one traceable to them, so I’m inclined to overlook this as just saving time.

I really want to say some positive things about this episode because I think that the clues about Leslie were pretty well done and I feel like there has to be more positive things to say about this episode, but I can’t think of anything.

Well, I do like the Cabot Cove scenery. That’s always nice. The world-building of the small town where everyone knows everyone else is really fun. TV shows with recurring characters and locations leaned heavily into the parasocial aspect of television and for Murder, She Wrote that mostly meant the Cabot Cove episodes. The parasocial aspect of television is enjoyable, even if it’s not always the healthiest thing. But as long as we recognize it for what it is, I think it can be safely enjoyed.

So far, Murder, She Wrote is off to a pretty shaky start. Deadly Lady was solid, but every episode since then has featured something wacky. Lovers and Other Killers kept the wackiness to a few scenes, but in this episode we’re back to weird gimmicks. It’s been long time since I’ve seen the episodes coming up, but looking over the list I think that the show is going to settle down soon. I’m looking forward to that because wacky doesn’t work for Murder, She Wrote.

Next week we’re in Chicago for We’re Off to Kill the Wizard.