I was recently talking with a friend about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Sub Rosa and how, while it was bad, it had some cool ideas. (I explained why it was bad in this post.) Specifically, it was interesting how it suggested, though it did not explore, what life might be like for people who had no interest in Starfleet.
In the episode, Beverly Crusher’s grandmother died and Beverly goes and visits the settlement where her grandmother had lived in order to organize her things. While there, she meets an “anaphasic entity” which behaves much like a ghost, and there are elements of gothic horror in the story, which mostly turns stupid toward the end. But before it turns stupid, the community is quite interesting, or at least hints at being quite interesting.
On the Enterprise, everyone is a member of Starfleet and shares Starfleet’s three primary values of exploration, technology, and bureaucracy. But on this small colony on a completely unimportant world that no one else cares about, there’s no great reason for them to care about any of these things, the valuing technology being the most interesting of the three. People need to do something during their day, and Starfleet officers occupy their time by using advanced technology, following orders, and filling out reports. But there’s no need, in the 24th century of The Next Generation to use advanced technology wherever possible. It’s entirely possible to only use it for the things you don’t enjoy doing the old fashioned way, while doing things the old fashioned way that you enjoy doing the old fashioned way.
Indeed, if you look around at people’s hobbies today you can see this all over the place. There are people who knit by hand rather than using knitting machines, though knitting machines certainly exist. There are people who hunt with a bow and arrow rather than with a gun. There are people who sew their own clothes and do some of the seams with a needle and thread rather than with a serger or more primitive sewing machine. Why? Because for the people who do them, these things are rewarding and enjoyable.
In the 24th century, it’s quite possible that people who live someplace where no great empire cares that they’re there would spend their time farming, weaving, making clothes, cooking, and similar things, only using replicators as a back-stop in case something didn’t go well.
Ultimately, these are the people that explorers find interesting, anyway. Explorers are not, generally, satisfied to go someplace else only to find people who don’t want to be there either and are spending all their time looking for something; they like to find new worlds and new civilizations. That is, they want to find new groups of people who actually want to be where they are.
I can see why most Hollywood writers would be terrible at writing this—they’re not happy where they are—but it would certainly be quite interesting to see it done well. Sub Rosa was never going to live up to this promise, but it would be quite interesting if some story did.
And given how much Science Fiction has been written to date, somebody probably already has and I just don’t know it.
A while ago I came across an interesting video from RazörFist called Hollywood Was Always Red. (A warning: RazörFist uses very salty language.)
One of the things that really struck me from it was when RazörFist pointed out that Joe McCarthy did not run the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the first clue should have been in the name: the House Unamerican Activities Committee. How, he asks, would Senator Joe McCarthy run the House Unamerican Activities Committee?
If you look it up, what Joe McCarthy ran were called the “Army-McCarthy Hearings” which were held by the “Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee” (see here). They had nothing to do with Hollywood blacklists and, as the name would suggest, were investigating communist infiltration into the Army.
The House Unamerican Activities Committee, or more properly the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was formed in 1938—9 years before Joe McCarthy would become a senator—and was initially chaired by Martin Dies Jr, a Democrat from Texas. (Check out the Wikipedia page on it.)
When he pointed out that the first clue should have been the name and highlighted the “Senator” in Senator Joe McCarthy and the “House” in House Unamerican Activities Committee, I was stunned. It’s so obvious, just from that, and yet somehow I had never considered that and just went along with the fake history I was told about how the House Unamerican Activities Committee was part of McCarthyism and McCarthy led to blacklisting in Hollywood and the like.
I don’t get stunned watching YouTube videos often. In fact, I’m not sure I have other than with this one. But it’s so strange to have realized that something that was commonplace among everyone I knew wasn’t just wrong, but obviously wrong. Not just obviously wrong, but we had all the information to know that it was wrong and just never put it together. The “House Unamerican Activities Committee” was just a name, not a collection of meaningful words in a meaningful order. But it really should have been.
On the twenty first day of April in the year of our Lord 1985, the twenty first episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Also the last episode of the first season in was set in Wyoming and titled Funeral at Fifty Mile. (Last week’s episode was Murder At the Oasis.)
As the title screen establishes, Wyoming is a beautiful place. This helps to establish a bit of a golden-age mystery feel, since the beauty of the land will contrast with the ugliness of murder.
Right after the first establishing shot we we get another:
On the left we have an ancient Chevy truck driving by, which gives us the sense of a land where things move more slowly. On the right we have a sign that tells us we’re in a small town in Wyoming. A town so small, in fact, that they publish the population down to the individual. Not only are there not that many people, but the number doesn’t change so often that it’s expensive to change it when it does. (Though sometimes such signs simply reflect the population at the last census.)
After this we fade to a funeral where the preacher gives some useful introductions in his closing remarks. First is the deceased’s beloved daughter, Mary Carver:
Standing next to her is her fiance, Art Merrick.
Also is the deceased’s younger brother:
His name is Timothy Carver.
Also mentioned are Jack’s close and inseparable friends.
Doc Wallace:
Sam Breen:
and Bill Carmody:
(If you recognize William Windom, the actor playing Sam Breen, you probably know him as Jessica’s friend Doc Hazlett. That starts in the second season of Murder, She Wrote. Right now her close friend is Captain Ethan Craig, though we haven’t seen him in a while.)
After these closing remarks we find out that the deceased’s name is John Carver, and he was apparently in the military because his coffin has an American flag draped on it. There’s a brief prayer mentioning ashes to ashes and dust to dust, then a bugle plays a mournful tune.
As the bugle plays, a strange couple drives up in a large RV. They get out and walk up to be relatively near the casket:
We get a little bit of military ceremony—a five gun salute and the flag gets folded and given to Mary—then people begin to disband. The strange man asks Carmody if he’s coming after him with that gun and Carmody replies, sourly, that it would be futile since it’s loaded with blanks. We find out that the man’s name is Carl Mestin and the woman, whose name is Sally, is Carl’s wife.
Shortly after, Jessica is walking with Mary and Art and Mary remarks that it’s strange for Carl Mestin to show up since her father never did business with him and no one around these parts can stand him.
During the conversation it comes up that Jessica is, apparently, an old friend, since she can remember when Mary was born. Well, not the actual birth, but having heard that her mother died in childbirth. “We” were so worried, she says, wondering how jack was going to manage all alone, but he did just fine. In addition to this being awkward exposition, it leaves out the really important part—how was a school teacher in Maine friends with a woman who died in childbirth in Wyoming in the 1950s (or perhaps the early 1960s)?
The scene then fades to the Carver ranch, which we can tell by the establishing shot:
A storm is moving in—we hear the sound of thunder and it forms the subject of conversation inside.
We then meet “Marshall” (actually Sheriff) Ed Potts:
He’s read one of her books: it’s not up there with Mickey Spillane, but darn good for a woman.
I’ve never enjoyed Murder, She Wrote‘s attempts at making fun of sexist police officers and this one makes particularly little sense. While it’s true that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (basically) created the genre of detective story with Sherlock Holmes, many of the biggest figures in the genre were women. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh were known as the “Queens of Crime.” Recent reprints of Agatha Christie’s novels often mention that she’s only been outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. Detective fiction is, as fiction goes, probably the most 50/50 genre you can find. The only way to think that the best detective fiction is all written by males is by knowing nothing about detective fiction. (I suppose if you only like American hard-boiled detective fiction—a genre I dislike and am not sure should even count as detective fiction—this would be more defensible. And he did cite a hard-boiled detective writer. But even so. This is just annoying and dumb.)
In case you’re not familiar with Mickey Spillane—as I wasn’t until I looked him up—he wrote a series of hard-boiled detective novels featuring the detective Mike Hammer. From reading the plot synopsis of his first novel, I, The Jury, the name Mike Hammer is a bit on-the-nose as far as the kind of story it was, so just imagine the kind of story featuring a hard-boiled detective named “Mike Hammer” and you’re probably close enough, especially if you consider the various things “hammer” can be a euphemism for and go with all of them.
Jessica smiles and replies, “Yes, we all struggle under Mickey’s shadow, I suppose.”
The contrast is there for the joke they’re making, but it is very confusing with regard to the character of Marshall Potts. How on earth is a Sheriff who prefers to be called Marshall a fan of Mike Hammer stories? That said, he does immediately afterwards say that he doesn’t really read detective fiction, it’s westerns that have his heart. Like “Coop” in High Noon. (This would be a reference to the actor Gary Cooper in the movie High Noon, where Cooper plays a sheriff who stands alone against a gang of criminals.)
Jessica then says she notices that he wears his holster tied down and asks if this is for quickly drawing his gun. He replies that it is, and that he practices for half an hour every day. There’s a bit more banter where he says that he’s ready for someone to “make my day,” which is a line from the Clint Eastwood movie Sudden Impact, which came out in 1983, only two years before this episode. It’s a strange line to quote for someone who loves westerns, but I guess the point is to portray him as trigger-happy.
There’s also a minor point that Tim (Mary’s uncle) calls his own ranch, which neighbors this one, to make sure that everything is OK—that the ranch hands have everything battened down for the storm, which seems to be there already. That done, Tim brings up to Mary and Sam that he had promised to buy the ranch from Mary after John died, to make her comfortable for the rest of her life. Sam says that he doesn’t doubt that they discussed it, but the fact of the matter is that there is no will. Mary, being his only child, will inherit, but it will take longer to run it through probate than it would have been if there was a will.
This discussion is cut short by a loud honking from outside. Looking out the window, it turns out to be Carl Mestin and his wife. Mary tries to throw him out, but he produces what he claims is a copy of John Carver’s will, leaving everything to him except for a little money for Mary. This does not make Mestin’s reception any friendlier and he antagonizes people until Art Merrick has to be held back from punching him.
Mary asks Jessica why her uncle Tim and the others seem to be afraid of Mestin. Jessica doesn’t have an answer, then the Marshall comes over, warns Art that starting a fight isn’t going to help anything, then gives his condolences to Mary and takes his leave. (This is a very strange thing to do without apology, since an incendiary situation would benefit from his presence to keep things from getting out of hand.)
Jessica then talks to Mestin and remarks that Wyoming is very different than Maine. Back in Maine, she couldn’t imagine a father disinheriting his only daughter. Mestin replies that it probably has something to do with having saved John’s life back in Korea at the Inchon landing. Jessica is surprised at this and asks if he knows her husband, Tom Fletcher. He was Jack’s commanding officer. (She clearly doesn’t believe him and is testing him, since her husband’s name was Frank.)
Mestin thinks and remarks, “Oh yeah, Lt. Fetcher. He’s quite a guy. He’s a good guy.”
He then excuses himself. (In addition to not flinching at the name, Frank Fletcher was a captain, though we won’t learn that for a few more seasons.)
I should note, since I complained about it before, that we do, finally, have an explanation for how Jessica knows any of these people who never seem to have left Wyoming—Jessica’s husband and the deceased had served together in the Air Force.
Later in the afternoon, though it looks like night, after Mary is asleep courtesy of a sedative the doc gave her, her father’s friends are putting on rain coats to help batten the place down in the storm. Carl and his wife are arguing over drinking, with her calling him a lightweight and him saying that he’s not getting into a drinking contest with her. She then brags about having beaten him at an arm wrestling contest and he claims that he let her win. She bets him $500 ($1,505.46 in 2025 dollars) that she can beat him right now. She goads him into the match by accusing him of being too cheap or too chicken to do it, and he accepts. The people who were getting ready to help with tying things down in the storm stop their preparations and watch.
She beats him easily.
I don’t know if this will come up later, but it’s curious that they are arm wrestling left handed. It may come to nothing, of course, but it’s hard to not notice left-handed people in murder mysteries.
It should also be noted that this is very strange behavior of a woman who is supposedly his wife. It seems likely that her being is wife is another of Mestin’s lies. Anyway, he pays up, then goes and joins the people getting things prepared for the storm. As he joins them he asks whether a particular door still needs to be tied down in the wind, suggesting he knows the place.
Later in the day, after the storm has passed, Art comes back to the house having been given a ride by one of the employees named Jesús. Art greets the people inside—everyone from the funeral is still here. They ask where he was and he says that he got the pickup truck stuck in the mud on the way back. After two hours of trying to dig it out he gave up and started walking back. Jesús passed him on the road and picked him up. As Art goes to check on Mary, Jesús finds something that scares him in the barn. In a panic fetches the people from the house and they come. Then we see that the thing that terrified him was the body of Carl Mestin, hanged.
We then fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we get back, the Marshall shows up. He doesn’t much know what he’s doing with a murder investigation and Jessica “subtly” helps him out. She points out that a hay bale was dragged near the body, as if to suggest suicide, but the killer seems to have changed his mind or been scared off.
Jessica also mentions that there looks to be a blood smear above his left ear, as if he was hit by something before he was hanged. (Doc checks out the body and confirms this, saying that Jessica has sharp eyes.) Jessica also notes that the rope on the beam had been splintered, suggesting that it was holding Mestin’s weight when it was pulled over.
Jessica asks Doc how long the body had been dead for and he answers 4-5 hours. Which is rather odd precision to give, even apart from not having taken the temperature of the corpse and run the relevant calculations. Anyway, the Sheriff does the math and says that it was around 3pm, when everyone has battening down the ranch.
That evening, Jessica talks with Mary. She asks Mary what she meant by Mestin shortening her father’s life. Mary explains that she was there on her daily visit and saw Mestin coming out of her father’s room. Mestin didn’t say anything to her and just looked smug. Her father was so upset he couldn’t even talk. He was never the same after that and two days later he died.
Jessica points out that the witnesses on the will were nurses. She suggests that Mestin arrived with the will prepared and pressured her father into signing it. Jessica mentions Mestin’s story about having saved her father’s life during the war, but that’s nonsense. She tripped him up with asking about knowing her husband, which he clearly didn’t. Whatever made Mary’s father sign the will, it wasn’t gratitude.
Bill Carmody then comes out and says that the Sheriff wants them assembled for questioning. Mary asks if Mestin might have been holding something over her father and Bill says he doesn’t know and didn’t know Mestin well. Mary asks about a business venture that they were in together and Carmody explains that Mestin talked into buying grain in order to open up a feed store. Bill bought the grain, then Mestin pulled out and left Bill holding the bag, causing bill to lose a lot of money.
Mary then asks why Bill did business with Mestin, since everyone she knew seemed to hate him. Bill replies that he didn’t have much choice, then says that they had better get inside.
Inside the Sheriff asks everyone where they were at the time that Mestin was killed. Doc, Uncle Tim, Sam Breen, and Bill Carmody were all working around the barn and saw each other. Mary was sleeping after Doc gave her some sleeping pills. This woman, who I presume is an employee, never left the house:
Carl’s wife was in her RV “sleeping it off.” Jessica was in her room “getting rid of jet lag.”
Jessica notes that the women are the only ones who can’t corroborate their alibis, but that don’t make no nevermind to this here Sheriff, as he doesn’t think a woman could have done Mestin in the way he was done did in. In his mind, the only possible suspect not accounted for is Art Merrick, which is good enough for him—he concludes with certainty that Art did it. Jessica shakes her head at him, and he replies, “I thought that you were smarter than that, Ma’am. There ain’t anybody else. Process of elimination.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
The Sheriff then goes over to where Art is getting his truck out of the mud. He points out that there was solid ground on either side of the mud hole, so Art clearly got himself stuck on purpose (Art says that it was raining so hard he didn’t see the hole until he was in it). The Sheriff then accuses him of the murder and arrests him.
The next day, in the morning, Mary drives Jessica over to the Sheriff’s station:
I find the interior quite interesting:
The most interesting part to me is that while the matte painting behind the set is quite good—it is appropriately out of focus for the foreground, for example, and thus looks fairly convincing—it’s entirely wrong for the environment and the external shot. (We can see based on how Jessica and Mary walk in that the door behind Jessica, here, is between the building and the hill in the exterior shot. But look more closely at what we can see through the window:
(I upped the exposure and size a bit to make the background clearer)
The hill is missing. Also, that looks like a fairly populous town across an empty plain.
Anyway, Jessica tries to talk some sense into the Sheriff. Mestin was struck from behind on the left side of the head, suggesting a left-handed killer, while Art is right-handed. Also, he didn’t have a motive. The only one who benefited from Mestin’s death is Sally Mestin.
The Sheriff then storms out and Sam Breen tells Jessica that bail is already in the works up at the county seat. Also, he and the boys talked and figure that they should stay close to Mary until things are settled.
He leaves and Jessica goes to Mary and Art, where Art relays what he overheard from a call that the Sheriff got from the coroner. This was more substantive than you might expect because it shook the Sheriff up enough he repeated everything the coroner said. The important part of which is that Mestin died of hanging and the blow to the head came afterward. Jessica wonders why Doc was so sure that it was the other way around, and Mary suggests Jessica ask him since his place is just down the street.
Doc’s house is interesting, partially because the shot is so close-cropped. I wonder where this really was.
Anyway, Doc isn’t in, but his nurse/receptionist/housekeeper is in.
She recognizes Jessica because she’s also the local phone operator and nothing goes on in Fifty-Mile that she doesn’t know about. Doc’s on a house call and will be back in about an hour. Jessica can’t wait and wonders if Doc made any notes about the examination he made the night before and wonders if Doc would mind if Jessica peeked in his files to see. The nurse replies that he’d skin her alive if she let Jessica look through his files—the only time Doc ever lost his temper was when he caught someone poking his nose in the Doc’s files. He threw the man out, using words that would “shame Lucifer himself,” and told him that if he ever breathed a word of what he found out it would be the last words he ever spoke.
Jessica asks if the man was a stranger, but it turns out to be Carl Mestin.
The nurse then says that, in her opinion, a man like Carl Mestin was born to hang. Jessica doesn’t agree, but also doesn’t demur.
Back at the house Jessica and Mary run into the housekeeper, who says that Mrs. Mestin requested a lot of coffee and has been on the phone all morning making calls, mostly long distance. Mary then confronts Sally and demands that she leave. Sally refuses and suggests that Mary leave, instead. Mary asks what Carl had on her dad that got him to sign the will and Sally replies that Carl never told her, but whatever it was it must have been very “juicy” because it was very profitable.
A little while later the Sheriff arrives with Art Merrick. He’s dropped the murder charge after he had a chance to think about Jessica’s arguments. Jessica tells him that it takes a strong man to admit his mistakes. The Sheriff replies that Art is still his best suspect… so if he didn’t do it, who did?
Jessica suggests that the Sheriff challenge Sally Mestin to an arm wrestling contest. He might find it illuminating.
Interestingly, he does.
In the preparation for the match, Jessica drops in and says that she wants to observe Sally’s technique. Sally replies that it’s all in the timing and body English. The women’s North American champion is just a little bitty thing, much smaller than Sally. (Sally is significantly overstating this; while technique does certainly matter in arm wrestling, as in all kinds of wrestling, there are significant limits to the strength difference it can overcome.)
They begin and at first not much happens except for the Sheriff grunting. But right before Sally wins, we get a closeup of her hand:
and then her arm:
They did this pretty quickly in the episode, so I’m not sure that it’s reasonable for them to have expected us to notice, but you can see that Sally has a tan line from her bracelet but not from her wedding ring (she’s wrestling with her left arm, so this is her left hand). So she clearly hasn’t been wearing the ring long.
Anyway, after Sally wins, the Sheriff remarks to Jessica that he never thought a woman would be strong enough to do in Mestin, but Sally is sure strong enough and she’s left-handed to boot.
Sally doesn’t take kindly to this and storms off.
That night, while Jessica is in bed, she hears some tapping on her window. She goes over and looks out the window and sees a noose hanging outside.
Jessica looks thoughtful and says, out loud, “I do believe I’m making someone nervous.”
And on that we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, Sally leaves her trailer and barges in on everyone having breakfast. She’s brash and provocative, and comes on pretty strong to Art Merrick, clearly to antagonize Mary.
Right after she’s served breakfast, though, Sheriff Potts comes in and informs Sally that he has a warrant for her arrest for the murder of her husband. She complains a bunch, then when Sheriff Potts holds up a pair of handcuffs Jessica asks Sally if now isn’t the time to play her trump card, before she winds up on trial for murder.
Sally says that she doesn’t know what Jessica is talking about, but Jessica replies that she does. Her supposed motive for killing Carl is to get ownership of the ranch as his widow, but she’s not, in fact, his widow. She and Carl were never married. Jessica checked on all of the long distance phone calls and they were to quickie wedding chapels in Nevada. She figures that Sally was looking for one that would sell her a forged wedding certificate, and since Sally got so much bolder after those phone calls, she probably found one that would. Jessica suggests that the proof is that the skin under her wedding ring is as tan as everywhere else; only the skin under her bracelet has a tan line. Clearly, the wedding ring was a prop.
Sally sinks down in her chair. She sighs and says that Carl said that people around here are old-fashioned. If they pretended to be married, it wouldn’t make waves. She then gets up and says that if she’s not under arrest she’d like to leave. The Sheriff replies that there are some nice places on the edge of town where she can park the RV, but he recommends not going any further than that from town.
After she leaves, Potts sits down and expresses his frustration. Now he’s back to the beginning.
Jessica says that she can give a description of the murderer. He’s a tall, strong, ambidextrous man who had number of reasons to hate Carl Mestin but only one reason strong enough to kill him.
The Sheriff replies that there ain’t anybody like that around here, and Jessica sadly nods her head and says, “Yes. I know.”
A few minutes later Art, Mary, and Jessica are standing on the porch as Sally drives off. Art says that he can’t say that he’s sorry to wave goodbye to her and Mary replies that in a funny kind of way she feels sorry for Sally. Art then points out that now is a good time to get his truck and Mary volunteers to drive him over. She invites Jessica to come with her for some reason but Jessica declines.
When Jessica comes in, only Doc is at the table, peeling an apple. Jessica notes that he’s left-handed. He replies that he’s very left handed, but not ambidextrous. He asks her why she says the killer is ambidextrous and she replies that Mestin was struck from behind on the left, but the hangman’s noose outside her window was tied by a right-handed person. Hence, ambidextrous.
He asks Jessica if she really knows what she’s saying and Jessica replies that, unfortunately, she does. She then says that she’s going to take a walk, perhaps go down to the barn and look around.
The Doc follows her and asks her to not meddle in things she doesn’t understand. Someone could get hurt. Jessica replies that he’s not talking about her, he’s talking about Mary, isn’t he? It seems to her that Carl Mestin was killed to protect Mary from some terrible secret that’s worse than the loss of her birthright. Could any secret be worse than that?
Doc replies that one could and asks her to drop it.
When she gets to the barn Uncle Tim, Sam Breen, and Bill Carmody are waiting there.
Jessica then says that they’re four men who added up to one tall, strong, ambidextrous killer. After revealing a bunch of what she knows, she then asks about what she doesn’t. Who was Carl Mestin? He knew about the haymow door needing bracing in the wind, so he seems to have worked here in the past, but a long time ago since it was before Mary was old enough remember.
It’s Uncle Tim who finally speaks. Carl—which wasn’t actually his real name—was a randy young ranch hand at Carver ranch. He tried every way he knew to seduce Jack’s wife, but it didn’t work. One day he found her alone and raped her. Then he ran and the five of them—including John Carver—chased him down and caught him. They strung him up and were going to hang him but John said no and talked them out of it. Because he asked it, they instead turned him over to the law. Only Carl escaped and got clean away. And Ruth—John’s wife—turned out to be pregnant with Mary. She seemed to believe that the child was John’s and Doc let her believe it. After Ruth died in childbirth, John raised Mary as if she was his own. He loved her and doted on her, and his one great fear was that she would find out the truth about her parentage.
Jessica asks how Carl figured it out. Sam Breen replies that as near as they can figure out, he changed his name, stayed around near Fifty-Mile but out of their sight, and read about the birth in the paper and did the math. But he needed a clincher, so he broke into Doc’s files. Not Mary’s, but John’s. John was sterile and could never father a child of his own.
The night of the funeral, they saw the horse run into the barn where Carl was and the idea seemed to hit them all at once. They put a noose around his neck and put him up on the horse in order to scare him, but he was cocky and mocked them, saying that they didn’t have the guts. Then there was an enormous lighting flash and the horse spooked and bolted. The fall off the horse broke Carl’s neck when he finally fell to the end of the slack in the rope. It felt like divine providence. After that they knew that one man couldn’t have lynched him, so they took him down, Doc hit him because he knew where and how hard, then they strung him back up, so it could look like the work of one man. It never occurred to them that Art would be blamed. They’d had stepped in if Jessica hadn’t cleared him.
Jessica then asks, “So what happens next?”
Sam stands up and says, “Alright. We’ll go to the Sheriff. Tell him what happened. Stand trial. I don’t know what a jury will say. We’ll even go to jail if it comes to that. But there’s no way on God’s green earth Mary will ever know the reason why. Not from any of us.”
Jessica replies, “Nor from me, Sam. She’s been hurt enough already.”
Sam then takes off his hat, offers Jessica his arm, and they all walk back to the house.
I have very mixed feelings about this episode. On the one hand, parts of it are well done. We get a good sense of the loneliness of the Carver ranch and the close-knit nature of the sort of community which is necessary to thrive where there are so few people. On the other hand, I really don’t like the ending.
The ending violates the ideal structure of a murder mystery. In an ideal murder mystery, the murder—that is, the intentional, unjustified killing—causes a disorder in the community through the misuse of reason. The detective then enters the world, temporarily becoming a part of it, and through the right use of reason restores order to the community. Plenty of mysteries don’t have this structure; however, though it’s not universal, it is common and, more importantly, it’s the structure that the best mysteries have.
The first major violation of this structure in this episode is that the killing isn’t even murder. It is more properly manslaughter, since they did not intend to kill but nevertheless did kill during the commission of a crime (assault).
The second major violation of this structure is that the death didn’t cause a rupture in the community. In fact, Carl Mestin’s presence caused the rupture in the community and his death fixed it. It didn’t perfectly fix it, but everyone was better off with Carl Mestin dead.
Worse, the part that Carl Mestin’s death didn’t fix wasn’t fixed any other way, too: Carl’s inheritance of the ranch. With Carl’s death it doesn’t go to his widow, since he wasn’t actually married, but if he doesn’t have any near relatives, it would go, not to Mary, but to the state of Wyoming. About the best case for Mary would be that, with Mestin dead, no one who will speak up on Mestin’s behalf will mention the existence of this will and consequently Mary can inherit under the rules of intestacy. If things turned out that way it would just bring us back to Carl Mestin’s death being the thing which fixed the problems that his life caused. (It would actually work for Mary to inherit as his daughter, presuming Mestin died intestate, but that just causes other problems.)
Which means that Jessica’s solving of the crime did no one any good.
And the thing is, I mean literally no one. Not even the Sheriff. Contrast this with Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, Murder On the Orient Express. (spoilers ahead, but, dear reader, as you’d have to be 92 years old at the time of my writing this to not have had your entire life to read it, I think you’ve had enough time and I can discuss the plot with a clear conscience.)
Murder On the Orient Express, like Funeral At Fifty Mile, has the solution that almost everyone did it together. And, further, it has the property that the victim really had it coming, and his departure from the world fixed problems caused by his wickedness while it did not introduce any new problems, except for the responsibilities given to the authorities. Which brings us to the key difference: in Murder on the Orient Express, the authorities had a real problem caused by the death. Specifically the director of the Wagon-Lit company had a murder on his train and for which he was responsible to his passengers because passengers really dislike trains on which people get murdered. And owners of companies do not like it when their customers get murdered while being customers. Poirot solved these problems for him without creating more problems. He laid out two possible solutions: an uncatchable fake assassin who crept away in the snow but who was specifically after the victim and who might have killed him anywhere, and the real solution. He laid out the assassin theory first and the director of the Wagon-Lit company at first dismissed it, but Poirot admonished him to not be so quick to dismiss it because he may come to like it after hearing the second solution. And, indeed, he did. After Poirot carefully laid out the real solution, the director said that clearly he had spoken too hastily and obviously the first solution was correct. That is, Poirot gave him a way to fulfill his duty to the rest of society and also to act justly in this case, and left the decision with him.
By contrast, Sheriff Ed Potts didn’t really have any obligation to the community to solve the killing of Carl Mestin because the general opinion in Fifty Mile was that Mestin was born to hang and the world was clearly better off without him in it. And these are the people who employ Sheriff Potts and the only people to whom he answers. Unlike the director of the Wagon-Lit, if he just left well enough alone, everyone would be happy. And it is in this context that Jessica demanded that the four friends not let the Sheriff leave well enough alone.
This brings us to one of the strange things about Jessica Fletcher as a person: her greatest faith is in civic authority. She is, perhaps, best described as a devoted believer in the American Civic Religion. (It’s an amorphous, hard to nail down religion which is vaguely deist and holds America to be something sacred and thus all its institutions are sacred.) She has notions of justice, but her devotion to the American institution of the courts is greater. Poirot, being Catholic, could hold that human institutions are fallible and not always to be trusted with the difficult cases. Jessica cannot; she must see the law carried out no matter what.
Which means that Murder, She Wrote does better when it sticks to actual murder and leaves things like manslaughter, justified homicide, etc. alone. Les Miserables would not be improved by having Javert as the protagonist.
Moving on from the ending, the characters in this episode were mostly pretty good. None of them were well fleshed out but they at least all had a few hints of a personality and the actors did a lot with those hints. William Windon as Sam Breen, in particular, was a ton of fun. This may be why he replaced Claude Akins as Jessica’s close Cabot Cove friend starting in the second season.
The main exception was Sheriff Potts. He was a caricature from the beginning, which can be a fun start if the caricature becomes a character; that is, if he gets turned into a real person who simply has some interesting quirks. That often reflects how we meet people, after all. At first we notice their unusual characteristics, then we get to know them. The problem with Ed Potts is that he never became a character. The closest they came was having him drive Art back home after dropping the charges, as that did require some sense of responsibility. But on the whole I found him annoying without any compensation for that annoyance.
The setting was also enjoyable: Fifty-Mile, Wyoming, was a nice place to visit.
Another point in this episode’s favor is that it does actually establish how Jessica is connected to the place. Over the seasons, Jessica has an oddly large number of old friends who are never really explained and are often not very plausible; attending the funeral of someone her late husband served with in the Air Force is a nice way to explain this that is plausible.
As far as plot holes go, this episode did pretty well. I think one plot hole was that the people were a bit over-concerned that Mary never find out that she was Mestin’s daughter. It would be pretty unpleasant to find out that the man you thought was your father was merely a man who loved you and raised you as his own, but your real father is a scumbag rapist. On the other hand, it’s not like anyone gets to pick his parents and having someone raise you lovingly because you’re the daughter of a good woman he loved would help her to deal with it, and it’s not like anybody in the area believes in a tainted bloodline, so she wouldn’t face any practical consequences. I don’t want to overstate that; I completely understanding not wanting to burden her with the truth, but that can easily be taken too far. Very few good things come from running from the truth. And I very much doubt it would be worth disinheriting Mary rather than telling her the truth. Especially now that she’s an adult. As a child she might worry that she will take after her real father, but as an adult she knows who she is, regardless of who her father was.
The only other real plot hole I can think of is the noose outside of Jessica’s window. That really came from nowhere and went nowhere and didn’t fit the character of any of the four conspirators. They really just did it so that they could go to commercial break on a dramatic note and couldn’t come up with anything. But at the same time it only takes a few seconds and could easily be excised from the episode without anything else having to be changed. Well, that’s not quite true. Instead of Jessica saying that the noose outside her window was tied by a right-handed man, she’d have had to say that the noose around Mestin’s neck was tied by a right-handed man. Half a line isn’t much of an impact.
Actually, there’s one more plot hole I can think of: I’m not sure that Sally not having a tan line under her wedding ring is actually proof that she wasn’t really married. Sally would, in any event, have been pretending that she and Carl got married recently, which means that even if it were true she’d have had no time to get a tan line from her wedding ring.
Well, that’s the end of the first season of Murder, She Wrote. Back in 1985 it was almost five months until Season 2 would begin with Widow, Weep For Me.
On the seventh day of April in the year of our Lord 1985, the twentieth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Set in the fictional city of Desert Palms, California, it was titled Murder At The Oasis. (Last week’s episode was Armed Response.)
While we hear someone tinkering on a piano we get some establishing shots of a very fancy house with a gate and a security guard house next to the gate on the driveway. Then we then see who is tinkering on the piano and meet one of our main characters:
His name is Johnny Shannon and the various gold records framed on the wall suggest that he is connected to the music business and is quite successful. (Why he’s wearing his coat like a German officer is not explained.)
We also very quickly establish that he’s extremely unlikeable. He calls in his son, Mickey…
…and then berates him for composing such a terrible piece of music. We get the impression that this is a common occurrence because Mickey is only mildly disappointed and calmly tells his father to just play it at the right tempo, which he proceeds to demonstrate.
While Mickey is playing it, Johnny summons his assistant, Buster:
Buster makes Johnny wait a moment, though, so he can tell Mickey that he likes the piece and it’s good work.
Johnny, disappointed by this reaction, orders his car to be prepared because he has a lunch date at a tennis club. On the way there, they receive a phone call on the car phone from a major mob boss, but Johnny refuses to take the call because he’s now “protected.” He clarifies to Buster that he has “a special kind of insurance,” but then says no more about it.
At the tennis club, we actually see Jessica and her old friend Peggy, who is Johnny’s ex-wife.
From some casual conversation we find out that they’re expecting Johnny to join them for lunch.
Which he eventually does. There’s a bit of small talk where it turns out that she recently leased a house in the area so she could visit her children since they rarely visit her anymore. Mickey is one of those children and then we meet the other: Terry.
Terry then excuses herself because she has to meet a friend and Johnny expresses concern that it’s not “that tennis bum”. Her refusal to respond suggests that it is and this is confirmed by the tennis bum coming up to her table a minute later and kissing her for an extended period of time.
Johnny gets up to intervene and Peggy lays a restraining hand on his arm, saying that Terry is old enough to choose her own friends. Johnny replies that she told him this before and she was wrong, then, too.
His interfering goes about as well as one can expect it to; the tennis bum shoves Johnny and then several people whom Johnny employs comes to his aid, restraining the tennis bum.
Curiously, this is interrupted by a man who introduces himself as Sergeant Barnes of the police and asks what the trouble is. When Johnny tells Barnes that he doesn’t want the tennis bum around his daughter, Barnes replies that he doesn’t work for Johnny. Johnny then replies, “You must be new. Ask around. Somebody’ll set you straight.”
He then escorts Terry home.
With Johnny and his entourage gone, Peggy tells Jessica the backstory: when Terry was seventeen she eloped with a boy that Johnny didn’t like. Johnny sent some men after them who roughed up the boy then gave him a one-way airline ticket out of the country. Johnny had the marriage annulled and Terry never forgave him. She still lives in her father’s house to get back at him—to torment him with behavior like this.
Later that night, at Johnny’s house, Buster brings Johnny a glass of milk only to find the door locked. He knocks loudly, then even louder, but no matter his volume he gets no response. In desperation he calls Lou, Johnny’s bodyguard. Mickey, hearing the commotion, knocks on Terry’s door, finding her with the tennis bum.
Back at the door the bodyguard has arrived and breaks the door down. They go inside and find Johnny, dead.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen an ad like this:
When we come back from commercial, Jessica and Peggy are driving along. After Jessica observes that Peggy is driving too fast, Jessica offers her condolences. Peggy replies that at least Jessica had a happy marriage with Frank; Peggy isn’t even a widow. She apologizes then thanks Jessica for going to the house with her because she can’t face it alone.
The scene then shifts to the men’s locker room at the… I’m not sure what this place is. Perhaps a tennis club? Anyway, she goes into the men’s lockerroom and finds the tennis bum she had been with and tells him that her brother is sure to tell the police that he was in the house the night before. She gives him money and tells him to flee the country if he doesn’t want to be part of a murder investigation. She adds that he should not try to contact her.
When the tennis bum asks, “what about us?” She scoffs and tells him to not be stupid. Now that her father is dead, she doesn’t need to play “let’s pretend” anymore. She adds that the truth is that she doesn’t even like him. (He doesn’t take this well, but nothing comes of it.)
Jessica and Peggy then arrive at the house. Oddly enough, she still goes by “Mrs. Shannon” despite being divorced from Johnny Shannon for years.
Inside the house, Mickey is glad to see his mother. He’s also glad to see Jessica, because they can use a good detective. Jessica objects that her exploits have been greatly exaggerated, but Sergeant Barnes walks into the room and answers her that he’s heard differently.
He’s the new police officer from earlier, and he explains that he’s been assigned to the case because in Desert Palms they don’t have a homicide division. He was on duty when the call came in so it’s his case.
Peggy, Mickey, and Sergeant Barnes press her to help on the case, but Jessica is reluctant. I always find this strange because if the police detective doesn’t want her on the case, she can’t be kept out. I wish that she was a bit more consistent as a character. Anyway, Barnes eventually gets her to help by telling her that she’s covered the subject of murder well in her books, even if she’s not always accurate. This piques Jessica’s interest, and she asks why he says this. When he says that he’ll explain on the way to the crime scene, she accepts. As they walk to the other room, he tells her, “You’re a little shaky on police procedure. And you always make your killers more interesting than your cops. You see, most killers are very dull people.”
They then leave the room and Mickey and Peggy discuss Terry in terms meant to make us suspect her, which, in Murder, She Wrote, means that she’s definitely innocent. It’s more reliable than a solid alibi.
In the room where Johnny was killed, Jessica notes that the door had a spring lock, so the killer must have pulled it shut on the way out.
They discuss the room as characterizing the victim:
Barnes says that Johnny was found in his favorite chair. He was shot in the back of the head and probably didn’t know he was about to be killed. Jessica wonders why he was sitting in a chair opposite to a blank TV when there was a perfectly good couch to sleep on, if that’s all he was doing.
Barnes agrees that this is puzzling. He adds another puzzling thing: no one heard a shot. The walls are thick but if you walk past the room in the hallways with the door closed, you can hear if a piano is being played, so they should have heard a gun, which is much louder than a piano.
Jessica says that she’s never seen a silencer herself, but mystery writers are addicted to them. (I think that this was true only of a certain era; but certainly this was part of that era.) Barnes objects that “mufflers” would be a better name for silencers; you can’t actually silence a gun and there’s always some noise.
Interestingly, that’s not quite true. The British developed an effectively silent gun called the Welrod.
It uses a series of solid rubber wipes in addition to many baffles in order to suppress the sound down to the point where it’s quieter than people speaking conversationally. The trade off is that you can only fire a dozen or so shots from it before the wipes are too degraded to suppress the sound that effectively. Also, it fires sub-sonic ammunition. This part is critical because it doesn’t matter how well you suppress the explosion which propelled the bullet if the bullet itself creates a supersonic boom. As a result, it has an incredibly short range—measured in tens of feet. On the other hand, its purpose is incredibly close-range assassination, and it actually has a concave front to allow it to be effective when pressed up against a person, so this isn’t too much of a limitation.
That said, it’s very unlikely that a killer in California in 1985 would be using a World War 2 British special services assassination pistol. There were a few similar guns made over the years but they’re exceedingly rare because there’s basically no market for them. So, in practice, Sergeant Barnes is right.
Jessica says that if the sound was muffled and not recognizably a gunshot, it might have gone unnoticed, confused with ordinary household sounds such as radio, television, etc. Barnes agrees that might be the case, but asks how on earth the killer got through the security system. There are guards on duty 24 hours per day at the front gate and the service entrance, at the back of the house, is protected by a tall fence and a sophisticated alarm system with TV cameras. The gate is opened remotely by the guard at the front gate after confirming the identity of the service person over the camera and through an intercom for voice verification. Nobody pushed the buzzer on the back gate last night and nobody could have gotten over the gate or wall without the alarm going off.
Jessica states the obvious conclusion: the murderer came from inside the house. (This was not lost on Barnes, who had already come to that conclusion.)
Having said that, I’m not sure it’s right. It’s unlikely that the tennis bum got in through the front gate by being on the invitation list—Johnny would almost certainly have told the guards to forbid him entrance—so his presence demonstrated it is possible to get in.
The scene then shifts to Terry pulling up in a fancy car as tense music plays. I’ve no idea why this might be important since we’ve already established that Terry is definitely innocent, but it’s a good excuse to show the front gate:
Terry goes into the house and demands to know what Mickey told the cops before she realizes that her mother is there. She then switches to condoling with her mother, which Mickey doesn’t take very well. Some hot words pass and Terry runs off.
Back in the murder room, Jessica and Barnes are discussing motive. Barnes suggests the standard: someone who stood to inherit. It was the servants’ night off, so other than family only the bodyguard and Johnny’s assistant were there.
When Jessica asks if the motive could have been robbery, Barnes shows her a hidden wall safe in the room which Mickey told him about:
Barnes doesn’t think this is the motive, though, since the killer wouldn’t have shot Johnny before making him open the safe in that case. Unless, as Jessica points out, the killer already knew the combination. Barnes admits this possibility, but while the safe contains valuable things, members of the household confirm that nothing is missing. Jessica then points out that her theory is unlikely since someone who knew the combination wouldn’t need to kill Johnny to steal it, they’d only need to wait for him to be out of the room.
Jessica then wonders if the motive might have been something else. There’s an obvious spot on the wall where something that was framed was missing. Barnes says that it wasn’t anything, though—just an old picture of Johnny and his kids.
This is interrupted by Buster, who asks the Sergeant to come quickly because the bodyguard is convinced that Mickey killed his dad and is busy assaulting him by the pool.
They get there in time and Barnes knocks the bodyguard into the pool. Mickey isn’t feel great from all of the strangulation he just experienced, but he’s otherwise OK.
The bodyguard insists that Mickey needs to be arrested, and when questioned, explains that he finally remembered that he wasn’t the last one to see Johnny alive—he saw Mickey go into the den after he left it.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial Sergeant Barnes asks Mickey what’s up. Mickey says that Lou (the bodyguard) had it all wrong. He did go down to the den to show his father some changes on the arrangement he was working on but his father didn’t want to see it until the arrangement was finished. So he immediately went back upstairs. He wasn’t in the den for more than a minute. (I’m not sure how the short duration is important because it takes only a few seconds to shoot someone in the back of the head. Perhaps Mickey is still groggy from being strangled.)
Mickey then goes on to say that he didn’t always get along with his father and there were times when he hated him, but when he was angry at his father he’d always think of the good times, before they moved out to the desert.
This is interrupted by Terry, who walks up with Peggy. Terry says that Mickey didn’t kill her father, there was someone else in the house—the tennis bum. She let him in at the rear service entrance. She used the master switch to turn off the alarm long enough for the tennis bum to get in and make it to the house. The guard would only notice that the system was switched off if he was paying close attention because the only indication is a tiny red light. The night man reads a lot and doesn’t check the panels often. The TV monitors are always off unless the alarm is tripped.
When Barnes remarks that she knows a lot about the security system, she replies that this isn’t the first time she’s let a man into the house.
When Terry mentions that she sent the tennis bum away and doesn’t know where he is, Barnes borrows the telephone and calls in an APB on the tennis bum.
As he’s doing this, Jessica asks where Lou (the bodyguard) was when Mickey came out of the den, that Mickey didn’t see him. He went to his room because Johnny told him to get lost. Buster says this means that he was expecting a “broad” (a woman). He always sent Lou away when he was expecting a female visitor.
Lou doesn’t think this is plausible, though, because he wasn’t given a name to call down to the front gate. Jessica mentions that perhaps the guard knew this woman on sight. When Lou said that Johnny’s rule was female guests always had to be specifically called down, Jessica looks at Peggy and says, “there are exceptions to every rule.”
Jessica and Peggy talk privately; Peggy confirms that it was her and that she wanted to talk to Johnny about Terry, but she found him in a mellow and affectionate mood and for the first time since she left him, they made love. She then discusses how Johnny always had a way with women—which was why she ended up leaving him. He was always using women and seemed genuinely surprised that Peggy cared. He even once took a girl away from Buster, who was heartbroken over it until he made a joke of it.
A bit of talk later, Jessica asks if Johnny had any enemies and Peggy said that last night Johnny was bragging about “putting one over” on a mobster named Milo Valentine (this would be the mobster who called him on his car phone, that he said he had protection against). Milo started Johnny in show business, but their relationship turned sour. Last night, Johnny said that he felt like he could nail Valentine to the wall, but didn’t explain what he meant by that.
Jessica then goes to Sergeant Barnes at the police station to give him her latest theory that Johnny was killed by a hitman. She remembers reading that shooting someone in the back of the head was part of the mob’s execution ritual. Which sounds rather inconvenient and also at odds with the mark of a professional killer being to shoot someone twice—once in the heart and once in the head. But, what do I know?
Barnes isn’t overly impressed by the idea that Johnny was killed by a hit man but he doesn’t dismiss it. When he worked in Chicago before he came here, he remembers hearing rumors that Johnny had a mob connection.
Jessica thinks that this would put the kabosh on the tennis bum theory, but Barnes disagrees. Hitmen don’t wear a t-shirt that says “professional killer”—they have some kind of cover. Tennis seems good for this, allowing him to move around. He’d have started an affair with Terry to gain access.
Back at the Shannon residence, Buster is out by the pool making a phone call to Milo Valentine, saying that he has an urgent matter to discuss. When he hears Terry draw breath in surprise (she’s listening on another phone, inside the house), he realizes the conversation is being overheard and asks who’s on the line, to no avail.
Jessica then comes up to the house in a taxi, and after questioning the security guard offscreen, she goes inside and talks with Terry, who is sitting in her father’s favorite chair and watching tapes.
She comments on the tape that she was watching. “That Vegas showgirl nearly became my stepmother. But so did a lot of others.”
During the conversation, it comes up that Terry took the family photo that’s missing from the wall up to her room. She took it right after they found her father because she needed something of him to hold onto. The guy on the tapes is a stranger; her daddy was the man in the photo.
Jessica asks about the tennis bum and how they met. Terry says that he was the loudest, most obnoxious player in the bar at the tennis club so, knowing that her father would hate him, she picked him up. She’s fairly certain he didn’t kill her father, though, since when she told him that her father was in the den, the tennis bum was too scared to leave her room.
Terry also ends up telling Jessica about Buster’s phone call to Milo Valentine. Jessica also gets some further information about the VHS tapes above the television. Most are of Johnny’s TV shows, but a bunch are of his pool games. He had a camera installed to record the pool table so he could watch his games and figure out how to improve.
Jessica says that it’s hard to see in the dark corner where it is.
The scene then shifts to a few miles north of the Mexican border, where some police catch up with the tennis bum and arrest him. As he’s being led to the police car, he says that he didn’t kill Johnny Shannon, Terry did.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
(You’d only have seen this particular ad if you lived within a few hundred miles of the Pocono mountains.)
When we come back from commercial we’re at police headquarters where the tennis bum is interrogated in front of Jessica and Johnny’s relatives.
It’s strange enough when Jessica is at police interrogations; I’ve got no idea why almost everyone is here.
The upshot of the interrogation is that the tennis bum believes that Terry killed her father and used him as a patsy, which is why she paid him to leave.
Interestingly, Jessica actually tells the tennis bum to reconsider not having an attorney present, which is out of character for her. Out of character for him, he takes this advice and says that he wants a lawyer, which ends this interrogation.
Once the tennis bum is escorted out to make a telephone call, Jessica remarks to Sergeant Barnes that it seems unlikely a professional killer would have no better escape route than an unreliable van on a back road to Mexico. (She doesn’t add that it’s even stranger for him to hang around and wait to make his escape, rather than starting that night.)
Barnes replies that perhaps he’s new at it, or perhaps he’s not a pro and perhaps he’s telling the truth about Terry. Some bickering later, the Shannons leave for their home and Jessica joins them because she has something she wants to look into. Barnes asks if she’s going to let him in on it and she replies that she will once she’s sure—she’d hate to look foolish in front of the police.
Back at the house, Jessica talks to Buster, who explains that the phone call was only because he was worried that Valentine might have a contract out on Buster as well as Johnny. He also explains what the cause of the split was—Valentine got Johnny started, which gave him control over Johnny, which Johnny resented when he made it big. Johnny chafed under this and eventually started making his own moves. When Johnny failed to make an appearance at a political rally for one of Valentine’s payroll politicians, Valentine flew over and had a meeting with Johnny in the den. Buster wasn’t in the room but did hear the sounds of pool being played.
Jessica puts two and two together and concludes that Johnny taped the game with Valentine and then threatened him with the tape. The killer must have had a double mission: to kill Johnny and to retrieve the tape.
When Jessica tells him not to worry about a contract being out on him—had there been one, he’d already be dead—he tells her to say no more, he gets the picture. She asks him to repeat “I get the picture” then she announces that she knows who the killer is. She calls Sergeant Barnes to let him know that she’s solved it.
When he arrives, she begins by explaining how the killer got in. He kept a close eye on the tennis bum, figuring that he’d be brought into the house sooner or later. That night, he got lucky and followed the tennis bum in. He knew where the den was because Milo Valentine had been in the house and described the layout for him. He figured that Johnny wouldn’t help him find the tape, so he shot Johnny immediately. He then locked the door and searched through the tapes. Jessica experimented and all of the tapes up to the missing tape were played for a short time, while all of the ones after the missing tape were at the very beginning. The killer then turned off the VCR and TV, then waited. While Lou was breaking down the door, Terry turned off the alarm to let the tennis bum out. The killer went out behind him.
Barnes says that this makes sense but leaves them with the problem that they can prove that the tennis bum was in the house and can’t prove that anyone else was. Jessica demurs. The morning after the murder, Sergeant Barnes told Jessica it was his first time in the house, but he knew what was in the picture missing from the wall, despite Terry having taken it to her room right after her father was found dead.
Barnes replies, in surprise, that Jessica is good. He then takes out his gun and puts a silencer on it. He says that he never kills unless he is well paid for it, and it hurts him to make an exception in her case.
Jessica then calls to the waiting people, who come in.
She then tells Sergeant Barnes that he would be well advised to not make any sudden moves. Lou took Johnny’s death very hard.
He thinks for a moment, then smiles and hands Jessica his gun. She thanks him, saying that it means a great deal to her. He asks if she means as a trophy, and she replies no, as the only real evidence that he killed Johnny Shannon. “Ballistics will prove that the bullet came from your gun.”
After a moment, she adds, in reference to their first conversation, “That’s police procedure.”
This was a very interesting episode. It’s most notable quality, of course, is that the police detective was the murderer. This was extremely rare for Murder, She Wrote—as it should be. But I think they did a good job of pulling it off.
The main danger of having the police detective be the murderer is that he is, with regard to the investigation and often with regard to the crime itself, super-powered. That is, the extra powers which the police are given in order to fight crime put them at a tremendous advantage for committing it. The result is that it really should be impossible to catch them, and catching them requires the writer to make them do something very dumb in order to get caught.
I think that they avoid that in this episode. Barnes knowing what was in the picture was, perhaps, not maximally convincing—I’m not sure why he ever looked at that part of room—but it wasn’t dumb. He had been in the middle of discussing the case with Jessica and he had to act the part of the police detective trying to solve the case. He had to discuss it for real in order to be convincing, and he had to reveal to her all sorts of things he learned from the family. It is plausible that he had lost track of what he knew because he was the killer and what he had learned as the police detective, even if the particular execution could, perhaps, have been improved upon.
The other golden age rule this episode broke was having a hitman as the murderer. A professional killer with no connection to the victim and no personal interest in the victim’s death is simply outside of the mystery genre. That said, this episode introduced the mobster right at the beginning and introduced the character of Sergeant Barnes before he was investigating the crime. Barnes remained a significant character throughout. The episode also introduced the idea of the hitman very early, even apart from it being implicit in a mobster being involved. Further, Jessica took the option of the hitman as a live option as soon as it was mentioned. So while it broke the rules, I think that they pulled it off.
I think it was for the best that they had a hitman be the murderer very infrequently. Having said that, I have to admit that it was the case in one of my favorite episodes (Snow White, Blood Red), so when they did it, they tended to do it well.
Another good thing about this episode was the characters. They kept the cast relatively small, which enabled them to have some character development for most of them, which they took advantage of. To be clear, the character development is mostly us learning about the characters rather than the characters having an arc; that’s simply appropriate to the format. But we get complexity on several of the characters. The character of Terry is probably the most obvious, from this perspective: she starts off seeming to be a hedonistic spoiled brat who is coolly distant from her father because he represents restraint, but we find out that she was angry at him and unable to form a real relationship with him. The moment when she tells Jessica that the showgirl in the video almost became her stepmother, but then so did a lot of other showgirls, too, reveals a lot. The moment when she said that the guy on TV wasn’t really her father, her real father is the guy in the picture of happier times was quite poignant. There’s a sense in which it’s true, but also a sense in which it isn’t. Each action that we take does shape us and is part of who we are, but it is also true that some of the actions that we take are unnatural to us—they may warp and twist us, but they are never really part of us. Which is not to say that we can’t cling to them until the original isn’t left, but the distinction remains true even if we turn it into a theoretical, rather than practical, distinction. And underneath the glitzy jewelry and promiscuous behavior, there was a little girl who wanted her father back.
Mickey is another interesting character. At first it seems like he might just be a stereotype of a son who was never good enough for his successful father, but he has real depth. Even right at the beginning, he simply doesn’t respond to his father’s bluster. I didn’t describe it in the plot summary, but Johnny even tells Mickey to let him have it, saying that he (Johnny) told his own father off more than once, but this doesn’t phase Mickey. It’s not that he’s putting up with it; he just doesn’t care. But what gives it depth is that they make it clear that he’s not intimidated. He has his own goals and is pursuing them, and even still has some affection for him. He points out that his father might be wrong because this would actually be beneficial for his father to consider. This gets reinforced later, when he says that he was deeply frustrated with his father but when he gets mad he thinks of the good times.
Peggy is probably the best fleshed out of the characters. She’s divorced from Johnny but clearly doesn’t want to be. The part where she tells Jessica that she’s not even a widow is particularly poignant. She feels a widow’s loss, but does not have the support of the community a widow would have. They do not go any deeper into it than this but it points very strongly to some of the costs of divorce and even more of society having moved to being so accepting of divorce. Worse for the character, she’s one of the people who accepts divorce and thus has no framework to make sense of her grief. She eventually fades out of the story after her reunion with Johnny is revealed in order to clear up a red herring, but had there been more time there would have been very interesting places to go with her.
Even the character of Sergeant Barnes is interesting, in this episode. On the one hand, he’s keeping an eye on Jessica because he doesn’t trust her and wants to mislead her; on the other hand he is a bit hubristic and assumes that he did such a good job that she can’t possibly catch him. This raises the question of whether he was sincere when he told Jessica that she goes wrong by making her killers too interesting while in reality most killers are very dull people. One possibility is that he’s sincere but holds himself to be far more interesting than the average killer. Another possibility is that he’s insincere and thinks that the killers are actually more interesting, and this is misdirection. Yet another possibility is that he doesn’t think of himself as interesting, for as G.K. Chesterton once observed, every man is normal to himself. Or, to quote Chesterton:
To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all. In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
Another unusual aspect of this episode is that I can’t think of any major plot holes. The one question I have is how Barnes knew what the missing photo was, since his business would not (obviously) have taken him to that wall of the room, and it was a very large room with many things on the wall. On the other hand, this could be explained by Barnes making a general search of the room before concluding that the only relevant thing was the VHS tapes. He might even have been looking for the safe in the wall and perhaps tried to get in before concluding that wasn’t a way forward. And, really, that’s it. You can ask questions about how Barnes managed to conclude his business with relatively tight timing, except that I don’t think that the timing was all that tight. Mickey was, supposedly, the last one to see Johnny alive, but Johnny had time to have Peggy over and for them to make love and her to leave; presumably after this he got dressed and, feeling wistful, went to watch some tapes of his glory days, when Peggy was still his wife, where he got shot by Barnes. There is, perhaps, a bit of explanation that would be helpful for why Buster brought Johnny a glass of milk at what must have been one or two in the morning without it having been request immediately before but something could easily have been worked out. As Murder, She Wrote goes, this is airtight.
I wonder how many scientists would get this wrong:
You want to know if one basketball team is taller than another so you measure the players. On the one team the average is 6’5″ (15 players, standard deviations is 1.3″) while for the other it’s 6’6″ (14 players, standard deviation 1.4″). What is the p value for this 1″ difference?
I suspect that far more than zero would do what Gemini did when I presented it with this question:
The p-value for the 1-inch difference in the average heights of the two basketball teams is 0.0571.
Explanation of Statistical Test
To determine if the 1-inch difference in average height is statistically significant, a two-sample t-test was performed. This test compares the means of two independent groups to see if the difference between them is due to chance or if it’s a genuine difference in the populations from which the samples were drawn.
Here’s a breakdown of the calculation:
Hypotheses: The null hypothesis (H_0) assumes there is no true difference in the average height of the two teams (mu_1=mu_2). The alternative hypothesis (H_a) assumes there is a difference (mu_1nemu_2).
T-statistic: This value measures the size of the difference relative to the variation in the sample data. A larger absolute value of the t-statistic suggests a stronger difference. The calculated t-statistic for this data is -1.9894.
Degrees of Freedom (df): This value, 26.44, is a measure of the amount of information available to estimate the population variance. It’s used to find the correct p-value from the t-distribution.
P-value: The p-value, 0.0571, represents the probability of observing a difference in average heights of at least 1 inch (or more extreme) if the two teams were actually the same height on average. A common significance level is 0.05. Since the calculated p-value of 0.0571 is greater than 0.05, we do not have sufficient statistical evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
This means that while Team 2 is an inch taller on average in this sample, this difference is not statistically significant at a 5% level of significance. It’s plausible that the observed difference is simply due to random chance.
This is completely wrong because it’s a trick question. There is no p-value for this 1″ difference because the entire population was measured.
The p-value, used to determine whether a result is statistically significant, is, in theory, the computed probability of the result having been gotten by random chance if the null hypothesis (usually, no causative relationship or correlation existing between the two measured things) is true. However, that’s not how it’s actually used in practice.
The p-value that is used in practice is actually the probability of the results having been generated by random chance simply by how the members of each group being compared were selected from the total population.
Despite how this may sound, it’s actually a really easy concept, so let me illustrate it with an example. Suppose you want to know whether 1 beer is enough to get people drunk enough that they’re bad at playing ping pong, so you select two groups of people, each with fifty people in them, and to one group you give them the beer and to the other group you give them a non-alcoholic beer. (Let’s make favorable assumptions on all of the practical stuff, like having taken baseline measurements of their ping pong skill beforehand.)
Now, we know ahead of time that there is variation in the population in alcohol tolerance. Some people can safely operate heavy machinery after six shots of vodka and some people are under the table after one, with most people falling somewhere in between those two extremes (even apart from variations in body weight). So here’s the thing: what are the odds that instead of both groups being exactly representative of the population as a whole, your randomly assigning people from the population to one of the two groups just happened to put more alcohol-tolerant people into the 1-beer group than is representative of the whole population? The laws of probability tells us that if you run this experiment enough times, at least once you’ll randomly have all high-tolerance people in the alcoholic beer group and at least one other time you’ll have all low-tolerance people in the alcoholic beer group.
What people are measuring by p-value, in almost all scientific experiments, is how likely this kind of skew is. They are not measuring the effect of, for example, random errors in the actual measurements taken. (Conveniently for the researchers, those are always assumed to be perfect, or at least to always balance out.)
This is why the question I started this post with is a trick question: it’s got all of the information that you’d find in a random trial, presented in roughly the way you’d get it in a random trial, except there was no random selection. Within the hypothetical of the question, the entire population we care about—the two basketball teams—was measured. If you want to be super nit-picky, you can say that the p-value is zero since there was no chance of this being produced by random selection, in the same sense that the probability of a coin set down on the table with the head facing up turning up tails is zero.
But the thing is, there are scientists—evidence points to it being an awful lot of scientists—who don’t actually know this is what they’re doing when they run a p-value calculation. And, of course, there are contexts where this isn’t awful. If they’re copying a format for experiments where this happens to work, well, then, it happens to work. But because they don’t understand what it’s about, they don’t realize that the p-value is the absolute floor for how meaningless the result is. That is to say, if the scientist does a randomized (controlled) trial and gets a p-value of .045, which is below the industry threshold of .05, this means that there is a 4.5% chance that the results are meaningless if everything else is perfect.
Imperfections in instruments, fluctuations in the things to be measured, defects in the measuring tools, biases in the researchers, flaws in the study design—these all raise the chance of the results being meaningless, potentially by quite a lot.
Of course, if you want to be cynical about it, it’s in scientists’ best interests to not know any of this.
Most words have multiple meanings, but there are problems when you can’t tell the meanings apart by context. The word “feminism” has exactly this problem because it has been used to refer to people doing superficially similar things in the same contexts which are actually quite different. There have been many feminisms, some of which have been absolutely terrible (especially Marxist feminism). A full taxonomy of them would take more than a little time and probably not actually be very interesting, but there are two types that I would like to distinguish in order to illustrate this point: the feminism of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (in 1848) and 2000s era internet feminism.
The 1848 version of feminism was about the context in which there existed places in America where women could not own property in their own name (the legal context of mid-nineteenth century America was far more heterogenous than modern America) and in some places could not be legally held accountable for their own crimes. In fact, one of the articles in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was that it was not just that, in some places, a father or husband would be held legally liable for a woman’s crimes and not she herself. That is, they asked for a reform to the laws that would involve holding women criminally liable for their own crimes. (Please note: I am not, thereby, saying that this was all that was in the declarations of sentiments or that it was a perfect or an unalloyed good; I’m not interested in discussing that one way or another. My only point is that one of its major concerns was both legal rights and responsibilities, many of which amounted to bringing American law in line with European and especially British legal traditions, rather than innovating.)
By contrast, 2000s era internet feminism was largely selfish people telling obvious lies to justify why they shouldn’t have to treat people decently or even take the trouble of developing basic social skills. You can see this today in the wretches who complain about “emotional labor” and when you look into what they mean, it turns out that they’re talking about the work of living in a society and having to treat other people better than as chattel slaves.
Of course, I’m not saying to never use the word “Feminism.” My point is, rather, that one should rarely, if ever, use it in an unqualified way. When talking about some feminism, it would be much better to say things like “equal property rights feminism,” “suffragette feminism,” “Marxist feminism,” “sexual liberation feminism,” “2000s era internet feminism,” etc. It is more cumbersome, of course, but it drastically improves the likelihood of actually being understood; all the more so as many people are only familiar with some of these and if they’re not familiar with the one you’re talking about they’re going to assume it’s one of the ones they do know about. By adding the qualifiers, this will be especially helpful in this case as their reaction will be “what are you talking about?” rather than “you idiot.” “What are you talking about?” can be an excellent starting point to mutual understanding. “You idiot,” pretty much never is.
A conversation with physicist Dr. Hans Schantz about his upcoming trilogy of books, Fields & Energy, as well as a discussion about the recent history of physics and more.
Chris Lansdown 
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