For some odd reason I decided to watch Disney’s new show, The Acolyte. I guess all the buzz about how bad it is got me intrigued. And it’s bad, to be sure. It’s not all that fun, though, since it’s very slow. Each episode could have five to ten minutes trimmed from it without removing any plot points, dialog, or important reaction shots. Which is not to say that they wouldn’t benefit considerably from trimming some of that, too. The episodes are about forty minutes long and with decent editing for pace, I think they could easily be twenty five minutes long without feeling rushed. Which would make enjoying the badness a lot more fun.
Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is that The Acolyte is, at its core, a mystery. It’s not detective fiction; it’s more like a suspense thriller—you don’t know who the good guys are or who the main character can trust. Everyone has a story, we only know parts of them, and we don’t know if any of these stories are true.
Now, when this kind of thing is done well, the fun is that you start to figure out who you can trust because there become cracks in the stories of the people you can’t trust. Things they say or do don’t quite fit in and though they have explanations, the explanations don’t quite fit.
Frankly, I think it’s quite rare for this sort of thing to be done well because it’s very hard to pull off. But what really doesn’t work in this genre is having gaping plot holes early on. For example, having a fire break out in the vacuum of space which gets put out by smothering it with a fire extinguisher. Later on, when a stone building catches fire like it’s made of paper soaked in gasoline, you can’t say, “That couldn’t have come from the fire Mae started because there was no way for it to spread so quickly in a stone building. It must have been the Jedi and they used Mae happening to set fire to a book as a cover!” You can’t say this because the idiots who wrote a scene with metal catching fire in the vacuum of space easily might not realize that stone doesn’t catch fire as readily as paper soaked in gasoline. Then again, for all we know, they did and the pointless scene of the metal-on-fire-in-outer-space was meant to prepare us to accept stone catching fire.
I think that the way you’re supposed to watch this kind of show (that is, what the makers of it hope you will do) is to turn off the rational part of your brain and just feel whatever the music and acting is telling you to feel in the moment with no reference to having seen anything before. Which really doesn’t fit into the suspense thriller genre, in which the primary pleasure (outside of the frequent action scenes, which The Acolyte is sparse on) is intellectual.
This also makes guessing the identity of the sith master (or whatever he’s supposed to be that’s t he obvious equivalent of the sith) no fun. My best guesses—based on the psychology of the writers so far, not the plot—is either master Vernestra, mother Kora, mother Aniseya, or someone we haven’t met yet. I think that the fourth episode is trying to set us up to believe it’s Qimir (the character that Critical Drinker refers to as “discount Ezra Miller”), which means that it’s almost certainly not him because it’s too early for it to be him. Now, in a well-written show, you could consider various bits of evidence presented within the episodes. In this show, that would be a waste of time because anything that you see could easily just be the writers being incompetent. And even my guesses about who the sith is are based on the assumption that a character being in the same scene as the sith means that they definitely can’t be the sith. For all I know, that’s not true and master Sol or Yorg is the sith.
This is one thing that, for all its flaws, I have to give The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson never wrote anything that depended on you remembering anything else he wrote or thinking that it made sense.
If you go to any KFC (formerly, Kentucky Fried Chicken), you will notice the image of Colonel Sanders. Take this example from their website of a family meal:
It’s not just a drawing, though. Back when I was a child I remember commercials with the Colonel in them, like this one:
You never know how long YouTube videos will work, or if they will work embeded, but here’s a KFC commercial from 1980 featuring him:
As a child I had assumed that he was a fictional character, like Ronald McDonald or The Burgher King. But it turns out that no, he was very real. He was even a real colonel, if, granted, not a military colonel. He was a Kentucky Colonel, which is a title of honor bestowed on prominent citizens by the state of Kentucky, analogous to modern knighthood in Britain. He was even the guy who developed the KFC method of frying chicken using a pressure fryer and their secret “eleven herbs and spices”.
He led a curious life; he grew the facial hair and wore the white suit to play the part of the character of the Colonel in relation to his restaurant franchise. Apparently he wasn’t much of a businessman but actually was a good cook.
On the sixteenth day of December in the year of our Lord 1984, the eighth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Death Takes a Curtain Call it’s set in both Boston and Cabot Cove. (Last week’s episode was We’re Off to Kill the Wizard.)
Unusually, the title card above is from a minute or so into the episode. The episode actually begins with an establishing shot of Jessica’s house:
(The exterior of Jessica’s house was played by the Blair House Inn in Mendocino, California, as was the coastline and many other exterior shots since shooting in rural Maine was too expensive.)
Inside the house Jessica and Ethan are listening to the news on Jessica’s kitchen television as Ethan tries a slice of apple pie which Jessica just baked.
The news reporter says that police tangled with anti-communist protesters outside the venue where the Rostov Ballet was going to give a preview performance this afternoon. Ethan asks about the slice of pie with urgency but Jessica waves him away as she gets closer and concentrates on the TV. The news then shows a woman shouting that it’s the USA, not communist Russia, and they have a right to be heard saying that the ballet should be banned. Oddly she’s named, though she isn’t shown clearly. (Her name is Velma Rodecker, and she’s called one of the protest leaders.)
After she cries out that the ballet should be banned because we don’t want red culture here, Ethan remarks that it’s enough to spoil a man’s appetite. I never took Ethan for a communist sympathizer, but you never did know about people back then.
Anyway, it comes out that Jessica is going to that performance because someone by the name of Leo Peterson invited her. After a bit of small talk of her asking how the pie is and him saying, “delicious, as always. I’d have told you if it wasn’t” and Jessica saying that she’s sure that he would, we then cut to the Boston and the title card.
Jessica and a man we presume to be Leo Peterson walk into the ballet house and as Leo presents his tickets, his gaze is caught by a gruff looking man who is watching everyone. His name will turn out to be Major Anatole Karzof.
Leo looks troubled, and the man politely tips his hat.
Inside, they meet a young man by the name of Mr. Eddington who is both the president of the arts council and also handing out programs. Jessica met him a while ago and he’s delighted to see her again. She introduces Leo, who compliments him on the choice of the Rostov ballet.
After a little small talk he hands Jessica a program and then hands Leo a program from the bottom of the deck.
It’s not subtle, but they couldn’t have been subtle back then, given television quality. I can’t help but wonder how subtle they would be if they were shooting it now, with modern high definition and no static from radio broadcasts.
Anyway, Jessica notices this completely unsubtle gesture and they walk off.
We then meet a character backstage who tells somebody how to tie a rope, then goes and hits on one of the ballerinas.
He asks her to come with him, and about ten feet over from where she was, he asks her name.
It’s Irina.
Anyway, he hits on her in an absurdly clumsy way, including pawing her to her obvious discomfort, when he’s grabbed from behind by someone his own size.
Obviously a member of the KGB sent to guard the dancers, his name is Sergei Berensky and he warns the guy to not associate with members of the company. The jerk in the argyle sweater isn’t impressed, though, and walks off.
Irina then goes into the dressing room of the star ballerina and ballerino, Natalia and Alexander Masurov (husband and wife). She embraces Natalia and asks if she’s nervous.
She is because she and her husband are going to defect to America. Irina tells her not to be afraid and Natalia thanks her for being such a good friend and that their good wishes will be with her always. They both kiss her on the cheek and wish her well in the future.
Irina seems a little embarassed by Alexander’s kiss on her cheek, but this might just be fear of the KGB because she’s already been there for like thirty seconds. At the backstage call of “three minutes” she excuses herself and runs off.
In the audience Jessica asks Leo if he’s seen the Rustov ballet before and he says yes, many years ago. She asks if this was why he was favored with a special invitation to this performance and he replies, guardedly, “perhaps.” Jessica then notices something written in his program.
I’m not sure why the single number nineteen would be written down in a program when it could be easily worked into conversation, but in any event, the plot thickens. Something is clearly up.
Jessica sees it and tries to ask him about it but he hushes her because the ballet is starting. As the curtain opens we see Alexander and Natalia, so they’re clearly not defecting quite yet.
Backstage, Sergei warns the guy in the argyle sweater to stay away from Irina again, and again to no avail.
A bit later Jessica notices the arts director wandering off and Leo notices too.
Outside, Velma Rodecker, the anti-communist protestor, bangs on a door in an alleyway and demands entry. Presumably no one is actually hearing her.
In my extremely limited experience of theaters, it’s fairly rare to have back entrances manned during a performance, since they’re really only convenient ways of making certain kinds of deliveries. Though down this large a flight of stairs, it’s probably more of a fire escape than anything else.
Anyway, after a while she concludes that this won’t work and starts to leave, but on her way out notices a second floor window being opened.
Inside, this seems to have been done by the arts director, who may have been seen by Sergei.
A moment later, Leo excuses himself to Jessica, saying that he’ll be right back.
He’s still gone when the triumphant finale comes and the lights go down and the curtains close. When they come back up a moment later, as everyone is giving them a standing ovation, the ballerinas are in a line and bow.
Then the ballerinos come out and bow.
The older KGB agent (the one with the silver beard) speaks into a walkie talkie saying that Alexander and Natalia are not on stage, and to check on their dressing room. Sergei answers in the affirmative and goes off to do it.
Just then, Velma runs on stage, calling on the people to wake up because the Russian tour is only an excuse!
An excuse for what? To bring more communists into our midst. I’m not sure, but I think that this is meant to be amusing because, at that very moment, the communists are working hard to not permit two communists to leave and go into America’s midst.
Security guards then rush on stage and drag her off.
Leo then comes in and tells Jessica that they must leave and now. He rushes Jessica off. In the lobby she protests that the parking exit is not the way that they’re going, but he tells her to nevermind.
There’s then a scene of major Karzof looking down, as if having seen them, but he doesn’t look like he’s somewhere he could have seen them. Anyway, another KGB agent rushes in and asks what happened. He tells him to clover the exits and close down the theater, because Alexander and Natalia are missing. They walk off.
The argyle sweater guy then walks in and looks at where Major Karzof was looking and the camera pans out to show us what he was looking at.
Sergei is dead!
Oddly, we don’t fade to black. Instead, we cut to Peter and Jessica rushing off in a hurry to a car.
Somehow, Jessica manages to recognize their chauffeur, despite only having seem him on stage from a distance.
When she gets into the back seat, Natalia is there. Alexander starts the car and drives off, and we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, after an establishing shot of Chicago, the scene is of the car driving along is Boston in glorious rear projection:
Natalia is reaching across Jessica and saying, “it is wonderful to finally meet you, dear Uncle.” He kisses her hand and replies something in Russian.
Leo asks Jessica to forgive him for involving her; he thought that a single man—with an accent, no less!—at a ballet would arouse too much suspicion, so he invited her. Natalia thanks her, as they’ve been planning this escape since she was a little girl.
After Leo says that they must go to federal authorities to seek asylum for Alexander and Natalia, Jessica says that by now their absence must have been noticed and there might be news, so they have Alexander turn on the radio. Fortunately it’s tuned to a news station which is broadcasting the news of Sergei Berensky’s death (from stabbing) in Natalia and Alexander’s dressing room. They are being sought by federal authorities.
There’s some discussion, including Natalia translating the news into Russian for Alexander (who apparently speaks no English), and Natalia assures Leo and Jessica that they had no part in Sergei’s death. They never even went to their dressing room and never saw Berensky.
Jessica says that they should go to the police right now because if Natalia and Alexander are innocent, they have nothing to fear. For a bright, worldly woman, sometimes Jessica can be a complete idiot.
Leo points out how this is madness and if the KGB gets their hands on Natalia and Alexander they will drag them back to Russia and there is no such thing as a fair trial there.
Jessica says that if it’s a matter of delaying their surrender, she’s willing to be an accomplice to that, and says to take them back to Cabot Cove. She’ll telephone Ethan and explain the situation, then stay here and try to solve the murder (technically, she says, “find out what I can”).
Back at the theater, an FBI agent and Major Karzof are interviewing Argyle Sweater Guy when Jessica comes up and asks who’s in charge and the FBI agent and Major Karzof both reply, “I am.” The FBI guy tells Argyle Sweater Guy that they’ll talk to him later and he leaves.
The FBI guy walks up to Jessica and introduces himself. Chief Agent O’Farell of the FBI.
When he asks what he can do for her, she begins to explain that she was in the audience, and Major Karzof notes that she was with a distinguished gentleman. Anyway, it comes up that she’s J.B. Fletcher the mystery writer and Major Karzof is a huge fan. He’s delighted to meet her and introduces himself in full, Major Anatol Karzof, Committee for State Security. She corrects this to “KGB”, to which he replies “Well, if you prefer.” KGB was just an acronym for the Russian name, Комитет государственной безопасности, which is romanized to Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (note the initial letters in the romanized version), so he was just introducing himself in English.
Anyway, O’Farrell interrupts to say that unless she has some relevant knowledge about what happened, he’s going to have to ask her to leave. Fortunately for Jessica Major Karzof is a huge fan and says that he would welcome her observations in the matter as she has remarkable powers of deduction.
O’Farrell is not pleased by this and says, hotly, that he wouldn’t welcome them and this is his turf. Karzof begins to shout back, “I would—” but then catches himself, moderates his tone, and finishes his sentence, “hope, in the spirit of cooperation, in this instance you might defer to my request, eh?” By the end of the sentence he’s quite friendly and charming.
O’Farrell gives in, says, “suit yourself, major,” and walks off.
This places Jessica in a very interesting position since she clearly doesn’t like the KGB but on the other hand is indebted to Major Karzof for being allowed to investigate. Karzof says to her, “I feel as if I already know you from the many hours I have spent absorbed with your books.”
Jessica says that he’s very kind, but it is unfortunate that Russia doesn’t see fit to pay authors royalties. Karzof laughs and replies, “that is a capitalist invention. Come, shall we investigate the scene of the crime?”
Karzof was the first to find Berensky. He was face down, with a jeweled dagger in his back. The dagger was part of Alexander Mazarov’s costume. He sent Berensky to find Natalia and Alexander, and apparently he found them. There was a struggle with Natalia and Alexander stabbed him. He knows that there was a struggle because there were nail marks on Berensky’s face.
Jessica then says that while that is sound, surely there must be other suspects. The major, for instance. Realizing that the dancers slipped away and nothing short of murder could prevent it, he might have killed his own man to prevent their seeking asylum.
Karzof is deeply amused. It’s wrong, but brilliant, he says. He then asks if she’s staying in the city and she says that she hand’t planned to, but under the circumstances she thinks that she will. He then recommends the hotel where he’s staying, and leads the way out.
In her hotel room, Jessica pleads with Ethan, over the phone, for Ethan to take the young Russians in. Despite having been established as a communist sympathizer—or perhaps, because of it—he’s reluctant, but he never really had a chance of having it his way, and eventually agrees. (Oddly, Ethan is taking this call from a payphone.)
Jessica says goodbye as she hears someone knocking on her door. The knocking is very loud and insistent. When she opens it it’s major Karzof, who apologizes for knocking so loudly and explains it’s an old habit from his days in the militia. Some people were reluctant to answer the buzzer. Jessica replies that she’s glad she opened the door before he kicked it down. He chuckles and this and tells her that the lab reports are in he thought she might like to come with him to police headquarters. Which she would.
At police headquarters, someone dumps out the stuff which Berensky had in his pockets and Major Karzof remarks, pensively, “Isn’t it sad how a man’s whole life can be reduced to a pile of trinkets?” No one replies, but Jessica, looking through the police report, says to him, “Now here’s something interesting, Major. The victim’s handkerchief was found in his pocket, stained with his own blood.”
Jessica notes that this disproves the Major’s theory that Berensky was scratched while struggling with Natalia as Alexander stabbed him in the back. Chief Agent O’Farrell isn’t impressed, but Karzof agrees with Jessica that it’s absurd that Berensky wiped his face with his handkerchief after having been fatally stabbed, so the face scratching must have happened earlier.
Chief Agent O’Farrell does not contradict this, and instead asks if the report mentions green fibers, as from a sweater, caught on the watch band. Jessica points out that Velma Rodecker was wearing a green sweater. She’s currently locked up “upstairs” and so a sergeant is dispatched to see if the fibers caught on the watch that the Chief Agent was inspecting match her sweater. Jessica adds, sotto voce, that the sergeant might as well check under Velma’s fingernails while he’s at it. Major Karzof chuckles approvingly at this.
The scene then shifts to the hotel where Jessica and the Major are staying. While they’re in the elevator, the Major asks Jessica if this will be valuable material for a new novel. Jessica, I think aware that this research is her cover story, says that it certainly has the right ingredients. A murdered Soviet agent and the disappearnce of two world-famous ballet stars. Karzof asks her, smiling and laughing, to not forget the wise and venerable chief of state security who solves the murder and brings to justice the misguided betrayers of the homeland. The elevator stops at his floor and he asks her if she would like a nightcap. Jessica says that she’s had a very long day and needs to get to sleep, but she would like to take a rain-check. Karzof, ever-genial, replies, “You have a rain-check,” and walks off.
Jessica doesn’t go to her room, though; she instead visits Mr Eddington, the president of the arts counsel (the man who handed Leo the brochure from the bottom of the deck).
Jessica tells him about how she saw him deal with the program from the bottom of the deck, and he explains the importance of it not getting out that he was involved in the defection or the Soviets will never cooperate with the arts counsel again. Given her assurance of confidentiality, he explains that his father was the American officer who arranged for Leo’s defection from the Soviet army during the fall of Berlin in World War 2. He was, then, Leonid Petrovich, a dancer with a burgeoning reputation that was cut short by the tragic accident which gave him his limp.
This backstory doesn’t really have anything to do with the mystery, but it’s nice world-building. This kind of thing really helps to flesh out the world and make it feel more real, which helps the mystery to feel important.
His participation in the defection (which is relevant to the mystery) was relatively minor. He opened a window in the musician’s room and Leo was to bring a change of clothes for Natalia and Alexander and leave them in a locker—locker number 19, which was the significance of the number scribbled on Leo’s program. There was one small hitch—when he left the musician’s room, Berensky saw him from the far wing. He remembers because Berensky was holding a handkerchief to his face for some reason.
Jessica bids him adieu and, declining his offer of a lift, walks back to her bus. She’s followed, which she notices, and ducks into a doorway and catches up to the man following her. When he turns around she asks if he’s looking for someone, Major Karzof drives up and tells the agent to leave. He hopes she was not startled, and she replies she wasn’t and thanks him for the bodyguard. She wouldn’t have dared to walk the streets alone if she didn’t know that Mr. Nagy was following her. Karzof then tells her that it was a waste of time to interview Mr. Eddington. The fibers in his watch match those of Velma Rodecker’s sweater and traces of his skin were found under her fingernails, as Mrs. Fletcher suggested.
I don’t know how they could have confirmed it was Berensky’s skin under her fingernails, back in 1984—they didn’t have DNA analysis then. About the best they could say was that the blood types matched, but unless they gave Berensky an extremely rare blood type such as O-, that wouldn’t mean much. This may just be a matter of the writer assuring us of facts to save time over proving them, since he’s only got 48 minutes to work with.
Jessica asks if Velma has been arrested for the murder and Karzof says that she has. He adds that, while he has no sympathy for a neurotic anti-communist, he regards it as a most depressing development.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial we’re in Cabot Cove.
Amos walks over to Alexander, who is in disguise. He asks if Ethan is around, and, after pausing for a moment in obvious panic because he speaks no English, Alexander says, “Ah, yup.”
Amos then introduces himself, and Alexander guardedly answers everything with “yup.” At that moment Ethan spots this and interrupts, explaining that this is his new deck hand, since the cod are biting so well. Ethan navigates the conversation, hinting to Al whether to say “nope” or “yup” for a bit until he’s able to maneuver Amos away by offering him a cup of coffee. There’s a cute bit where Amos remarks that “Al” seems like a nice sort, and Ethan replies, “a might too gabby for my taste.” This is a fun use of the stereotype of Maine fisherman as being very reserved with people they don’t know. Amos also asks if Ethan’s seen any suspicious characters around, and explains about the “Rusky toe dancers” who’ve defected but there’s a warrant on them because they murdered someone. Ethan keeps his reply to saying that he doesn’t know if he’d know a Russian if he saw one. Amos also spots Natalia, who’s helping someone elsewhere at the docks, and gives her a cover story of her being Niels Larsen’s cousin.
I sure hope that Niels is in on this, because in a small town like Cabot Cove news would get around fast if he’s not.
The scene then shifts back to Boston where Jessica is having breakfast with Major Karzof. He jovially reports that Velma Rodecker is deriving intense pleasure from her newfound notoriety. He does think that she is guilty, though. Jessica isn’t so sure—she has reservations about how Velma got the dagger. Karzof explains she had the opportunity because the dagger—part of Alexander’s costume—is not worn in the final scene, so it would have remained in the dressing room.
Jessica notices Irina, who is at a table with some of the other ballerinas, and the Major offers to introduce them. Jessica would like that, so he politely calls her over and she comes very sheepishly—which is, I assume, how most people come when the KGB calls them. She’s very sad about Natalia and Alexander, as well, and Jessica expresses her condolences because she, too, knows what it is to lose a friend. Major Karzof thanks Irina, and she meekly leaves. Jessica then says that, with the crime solved, it’s time for her to head home. Major Karzof says that it is farewell only, not goodbye. After Jessica walks off, a KGB agent comes to Karzof and tells him that Velma Rodecker has decided to talk.
Back in Cabot Cove, Amos meets Jessica at the bus and she gives him the news about Velma. She asks about Ethan and Amos says that he’s showing his new hand the ropes. Amos says that he’s a friendly fellow, who sounds like he’s from around Bangor. (While Cabot Cove’s location was never given, it’s generally depicted as being in the south-west of Maine and certainly on the coast. Bangor is about twenty miles inland in the north-east of Maine.)
Jessica rushes off to find Ethan and after bickering with him about how he hid the Mazurovs—Amos thinks that Natalia is a Swede from Minnesota—she discusses how they have to make new arrangements because The police, the FBI, and the KGB might descend on the town at any moment, since Velma certainly isn’t the killer.
That night at dinner they’re interrupted by a young man who knocked on the door. He was looking for Ethan, as he’d just put into the harbor with a blown gasket and heard that Ethan might have one to sell him.
Ethan doesn’t and suggests that he try Gus Harker over at Rockwater Bay. The young man is disappointed and asks if he can use Jessica’s phone to call over there to make sure that they have one before he starts hitchin’ in that direction. Interestingly, he’s got a Maine accent, unlike about 90% of the inhabitants of Cabot Cove.
He notices the places at table and asks if she’s expecting company. Jessica replies that they are a bit late—you know what babies can be. She points him to the telephone and asks if he’s from Down East. He replies that no, Ma’am, he’s born and bred in Maine, up near Bar Harbor. (Not that it matters, but Bar Harbor is, as the name suggests, on the coast, a little further north-east than Bangor.)
He makes his phone call while Jessica comes out and watches the TV with Ethan. It’s a news program which reviews what we already know, and shows a clip of the curtain call of the ballet where Natalia and Alexander failed to appear. They’ve shown us this clip of the ballerinas taking their bow after the curtain more than once, so it must be important:
I showed that clip before when it was from the audience’s perspective, but it’s interesting to look at it now, as shown on a TV. If you look, you can see how round the screen was. The screen curvature was a function of the distance of the screen from the electron gun in the cathode tube since it was helpful to have every point on the screen equidistant from the electron gun. That said, it distorted things as they were viewed, which you can see pretty well here. It helps to explain the closeups on clues.
A moment later the male dancers come out, but not a single male dancer other than Alexander is a character so it must be the female dancers that hold the clue. Since about the only thing we can see in this clip is the number of dancers, there’s a good chance that that’s the clue. Let’s compare to how many dancers there were at the beginning of the ballet:
It’s not super clear, here, but there aren’t many shots where it is. There are certainly six of them, though, meaning that not every ballerina in white was on stage during the curtain call.
Anyway, the young man comes out, saying that Gus does have the seal, so he better get headed on over there now. Jessica bids him farewell and Leo comes out as soon as the door is closed because this is television and we can’t spend the time to wait a realistic amount of time for him to no longer be within earshot. I think we should assume that, had this been a book, Leo would have waited for Jessica to give a signal that all was clear.
In response to Leo’s question if he’s gone, Jessica says yes, but not to Gus Harker’s. Down East is slang for Maine (or, more specifically, the coast of Maine, at least according to Wikipedia), and someone born and bred in Maine would certainly know that. He’s not who he says he is, so who, then, is he? Jessica says that we’ll soon find out, and she’s got a strong suspicion that he’s done something to her telephone.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back it’s the next day and Jessica is on the phone talking to Letitia (the local operator), saying that she needs to make a call to Boston. She’s interrupted by a heavy knocking at her door. When she opens it, it’s Amos, Major Karzof, and someone else.
(I’m sure it would be more obvious in the blu-ray if they ever make one, but even in the DVD version you can see that the backdrop is a painting. The interior of Jessica’s house is, of course, in a sound stage, so it must be this way, but I don’t think we’d have noticed in broadcast quality.) Amos mentions that it wasn’t him doing the knocking, but I think we all knew that. Major Karzof is not so jovial this time; he and his associate have a warrant to search her house.
While Amos and the KGB agent go on their fruitless search, Karzof explains why he’s searching here. Velma Rodecker had an interesting story to tell. After she struggled with Berensky he threw her out of the theater. She then discovered an open window in the musician’s room. She then saw Leo (though she didn’t know his name) slip in through the window with a viola case and take out of it two costumes which he put into a locker. He matched the description of “Mr Peterson” and a quick check with the soviet embassy revealed Leo Peterson’s real name, history, and relationship to Natalia.
Amos and the KGB agent come back to report that there is no sign of the Mazurovs and Major Karzof asks Jessica to give the Mazurovs a message, should she meet them, unlikely as that may be, that if they turn themselves in the Soviet government will give them a fair and just trial. Leo Peterson walks in at this point and finishes the sentence, saying, “after which they will be executed.” He then announces that he’s prepared to give himself up and make a full confession. He then says that he killed Berensky so that his niece and nephew would have time to escape.
Jessica tells the Major to not listen to him. It’s a noble gesture, but it’s not true. Major Karzof dryly replies, “Obviously. Arrest him anyway, Sheriff. He is guilty of obstructing justice.”
As he goes to leave (he is the last one out the door) Jessica asks him if that was really necessary. He replies, gravely, “Ours is a war of attrition, Mrs. Fletcher. That was a warning shot across your bow. Don’t be deceived by my gentle manner. I beg of you.”
Jessica, alone in the house, then makes her call to Boston, which goes to the argyle sweater guy, now wearing a pink short-sleeve button-down shirt.
Ah, the 1980s. Still not as bad as the 1970s, fashion-wise, but it certainly had its weird choices. He answers the phone, “stage manager,” which is about as close as we’ve gotten to his name. We don’t hear what Jessica says, then he merely answers, “yeah” and calls Irina, who is at the theater for some reason.
We hear the telephone call as an overlay to the young man with the Maine accent who didn’t know that “Down East” was a nickname for Maine in his boat is listening in to it over radio equipment.
This is some fairly sophisticated equipment, by the standards of 1984. Radio was quite advanced by this time, but an easily concealed transmitter powered off of a battery would require fairly sensitive equipment to pick up. Unless they’re meant to be using Soviet super-technology. In 1984 the Cold War was was still almost seven years from over and we had a tendency to over-estimate the state of Soviet technological prowess.
Anyway, Jessica tells her that Natalia asked her to call Irina and tell her that they’re safe. She adds that Alexander also sends a message (in Russian, of course, since Alexander speaks no English). She then tries to pronounce the Russian and adds she hopes that she said it correctly, she doesn’t know what it means. At this Irina perks up quite a bit. She says, “if only I could be there.” Jessica suggests that “Mr Flemming” might be able to be of some assistance. That might possibly be argyle sweater guy, though how Jessica would know his name I do not know.
The next day we get some ominous music as Jessica’s morning run is spied on.
He goes off to report to Major Karzof, who is at the Sheriff’s office becoming increasingly frustrated with, and disappointed in, Amos. Karzof then gets a phone call that Irina has gone missing, to his greater frustration.
That night we get a scene of Irina and Argyle sweater guy in a car. (They save on rear projection by having it be completely dark.) She calls him Mr. Flemming to his face, so that must be what his name is. When they get to Jessica’s house Irina gets out and goes to the door and Mr. Flemming follows. Irina declares that Natalia’s bravery has inspired her and she wants to joint Natalia and Alexander in living in freedom. Jessica says that this is great and that she needs to go make a phone call. Argyle sweater guy (I can’t get used to “Mr. Flemming”) asks what’s wrong with the phone in this room and Jessica answers, “Well, that phone isn’t bugged.”
This phone call is to Ethan. Jessica tells him to take Alexander and Natalia to his boat.
The pretend-Mainer radios to Chief Agent O’Farrell with the opening, “Flotsam to Sand Castle.” So I guess he’s American, not Russian, and the stuff I said about Soviet super-technology doesn’t apply. I guess it was FBI super-technology. (If this was the FBI, I wonder why they didn’t tap her phone at the phone office, since they would have the jurisdiction to do that and it would be easier and cleaner.)
Anyway, as Jessica is setting the table for Irina and Argyle Sweater Guy, the doorbell rings. It turns out to be Amos and Major Karzof. Jessica asks if they forgot to search her fruit cellar and Karzof cuts off Amos who was in the middle of saying “come to think of it—”. He briefly says that he was informed she has visitors from Boston, and goes to talk to Irina.
He asks her what she’s doing here and if she knows what the penalty for shielding a murderer is. Irina protests that Alexander didn’t kill anyone and tries to pin the blame on Argyle Sweater Guy. He killed Berensky out of jealousy because he wanted Irina for himself.
Jessica, however, isn’t buying it. Argyle Sweater Guy had nothing to fear from Berensky because Irina was in love with Alexander Mazurov. Major Karzof says that this is incorrect and that Alexander’s affair with Irina ended when he took up with Natalia. But Irina protests that this is wrong and Alexander still loves her. She then asks Jessica to tell him the message which Alexander gave her. Oddly, she doesn’t give Jessica a chance. She immediately repeats it in Russian, then translates to English. “I will love you always.”
Jessica then apologizes for lying. Alexander didn’t send that message. She only said he did. Leo gave her the words, so she could trick Irina into revealing her true feelings for Alexander.
As you might imagine, Irina is disappointed.
When Major Karzof asks why, Jessica explains that it was her motive for killing Berensky. This dawned on her when she finally realized what was wrong with the curtain call—it was asymmetrical because a ballerina was missing. She sensed that they were going to defect and when she saw them leave the stage, she ran after them. More specifically, she hoped to stop the man she loved from running out of her life. But she found their dressing room empty. Berensky came in shortly after her and told her that they were gone. There was still one way to prevent their escape. In her desperation she picked up Alexander’s dagger and—
“Stop!” cries Irina. “Stop. Please stop.” Through sobs she says that she just wanted Alexander back. She didn’t think and didn’t know what she was doing.
After crying a bit, she composes herself and says, resignedly, that it makes no difference anymore. She then looks at Major Karzof and says, “Take me back.” He merely looks at her, and Jessica says, “Child, he has no jurisdiction here.” She then asks Amos to be gentle with her. Amos gently replies, “Yes Ma’am. I sure will.” He escorts Irina out.
After a moment, Argyle Sweater Guy says, “Well, if no one objects, I’ll just get the hell out of here.” Jessica tartly replies, “I was about to suggest the same thing, Mr. Fleming. Goodnight.”
Major Karzof, who stayed behind, says, “So, J.B. Fletcher has wrapped up another mystery. Rather neatly done, I might say.”
Jessica demurs, since she did leave poor Mr. O’Farrell on an empty boat. But then, he shouldn’t have tapped her phone. Major Karzof laughs at this. And what of Natalia and Alexander Mazurov?
Jessica replies that they’re on their way to Portland to turn themselves in as defectors seeking sanctuary.
Karzof replies, “I thought as much.”
“You could have tried to stop them,” Jessica observes.
Karzof smiles and holds up his hands helplessly. “Well… I did what I could.” He chuckles then adds, “let them live in peace.”
Jessica asks, “and what about you, Major? Have you ever thought of living in peace?”
He looks grim and replies, “As a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, I will pretend that I did not hear that.”
He then lightens his tone and asks, “Tell me, how is the fishing around here?” Jessica tells him that it’s marvelous and asks if he fishes. Of course he does, every chance he gets. Jessica suggests, enthusiastically, that perhaps he could stick around for a few days.
Karzof chuckles at this. “Hm. A few days.” He smiles, then sighs and says, sadly, “Unfortunately, days have a way of growing into years.”
He bids her farewell and says that he’s looking forward to her next novel. She says that she’d like to send him a signed copy, if it won’t compromise him in the Kremlin.
He laughs and says, “Sometimes, a man likes to be compromised. Eh?”
He then kisses her hand and we go to credits.
This was one of the great Murder, She Wrote episodes. A big part of that was William Conrad’s performance as Major Karzof. Conrad has a beautiful, rich, sonorous voice and if his Russian accent isn’t perfect, it’s plenty good enough for 1980s television. His performance is magnificent and he imbues the character with real depth. That said, the writers gave him a good character to play, which should not be overlooked.
Major Karzof is an ambiguous figure in a difficult position. On the one hand, you don’t become a major in the KGB entrusted with guarding performing artists in America without a decent record of being trustworthy. On the other hand, (if you’re not a fool) you don’t become a man in his sixties without developing a certain amount of cynicism of politics and human institutions. And in any event, but especially in the latter case, you don’t last into your sixties in the KGB in the Soviet Union without a reasonable amount of cunning. But, of course, you also can’t be too idealistic.
Major Karzof threads this needle well. His words, especially anywhere they can be overheard, are very officially correct. His manner is very genial, but he is also clear that this is a facade. Well, not precisely a facade. He certainly wants to be pleasant, but will not let that get in the way of doing his duty, however unpleasant that is. This reminds me a bit of Winston Churchill’s famous comment defending his politeness in the declaration of war against Japan he gave to the Japanese ambassador, that if you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
The mystery is good, though not perfect. A dagger is a weapon that can kill a man, and Irina is an athlete, not a sedentary older woman. Ballerinas, though thin, tend to be surprisingly strong for their size, and it’s quite plausible that Irina could actually kill a man with a dagger, provided of course that it was sharp. American prop weapons tend to not be sharp but it’s believable that Soviet props would be sharp. Irina’s motivation is a bit thin, of course—striking out in a moment of blind desperation to keep the man she loved in her life is unlikely, but of course murder is always unlikely. If you exclude organized crime and gang violence, murder is just extremely rare. But it does happen, unfortunately, and so all murder mysteries will be unlikely because they describe very rare events. Incidentally, that’s one reason mystery writers need to move their detectives around a lot. If you want someone to encounter a bunch of rare events, moving him around helps to make it more believable, since these rare events are still rare locally.
The solving of the mystery is done quite well, especially with the interleaving of the solving of the mystery with the hiding of the defectors. Making Major Karzof a fan of Jessica’s worked well, especially because he had his reasons to play this up in order to keep Jessica close in order to keep an eye on her, since he clearly has his suspicions of her friend. You never quite knew where you stood with Major Karzof, and he certainly liked to keep it that way. And so the mystery started off with the Mazurovs as the chief suspects, as it had to. (It’s a nice touch that it had to both because of the needs of the story but also because of the intention of the murderer, even if the intention was confused and panicked.)
Then Jessica visits the director of the arts counsel and gets evidence which she cannot share with anyone. That sets Jessica up in an interesting position because she cannot cooperate with anyone on the official investigation. Of course, at the time she doesn’t really want to, so this is no major inconvenience. But it also sets up the plot to come.
Then Major Karzof tells Jessica about the evidence pointing towards Velma Rodecker, which gives a big twist. But of course we know it can’t be Velma both because it’s way too early in the episode and because of the evidence given to Jessica by the arts counsel director. Jessica clearly knows this, but it makes a perfect excuse for her to go to Cabot Cove without looking suspicious. This is probably partially wasted because Major Karzof is habitually suspicious of everyone, but it still works very nicely.
And it gives Jessica time to prepare for when Major Karzof and his crew descend on Cabot Cove the next day.
When Major Karzof comes to Cabot Cove, we get a very interesting development of his character, and of his relationship with Jessica. Before, he had been purely genial and almost fawning on Jessica. Now, he acknowledges her as an adversary. To be fair, we got a hint of that with Karzof having an agent following Jessica and showing up himself when he said that he was going to bed. Here he becomes explicit, though he always preserves proprieties. I love, for example, his preface of the message he asked Jessica to give to the Mazurovs: “If you should, by some chance, happen to encounter the Mazurovs, as unlikely as that may be,” Of course, he knows full well that she’s taking part in hiding them. Moreover, she knows that he knows, and he’s well aware of that, too.
I also love the warning he gives her a few moments later, when she asks if having Leo arrested was really necessary: “Don’t be deceived by my gentle manner. I beg of you.”
He is a KGB agent who does not like to be cruel. But that does not mean that he will refuse to be cruel if it’s necessary. You don’t become a KGB major by being shy.
It raises the interesting question of why he brought Jessica on, and why he’s treating her as he is. They don’t spell it out—it would not be in the Major’s character to be unambiguous on the point—but my favorite theory is that solving the murder is his primary concern and he knows that he’s at a significant disadvantage in solving it here in America where the KGB is openly hated. Recognizing that Jessica is at least tied to the people hiding the Mazurovs, he knows that she’s in a position to solve the murder and that putting pressure on her about the Mazurovs will motivate her to get the job done.
Another aspect of this episode which interests me is how cruel Jessica is to Irina. Lying to her that Alexander said he still loves her in order to trick her into running to Cabot Cove so she could set her up and confront her. And whether it was her original intent or not, it was crushing Irina with the knowledge that Jessica lied and Alexander didn’t say this that got Irina to confess. She is as hard and willing to be cruel as Major Karzof. Yes, afterwards, she takes a comforting manner to Irina and asks Amos to be gentle with her, but how is this different than the gentle manner of Major Karzof? The two have more in common than Jessica would like to admit. And another point to Major Karzof as a great character, I think he knows it.
Though Jessica might know it; there’s a hint of it in her line, after she said that the Mazurovs are on their way to Portland to turn themselves in as defectors seeking sanctuary and Karzof replied, “I thought as much.” She says, “You could have tried to stop them.” There’s almost a hint of reproach in her voice.
And after this, and after he drops the mask for a moment and says, candidly, “let them live in peace,” she is genuinely affectionate towards the Major. So perhaps she does recognize having more in common with him than she’d care to admit.
Still, I think the best line is right before the end, when Jessica invites him to stay for a few days to enjoy the fishing and he is at first excited, then sadly sighs and says, “Unfortunately, days have a way of growing into years.” He does elaborate, but he has a family back home. He has friends and responsibilities back home. They would all suffer if he chose to stay. It gives Major Karzof an element of nobility and a great deal of depth.
Recently I’ve been working on my review of the Murder, She Wrote episode Death Takes a Curtain Call. It’s a really good episode and has one of my favorite characters in it. Ironically, though I was excited to get to it, I’m finding it much harder to finish the episode review than I normally do precisely because it is such a good episode. There’s a lot to say, and praising a thing well is much harder than criticizing self-evident problems. There’s a lesson in there, I think.
This may be related to why C.S. Lewis said that he wrote The Screwtape Letters only from the demons’ perspective, which left the book unbalanced. The problem was that letters from an archangel to the man’s guardian angel would need to have all of the virtues that a perfect being of superhuman intellect would naturally imbue into them, and to do that Lewis would need to have an equal intellect and equal perfection. This was a wise choice for The Screwtape Letters, but I think that the difficulty in praising a thing well causes problems in the case when there is no requirement for the praise to be perfect. That is, it makes it very tempting for people to leave off praising things that they should praise. And that’s a mistake, because it tends to lead other people to have a distorted view of life. As Dale Carnegie rightly observed, any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. As a result, there tends to be tons of complaining in life, while the better things often go unpraised. When the good things are praised, it’s often by people who don’t appreciate the difficulty of praising things well and in consequence give mediocre if not outright bad praise.
So next time you hesitate to praise something, give yourself an extra push to do it. It’s probably better for the world than keeping silent.
And I’ll get to work on that Murder, She Wrote review.
When it comes to health and fitness, and in particular to reducing the amount of fat on one’s body, the dominant story within our culture, at least from the sort of people who present themselves as experts, is that fat gain or loss is just Calories-in-vs-Calories-out so just take however many Calories you burn and eat less than that until you’re thin.
Now, obviously there is something truth to this because if you stop eating you will waste away until you die, and you will be very thin shortly before your death. (Though, interestingly, if you autopsy the corpses of people who’ve starved to death you will find tiny amounts of fat still remaining.) Of course, the problem with just not eating until you’re thin is that starvation makes you unfit for pretty much any responsibilities and it’s also bad for your health. (Among many problems, if you literally stop eating your muscles will substantially atrophy, including your heart.)
So the big question is: is there a way to eat fewer Calories than you burn while remaining a functioning adult who can do what the people you have responsibilities to need you to do, which doesn’t wreck your health?
The good news is that there are methods that accomplish this balance. The bad news is that (at least as far as I can tell) there’s no one method that works for everyone.
Since this post is about the Calories-in-vs-Calories-out mantra (from here on out, Ci-Co), I’m only going to discuss moderate Calorie restriction—oversimplifying, aiming for a deficit that results in about a half a percent of bodyweight reduction per week, for a period of 6-12 weeks, before returning to maintenance for an approximately equal length of time. (This is a version of what bodybuilders do and they’re probably the experts at losing fat because bodybuilding can be described, not entirely inaccurately, as competitive dieting.)
Now, at first glance, this isn’t too far off what the Ci-Co people seems to be saying. However, it’s very different in practice, and those differences will be illuminating, because they’re all things that the Ci-Co people get wrong.
The first big problem with trying to implement Ci-Co is: what on earth is your daily Calorie expenditure? There are highly accurate ways of measuring this which are extremely expensive with most being infeasible outside of a laboratory. Apart from that, there’s no good short term way. The best way—which is what bodybuilders do—is to carefully measure your Calorie intake and your weight over a period of time, then see what your weight does, and calculate your Calorie expenditure from your intake plus what your weight did. For example: suppose you take 3000Cal/day and over 14 days lost a pound. A pound of fat contains roughly 3600 Calories, so your actual expenditure was 3000 + (3600/14) = 3257. From there you can refine your intake to achieve what you want. (Bodybuilders also have phases where they put on muscle, which means gaining weight, so they will have to eat at a surplus to provide energy for building the extra muscle tissue.)
This looks nothing like what the Ci-Co people suggest, which usually amounts to either taking the USDA random-number of 2000 or else using an online tool which estimates your Calorie expenditure from your height, weight, and some description of how active you are. These are generally accurate to +/- 50%, which is not obviously distinguishable from useless. Using myself as an example, entering 6′ and 215 pounds with high activity, it estimated my maintenance Calories as 2900 and a weight loss target of 2450. I’ve actually been using the MacroFactor app to track approximately 100% of what I eat and weighing myself every morning when I wake up. It estimates my maintenance Calories as about 3900 Cal/day and I’m losing a little over a pound a week with a target Calories of 3200 Cal/day. On days when I eat about 2800 Calories I go to bed hungry and am very hungry the next day. If I tried to lose weight at 2400 Cal/day in a week or two I’d be constantly ravenous, unable to concentrate, barely able to do my job (I’m a programmer), and miserable to be around.
Because here’s the thing: the human body can tolerate small (consistent) Calorie deficits without worrying, but if they become too large the body freaks out and concludes that something very, very bad is going on and the top priority for the foreseeable future is getting through it. That means two things, both very bad for losing fat:
Spending all your waking hours trying to find enough food
Reducing your Calorie expenditures as much as possible to conserve what energy we do have until the bad times have past.
The second point is probably the bigger deal. What the CiCo people don’t realize is that your Calorie expenditure is nowhere near fixed. If your body thinks it’s a good idea, you can maintain on a surprisingly large number of Calories. If your body thinks it’s a good idea, you can maintain on a surprisingly small number of Calories. The former looks like having a lot of energy and feeling good. The latter looks like being tired and cold all the time.
Even worse, there is reason to believe—though this is nowhere nearly as well established—that if you make your body freak out and think it needs to survive a famine too many times, it will start to prepare for the next famine as soon as food becomes readily available again, much as people who’ve been broke a few times and also had good times tend to live like misers and save money the next time things go well. (In the the case of your body, this means gaining the fat you will need to survive the next famine, just like bears put on a ton of fat in summertime in order to get through the coming winter.)
This is why the other critical part of how bodybuilders diet is that they only do it for 6-12 weeks at a time, then take long maintenance breaks at their new weight. (The variability because they pay attention to how their body reacts and if it seems to be starting to freak out, they stop losing weight and start maintaining so it doesn’t have to adapt to the diet—there are many factors which go into how long it’s possible to diet before the body starts to freak out.) This relatively short fat-loss window ensures that the body never goes into surviving-famine mode. And the maintenance Calories are not a fixed number, either. They can easily increase for a few weeks as your body gets used to the extra food and raises your metabolism because it seems safe to do so.
When you put this all together, it’s why the Ci-Co people give the laws of thermodynamics a bad name. It may be perfectly true that losing weight is the result of one number that’s not easy to measure being lower than another number that’s impractically expensive to measure and impossible to usefully estimate, but knowing that that’s true has no practical value.
This post was about the problems with Calories In vs Calories Out, but I would be remiss to point out that everything I said up above about how bodybuilders reduce fat is predicated on having a reasonably well-regulated metabolism to begin with. There are all sorts of ways for the human metabolism to become disregulated and if yours is disregulated your odds of successfully reducing fat are much lower until you figure out what’s wrong and fix it. In my own case, I’m about 99% certain that at times in my life I’ve induced insulin insensitivity in my body through excessive fructose consumption. (I can eat a pound of chocolate for lunch if I let myself and there was a period back when I was in grad school when I was drinking full-sugar Mountain Dew and eating cake mix out of the box with a spoon. That stuff has more sugar and flour in it. This is during a period when I was unemployed and depressed as well as young and dumb, and I had yet shaken off being raised during the low-fat craze of the 1980s and 1990s.) I believe some extensive low-carb eating has allowed my body to mostly reset its relationship with insulin and at this point I’m only willing to eat candy/ice cream/etc. on Christmas, Easter, and my birthday. That said, when I’m cutting (reducing fat), I find it much easier and more successful if I go back to eating low carb or even keto.
That’s me; I suspect that many people are in a similar boat because fructose is way more common in processed food than people normally realize and it’s reasonably well established that extremely high fructose consumption (much higher than anything you’d get from any reasonable intake of fresh fruit, btw) can induce non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which seems to have a causative relationship with insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome. That said, this is not everyone who’s got excess fat. There are tons of things that can go wrong to disregulate one’s metabolism/appetite, some of them dietary, some of them endocrine, and some I don’t even begin to have an idea. The human body is unbelievably complex and there are a lot of ways it can malfunction. There’s really no substitute for trying things and seeing what works. And at least we know that it’s a good idea to get regular exercise no matter how much excess fat you’re carrying. It may not make you lean, but it will certainly make you healthier and happier than if you don’t do it. After the first few months.
Oh yeah—and I’m no expert, so please do your own research and don’t take my word for it.
I was recently re-watching the 2009 documentary Fat Head, mostly for nostalgia because I enjoyed it and it did me a lot of good back when I watched it circa 2010.
If you haven’t seen it and are curious, it’s available (officially, from its distributor) on YouTube. (Weirdly, it’s age-restricted so I can’t embed it.)
This was back when the documentary Super Size Me blaming McDonalds for people being fat was only five years old and people still remembered it. Fat Head was a response-documentary criticizing Super Size Me, but it actually spent more of its time discussing the lipid hypothesis (the idea that fat and especially saturated fat causes heart disease) and the problems with it. Throughout the documentary, Tom Naughton (the filmmaker and narrator) continually refers to “the experts,” by which he mostly means the people who give official advice, such as the USDA giving food recommendations or various medical organizations telling everyone to reduce their saturated fat intake as much as possible.
“Expert,” of course, ordinarily means a person who is extremely knowledgeable in a subject or very good at it. But “expert” is also a social designation for special people to whom ordinary people are supposed to defer, generally with the assumption that they are expert in the first sense. But this introduces a problem: how do you know that someone is an expert in the first sense?
The easy way to do this is to be an expert yourself. Expertise will generally be good at recognizing expertise, as well as recognizing what is not expertise. That’s great, but if you’re an expert yourself you don’t need to know who else is an expert so you can defer to them.
So what if you’re not an expert?
Well, it gets a lot harder.
You can, of course, punt the problem to someone that you trust, but that is a general solution: it works for literally every question. How do you calculate the circumference of a circle given its diameter? Ask someone you trust.
But let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that you want to find an expert and aren’t going to just have someone else do the work. How can you do this—again, assuming that you, yourself, are not an expert?
It certainly cannot be in the same way that an expert would, that is, by evaluating how the person does what they do. There is something left, though it’s not nearly so efficient: you can see whether the person can achieve what only an expert could achieve.
In most of the places where this is possible, it’s fairly obvious. If you want to know if a man is an expert archer, you ask him to shoot at a few things which are very difficult to hit. If you want to know if a man is an expert lock pick, you ask him to pick a difficult lock.
There are some intermediate situations, which do not admit of demonstrations which only take a moment. If you want to know if a man is an expert painter, it is not practical to ask him to go to all of the trouble of painting a painting in your sight. But you can ask him to show you paintings which he has painted, and then after he shows you some impressive paintings you have only the ordinary problem of finding out whether he’s an honest man and really is the one who painted them.
But then we come to problems which are far more difficult. How can you tell if a man is an expert teacher? The only practical effect of a good teacher is a learned student. If you have access to the students to test them, you mostly can only tell in the negative—a student who obviously knows nothing—since the whole reason to seek out a teacher is to be taught. (There are exceptions for things such as being an expert in Greek but not in teaching Greek, and you want to find an excellent teacher for your child. Let us set that aside as a special case which is easier than the one we’re trying to deal with.) However, even in the best case this is not a pure evaluation of the teacher because the end results also depends upon the quality of the student. This is clear in the case of athletics. Some people have bodies which are proportioned exceedingly well for the sport and when this is married to a disposition which finds physical activities intuitive, they would come to be very good in their sport regardless of who their teacher is; an excellent teacher will make them better but a bad teacher will still make them good (unless he gets them injured).
Medicine is an interesting hybrid of this. It is possible to evaluate a trauma surgeon mostly based on results because how well one patches up a man after a knife would or a gun shot or a bear mauling does not depend very much on the constitution of the victim. It does depend on the wound, of course, but it’s not that hard to evaluate wounds based on criteria such as their rate of blood flow or the amount of the victim which is missing.
It is nowhere near as possible to evaluate an internal medicine doctor’s treatment of chronic conditions. The human body is an unbelievably complex thing—I mean that literally; most people can’t believe the complexity involved. Biology keeps on making new discoveries that things are more complex than previous believed. All of this complexity can go wrong, and there are far fewer kinds of symptoms. In short, we have no way of evaluating what is actually wrong with a patient or how bad it actually is. Not everything is fixable; how much that doesn’t get better is the fault of the doctor and how much is the fault of the disease? We have no way of knowing, certainly not for the purpose of evaluating the doctor.
So what about the kinds of experts who give health and nutrition advice?
The first thing to notice is that the time scales are not favorable. Being healthy over decades is a thing that takes decades, and that’s a really long time over which to evaluate someone’s advice in order to determine whether their advice is worth following. And we’ve also got a problem much like in evaluating internal medicine doctors: we’re talking about how to optimize an unbelievably complex system (the human body). Worse, though, is that this kind of advice is general, and the population itself varies. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that the same dietary advice is equally good advice for all members of the population. For all we know, Frenchmen do better eating baguettes than Germans do and Germans are healthier eating sausages than Frenchmen are. For all we know, there might be two brothers and one does well on pasta while the other will get fat and sick on it. At least internal medicine doctors treat individual patients; experts who give general advice on health and nutrition give the same advice to everyone. That might be fine—no one should eat uranium, for example—but it’s not obviously fine. For all we know (without be experts ourselves) universal dietary guidelines are intrinsically a bad idea that no true expert would do, just as no true fencing expert fences with reverse grip or by holding the tip and trying to thrust the hilt into his opponent.
But even if we grant the idea, for some reason, that a true expert would give general dietary advice, how do we evaluate the expertise of a particular expert giving it? The effect that we could measure would be the superior health and fitness of the people who follow this advice to what they would have had if they didn’t follow this advice.
OK, but how on earth do you measure that? How do you identify the people who follow the advice. How do you figure out how healthy they would have been had they not followed the advice?
That last part is important because it’s extremely easy for advice which does nothing to select for people who are generally superior. To give a silly but clear example: if you give advice on how to grow taller and it’s to dunk a basketball ten times a day, every day, and then measure the average height of the adherents and the average height of the non-adherents, you’ll find that the adherents are, in fact, taller. No taller than they would have been otherwise, but certainly taller than the non-adherents. Or if your advice for strength is to pick up a three hundred pound rock and carry it five hundred feet each day, you’ll certainly find that the adherents are stronger than the non-adherents, since only very strong people will even try to follow this advice. In like manner, if you recommend that people eat a pound of arugula a day, it’s quite possible that only people who are very healthy would even consider putting the stuff in their mouth given how much (if you don’t disguise its flavor with oil or sugar) it tastes like poison. (Because it is; the bitter taste of many plants come from natural pesticides they make in order to dissuade bugs from eating them. These are just poisons that have little to no effect on us since we’re mammals and not insects.)
The basic answer is that you can’t. Not to any important degree.
There’s a related issue to the question of “how can you tell if someone is an expert?” and that’s “how does someone become an expert?” It’s related because, oversimplifying, the way you become an expert is to evaluate whether you can do what an expert can do and then change what you’re doing until you can do those things. If there’s no way to evaluate whether you’re getting better at the things an expert could do, there’s no way to tell whether the things that you’re doing are making you any better, which means that there’s no way to actually become an expert. (I’ve oversimplified quite a bit; this really deserves its own blog post.)
So what does that mean for fields where it’s not possible to tell who’s an expert?
Effectively, it means that there are no experts in that field.
Several years ago, in his series on the Conan stories, Mr. John C. Wright wrote about the theme of how barbarians were stronger than civilized men:
“Zaporavo was the veteran of a thousand fights by sea and by land. There was no man in the world more deeply and thoroughly versed than he in the lore of swordcraft. But he had never been pitted against a blade wielded by thews bred in the wild lands beyond the borders of civilization. Against his fighting-craft was matched blinding speed and strength impossible to a civilized man.Conan’s manner of fighting was unorthodox, but instinctive and natural as that of a timber wolf. The intricacies of the sword were as useless against his primitive fury as a human boxer’s skill against the onslaughts of a panther.”
As for me, I feel sorry for the man who is the most well-versed and skilled swordsman in the whole world being bested by a quick and strong adversary who is just born better than he. Hardly seems fair.
My own limited experience as a fencer gives a ripe and loud Bronx Cheer to the idea that natural talent can overwhelm trained skill with a blade. I have fought men stronger and faster than I, but less skilled, and have fought men slighter and slower than I, but more skilled. The victories are not just occasionally or even mostly to the more skilled swordsman, but inevitably. My stronger but unskilled foe could not land a single touch on me, no, not one. My weaker but more highly skilled foe did not let me land a single touch on him, no, not one.
On the other hand, if the reader is not willing to accept, as a given, that naked aborigines, scratching themselves with sticks, living in mud huts, drinking from mud puddles, and eating mud-worms are not stronger and faster than the Olympic Athletes or US Marines formed by training grounds or bootcamps of civilization, such a reader simply is not entering into the daydream of the noble savage, and into the spirit of a Conan story.
It is as stubborn as saying there is no such planet as Kripton, or no such thing as an Amazon, or that no orphaned millionaire fights crime in secret by dressing as a bat. The one unreal conceit to be granted the author is the ticket price for entering any fiction story. Anyone unwilling to pay is left outside, and will never get what this genre of stories are about, or what their appeal is.
Now, Mr. Wright is of course correct about the suspension of disbelief required, and how that is merely the price of admission to the fun. But there is one thing I would like to say in defense of the superiority of the barbarian over the civilized man, and that is, while Mr. Wright is certainly correct that the best that civilization has to offer will tend to massively overwhelm the best that barbarity has to offer, this is not nearly so true of the averages.
Barbarians—if by that we mean hunter-gatherers and not merely people who don’t speak Greek or else Germans—will be, on average, moderately strong and moderately athletic. They actually tend to be decently fed and decently healthy, since in the places where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle works it tends to work quite well and require quite a bit less work than agriculture does to meet one’s caloric needs without the same danger of famine as monocultural agriculture. They have very little in the way of refined sugars or alcohol, and often do a lot of walking and a non-trivial amount of climbing. (I’m painting with broad strokes, of course; there’s a great deal of individual variation.) This will not tend to make anyone nearly as strong as an athlete who trains specifically for strength and speed and who has access to great abundances of foods, as the cream of the crop of civilization has.
But on the other hand, civilized men in the age of mechanized farming, which was when Howard was writing and almost certainly what he was really writing about, could be almost unlimitedly soft and weak unless they specifically chose to be better. And even when they chose to be better than soft and weak, it was often a play form of it, like many modern martial arts.
Modern martial arts suffer from the same problem that all martial training has—you can’t actually practice killing people, so you have to practice the skill of killing people with equipment which prevents you from actually killing them. And, almost invariably, in addition to safe equipment you need to impose rules which prevent injury, too. These rules create an even playing field if everyone is following them, but they can create openings for people who are not following the rules.
The flip side of this, of course, is that experience can be easily misleading; generals of armies are known for often fighting the last battle, not the present one, and this will apply to fighters whose only teacher is experience no less than to generals. There are things you only learn by trying a thousand times, and no one survives a thousand fights to the death. Eventually you come across someone too tall, or too short, or just too lucky, for your previous experience to help you.
Howard’s solution in Conan is the raw fury of the barbarian; unmatched power produced by pure, bestial adrenaline. It’s nice in theory and even works if Conan is just a symbol for nature because hurricanes and volcanoes have orders of magnitude more power than any of the works of man. If Conan is just a man it may work in theory but it doesn’t work in practice—not against an expert.
But Howard isn’t really writing about experts, not real experts. Zaporavo is not meant to be a man who’s fought in a thousand real sword fights and is genuinely skilled at sword fighting because he’s practiced it. I mean, Howard literally wrote that, but I don’t think that he meant it. What he meant (I contend) was that Zaporavo knew the theory of sword craft, and had lots of experience in civilized sword fights, which were under rules because his opponents were also so civilized that they were detached from reality even in a duel to the death. That is, he had the virtues of civilization but also the vices of civilization.
Does that make sense for a long-experienced pirate who lived by his wits and skill? Oh heavens no. But the artistic point is that civilized human beings lost their contact with nature, which is far more powerful than our puny intellects.
And that was certainly going on in the 1930s. One of the curious things, if you knew people who grew up in the 1910s and 1920s, was that they were practically allergic to exercise. (Not all of them, of course; movements such as Muscular Christianity had been trying to get people to want to exercise since Victorian times.) This is a complex historical phenomenon I don’t have the space here even to sketch out with justice, but the short, short version is that a man in the 1930s could look around and conclude that his fellow men wanted to be weak and delicate while attributing to themselves all of the power of technology. They wanted, to use G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, “to sit on sofas and be a hardy race.”
Nearly one hundred years later, I don’t think that this can be appreciated as much because in the intervening decades professional athletes have become celebrated heroes of our culture. Laziness abounds, but the lazy will profess that they should be exercising.
There’s also the issue that the 1930s was the era of the Great Depression, when it looked to many like civilization was failing. I don’t mean failing to be perfect, as it is common to complain about now and in all eras, but failing to be even viable in the basic sense. It was failing to provide jobs for many and failing to provide food for some. (Under-nutrition was more common than outright starvation, but it was fairly wide-spread.) Under these conditions, it looked to many like the collapse of civilization back into barbarism was imminent. And, given what the second world war was like, there may even have been some truth to the expectation.
We have something a little similar in that many people were promised by schools and universities that they were becoming the elites of society when they weren’t. This has been described as “over-producing elites” and they are bitterly disappointed and mistake having been lied to for society collapsing. However, their anticipation of society collapsing looks very different, since they are (wannabe) elites, with at least pretensions to elite tastes.
I think that if we take this historical context into account, the symbolism of the tale rings a bit more true, and requires less effort to buy our ticket with the suspension of disbelief.
While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with travelling or being a tourist, there is a problem with how it’s frequently done, and Chesterton summed it up very well in his chapter on Rudyard Kipling in his book Heretics.
The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men–diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men–hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.
If you want to know what it is like to be a Chinese peasant, you will learn far more about it by trying to grow some food in your own back yard, even if you grow plants no Chinese peasant has ever heard of, than by going to China, staying in a hotel, and watching the peasant every day for a month.
So much of what the Chinese peasant does he only does because of the accidents of where he is and would do quite differently if he lived, say, in your back yard. If you want confirmation of this, just look at how differently peasants act when they immigrate somewhere else. They haven’t suddenly become different people but they eat different food because different foods are now cheap and wear different clothes because different clothes are now cheap (and possibly better suited to the weather where they are now). The person who only learns the particular reactions to particular accidents learns only about the accidents of the peasant, not about his soul.
Of course, this may be by design; the Chinese peasant being a human being his soul will be much the same as that of other human beings. Well, not the same as the globe-trotter’s.
On the ninth day of December in the year of our Lord 1984, the seventh episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. It was called We’re Off to Kill the Wizard. (Last week’s episode was Hit, Run, and Homicide.)
There’s a man inside the car who is on a car phone talking to someone named Horatio.
For those who weren’t alive in the 1980s, a car phone was a cell phone actually build into the car. This worked better than hand-held cell phones for several reasons, but the primary one was that it had a better antenna and could be powered by the car’s generator. Cell phones in this era were analog devices, and not very different than talking over a radio only with private channels. They were also extremely expensive and pretty rare. This means that this guy is rich and important.
Anyway, the guy promises Horatio that he will do whatever it takes to bring Mrs. Fletcher back with him.
The scene then shifts to Jessica working on a bicycle while two kids look on.
The boy’s name is Billy. The girl’s name is Cindy. You can just see their mother in the background. She walks up a moment later, after Billy rides off on the repaired bicycle. (Apparently their father couldn’t figure out how to fix it and was ready to junk it. Jessica has one just like it back home in Maine. Given that this is a BMX-style children’s bicycle, I assume that the similarity is that her bicycle also has two wheels.)
Her name is Carol Donovan and she’s Jessica’s niece (her children share her last name). She says that Jessica’s flight to Kansas City has been confirmed, but won’t she consider staying longer?
Jessica replies that she won’t because a good guest is like Haley’s comet: seen and enjoyed seldom and briefly. Right after her lecture, she goes straight home.
This is interrupted by the car pulling up and the guy on the car phone stepping out of it. His name is Michael Gardner and he’s an ardent admirer of Jessica and her work. His employer, whose name is Horatio Baldwin, who goes by the stage name Horrible Horatio, desperately wants to meet her. Little billy is excited at the mention of Horrible Horatio. He runs theme parks throughout the country and today he’s got an opening of a new venture, Horatio’s House of Horrible Horrors (or words to that effect). Little Billy and his sister are so desperate to go that Jessica relents and accepts, despite obviously hating the idea.
It’s apparently medieval themed.
The scene opens with a monk in a cart being led to a gallows. The monk is Horatio Baldwin, and he protests that it’s all a big mistake. He keeps protesting as he’s led onto the gibbet and the noose is fitted round his neck. His cries for help are eventually answered by a robin-hood like figure standing on the wall.
He swings in on that rope and wrestles with the executioner. Unfortunately for Horatio, in their tussle they knock into the lever which operates the trap door, and Horatio falls. The crowd is aghast, but then Horatio appears, laughing, at the top of the castle and assures everyone that he’s fine. The crowd applauds.
Michael Gardner approaches Jessica and her niece and grand-niece and grand-nephew and asks how they enjoyed the show. Jessica says that she found it appalling, I think because she’s morally opposed to fun. Or perhaps it pains her to see children enjoying themselves at something other than a founder’s day picnic. Anyway, Michael says that Horatio is ready to meet her and he’ll arrange for the rest of the family to tour the park.
Horatio meets her in an underground office.
He looked better in the robes, but then most people do. He also has a kind of British accent, which is never explained. He tells her that it was good of her to come and she replies, “How could I not? I had two loaded children pointed at my head.” She says that she doesn’t want to be rude but wants to get away as soon as possible.
When he says that it must seem odd to have an office complex beneath the park, she says, “perhaps you have an aversion to sunshine.”
Jessica isn’t usually this rude and I don’t know why she’s so desperate to get away from her niece, Horatio, and the entire city. It’s an odd choice for the writers because it’s just unpleasant without adding anything. I think this may be because of the idea many screenwriters had that there must be “conflict” which they took to mean everyone hating each other, rather than somebody having some goal that they can’t easily achieve.
Horatio is then accosted by Nils Highlander.
He doesn’t care that Baldwin is busy; he’s been busy for weeks but won’t be so busy if the city shuts him down for safety violations. This upsets Nils because it’s his name on the building permits and his reputation that’s at stake. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works unless Nils is in charge of the safety situation and directly responsible for it, making the safety violations his fault. I suppose that they’re trying to set it up that Horatio personally intervened and forced the people who report to Nils to introduce safety violations in the rides in spite of what their boss was telling them. You know, like highly successful businessmen do. Because that benefits them somehow. They enjoy micromanaging operations in order to create fodder for lawsuits.
Horatio yells at Nils and he leaves. Horatio then directs Jessica to his office and she pauses and asks if he’s lured her here in order to offer her some kind of job. Why she thinks this I can’t image unless it’s because she’s read the script. Anyway, Horatio responds, “Mrs. Fletcher. Please allow me the seduction before you cry rape.” Jessica smiles at this and they walk off to his office.
Somebody sticks his head out of the door this was said next to.
The name on the door is “Arnold Megrim” so perhaps that’s this character’s name. I’m sure we’re going to see more of him later.
The way to Horatio’s office is through an antechamber with Horatio’s secretary.
Her name is Laurie Bascomb. Horatio instructs her to see that they’re not interrupted, though before they go into Horatio’s office she mentions that he had an important call from “Mr. Carlson”.
He replies, “I’ll be the judge of which calls are important, Miss Bascomb.”
The dialog isn’t realistic, of course; the goal is to paint the characters as efficiently as possible, not to scenes in which it’s possible to suspend disbelief. That’s a pity because it’s possible to do both and many Murder, She Wrote episodes do, but at least we’ve learned that Horatio is the scum of the earth.
Before they go in, Jessica spots one of her books on Laurie’s desk and offers to sign it for her. Laurie says she’d be honored if Jessica did and mentions that she’s trying to write a book herself. Horatio is impatient at this, of course, because his success up til now has been achieved by alienating everyone he wants something from. Or because we’re supposed to hate him. One of those two. Probably the first one.
The scene then shifts to a different office where we meet another character.
His name is Phil Carlson. Arnold (the guy who stuck his head into the hallway before) comes in and says that J.B. Fletcher actually came, but Phil is unimpressed. Arnold turns out to be worried, not impressed. This means another park, more red ink, and more falsified accounts. Phil tells him that if he doesn’t like the job, he should quit. Arnold says that he can’t quit, anymore than Phil can. Phil says that he doesn’t want to quit, though, since he’s going to be made a vice president tomorrow. Arnold replies that he was promised a vice presidency two years ago, before Horatio snatched it away.
This is definitely how businesses work, especially successful businesses.
To be fair, people do sometimes cheat and do illegal things, and murder mysteries will, by their nature, tend to focus on those cases because it provides more suspects (as the above was meant to do) and more intrigue. That said, the hurried pace and frank discussions where people are entirely open about doing illegal things feels cartoonish.
Anyway, as Arnold leaves he says, “he’ll do the same to you, Phil, just watch.” Given that Phil will find this out tomorrow, this seems unnecessary. Phil will certainly find out soon enough, one way or another. Phil considers this after Arnold leaves, though, and then we go back to Jessica in Horatio’s office.
Horatio’s idea is “Horatio Baldwin Presents: J.B. Fletcher’s Mansion of Murder and Mayhem.” He promises her a panoply of blood and gore, chills and thrills. The kids will love it!
Obviously, Jessica hates this because she’s a schoolmarm scold whenever it comes to physical violence, but I find this weird because it’s a complete misunderstanding of the murder mystery genre. Jessica may be a literary titan who’s work is known to three quarters of humanity and is to (almost) everyone’s taste, but the among the one quarter who doesn’t know her work is the majority of people who want to go to haunted houses for fake gore and jump scares. It just makes no sense at all to try to base a haunted house theme park on a mystery writer’s books. Horatio should be even more against this idea than Jessica is, since he has better reason.
There’s an interesting bit of conversation in which Horatio says that violence is money in the bank and Jessica is appalled. He asks her where she gets her moral outrage from. He’s read her books and they’re in the same business. She replies that she writes her books for people who read, while he stages his bloodbaths for tots who have not yet learned to differentiate his sordid charades from the real world.
This is idiotic, of course, but I’ve finally remembered that back in the 1980s there was a kind of woman (whom Jessica is meant to portray) that was deeply upset by portrayals of violence in the media, thinking that it would destroy civilization and debase everyone into barbarians. Tipper Gore comes to mind as one of the champions of this line of thinking. They were wrong, especially in their expectation that graphic violence would become pervasive. Graphic violence is not interesting to most people; even to the people who find it interesting it doesn’t tap into any strong instincts in the way that explicitly sexual content does. And that’s where I have a real antipathy to the people who were only against graphic violence. A particularly stupid catchphrase for this kind of idiocy was, “I’d rather a child watch two people making love than two people trying to kill each other.” Jessica never said it, but she might have; this is one of those aspects of Jessica’s character which I didn’t notice when I was a child but notice all too well now—Jessica wasn’t a good woman. She was a shrewish scold with no real principles except for a strong dislike of unpleasantness. It’s a real pity, but on the plus side it only ruins the occasional episode.
Anyway, this speech by Jessica is idiotic, in particular, because children so young they can’t tell that fake blood is fake don’t buy tickets to parks. In fact, Horatio’s parks almost guaranteedly have a minimum age for admission without a parent for simple practical reasons. He’s running amusement parks, not daycares.
This stupid exchange goes on for a bit longer, giving us an excuse to find out that Horatio has a button on his desk that locks his door. He had it installed to keep people out but uses it to lock Jessica in when she tries to storm off, but relents when she threatens legal action. This is obviously only here in order to establish its existence for later. I really wish that the writer for this episode, Peter S. Fisher, had tried on this one. He wrote Lovers and Other Killers and (aside from the scene with Jessica, the baby, and the nuns) it was much better written.
After he unlocks the door Jessica leaves and Horatio calls someone by the name of “Mickey” on the phone, telling him that they’re going to need his special brand of research in order to convince Jessica to agree to the mystery-novel-blood-and-gore theme park. This is so dumb I had trouble typing it.
Fortunately things pick up in the next scene, which is that night. A security guard at the park hears a gunshot and runs off to investigate. He’s joined by another security guard and they go into the anteroom to Horatio’s office. They wonder what Horatio is doing there this late at night and where Laurie Bascomb is because she never leaves until he does.
They check the door and Horatio has it bolted from the inside. They knock, but no one answers. The security guards wonder what to do and one recalls that (Phil) Carlson is still here and so they give him a call on the phone in Laurie’s office. Why they’re consulting the architect, I don’t know, but he directs them to break down the door, using the fire ax if necessary, and he’s on his way.
The guard does as he is bid and breaks down the door with the fire ax, then enters through it.
They don’t enter very far, though, when they see Horatio.
The camera zooms in so we can see the gun in his hand. The guards then walk up and take a look.
The one asks the other if he’s dead, and the other simply replies, “I don’t know.”
As they start to lean in to take a pulse, Phil calls to them from the door.
Phil walks in, looks at Horatio, then we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial break, little Billy is talking to his father about how great a day he had at Horrible Horatio’s Medieval House of Horrible Horrors. He’s telling his father about how everyone thought that the guy really got hung when Jessica interrupts to correct Billy that the correct word is “hanged.” Drapes are hung, people are hanged.
(The father’s name is Bert, btw.) This important lesson over, the phone rings and it’s for Bert. Apparently he’s been assigned to the investigation of Horrible Horatio’s Suspicious Suicide. Also, the Captain wants to talk to Jessica. Jessica expresses her conviction that it’s not a suicide since Horatio was not the kind of man to kill himself, and they’re off.
When we get to the scene of the crime we meet the Captain.
Played by delightful character actor John Shuck, the character’s full name is Captain Davis (he never gets a first name).
Anyway, while the physical evidence rules out murder, Horrible Horatio took a blow to the back of the head which was the cause of death, not the gunshot. So we’ve got ourselves a locked room mystery!
The Captain wants Jessica’s opinion on it because she creates such ingenious plots in her books. She has a way of creating “impossible” murders that are not really impossible. So he’s hoping that creativity will help here.
I don’t know why, but Jessica always responds negatively to this kind of request for help. Approximately as negatively as she does to police detectives who don’t want her to stick her nose in when she offers help unasked. I don’t know why the writers thought that this was a good idea, because it was a bad idea.
In this case Jessica isn’t as bad as she was in Hooray for Homicide; all she says is, “I’m sorry to disappoint you but I don’t have a clue.” No offers of help or anything, or even an expression of interest.
The next morning as Jessica comes back from her morning run in a full body sweat suit she finds the newspaper at the door and looks at it.
(The full headline is “Mystery Surrounds Baldwin Death.” I can’t really make out the text of the article but from the words I can make out it’s clearly got nothing to do with the episode. Presumably this was just stuff pasted over a real newspaper. Also, it’s curious that they used the actress’s head shot rather than taking a picture of her with the haircut she had in this episode.)
As an amusing bit of scenery inspection, here’s the front of the house as Jessica runs up to it:
Now, here’s what we can see out the door when Jessica walks in:
Let’s do that computer-enhance stuff of what’s over Jessica’s shoulder:
Not as good as in the movies, but it will do. We can clearly see that the interior, if it’s not just a sound stage, is very much not of the building that the exterior was of. If this is a sound stage, I’m impressed with how much they were able to make it look like there’s a real outdoors outside that door.
Anyway, when Jessica comes in, she immediately picks up the phone and calls the airport reschedule her airplane flight to a later one and then get a flight returning in the evening.
We then cut to the inside of one of Horrible Horatio’s rides.
The lips move a bit as a recording of Horrible Horatio’s voice plays, telling guests that they’ll have some moments of panic but they were warned. I’m not sure whether it’s Horrible Horatio’s face and voice because he was that much of a megalomaniac/celebrity or because it saves money on casting. Maybe a bit of both.
After a few lines, it begins to slow down and eventually stops. Phil and Nils come up to it and Nils says that it’s not the relays, he’s already checked that on another machine. They open it and begin to look into its guts when Jessica walks up looking for Phil.
Jessica asks Nils if he got his problem from yesterday solved and he sourly replies that he’s got no problems, he just does his job the best he can. A phone rings and he excuses himself, explaining that he programmed his phone to forward his calls here.
Jessica talks with Phil a bit and they discuss how literally everyone who’d ever met Horatio is a suspect, at least as far as motive goes. Phil concludes by saying that, personally, he thinks that Horatio did the world a big favor, but if not, let him know who to thank. He then excuses himself as having work to do.
Jessica then goes to the airport, where Michael Gardner intercepts Jessica. He’s armed and shows her his gun by way of persuading her to come with him. Jessica does, though she protests it’s not because of the gun but because her curiosity was piqued. This is weird because she says it insincerely, but it’s completely implausible that Gardner would actually shoot Jessica in front of dozens of witnesses, so it kind of has to be true.
They board a private airplane, where Jessica meets Horatio’s widow, Erica Baldwin.
There’s some small talk in which Jessica mentions that Erica has buried four husbands so far, according to her nephew, Bert. It also comes up that she used to be a showgirl. There’s also a bit where she asks if it would surprise Jessica if she said that she loved Horatio very much, and when Jessica assures her that it would, she replies, “then I won’t say it.”
Jessica asks about Michael’s attachment to her and she explains, “for the past two years, Horatio chose a celibate life. With Michael’s cooperation, I didn’t.”
Technically “celibate” means unmarried. What she actually meant was “continent” or “abstinent.” For some reason Jessica doesn’t correct her on this point of English.
Anyway, the conversation turns to the police suspecting murder and Jessica says that she’s concerned for Laurie Bascomb, and they’re very mistaken if they think that they can get her to stop investigating. On the contrary, though, Erica so much doesn’t want her to stop that she’s prepared to offer Jessica $100k ($297,766.38 in 2024 dollars) if she can prove that Horatio didn’t commit suicide. Eleven months ago he took out a life insurance policy worth two million dollars. This won’t pay if it’s suicide. He hardly seems the kind to have paid money which would only benefit other people, but life insurance policies are necessary to murder mysteries, so it’s fine.
Oh, and when Jessica says that she neither needs nor wants Erica’s money, Erica replies, “then give it to the starving orphans. They do.”
As everyone buckles up for takeoff, Jessica says that she doesn’t have the faintest idea how she can prove Horatio didn’t kill himself.
In the next scene Jessica returns to her Niece’s house via a taxi. After some apologies about them being worried and Jessica saying she tried to call the house which explains nothing that we saw, it turns out that they have company—Laurie Bascomb. She comes up to Jessica and says that she wanted to call her and doesn’t know what to do. Jessica tells her that it’s alright, but Laurie says that it’s not alright. “Horatio Baldwin is dead and I killed him.”
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial break.
When we get back, Jessica is pouring coffee for Laurie as we clear up that it’s not actually true that she killed Horatio Baldwin, she just feels responsible because she left her desk early. This absurd justification for the cliffhanger before commercial break feebly explained, we then get a flashback as to what happened.
Laurie wanted to quit because she couldn’t stand how Horatio used people, but he threatened her. He would reveal certain things about her past if she quit. She followed him into his office, then ran out back into hers and he followed her. He told her that she’d never work again but she didn’t care, she just wanted to get away. He laughed at her and went back into his office, shutting the door behind him. She heard the bolt slam into place at a quarter to seven.
Bert picks up on the blackmail and Jessica points out that if he was blackmailing her, he might have been blackmailing others. Laurie says that he had files on Phil, Arnold, Nils—all his key people. Laurie didn’t know where they were kept, though.
Jessica suggests in his office, given all of his security precautions. This is ridiculous, of course, since he has theme parks and consequently offices throughout the country—this one is only his latest—and that doesn’t even matter because the best place to keep something like incriminating evidence you probably won’t have to use would be in a safe deposit box in a bank, not in the office of your latest theme park. That’s not very convenient for a TV episode, though, so he will have kept it here as a character quirk.
Bert and Jessica go to Horatio’s office to search for a secret compartment for the blackmail files. Captain Davis comes in and asks why Bert didn’t arrest Laurie Bascomb. Before Bert can answer, Phil comes in and asks what’s going on.
The blocking of this is kind of interesting. I’m not sure why they’d arrange these people like this, especially with Phil coming between Bert and the Captain. It feels like it suggests something, but I’m not sure what.
Anyway, Bert answers and says that they’re searching for a hiding place. Phil says that no one could have hidden in here, but Bert says that they’re searching for files. The Captain asks what files and Bert explains about the blackmail. While this is going on, Jessica examines Horatio’s desk and finds the hiding place.
Well, not quite, but she’s on the trail. She wonders why Horatio has a builtin thermostat on his desk. She then notices that it is covered in soot. Jessica then strikes a match on the strange match-holder on Horatio’s desk right next to the thermometer…
…and holds it up next to the thermostat. When the thermostat reads hot enough, his desk slides open, revealing an empty compartment. Horatio was an inveterate gadgeteer, so this is in character! Also, the compartment is empty and the files are gone!
Phil is deeply skeptical of the murder theory, then excuses himself. No one asked him to be there so there was no need to excuse himself, of course.
When he’s gone, Jessica remarks, “for a man whose career has been steeped in illusion, Mr. Carlson has a very closed mind.” Jessica then suggests that they should find whoever did the research for Horatio, since Horatio was unlikely to do his own dirty work.
The scene then shifts to the airport where Arnold Migram is trying to board a flight to Mexico City. There is apparently a sting operation to catch him, for some reason, as the woman at the desk presses a special button to signal the guards that Arnold is there. The guards then apprehend Arnold, though not without a minor chase. As part of that chase, Arnold trips and his briefcase falls, opens, and an enormous number of bills pop out and start blowing in the wind. Some onlookers come to help, but Arnold rushes to it and starts scooping up bills, saying, “This is my money!” over and over again.
Back at police headquarters he swears at the money is his because Horatio owed it to him for ten years of servitude. In the briefcase there’s also the blackmail documentation of him embezzling money, though he says he never took it, it was his associate, Wanda Perlstein. Also, he has no idea how the blackmail documentation got there.
Jessica asks why he ran. He ran because he received a phone call saying that the police had Horatio’s files on him and would be around to pick him up. Bert notes that it was also a phone call that alerted airport security to pick Arnold up. He says this as if it being a phone call suggests it’s the same person, since normally you’d expect the airport to be told by a registered letter or by someone having rented an airplane that does skywriting. This, at least, explains the sting operation to get Migram, at least if we’re willing to believe that airports in the 1980s arrested people on the say-so of anonymous phone calls.
Migram asks if he can go because he’s worried about his cat, and Bert says that’s fine but he shouldn’t go anywhere they can’t find him. You know, like he just tried to do. But Migram says that he can’t anymore because they have all of his money.
After Migram leaves, Jessica looks through the blackmail documentation and wonders if it’s accurate. For example, the dirt on Phil is that he fled to Canada during the Vietnam Crisis, which is hardly a devastating revelation. Also, there’s one person who’s conspicuously absent—Michael Gardner, the business manager.
That night Michael Gardner, wearing a bright red robe over his pajamas, in hotel room on a high floor, hears a cat mewing from his balcony and goes to investigate. When he finds that it’s a tape recorder a figure dressed in black grabs him from behind and throws him off the balcony.
The figure then retrieves the tape recorder and leaves. We fade to black and go to commercial.
The next day Bert talks it over with Carol. As a curious bit of character development, they begin their conversation with him saying that she’s sexy in the morning and her saying that he’s finally noticed. She asks whether Michael Gardner really killed himself and Bert says that there’s no way to know. Interestingly (to Bert), his real name was Mickey Baumgardner, and he was a former private investigator who worked for Horatio digging up dirt. (I’d always thought that “Mickey” was a nickname for Michael, making this not much of an alias.) Also, he was apparently trying to dig up dirt on Jessica, which amuses Carol to no end. Bert asks where Jessica is and Carol says she went over to the house of horrors.
He wants to talk to Jessica so he’s sorry to miss her. There’s a private line into the office so he calls it. It actually goes to Laurie’s desk, and the security guard who had stopped in picks it up and transfers the line in to Horatio’s office where Jessica is.
After Jessica is done with the call she’s about to leave but then gets an idea and picks up the phone, takes off the back cover, and looks at it.
One of the red wires has been cut. Jessica then gets an idea. Talking with the security guard, she establishes that there are two lines, 1998 and 1999, and if 1998 is busy, the call is automatically kicked over to 1999. Like if you use 1998 to call 1999. She demonstrates, and on Laurie’s phone 1998 doesn’t light up and in Horatio’s office the phone doesn’t ring for 1999.
Ned (the security guard) asks what this is all about and Jessica says that she just figured out who killed Horatio and how it was done.
Ned then goes and visits Phil, giving him a note saying that Mrs. Fletcher stopped by and wants him to call her at her Niece’s house. He obligingly does so. She tells him that Michael Gardner had some microfilm that he had hidden. Her nephew thinks she’s bonkers but she knows exactly where it is and so does he—in the attraction that’s not quite working right. She asks if they can meet in forty minutes with the blueprints? It will take that long to get across town. Phil says sure.
This is silly, but since it’s clearly just a setup, it’s fine.
Phil then immediately goes to the ghoulish head of Horatio and turns it on for atmosphere, because when you’re trying to find hidden microfilm you want all of the circuits to be live. Anyway, he finds something he takes to be microfilm and as he does, Jessica, off to the side, says, “How wonderful, Mr. Carlson. You’ve found our prize.”
Jessica then explains that Phil killed Horatio because Horatio didn’t make him a vice president and also had some sort of really bad dirt on him which he replaced before planting the blackmail files in Arnold Migram’s briefcase. He used call forwarding to make it seem like Horatio was killed in a locked room, as Jessica had to seem forty minutes away. That and some misdirection.
Phil says that she’s clever and pulls out a gun. Jessica tells him that he can’t expect to get away with murder and he replies, “But I already have.”
He then shoots and a sheet of glass shatters. It turns out that it was just a mirror and Jessica was safely out of harm’s way. Bert, after cocking his pistol, tells Carlson to freeze and drop the gun. There’s an entire crowd who was watching, apparently, including armed backup.
Phil complies.
Jessica walks up and, after thanking Nils because the illusion was perfect, Phil says that she got lucky that he didn’t know about the microfilm. Jessica takes it from him and says, “Oh, this? No, this is just a roll of negatives from my trip last year to Spain.”
Back in Horatio’s office, Bert explains Jessica’s theory (he gives her credit).
After Laurie left, Phil came to Horatio’s office and Horatio and he quarreled because Horatio reneged on the promotion. Somehow Horatio was struck on the head, possibly when he fell. Carlson thought quickly. He got the gun he kept in his own office, then forwarded his phone to Horatio’s office. He disconnected the light under the line in Laurie’s office. He went into the office and bolted the door. He also disconnected the bell on Horatio’s phone. He then put the gun in Horatio’s hand and shot him in the head.
When the security guards called Phil, the call was forwarded to Horatio’s office where Phil took it. He then moved to the shadows next to the bolted door (there’s a cabinet there which is quite concealing) and pulled the black turtleneck sweater he had been wearing up over his head. There isn’t a great picture of this area of the room; the best one I can find is actually from a flashback when Laurie is telling the story of her fight with Horatio when she quit:
The cabinet is big enough and that corner of the room dark enough to make concealment plausible. When the guards broke in they were focused on Horatio. After they walked up to the desk and while their attention was on Horatio he quietly left the room behind them. In the corridor he got rid of his sweater (for some reason) and rushed back towards the office, calling as he did so.
Jessica remarks that it might have worked, had it not been for their medical examiner.
Later at the airport Bert and Laurie are dropping off Jessica. (Apparently, Jessica forbade Bert from bringing Carol and the kids to say goodbye to Jessica because she hates public goodbyes.)
Laurie tries to thank her and Jessica says that the best way to do that is to start writing that book she’s wanted to write. Laurie says that unfortunately she needs to find a job, and Jessica gives her the check that Erica Baldwin gave her for proving her husband’s death wasn’t suicide. Jessica has already endorsed it over to Laurie.
Jessica then tells Bert, “see you next year” and walks off to her flight.
There’s then a very weird scene where Laurie opens the check as Jessica leaves and is overwhelmed. She hugs Bert for some reason, and mouths “thank you” to Jessica, who is a bit far away to shout to. Jessica smiles and waves back, and we go to credits.
The mystery in this episode was pretty neat. Locked room mysteries only ever have so many solutions, of course—either the room wasn’t really locked, the victim wasn’t dead until after people broke in, or the murderer hid out and left after people broke in. Each of these has variants, though, and it’s in these variations that people can be clever, which this episode was.
It did play a little unfairly with us by not really showing the part of the room that could hide the murderer until late in the episode, but it did show us the guards being focused on the body in a way that might have let someone slip out behind them, so I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it cheated.
In terms of locked-room solutions, I would say that this one is decent, though not brilliant. They do a fairly good job of piling on the evidence that Horatio was alone, or at least that Phil wasn’t in the room. In general they don’t stretch plausibility too much to do it. Phil’s hiding place was pretty concealing and if he chose his time well, he probably could have snuck out behind the guards. He was taking a big risk that they both came in but he didn’t have many options since he had never intended to kill Horatio. Probably the biggest risk was in firing the shot with no clear indication of where it came from. In an underground complex with neither of the guards nearby they’d have no way of knowing which office it came from and with Phil being the only person known to be working late one would expect them to check on him first. Him not being in his office would certainly be a problem. (And you can’t solve this by having the guards nearby since then you’d have expected them to hear Horatio and Phil fighting.) That said, since this wasn’t planned it works for him to take his best chance and the only reason that there’s a mystery is because it happened to work out. It’s fine for the murderer to be audacious and lucky… at first.
It’s also interesting that we’re seven episodes into Murder, She Wrote and have met two nieces and a (female, niece-aged) cousin of Jessica’s. (I didn’t start with the pilot, but that has Jessica’s favorite nephew, Grady, so we can bring the relatives up to four at the expense of considering this the eighth episode.) Throughout the twelve seasons of the show we would only get about twenty relatives of Jessica’s, which is an average of 1.67 relatives per season. We’re currently averaging just under one relative per two episodes. I think that this may have contributed to the perception that Jessica had hundreds of nephews and nieces, since with (around) 260 episodes, the current rate would give us almost 110 relatives. Obviously, the rate of new relatives will go down pretty quickly.
There are a few odd choices in this episode, such as having Horatio’s widow offer Jessica one hundred large to do what she was going to do anyway. It didn’t make her a suspect and I don’t know that else it was supposed to add to the story otherwise.
There’s also the ridiculous business stuff. I really don’t know what to make of it; it’s so absurd that it’s tempting to think it was meant as comedy, except that the serious part of the plot depends on it. A businessman who runs his business by hiring key people at reduced salaries because he’s blackmailing them is not, strictly speaking, impossible. But how much money could he save this way? If he pays his top people $50k instead of $100k, this isn’t much of a savings when you take into account the fifty people making $10k each for each person at the top. Amusement parks are labor-intensive, especially when you include maintenance, security guards, etc. And what sort of quality of employee will you get if you only hire people who’ve done blackmail-worthy things in their life? It would be one thing if Horatio took over a business he didn’t know how to run and was basically managing its decline, but that’s not what’s portrayed. Horrible Horatio is a celebrity who built an empire. Again, anyone can do any evil, but this is just not in character. Someone making money hand-over-fist on his way up would very believably over-extend himself then be desperate to try to cover things, but that’s not what was depicted. Horatio, as we saw him, was still on his way up.
Also, if Horrible Horatio was in financial trouble to the point of cutting corners on safety for his slow-moving flat rides past barely-moving animatronics, why did he go to the expense of building an underground office complex? Excavating enough ground to fit a dozen large offices and then putting a roof on top of it which can hold an uncovered dirt floor (that gets really heavy in the rain) and multi-story buildings would cost a fortune.
And getting back to the issue of character consistency, Horatio was simultaneously charming and went out of his way to pointlessly antagonize people. It is generally good advice to “never make enemies for free” and Horatio gave out being his enemy like he was Santa Claus, if you’ll pardon me mixing my metaphors. It was helpful in establishing suspects, but it felt very much at odds with the charming bits.
This episode was a bit rushed and a bit silly, but at least it was not wacky, so I think that we’re starting to see Murder, She Wrote settle in to what it would be for the main part of its run. It was common for TV shows to need a half dozen episodes or so to find its footing, so we’re not doing too bad.
Next week we’re in both Boston and Cabot Cove for Death Takes a Curtain Call.
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.
Jenny Nicholson has an interesting 4-hour video on the Star Wars hotel (officially, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser):
It’s an interesting and entertaining video on the rise and fall of Disney World’s star wars hotel. If you’re in the mood for that kind of thing, I recommend it. If this is too long for you, the tl;dw is that the Hotel opened in spring of 2022 as a Star Wars sequel trilogy themed LARP hotel where there’s a running story with actors who sometimes walk around the “ship” and you, in theory, get to take part in the story. It seems like the taking part in the story is mostly theoretical, much of it being done with dialog trees on an app where characters are texting you, and after a few successful months interest faded quickly and the hotel was shut down permanently in the fall of 2023.
I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the thing.
Galactic Starcruiser looks very much like an idea which was going to be super cool and somewhere about three quarters of the way through implementation Disney realized that they couldn’t do it, and so scrambled to come up with something that could plausibly be considered a version of what they promised. They had wanted an interactive story, and that is doable if you have something like a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests. That would be expensive, but Galactic Starcruiser was. It was roughly $3000 per person for two days and two nights; that’s inclusive of food but still in the right ballpark to pay for a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests.
But for whatever reason, they didn’t go that route. Maybe they ran afoul of occupancy limits, maybe they couldn’t reliably hire enough actors. Whatever the reason, they ended up going more in the direction of a 1:20 actors to guests ratio. At that kind of ratio, it’s not possible to have any kind of interactive story where most guests are more than just extras. “Come pay a lot of money to be an extra in a star wars story that only you see” is not really a promise of “live out your star wars story,” so they had to come up with something. Enter the app.
Disney World has an app for using the parks and this was extended with gameplay for Galactic Starcruiser. Human beings can’t meaningfully interact in a dramatic way with 200 people, but a computer can. Well, not meaningfully, but it can interact with them, anyway. And so all of the interactions which had consequences consisted of texting back and forth with characters in the app going along dialog trees and doing miscellaneous activities which can be supported on a pre-existing phone app such as scanning QR codes on crates, ostensibly to help the characters you’re texting with. Of course, since the actors aren’t going to do anything differently based on how around 200 people interacted with an app, the consequences of these actions were mostly limited to scheduling you to appear at various scenes that would happen throughout the “ship” at different times. The actors’ dialog would be set up to be as compatible as possible with people thinking that their actions had affected the story, but that can’t be very much, at least for people over 8 years old.
Curiously, Disney didn’t even really commit to this approach. Most of your immersive experience being on a screen isn’t wonderful, but they didn’t even give you an exotic screen from the hotel. They just had you use your own phone. So you spent $3000 to go to a hotel where much of your time was taken up staring at your phone. I like my phone but I don’t go on vacation to spend more time with it.
It would have been easy enough to provide the guests with tablets that had star-wars themed cases (that beige metal with rounded corners which screams Star Wars, for example). That wouldn’t be a huge improvement, but it would have been an improvement and would have given guests something in their hands which is in-character and special.
It also wouldn’t have been that hard to make a recombining branching storyline. You can’t make it branch based on individual actions, but you could based on cumulative actions. For example, you could have guests on the First Order side look for hidden contraband, and depending on how much they find the resistance would smuggle some or most through, and the characters may have to do something different if it’s only most of the contraband. You’d still go to the next major story beat no matter what, but how you get there would be different and people would feel that they contributed to the outcome, much in the way that individual soldiers contribute to victory in a battle.
I find it weird that Disney did none of this nor anything like it, and relied on generic, ambiguous dialog to allow people to persuade themselves that they did something if they’re inclined to do that.
This weird course change also explains some of the really strange things, like how the hotel was quite small and everyone was expected to play the game that existed. This is an absurd design, since with a 1:20 actor-to-guest ratio it’s necessarily not a good game. It would have made far more sense to have a much larger hotel, with more things to do such as a pool, an arcade, etc. which cost a lot less and participation in the actor-driven game was a significant up-charge. That would make the cost structure far more bearable, make the actor-to-playing-guest ratio much better, and also make it more fun since there would be people watching the people who paid extra. And the people watching wouldn’t feel left out because they know that the people who are participating in the storyline paid like three times what they did for their stay. Plus most people don’t actually want to LARP anyway. If I, for example, was forced to stay at a hotel like this, I’d pay an upcharge for some kind of badge to wear which made the actors leave me alone.
There’s another really curious issue: did anyone like the sequel trilogy well enough to spend money to have a vacation themed with it? (The fact that the hotel closed does suggest an answer is no.)
I have a hard time believing that anyone could, or that at any time the answer could plausibly have been yes. This isn’t just about the sequel trilogy having been really bad. I mean, that certainly didn’t help, but apart from that the sequel trilogy wasn’t even coherent.
I haven’t seen The Force Awakens but plot synopses make it clear that the main driver of its plot is the search for the map left by Luke Skywalker in case the galaxy should need him. The Last Jedi simply throws this out. Luke Skywalker is a depressed old loser, the Jedi are terrible and should die out, etc. Love it or hate it (and there’s something wrong with you if you love it), this story simply doesn’t go with the first one. Worse, by the end of the film it is clearly established that there is no hope left in the galaxy and the Resistance has been so destroyed that it now fits on a single small ship. If you like this tale of incompetence and defeat, I don’t see how you can also like The Force Awakens, which is a hopeful story about main characters who are at least competent and striving to make the world a better place with some success. Yes, it is normal for the second movie in a trilogy to be a setback for the heroes, but not for it to be a complete defeat, due in no small part to their radical incompetence. Those are just dissonant, unless you pay no attention.
Then we come to The Rise of Skywalker, which again throws out a bunch of stuff from the second movie. Luke Skywalker straight-up says that he was wrong about stuff he said in The Last Jedi, and the galaxy is established to not be hopeless, and the good guys win through gumption, courage, and competence. Oh, and while the second movie claimed that Rey was no one—gutter trash whose parents sold her for drinking money—The Rise of Skywalker establishes her as the granddaughter of the Emperor. Again, this is just dissonant with the second movie. It also has minimal continuity with The Force Awakens, though I am on shakier ground, there, since I didn’t see the first one and only read detailed plot synopses. There is the redemption of Kylo Ren, so admittedly that is one through-line in the two movies. Turning Rey into a Palpatine is absurd and quite at odds with the first movie, but then so is Palpatine being alive. Again, these movies don’t really go together unless you pay no attention.
And the problem that I see, when it comes to marketing, is that people who don’t notice that movies don’t go together because they pay no attention don’t seem like a promising place to look for people who want to pay $3000 for a two-day vacation filled with stuff related to these movies.
The timing of the hotel with the movies is also a bit odd. They want Kylo Ren, and they want him in his Darth Vader knockoff mask because that makes casting easier, so they are forced to set the hotel inbetween the first and second movie. Except they can’t do that, because there was only about a day between the first and second movie and they also want Rey and she was off on Achtung at the end of the first movie. And Kylo had destroyed his mask halfway through the second movie and was dead by the end of the third movie, and had only rebuilt it for a little while during the third movie. So really, there’s no plausible time to have set Galactic Starcruiser. Now, this fits in with people who pay no attention and don’t care about details, but again that seems an unlikely place to look for people who will want to pay $3000 for a two-day “immersive” experience. What’s the point of immersion if you’re not going to pay any attention to it? Why pay $3000 for something you don’t intend to remember?
It would have been different had the movies been good, or even if they were just coherent with each other. I’m not in the target market for this, so I can’t draw on my own intuitions, but I can at least imagine someone who loves a trilogy of movies spending a lot of money for a day or two of pretending that he’s in them. But other than that one who who did the trailer reaction where he was crying at the beauty of everything equally causing many people to question his manhood and most people to question his sanity, I can’t imagine someone loving these movies. They just don’t cohere enough for that to be possible.
And given the spectacular failure of Galactic Cruiser, I guess I’m not going out on much of a limb.
I’ve noticed in the last decade or so something of an increase in people complaining about how awful so many people are now. The intended implication is generally that society is doomed, but the real implication is that you can’t just pick anyone as an employee/wife/husband/whatever. The thing is, it’s always been that way.
There never was a time when it worked to hire just anyone. There never was a time when it was a good idea to marry just anyone. Yes, society can be organized in such a way that the pools of people from which it would be reasonable to pick were larger, but there was no time in which it was the majority of people.
I suspect that in many cases the defeatist attitude is the real point—quite a few people prefer explanations for why they can’t possibly succeed to a realistic plan for succeeding, or at least for maximizing their chances of success.
Having acknowledged that, I think that it’s still worth pointing out that in anything important involving people where you get to choose who you associate with, it’s very important to choose carefully. People find it comfortable to talk about compatibility of personality, and there is something to that. Far more important, though, is to find people who are seriously committed to being virtuous. Not merely people who have some decent principles, or who generally behave well, but who are actively trying to live up to their principles.
This is important precisely because, unfortunately, we all fall short. With extremely rare exceptions, looking for people who have never done anything wrong is mostly looking for people who have never done anything. (This is one of the reasons why it’s so easy for young people to pick girlfriends/boyfriends badly; they’re far more likely to mistake someone who’s never failed because they’ve never been tested for someone who’s never failed because they’ve always done well.) Looking for people who are committed to being virtuous solves the dilemma of how to sift through the people who have failed—the ones to pick are the ones who keep trying.
And the thing is, realistically, this is a minority of people, and always has been. And as long as you’re looking for a person who is in the minority, it’s going to be a long, difficult process to find them. So we’ve got to do the same thing that people always had to do—cast a wide net, be selective, and live in hope.
That and realize that the cross we may be given to bear is not finding anyone suitable.
On the eighteenth day of November in the year of our Lord 1984, the fifth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Lovers and Other Killers, it is set in a university in Seattle. (Last week’s episode was It’s A Dog’s Life.)
The opening is unusual for Murder, She Wrote; it begins with a burglar dressed all in black and with a flashlight (that’s the bright spot in the opening card above) rummaging around. Then the burglar goes into a room with a large safe that he starts trying combinations on when a rich older woman walks in.
The burglar hides and the woman goes up to her nightstand where we get this shot of her telephone and some pictures next to it:
Presumably that’s her son, but the camera spends some time on it, possibly to give her backstory before she’s murdered in a minute. She tries to call someone but doesn’t get them. She then notices the rummaging (opened drawers and crumpled clothes) and investigates it. She picks up a very sentimental music box, whose song tinkles as the burglar creeps up behind her, waits for her to turn around and notice him…
…then strangles her with her pearl necklace.
When the old woman falls dead to the floor, we cut to an establishing shot of the Seattle airport. (The unusual thing about this opening was its length—it was over two minutes long. Well, that and actually having a murder within the first ten minutes.)
We then cut to the interior where Dr. Edmund Gerard (played by Peter Graves) is talking on the phone with his assistant, Amelia.
The subject is Jessica, who Edmund says was not on the plane. He asks her if there was any call about it and gives the background that Jessica said she was definitely going to be on this flight and might be coming with someone. He then spots Jessica and tells Amelia to ignore the call.
We then get to see Jessica and who she brought:
It’s then revealed that the person she was going to bring was Marylin Dean, her editor. The child is named Buddy, and Jessica then hands Buddy to two Chinese nuns.
At least, they’re dressed as nuns and Jessica speaks Mandarin Chinese to them and they respond in Chinese. When she introduces Edmund to them, in English, they greet him in Chinese. They then say goodbye and leave. Edmund calls off to them, “Sayonara” and Jessica scolds him that they’re Chinese, not Japanese.
I cannot imagine what the point of this scene is or how it was supposed to work; why on earth are there Chinese nuns in an airport in Seattle with a baby, and why did they randomly hand that baby to Jessica for a few minutes as they are getting off the airplane? Why would they show us something this strange with no explanation? When did Jessica learn to speak Mandarin? Why do the nuns understand English but not even attempt to speak it? Leaving aside all of the questions of how this is supposed to have happened, what on earth is it supposed to tell us about the characters? Are we supposed to believe that Jessica speaks most languages? Is this supposed to establish that Jessica has such a trustworthy face that random strangers will just hand babies to her and trust her with them to meet up with them later so that they can… I can’t even imagine what two nuns would have to do such that they can’t take turns holding the baby while the other one does it. This is just bizarre.
I suppose the best thing to do is to pretend that this didn’t happen. It’s still early days in Murder, She Wrote and perhaps they were just trying out wackiness. (Perhaps this was meant as a reference to the 1980 slapstick comedy Airplane! in which Peter Graves played the captain who got food poisoning.)
Jessica and Edmund leave and look for Jessica’s luggage. On the way to her luggage we get some backstory. Jessica is in town to deliver a lecture at the university and Edmund knows her from before she was famous. He’s now the Dean of Students at this (unnamed) major university in Seattle.
We then shift scenes to Edmund’s office at the university, where Jessica and Edmund talk with his secretary, Amelia. Apparently Jessica needs a secretary at her hotel, and while Amelia offers to help her, she explains that she needs a full time secretary and Amelia clearly has her hands full. According to the conversation which ensues, she handles Edmund’s personal bills as well as his school work. To prove this, she asks him if he really bought an inflatable raft, and he stammers that he might want to go camping some day. When she tells Jessica that it’s a wonder that Edmund has any money left, he remarks, “There she goes, acting like a wife again.”
Then we get this reaction shot (which will also serve to introduce her):
This distresses her, but then she notices Jessica and she starts laughing as if it didn’t sting. She covers by telling Jessica that she’ll post the secretarial job and one of the grad students will jump at it.
The scene then shifts to outdoors where Jessica and Edmund walk and talk. We learn that they used to hang out in the basement of Kappa Gamma Chi, which suggests that they went to university together. She spent most of her time with Frank, though, and Edmund jokes that she chose the wrong one. Jessica replies that Frank said the same thing—he had a morbid sense of humor. She also asks Edmund if he realizes that Amelia is in love with him, and he dismisses this as nonsense.
The scene shifts to Jessica’s hotel room at night, when there’s a knock on her door. She opens it, but with the chain still on. His name is David Tolliver and he’s here about the job as secretary.
Jessica is taken aback that he’s a young man; he asks if he can come in and she says no. Then she thinks better of this and lets him in. He is bold and presumptuous and apologizes for the late hour by saying that he wanted to beat the crowd and walks to her typewriter and gives a sample of his skills—he types very quickly, accurately, and without looking at the typewriter. He’s a smooth talker and takes the angle that people tend to be prejudiced against male typists.
Jessica humors him, but says that she would feel more comfortable with an older woman. Given that the actor who plays David was 29 at the time of the episodes and he certainly looks no younger than 24, I’m not sure how much older the woman was supposed to be than David is. This job was posted at a university. Did she expect one of the professors to take the job?
Anyway, he smooth talks her and she gives him the job. As he’s about to leave, she asks a curious question: “wouldn’t you rather attend the lectures?” He replies, “Well, actually, Mrs. Fletcher, my tastes in literature run from Vonnegut to Hesse.” Jessica looks a bit taken aback and he wishes her a good night.
Vonnegut is best known for Slaughterhouse Five, while Hesse is best known for Steppenwolf. If you’re not familiar with them (I had to look up Slaughterhouse Five on Wikipedia) they’re nothing at all like murder mysteries and generally quite dark. Which raises the question of why on earth David wanted the job.
Oh, David is also the guy in the pictures in the scene of the old woman getting murdered, so presumably that was his mother. This is our first glimmer of how that opening scene ties in with the rest of the episode.
The scene then shifts to the next day, with Jessica giving her lecture.
In fact this isn’t so much a lecture as a performance; she’s performing a dialog (with voices) between two characters.
We then get one of the most famous moments, or at least one that was included in the credits very memorably:
The crowd laughs, and we got a shot of the crowd. It’s large, as we might expect, though not quite the packed auditorium I had expected:
I guess we can chalk that up to extras being expensive.
Jessica then goes on for a bit explain some ludicrously complicated plot where Little Nell wasn’t deadly because she (Nell) was in a wheelchair and the victim was shot in the temple, the bullet coming out of the base of the skull, a downward trajectory.
This makes it slightly odd that Jessica points, not at her temple, but at her forehead:
She then asks the audience to say, all together, who the killer is, since it couldn’t have been Little Nell, and there was a confused bunch of different answers, to which Jessica answers, “by George, I think you’ve got it. At least some of you.” At which point she looks like she’s done and everyone applauds enthusiastically.
It’s a great showcase of Angela Lansbury’s acting talent, but it’s bewildering if you take it seriously as a lecture. Are we actually to believe that the university invited a guest lecturer to walk them through the plot of a murder mystery, acting it out as she went? This is really more of an act to be put on as student life entertainment, not an academic lecture. While it’s true that universities will give a lot of leeway on what counts as an academic lecture to famous people, even so, it’s not generally a straight-up theatrical performance.
I get that TV needs to be lively but they had the option of opening the scene with her closing remarks, rather than giving us part of the lecture. Realistically, they had a ton of options. And even TV audiences of the 1980s could stand a single relatively dry sentence which sounds sufficiently erudite to establish the lecturer’s status as an intellectual giant. Like the Chinese nuns at the beginning of the episode, this just doesn’t make any sense.
By the way, a downward trajectory through the skull ruling out the killer having been in a wheelchair doesn’t really work because the head is movable. You can get the same trajectory through the skull if the victim was looking down and the murderer was below him. Which you could easily get from a person standing in front of a person sitting in a wheelchair. (This could, of course, be excluded by the bullet having struck the ground shortly behind the victim, but she didn’t say that.) This is kind of just nitpicking, though I do have a point: TV writers of the 1980s were really lazy. Somehow, this worked for them, which I’m still trying to figure out.
And, of course, right after she’s done a bell sounds and the students start to leave. I’d say that the writers had never been to college—or perhaps the editor—but it was also a hallmark of 1980s TV that they thought that the average viewer was an idiot so they would get things wrong just because they thought that the idiots watching would expect it to be wrong.
Speaking of idiots, some guy by the name of Todd Lowery walks up and tells Jessica that her lecture was mind-boggling.
With that jacket, there’s nothing he can be but a professor, which he turns out to be—of English. He tells Jessica that he and his wife are both big fans—and his wife is very tough to fool. Jessica replies, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to try harder.” This is weird since he was complimenting her, implicitly saying that she managed to fool Emily.
Todd’s eye is then caught by a young woman who just came in the door waving at him.
Both Jessica and Todd notice this, and Todd excuses himself. Edmund walks up and congratulates Jessica, saying that her talk was a triumph.
This interests me more than it would most people, I think, because I was quite young when I first saw this and didn’t know to take it as exaggeration. A line from Tom Francis’ parody script for an episode of Murder, She Wrote might help to explain:
JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND: It’s so lovely to see you Jessica! How is your book tour going?
JESSICA: Very well, thank you. I am a literary titan known to over 75% of humanity and my work is to everyone’s taste.
When I was less than a decade old, I thought that this was an entirely realistic characterization of a novelist’s popularity. Further cementing this was how much the family I grew up in loved books; my mother, in particular, had a fierce love of (good) novels and so this kind of general love for an author just seemed realistic to me. It was only much later that I realized that, with incredibly rare exceptions, this isn’t even slightly realistic. J.K. Rowling may have had success like this, and maybe a few authors like Stephen King or Tom Clancy did. Jessica doesn’t seem nearly as exceptional as they are, though. For one thing, she’s in the mystery genre. It’s popular, but it’s only back in the golden age when someone might be literary-titan-popular in the mystery genre. And that was mostly just Agatha Christie.
I guess part of the problem is that we see Jessica too closely and she’s portrayed as too normal. She never has to deal with being famous, or with being popular; she only gets the benefits of it when it’s relevant. She never concerns herself with what people like in her books; she just writes whatever she likes and everyone loves it. She doesn’t even promote her books. There are no writers in this universe who are not as popular as her. None of this is really a criticism of Murder, She Wrote—Jessica’s being a writer was not really the point of the show. It’s just interesting for me to consider what led me as a child to conclude that this was normal for successful authors and thus the yardstick by which to measure one’s own success as a novelist. And to be clear, I’m not trying to blame Murder, She Wrote. It wasn’t a children’s show and children get all sorts of strange ideas when they watch stuff made for grown-ups. It’s mostly just interesting to see how sub-ten-year-old me misunderstood structures in the writing that were mostly there as excuses to get Jessica involved in the mystery or access to clues.
Anyway, I have a great deal of trouble believing that this talk was a triumph; very few lectures in the history of the world have been triumphs and I simply can’t believe that one which ends with play-acting a scene in which a character mistakenly accuses another of murder and then Jessica points out what’s wrong with the accusation and part of the class figures out who the murderer is with no analysis as to why could be a triumph of anything, whatever exactly the lecture was supposed to be about. (How to write murder mysteries, how to make money with murder mysteries, how to enjoy reading murder mysteries—we’re just never told what the basic subject of the lecture was.)
She asks Edmund about their dinner appointment but he has to beg off because of a faculty meeting. The idea of a same-day emergency faculty meeting is completely absurd. This could easily have been written as Jessica asking if they could do dinner and him saying that he couldn’t, or even explaining that he wasn’t able to get the faculty meeting moved because everyone’s schedules conflicted and they couldn’t find an alternate date. This is just sloppy because the writers were lazy. I suspect that part of this is that they expected that in a TV show no one would pay attention anyway, but at some point people should do their craft well just for the sake of doing it well. God sees a thing done well, even if 99% of the audience doesn’t.
The scene then shifts to Jessica getting home, where David is sitting on a couch reading a book. I wouldn’t normally bother with a screenshot of the book, but this one is very interesting:
Of course, this being television in the 1980s, everything has to be huge to be visible on most TVs. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the resolution of less expensive TVs wasn’t great and a lot of people had to deal with static due to atmospheric conditions since the TV signals were all broadcast over radio waves. So details like the back cover being entirely a picture of Jessica rather than text meant to sell the book works to make sure that everyone understands that this is Jessica’s book. The fact that it saves trouble writing a back cover that most people wouldn’t have been able to read is purely secondary, I’m sure.
Anyway, it has to be said that The Corpse Danced at Midnight is one of the all-time great titles for a murder mystery. It’s richly suggestive and just sounds great to say. I do fear that it would be very hard to pay off in a book, so it’s good that we never get read selections from the novel or a plot synopsis, but man is it a great title.
Borrowing from the fact that I have actually seen this episode before, the character of David makes my skin crawl every time he’s on screen and he’s supposed to. The actor does a great job of making him both charming and impatient for reciprocation in a way that makes him seem predatory. This is particularly good at setting him up as a suspect in the murder of whoever it is who’s going to get killed, but it does make him an unpleasant character to watch and so I’m going to summarize the parts with him more briefly than usual.
He finished the work hours ago and doesn’t explain what he’s still doing around. He then invites Jessica to dinner, which she declines since she’s uninterested in college student food. He suggests something much fancier, and when Jessica asks if he can afford that he replies, “no, but you can.”
Somehow this results in Jessica taking David to dinner, where he romances her.
As they’re about to leave, and as Jessica tells David that it’s a very nice car he drives and replies that it’s a reflection of the man, Lt. Andrews of the Seattle police walks up and asks David if he would mind coming down to police headquarters because they would like to ask him some questions about the murder of Allison Brevard several nights ago. When David says that he does mind going to police headquarters, Lt. Andrews asks if he would like to come voluntarily or if he would prefer to be placed under arrest, and on that bombshell we go to commercial.
When we get back from commercial break David and Jessica are walking out of the police station. David assures her that it was routine questioning but Jessica objects that two hours is not routine questioning. David says that they are questioning everyone who knew Allison Brevard and he was number 48 on a list of 50. Apparently she surprised a burglar and was killed in a struggle; there were black wool fibers under her fingernails, presumably from the murderer’s sweater.
Here, by the way, is the car he drives:
A reflection of the man, indeed. He assures Jessica that it’s nothing to be concerned about and drives off. They’re followed by what I assume is an unmarked police car.
The next day Jessica goes to the police station and runs into Lt. Andrews, who she was looking for. He’s amused when she says that David said that it was merely routine questioning, but stops being amused when she says that of course it wasn’t, since he’d soon run out of unmarked police cars if he put surveillance on every casual suspect.
He says that she looks like a nice lady and warns her to stay away from David. She’s surprised that he thinks that she’s romantically interested in David and explains she’s only been in the city two days and hired him as a secretary. Notwithstanding, she doesn’t think that he’s a killer. There’s some arguing back and forth in which it comes out that David had been seeing Allison Brevard for several months and she’s the one who gave him the car. After some more bickering, Lt. Andrews angrily drives off, saying that he doesn’t know why David killed Allison, guys like that play by their own rules.
Jessica goes back to her hotel room, where she is surprised and disconcerted to discover David. He gets to the typewriter and asks if she’s ready to start and she says that they should skip today. He explains about Allison Brevard—he has a story where everything she gave him was innocent, largely paid back, and the extent of their relationship was that he found her company delightful, but that’s it. (Jessica doesn’t know about the photos of him on her nightstand, so she doesn’t ask and he offers no explanation about that.) Jessica is noncommittal and still wants to skip today. When asked about the next day, she says that she’s not sure. He asks if he should call first and she says yes. As he leaves, she asks him to never let himself into her room like that again. He replies, “Word of honor.” It is, of course, very doubtful that his word of honor is worth anything.
In the next scene she’s talking with Edmund. When they get back to his office David is waiting to talk to him. He says that he knows that the police have been to see him and he wants to assure the Dean that he had nothing to do with Allison Brevard’s death. Edmund says he’s relieved to hear it, but it’s a pity that he doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder. David protests that he was home, alone, studying all night. He asks for the benefit of the doubt and Jessica says that he has it as far as she’s concerned. Tonight, she’s going to do a ton of writing so the next day he’s going to have scads of typing to do.
I really wonder how that’s supposed to work, given that Jessica notoriously composes on a typewriter herself. I don’t think that we’re supposed to ask what she’s doing with a secretary given that she never uses one at home. Nor are we supposed to ask why David would bother to talk to assure the Dean of Students at a large university that he had nothing to do with the murder. It’s not like they’re going to have a personal relationship, or even have met before unless David had been in trouble.
Anyway, David thanks her and leaves, and Edmund says that that was a mistake. Jessica says that while David is obviously something of a con man and perhaps a liar, she doesn’t think that he’s a killer. If he had killed Allison, surely he would have set himself up with some kind of alibi?
In the next scene Jessica receives a phone call from the pretty girl who waved at Professor Lowery after Jessica’s triumphal lecture. She’s in a bar and says that she’s an anonymous friend of David Tolliver’s and she can prove he had nothing to do with the death of Allison Brevard. She is, supposedly, taking a hell of a chance just making the phone call and doesn’t want to give her name, but she will meet Jessica at 10pm tonight at an abandoned warehouse by the docks, number 33.
When she hangs up an angry looking man walks up and asks her who she was talking to, and if it was “that man” again.
It turns out that his name is Jack, her name is Lila, and they’re still married, though from the sound of it, not for long. They fight, then the scene ends.
That night, despite protesting that she had no intention of meeting anyone anywhere, Jessica shows up, alone, at the abandoned warehouse in a taxicab. As Jessica enters the dark warehouse, a car, off in the distance, starts up and drives away as very ominous music plays. We get more ominous music as Jessica walks through the abandoned warehouse filled with stacked boxes until she finds the body of Lila. Actually, I got a little head of myself. Lila is still alive when Jessica finds her, walking towards Jessica with a very surprised look on her face, but then she falls down dead and we see the bloody wound in her back.
And on that bombshell, the screen fades to black and we go to commercial break.
When we come back, after a few seconds of walking around to make sure that the viewer who stayed behind called to everyone else that the commercials are over and the show is back on, Lt. Andrews tells a detective named Lou to go pick up David and find out where he’s been for the last few hours. He then hands Jessica a cup of coffee and asks if she heard anything. Jessica thinks that Lt. Andrews isn’t making sense in thinking that David did it since this would mean killing his alibi. Lt. Andrews counters that David may not have had an alibi, got the girl to say that he did, then killed her so she couldn’t say otherwise. Jessica is impressed by this theory, but unfortunately for Lt. Andrews Lou comes back and says that the surveillance team say that David’s been home all night and never left.
The scene then shifts to the police station where David, in a magnificent sweater, is saying that he told Lila to not call Jessica because of her jealous husband.
Sweaters in the 1980s were amazing things. Anyway, David claims that he and Lila had been seeing each other off and on and it was finally turning into something, which is why the talk of him and Allison Brevard was so much nonsense. This, of course, presupposes that David was the kind of man to not string an old rich woman along for gifts while also seeing a young, attractive woman for her body. Which he clearly was.
The next day Jessica goes to see Edmund but he’s not in. Amelia is quite cold to her and she takes the opportunity to tell Amelia that she’s not competition. She and Edmund are old friends, but that’s it. Amelia tries to demur but Jessica points out it would take a blind person to not see Amelia’s feelings for Edmund. She asks Amelia to let her be an ally and thinks that all Edmund needs is a nudge, and encourages Amelia to give it. Amelia thanks her and says that she’s sorry about David Tolliver, she’s always liked him. Jessica advises her to not write him off just yet; she thinks he’s innocent.
Jessica then goes to see Lila’s husband (now widower). In the course of Jessica impolitely grilling him, it comes out that David and Lila were just friends. There’s also a great exchange where he says, “You ask a lot of questions,” and Jessica replies, “I’m nosy.” He then asks her if it isn’t time for her to be in class, she looks at her watch, and runs off. How on earth he knew when her lecture was, I have no idea, and I doubt that the writers do, either. This is especially weird because he’s the kind of guy to say, generically, “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” which would have served just as well.
At the lecture, Jessica says that she wants to do something a bit different. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the murderer. This is, of course, highly necessary for someone who wants to write decent murder mysteries, but in this case it’s just a ploy for her to thinly veil grilling professor Lowery. I guess this is supposed to make Jessica look clever but it really just makes her look cruel. If she had any decency, she’d have waited for a private moment to do this.
When she gets home she gets a note from David that she got a phone call saying that professor Lowery wants to meet her at 9pm—it’s urgent and confidential. That night at 9pm, as she’s going through the dark, abandoned building, taking the stairs because the elevator is out of order, a shadowy figure at the top of the stairs pushes her down.
This is another scene which shows up in the opening credits. It looks cool, which is a good way to mask the switch to a stunt double to get pushed down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs Jessica is groggy, but hears David’s voice, then sees him, but blurry, and passes out. We cut to an ambulance, where David is with her as she’s being taken to the hospital. David heard about her thing with Lowery after he left the note and she was gone by the time he got back to the apartment, so he went to follow her. He got to the English building just as she screamed. He didn’t see who pushed Jessica—he didn’t see anyone.
In the hospital room, Edmund and Lt. Andrews show up. Edmund accuses David of having attacked Jessica and he denies it. He swears that he didn’t do it. Edmund asks if he’s telling the truth, just as he’s telling the truth when he said that he was with Lila the night that Allison Brevard was murdered. When David protests that he was, Edmund replies, “No, young man, she was not with you. Because that night she was with me.” And after a few startled reaction shots, on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
The next day Jessica is with Edmund at breakfast. He summarizes. A few months ago Lila came looking for a job and Todd Lowery needed a teaching assistant so he put her in touch. (This isn’t at all how teaching assistantships work, but whatever.) After a while Lila wanted to get out of the affair but Todd wouldn’t let her—whatever that means. In an affair with a married man, it’s not the married man who has the power in the relationship. No one considers this, though. Edmund thinks that Todd Lowery is more subtle than Lila’s husband, but just as dangerous. She came to Edmund for help and somehow this turned sexual. Eventually they met at the Lumberjack Inn, which is out of town and not exactly a campus hangout. They were there on the night Allison Brevard was killed. He remembers because they were almost run off of the road by a speeding car. It was almost as if the driver were trying to threaten them, or to warn them. When queried, he doesn’t remember the color; something dark like blue or black. He was confident that they weren’t followed. Lila was so scared of her husband she was always watching to make sure that they weren’t followed.
Incidentally, he pays the check for breakfast and the camera draws our attention to the fact that he paid by credit card.
Here in the year of our Lord 2024 this would hardly be worth mentioning, but it was far more unusual back in 1984. Incidentally, I love the generic credit card, “BankMaster”. Very similar to MasterCard at the time, but just different enough for legal reasons. Incidentally, this suggests he was very likely to put the hotel bill on his credit card, which means that Amelia would have seen it. It was established early on that she read his credit card bills very carefully. Anyway, Edmund says that his affair with Lila was foolish but that it did serve a useful purpose, which is to expose David Tolliver for the liar and the killer that he is. Jessica doesn’t question the liar part but it doesn’t escape her notice that this is hardly proof that David killed Allison Brevard.
Jessica then goes and pays a visit to professor Lowery. He asks how she’s doing and says that he had nothing to do with the phone call, which Jessica says she was already sure was the case. He thanks her for her little charade the day before because it knocked sense into him and he was up all night talking with his wife and next week they’re going to go on vacation together and try to patch things up. (This is an unusual university indeed if professors can just take vacations in the middle of a semester.) Jessica is delighted for him. She asks the color of his car by way of lying that she saw a student nick his blue sedan, but his wife dropped him off this morning and they drive a yellow station wagon.
On her way across campus she’s accosted by Lt. Andrews, who tells her that David has been released. The burglary division got some leads on the jewels that were stolen from Allison Brevard. They backtracked these through a fence to a “three-time loser who was on parole.” This tree-time loser gave a complete confession to the murder.
When Jessica gets back to her hotel room, David is there, waiting for her.
Andrew Stevens, who played David, is an impressive actor. He combines so many things, here, but more than anything looks amazingly like a shark about to eat her.
Jessica is not pleased to see him having let himself in when she wasn’t there. They fight a bit, but at one point he protests that the note really was because he got a call and the person who called asked him to take a message, said it was urgent. This catches Jessica’s attention. He said, “Person” not Lowery, or even “he”. This suggests something to Jessica.
Jessica then goes to Edmund’s office. He’s not there, only Amelia is, and Jessica tells her that she needs to speak to Edmund as soon as possible. She just got back from talking with Lt. Andrews, who is going to get a warrant for Edmund’s arrest for the murder of Lila Shroeder. He has no alibi. She tries to trick Amelia into acknowledging she knew about Edmund and Lila but Amelia feigns ignorance. She does get Amelia to admit that she drives a dark blue car but she denies knowing where the Lumberjack Inn is.
Jessica stops trying to get Lila to confess and starts presenting evidence. She tells Amelia that she’s lying. She had to know about the Lumberjack Inn because she pays Edmund’s credit card bills. When she first met Amelia she was confronting Edmund about a charge on his credit card bill. She then asks why Amelia called her hotel with a disguised voice, luring her to Lowery’s office. Was it to kill her?
Amelia says no, she just wanted to frighten her. That’s why she dressed in black, to make her think it was David. The police were satisfied but Jessica just wouldn’t let it alone. She then recounts the night of the murder—she had come to confront Lila but Lila was just leaving when she got there so she followed her, all the way into the warehouse. Lila spotted her and laughed. She knew why Amelia was there and threatened to tell Edmund. Amelia flew into a rage, grabbed a longshoreman’s hook, and lashed out at Lila, apparently after Lila turned her back to Amelia for some reason. Her story is interrupted by spotting Edmund, who had silently walked up.
Edmund quietly says, “Amelia, for God’s sake… why?” Amelia almost whispers back, “because I love you.” Edmund is stunned and says, “I had no idea.” Amelia replies, “No. None at all.”
It almost looks like they’re going to go to closing credits but instead the scene shifts to the Seattle airport. As Jessica is looking at postcards David shows up with a stuffed bear for her. There’s some back and forth where he tries to push for a relationship and Jessica turns him down. He has the wits to try to part amicably and says, “even casual acquaintances find a way to say goodbye.” So Jessica says, “Goodbye, David. And I do wish you well.” He replies, “And I, you. You know, I was enjoying the writing. Send me a copy of the book when it’s finished?” She replies, “I may do better. You may end up being a character.” He laughs at this and asks, “And what would I be? A victim? A Suspect? Killer?”
Jessica replies, solemnly, “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind yet.” She then turns and leaves. As she walks off David’s smile is replaced by an angry stare and we go to credits.
The actor who played David Tolliver did a masterful job making him look like a manipulative psychopath (in the clinical sense). And, structurally, it was very interesting to run two concurrent mysteries—one, the mystery of David Tolliver and whether he killed Allison Brevard; the other the mystery of who killed Lila Shroeder. The only real problem with this is that a manipulative psychopath makes my skin crawl and I can barely stand to watch the scenes with David in them. In some cases I resorted to skipping a few seconds at a time with subtitles on.
I’ve got to say, that as much as the episode did have its plot holes, it had an interesting structure which suggests answers for at least some of the plot holes. For example, how did David Tolliver hear of the job posting before everyone else? Amelia thinking of Jessica as a rival and wanting to do her harm explains this beautifully. If she knew David Tolliver would try to prey on Jessica, tipping him off about the job posting—and perhaps not even making the posting public until Jessica had time to say that it was filled—makes perfect sense. It also deepens Amelia’s character nicely.
Another example of something that the structure solves is the weird fact of Allison Brevard having pictures of David on her nightstand but him being completely unmoved by her murder. At first that helps to make it look like he’s guilty, but since he’s a psychopath who tries to seduce older women, it explains both that he was successful with her and also why he was unmoved by her death despite not being involved—psychopaths, by definition, don’t have feelings like that. Further, it makes sense why he would downplay his relationship with Allison so much rather than acting shaken up by her tragic loss—he had moved on to trying to seduce Jessica and the last thing that you want, when trying to convince someone that you’ve fallen in love with them, is another recent lover.
That said, there are things which have no obvious explanation, such as why Jessica wanted a secretary at all given that she famously composed her novels on her typewriter or why she just accepted David rather than interviewing anyone else.
I have a bunch of questions about Lila, too. For one thing, what on earth qualified her to be a teaching assistant for Todd Lowery? Teaching assistants are normally grad students who work as teaching assistants (in their field) in order to pay for grad school. We have zero indication that Lila has a degree in English, and while being young and married to an ex-olympian-hopeful doesn’t rule it out, it hardly makes it more likely, either. But that’s not an arrangement that will pay her in cash—teaching assistantships are pair for by remitting tuition for grad school. Setting that aside, how on earth did she just show up to the office of the Dean of Students, and why did he know about an opening for a teaching assistant? The Dean of Students isn’t Dean of the college. He’s Dean of students. Setting that aside, how did she start an affair with Edmund when she went to him for help in breaking off an affair with Todd Lowery? “I’m trying to get out of a sexual relationship with a controlling older man” is not exactly sexy. Setting that aside, given that she had broken off the affair with Lowery and had started an affair with Edmund, why did she show up after Jessica’s first lecture and to make eyes at Todd Lowery?
Also—and this one is not at the level of plot hole—how on earth were Lila and David friends? People can happen to be friends and in a TV murder mystery we have to be ready to accept some level of coincidence, but it would be nice to have some sort of backstory explaning how the wife of a swim jock and a grad student studying unspecified studies when he’s not romancing older women ever ran into each other.
Obviously, we’re not going to get answer to those questions, so it is what it is. Leaving those things aside, I do really like the plot construction that the manipulative psychopath turns out to be totally innocent of all of the crimes in the story. He seems sinister, of course, and is the sort of person who certainly could have committed the crimes. But he didn’t need to, and in the end, didn’t. There’s a nice kind of commentary in this on human nature, that we want evil to be perpetrated by someone easily recognized as evil, when in reality evil is often done by people who look very innocent.
Not literally by fifty year old secretaries with longshoreman’s hooks, of course. In the 1980s it would have been the extremely rare fifty year old female secretary (i.e. office worker) who had the upper body strength to kill someone with a hook. It’s a great tool for lifting things but an incredibly awkward weapon, making it require far more strength than a purpose-build weapon would need, and given that they were not, generally, needle-sharp, it would require quite a lot of force to plunge it deep into a human body through clothing. (In the 1980s, an older female office worker would almost certainly never have stepped foot in a gym with dumbbells or the kind of strength training equipment necessary to develop the upper body strength required to kill a person with a longshoreman’s hook.) This isn’t as bad as the episode where the victim was killed with a tuning fork through a sweater by a middle-aged woman whose arms weren’t much thicker than the tuning fork, but it’s still well outside the realm of the probable.
But if fifty year old female secretaries very rarely kill people in a way that a twenty five year old male dock worker would find difficult, they do sometimes hate people enough to do it if they could (and get away with it). In reality they’re far more likely to use poison, and far more likely still to use passive-aggressive techniques like reputation destruction, but nice people can wish to do great evil and sometimes go fairly far in their attempts to make it real while staying safe. This is the fundamental truth that this episode gets at. If evil were limited to obvious psychopaths like David Tolliver then we’d all be safe because people like him are pretty easy to spot. He was very smooth, but not subtle. Amelia was subtle.
I recently bought a copy of Errol Flynn’s autobiography. Supposedly he wanted to title it “In Like Me” (in reference to the famous phrase, “in like Flynn”) but his publishers insisted on a different title:
My Wicked, Wicked Ways is not a promising title, but I suppose it probably was more likely to sell more copies.
I’ve skimmed portions of it and I’m not likely to read the whole thing. From everything I can tell, Errol Flynn was not a good man and to some degree he was realistic about this. He did agree to the title—and not ironically, as far as I can tell. This is always sad. As Leon Bloy said, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” It can still be interesting when the man who is (so far) a failure in life has insight and can tell you with precision where he as gone wrong. That makes it all the sadder, in one sense at least, but it rewards you for the reading. When the bad man doesn’t see where he went wrong and wants your sympathy—this is merely sad and nothing else.
At the close of the book he answers the question of where he is now. He just turned fifty and bought himself a birthday present—a house in the Caribbean. The final words are written sitting on his porch there, looking out at the sea he loved so much. And the final line is:
The second half-century looms up, but I don’t feel the night coming on.
Less than four months later, he would die of a heart attack with cirrhosis of the liver listed as a contributory factor on his death certificate and this book would be published posthumously.
According to the introduction, portions of the book are certainly fiction and some others likely to be so. Oddly, many of these parts are the more lurid stories, such as killing a man in New Guinea. The thing is very much played up—for example, before the first page there’s both lyrics from a song suggesting that young men sow their wild oats when young so they can be happy in their old age and quotes from the bible about how there is no peace but sorrow for the wicked.
Of course, the autobiography was actually written by a ghost writer by the name of Earl Conrad, so however far one trusts Errol Flynn—and I’m not sure that should be very far—there is no reason to trust Earl Conrad, whose only real motivation was to sell as many books as possible. And certainly this was the motivation of the editor, whoever that was. And of the original publisher.
The result is a book it is impossible to trust, which has no really good object anyway. Flynn was charismatic and everyone in his life used that to make money. He did, Hollywood did, and finally his publishers did. I suppose this is fitting, in a sense. He set no higher value on his life than to derive benefit from being liked and to enjoy those benefits as much as he could. Why should anyone else have set a higher value on it?
Which brings us back to the fact that the saddest thing in life is to not be a saint.
A little while ago, I was watching a Chris Williamson podcast with a guest who studies bullying. One interesting thing about it was the finding that bullying is primarily among popular people. Which makes sense, if you think about it, because they are actually a threat to the status of others and so putting them down can actually accomplish something. But the thing I found really curious was the discussion of how to get people to stop bullying, because both of them didn’t seem to notice that within a secular framework, this is basically impossible.
It’s impossible for the simple reason that bullying works. When you are vying for social status with other people, bullying can discourage them and get them to stop trying to be popular too, paving the way for you to be popular. This isn’t the thing one typically sees in movies where a big guy picks on some small kid. It’s not that that never happens, but it doesn’t usually happen like in the movies. That kind of thing really is just simple theft—you don’t threaten to beat a kid up for his lunch money because it brings you a warm glow of satisfaction or makes you popular with others, you do it because you want more money and don’t want to put in the effort to get it honestly. In movies, mostly the bullies are just externalized versions of a person’s own conscience, and pick on him for his vices or at least the things he doesn’t like about himself because Hollywood writers are bad people and their consciences frequently bother them so they want to externalize their conscience so that they can eventually beat it up to the cheers of onlookers.
In real life, bullying is primarily done among popular kids because they have something of value—social status. Bullying them makes them feel bad and retreat from the things that make them popular. This kind of bullying is covert—in real life you don’t get crowds cheering for you when you bully someone, so you have to do your best to keep anyone from knowing what you’re doing. (Or else tell them stories which justify what you’re doing as protecting yourself or, at the worst, justice for what was done to you.)
In this context, bullying works. You can, through bullying people, make them feel bad. People who feel bad are not as charismatic. They don’t always show up to parties. People stop liking them as much. When you’re around and as charismatic as ever, your popularity goes up.
Worse for the people who want to stop bullying, bullying is one of the more subtle activities human beings engage in. If you try to have any kind of official anti-bullying campaign, some of the first people to use it will be the bullies. They will accuse their victims of bullying them, or the more sophisticated ones will provoke their victims into some kind of retaliation then bring that retaliation to the anti-bullying authority to get the victim punished.
All of this is especially true of female bullies, since females tend to take advantage of other females’ extreme sensitivity to rejection by females. Skilled girls and women can be artists with this kind of subtle signaling which is virtually undetectable to anyone else.
For these and other reasons, bullying is something that authorities (for the most part) can’t directly stop. But what you can’t directly stop you may be able to indirectly stop—you can try to persuade people to not bully others. The problem with this is that bullying works. Asking people to not bully others amounts to asking them to forgo a benefit. Why should they do this?
Within a secular context, now that quasi-religious feelings for nations have been discredited and no one cares, the only viable way of getting people to change their behavior is to show them why it’s to their own benefit to do or not do whatever it is you want them to do or not do. Hence, with drugs, you clearly communicate all of the many side-effects of drug abuse. To try to stop kids from having children out of wedlock, you try to persuade them that having children will suck and tell them in detail about every STD you can think of.
But bullying works and, if the bully isn’t caught, it has no immediate side-effects for the bully. All you can do is to ask them to forgo a benefit to themselves for the sake of another. But the idea that you should love people who can’t give you anything is a religious proposition; it stands or falls on the truth of metaphysical propositions such as God loving us and creating us to love each other (where love is defined as willing the good of the other for his sake). That’s not exclusively a Christian idea, but it is very far from a universal idea.
It’s easy to not notice when people exercise self control and don’t say things, especially critical things.
It’s healthy for your relationships to develop the skill of noticing anyway and appreciating them for it.
Then, out of curiosity, I asked my friend Ed Latimore (who, at the time of this writing, has over 200,000 Twitter followers) how he’d have written that tweet. Here’s his response (published with permission, obviously):
It’s important to notice what people *don’t* say…
Especially when tempers run high and it’d be understandable if they said anything wild.
I found the differences to be quite interesting, which is why I’m sharing it.
One obvious difference, of course, is that Ed’s version is more streamlined and easier to read. That’s partially because it’s a skill he’s worked hard at becoming good at and partially because complicated grammar is a weakness of mine. My first sentence involved a double-negative, while Ed rephrased to a single negative, which has an easier flow. The second sentence does flow more easily than the second sentence of mine, but more interesting is how much it diverges. In mine I had in mind the fairly tame, if quite common, case of people complaining or criticizing.
Ed went for the more vivid case of people being angry. The tradeoff is that this is less common—for most of us, anyway—but this makes sense to me as something that will grab attention better, which is important on Twitter since the dominant mode of reading is doomscrolling—or whatever the term for addictively scrolling while skimming to find things to interest one is. There is also an element of Ed’s brand on Twitter, which involves having grown up in the “hood” and in rough circumstances. I suspect that’s less that, though, and more about catching people’s attention.
There is still very much the same idea of noticing what a person prevents themselves from saying; one thing about the context of tempers running high is that it intrinsically suggests people doing what Dale Carnegie famously said most fools do (criticize, condemn, and complain). This does give the benefit of economy of speech, since in Ed’s version there’s no need to spend extra words. The use of “it’d be understandable if they said anything wild” also interests me because it requires imagination on the part of the reader. Exercising that imagination will predispose the reader to sympathy with the other (hypothetical) person. That’s something which was lacking in my version.
Ed’s version also makes greater use of cadence. There’s the emphasis on the word “don’t” followed by an ellipsis, indicating that the reader should take a moment to think about the implication of the sentence. Then there is the specific example; beginning it with the word “especially” serves to emphasize the first sentence as well as shape the the thoughts that the reader had on the first sentence. I can see how that would create greater sympathy between the reader and Ed, as well as making the reader feel greater ownership over the specifics that Ed then gives.
I was recently at a pharmacy where there was a small TV tucked into a corner displaying something I found rather odd:
If you have a hard time reading the text, it says:
Things To Remember When Lifting Weights When doing squats, remember to keep your knees behind your toes at all times. You also want to make sure that your back is straight and strong and your head is faced forward. —The Ginger Marie Blog
Those who are familiar with how to squat properly will know that the advice to always keep your knees behind your toes is a myth. Nothing bad happens if your knees go in front of your toes and many people need their knees to go in front of their toes to get full depth—especially olympic weightlifters who regularly bottom out their squat (so called “ass to grass” squatting). Like all lifting, it’s a bad idea to suddenly do it with near-maximal loads instead of working up to it, of course—but that’s true of all ways of doing all lifts. Walking up to a lift you’ve never done before and maxing out on it is a useful ingredient in maximizing your injury risk—though it should be born in mind that strength sports have pretty low injury risks compared to most other sports. But still, do work up to your maximal lift attempts. You’ll also lift more that way.
Also, does anyone really need to be told to keep their head facing forward when squatting? I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to look over their shoulder while squatting.
That’s not really why I bring this up, though. A pharmacy is a very strange place to get strength training advice in a corner overlayed on top of a picture of people on exercise bikes. To give a sense of how odd this is, imaging walking into a powerlifting gym and behind one of the machines is a TV which shows a picture of technicians putting someone into an MRI machine and the text on top says:
Things To Remember When Taking Medicine: When taking an antibiotic, always drink a large glass of whole milk with it, finish the antibiotics course unless otherwise directed by a doctor, and stand upright on the ground while taking it.
This, by the way, is the front page of The Ginger Marie Blog, as of the time I’m writing this post:
I do not say a word against Ms. Ginger Marie, but I must confess I’m curious as to why this particular site was chosen as the place from which to get advice on proper squat technique.
Though, to be fair to Ms. Marie, when I try searching the site for the word “squats” I don’t come up with anything. A google search for “The Ginger Marie Blog” and “squats” and “knees” also turns up no results, though that may not mean much since Google has been pretty bad for the last year or two. Still, it’s possible that the random TV in my local pharmacy is misattributing its dubious advice to Ms. Marie.
I wonder if we can blame AI for this? Perhaps a large language model mangled a quote from a publication like Marie Claire and then mangled the attribution, as well. This seems like the sort of thing that AI might do.
As dystopias go, this is a much nicer one than what most dystopian movies portray.
Chemistry between actors—specifically romantic chemistry between a male and female actor—is a complex thing and for that reason often taken to be undefinable. While it is certainly too complex to put into precise words, this doesn’t mean that nothing profitable can be said about how to achieve “chemistry.” And we can do that by looking at the term we all use to describe it, “Chemistry,” because, as G.K. Chesterton once said
The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.
Chemistry is the study of how chemicals interact with each other, that is, how they react to each other. Some reactions are not that subtle, but most of the ones studied by chemists are. And this is the essence of “chemistry” between actors. It’s all about how they react to each other’s subtleties.
The art of chemistry, which is just faking attraction—the art of acting is, at its core, faking sincerity—consists of doing the things that people who are attracted to each other actually do. This is subtle, and is divisible into three main parts:
Being extremely attentive to slight signals from the other
Being very attentive to what slight signals one is giving to the other
Being around the other person is just positive in its own right
Taking these in turn, the first of them consists of watching the other carefully. That’s not enough in acting, though, since we (the audience) can’t tell what’s going on in the character’s head. Which isn’t even what’s going on in the actor’s head, so even if we were telepathic it wouldn’t work. What the actor needs to do is to signal that he’s paying careful attention. That is done through reactions—mostly subtle—to the signals the other is giving. The reactions can be fake, but the paying attention can’t be. The actor needs to actually watch the other like a hawk and improvise appropriate sorts of minor reactions. A slight sign of interest should result in a slight indication of excitement or happiness. A slight sign of annoyance or frustration should result in a small sign of concern.
Of course, reactions are not necessarily linear. If the man is in a mood to flirt, the woman showing slight frustration might result in the man doubling-down on the frustrating behavior. The point isn’t the particular reaction, but that there is a reaction. (Some of this will be contained in the dialog, which is the job of the screenwriter, not the actors, but a great deal can be done with stance, facial expression, where the actor looks, etc.)
Another important part of this is that the actors do actually have to look at each other. You can’t be attentive to what is the focus of your attention without looking at it. This can be long, lingering looks; it can be sly, furtive looks stolen when there’s the least chance of them being observed. There’s a wide variety in how to do it, but it must actually get done, and it needs to be connected to the actions which follow it.
The second item—being very attentive to what slight signals one is giving the other—will typically manifest itself in a certain amount of awkwardness, though that’s by no means the only possible approach. It’s somewhat inevitable that people who are preoccupied will take very slightly longer to respond to everything. The feeling of extra care being taken in phrasing, at least some of the time is very helpful to communicate this, too. It will get more subtle the older the characters are, of course, since experience simply helps one execute better. Teenagers can stumble over their words; people in their thirties should have only slight delays if we’re to think of them as adults and not old children.
The third item—being around the other person is positive in its own right—needs to manifest in at least a slight uplift in all reactions to everything. If you’ve got a pitbull clamped onto your leg, it’s still better to have a pitbull clamped onto your leg with the love of your life around than when he’s not there. It’s not that people ignore everything—again, you can at best kind of get away with that in teenage puppy love—but that there is some improvement needs to be evident. This is going to be particularly hard to pull off because it means remembering to (slightly) lower the reactions in all scenes without the love interest, but without that the effect won’t be communicated to the audience.
These three things, if done, will go a long way to giving two actors “chemistry”. It’s not easy, but then there is a reason why people are impressed with good actors.
Since so many people who commented on my video about how determinism doesn’t exclude God, it excludes human beings seemed to want this video, instead, here’s a video debunking determinism.
This is my first time using a teleprompter (way less work than recording the audio, editing it, then finding images and editing them into the video), and I’m curious how well this works as a format.
Here’s Determinism Doesn’t Exclude God, It Excludes Human Beings:
I’ve been trying to work out a way to use a teleprompter to be able to read scripts for my YouTube channel without having to do any editing. (My traditional scripted videos, which use an audio track with pictures meant for illustration is extremely time-consuming and I just don’t have the time right now.) I’m trying the teleprompter because I’ve found that if you can see a human being speaking, it’s not a big deal if they occasionally correct themselves, but it feels really weird for that if it’s a disembodied voice.
Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to read a script off of a teleprompter, there’s no substitute for actually trying the thing and seeing how it goes. Which means I’ve had various takes of five to twenty minutes that were no good and had to be thrown out. In several cases these got junked by having the teleprompter settings off (too slow/wrong font size) or the AI teleprompter which uses speech recognition to advance the words losing track and giving up. In some cases, it was finding all of the settings on my laptop to have it stop going to sleep automatically. And in one case I had a complete take where I accidentally left something in frame which ruined the take.
All of this was very, deeply frustrating. I lost hours to this stuff at a time in my life when minutes are precious.
But that’s just how life goes, sometimes.
If you spend enough time doing creative work to do anything worthwhile, you’re going to encounter frustrations and wastes of time. For this reason, a man’s ability to make worthwhile creative things is only partially determined by his skill. That’s necessary, of course, but it’s not enough on its own. Equally necessary is the ability to not give up in the face of great frustration.
This is, of course, the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. If life is thought of as a race, it is won, not by whoever happens to be fastest at the moment, but by those who do not give up.
This is also why forgiveness is such a critical skill, particularly being able to forgive oneself. It does matter greatly how often one stumbles and falls so long as one gets up every time. Indeed, the man who gives up the first time he falls will fall only once—and will not finish the race.
It’s also the same idea as Woody Allen’s quip that “80 percent of success is showing up.” It’s not so much showing up the first time that’s hard, but showing up all the time.
Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Barbie. Reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia has ensured that I’m not going to willingly do that. That said, a defense of it has occurred to me which is kind of interesting. (If you haven’t, Barbie (the movie) rejects the idea that the sexes are complementary and meant to work with each other; Barbieland is an idyllic place where women rule and men are subjugated, and the film involves various things where the sexes are antagonistic towards each other, with an uprising of the Kens and their eventual re-subjugation.)
Barbieland is a young girl’s idea of playing with barbies before she’s old enough to know what boys are for.
I mean, even really young children get that to make new children you need a mommy and a daddy, but there is stage in development—frequently around 7 or 8 years old—where children start to figure out sex differences and it’s more than they can handle so they tend to oversimplify to make it manageable. This is an aspect of the classic “girls are annoying/boys are icky” phase.
The Barbie movie’s setting and plot does make a certain sort of sense if it’s meant to be a representation of this childish beginning-of-understanding of the world. It’s not, in general, good to represent childish mistakes in art without at least pointing to what the correction of that mistake is. And it’s a bit concerning that (apparently) many adult women found that this childish misunderstanding of the world resonated with them. That said, I’m not going to draw any conclusions because I haven’t seen the movie or talked in depth with anyone who actually liked it. (The one adult I’ve talked with who watched it said that the first half was very funny and it fell apart in the second half, which isn’t the kind of reaction I would find concerning, if the summary is accurate to the movie.)
Anyway, it’s just a stray thought that occurred to me; I offer it as a possible explanation because it makes the world seem a little less bleak.
I grew up with Jeremy Brett as the quintessential Sherlock Holmes and I still think that he is—especially his early portrayals of Holmes. In my youth, though, I met people who held that Basil Rathbone was the quintessential Holmes. Eventually this intrigued me enough to look into it.
Basil Rathbone played Holmes fourteen times, though (from what I’ve read) only the first two were big(ish) budget movies which attempted to the faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. The first, and by some accounts, the greatest, of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies was The Hound of the Baskervilles. So I bought a copy and watched it.
I can definitely see the attraction to Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes. It doesn’t have Jeremy Brett’s energy and intensity, but he probably looks the part a little more than Jeremy Brett did and he does portray Holmes’ intelligence and confidence as well as Brett did.
The movie itself was curious. There were a few parts which were more faithful to the original story than in the Jeremy Brett version, but for the most part it was considerably less faithful. I think that the unfaithful parts were primarily about making the movie shorter—it had a running time of only an hour and twenty minutes. (The Jeremy Brett version was a full twenty five minutes longer.)
The section with the escaped convict was shortened; we heard nothing about the escaped convict before we saw him and he was discovered almost immediately, as was the connection between Barryman and the convict. In the novel, this formed a considerable part of the initial mystery which Watson investigated. They also omitted Watson’s investigations of the figure who turned out to be Holmes; they had Holmes show up as a peddler trying to sell odds and ends and then leave a note for Watson to come to his hut. Oh, and they also omitted Laura Lyons and completely left out the question of the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville. (I think that this omission is why they added Stapleton trying to shoot Sir Henry with a revolver in London; it gave Holmes a reason to go to Baskerville Hall that wasn’t investigating Sir Charles’ death.)
Also curious was the choice to turns Stapleton’s “sister” into his actual sister. And they had her marry Sir Henry Baskerville. It’s tempting to think that this was meant to make the story more exciting by introducing an uncomplicated romance into the story, but I think that it may have been more about trying to shorten the story. By making turning the relationship into an uncomplicated romance they needed to spend considerably less time on it.
By contrast, I think that the change from exposing Sir Henry to danger from fog to exposing Sir Henry to danger from a broken carriage wheel (and Holmes and Watson arriving late) was really just about saving money. In 1939, it would have been expensive to create a convincing amount of fog. Not impossible, of course; dry ice was commercially manufactured in the US starting in 1925 and putting dry ice into water is a decent way of producing a fair amount of fog. (There are others, and I couldn’t easily find the history of them to know when they were first produced.)
I suspect that cost savings is also why they didn’t get a particularly large dog nor did they put any kind of glowing material on him. (I actually wonder whether they put glowing material on the dog in the Jeremy Brett version; the effect looks a bit weird and it’s possible that it was applied in post-production.)
I’m at a loss to explain why, after Sir Henry Baskerville was mauled by the hound and Holmes and Watson shot the hound, they then had Holmes get imprisoned in the hound’s cave, Stapleton go to Sir Henry and tell Watson Holmes wanted him, then Stapleton try to poison Sir Henry only for Holmes to show up and knock the glass out of Sir Henry’s hand. The speech that Dr. Mortimer gave about how Sherlock Holmes is the greatest Englishman and every man, woman, and child in England sleeps better knowing that Sherlock Holmes is watching over them—that’s not quite the speech, but it’s of that ilk. Anyway, The reason for that speech also escapes me.
For all that, it’s an enjoyable movie.
The timing of it is interesting to consider. It came out in March of 1939, which places it shortly before the start of World War 2 and almost two years before America would enter the war. The Great Depression was in many ways over (at least by economic metrics) though people did not think of the hard times as having past. It had been thirty-seven years since The Hound of the Baskervilles had been published and twelve years since the final Holmes short story was published (The Adventure of Schoscombe Old Place). This, too, may have had an influence on all of the changes. When a thing is sufficiently new, people are more inclined to variation for the sake of it; if you want the original it’s reasonably fresh itself. When enough time passes, faithfulness to the original becomes more valued.
I don’t want to overstate that; true fans of a work will always look for faithfulness in movie adaptations and when things come out of copyright there are always very loose adaptations because that’s easier than writing original stories. For all that, though, I think that there is something to what I said, and the timing of the Basil Rathbone version had some influence on how much of it was changed.
That said, it is interesting to note that—according to Wikipedia—this was the first Holmes film to be set in Victorian times, rather than to be made contemporaneous.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the grand conclusion that I feel like I should have at this point. It’s an interesting film; mostly at this point for historical reasons. I can’t imagine preferring this to the Jeremy Brett version. On the other hand, it probably did help to increase Sherlock Holmes’ popularity; it’s possible for movies to help readership of a book among people who never saw the film. I certainly recommend it if you’re interested in the history of film, detective fiction, or both.
The cover art for mystery novels is interesting. Unlike many other popular genres, whose covers feature images depicting the characters in the book doing something which might possibly happen in the book (that part is, admittedly, less common), the covers of mystery novels are frequently iconography. Consider the cover to this Barnes & Noble complete Sherlock Holmes (bought twenty some-odd years ago):
The most prominent is Holmes himself, of course, in his iconic deerstalker cap, inverness coat, and with the curved pipe made iconic for him by William Gillette.
There is also London Bridge, which so far as I know never featured in a Holmes story. Well, not the London Bridge, but a London bridge. That’s actually Tower Bridge. It’s a newer bridge, downstream of London Bridge. It still never featured in a Holmes story, so far as I know, but it is very iconic of London.
There are the buildings of late Victorian London with the smoke coming out of their chimneys and also a street lamp. Also the great Clock Tower (renamed in 2012 to Elizabeth Tower), with the clock popularly known as Big Ben. I don’t believe that it ever featured in a Sherlock Holmes story, either. Like Tower Bridge, though, it is symbolic of London, and Holmes is inextricably bound up with London.
There are also a few symbols of Holmes himself—the curved pipe above the tea pot and the violin. These are quite straight forward.
Then there are symbols of some of the mysteries, or at least of mysteries in general. Starting in the lower left we have an old fashioned key. Certainly keys have fit into Sherlock Holmes stories, though they also work as symbols of detective fiction in general—the detective is always seeking the clue which is the key to the mystery. On the lower right we have a diamond, presumably the blue carbuncle, though it might be a more generic diamond symbolizing the wealth for which people commit crimes.
A little higher we have a silver tea pot—certainly the British in Sherlock Holmes’ time drank a lot of tea. I don’t recall a tea pot being crucial in a Holmes story, though I feel like I might just be forgetful, here. They can easily fit into issues of poisoning, though.
Then we have a smoking gun. What could be more iconic of a murder mystery than a smoking gun? Well, a knife dripping blood, perhaps, but it’s close. There were many Holmes stories featuring guns, though of course the Problem of Thor Bridge comes to mind.
In the top left we have footprints—oh, what can be more iconic of a golden age mystery than footprints? Holmes certainly identified more than his fair share of footprints in the stories.
And then, in the top right, we have Holmes’ powerful magnifying lens. Or, more colloquially, his magnifying glass. What an icon of Sherlock Holmes!
He used a powerful magnifying lens a few times in the stories, of course. Even if he didn’t, it would be such a great symbol, though. A magnifying glass represents sight, as well as focus. One of the great themes of Holmes instructing Watson in his methods is, “you saw, but you did not observe.” There was something similar in a Poirot story, though I can’t find it at the moment. Poirot was remarking that it is not enough to see the facts, you must understand them, or else the pigeons would be the greatest detectives since they see everything that goes on.
The magnifying glass does also symbolize powerful vision, since it makes details greater, but I think that the focus is of greater symbolic importance since the intrinsic tradeoff of the magnifying glass is that you see some things more clearly at the expense of seeing other things not at all. When you look through a magnifying glass, you have a very narrow field of view. It is thus imperative that you look at the right things. And it is that quality of judgement which is really the epitome of the detective, or at least of the most interesting kind of detective. There are the Dr. Thorndykes of the world who do their chemical analyses and present the findings, or even the Encyclopedia Browns of the world who just know an enormous number of facts which occasionally come in handy. But the greatest detectives are those who can see what other men see and understand it where they don’t. And few things represent that as well as does a magnifying glass, since any man can use it, but few know where to look with it.
I suspect that this is, in part, an aspect of temperament—I’ve always been fine being alone and unusual—but I really don’t get the argument for agnosticism from lack of popularity. It’s usually a gussied up version of “people don’t all agree and there’s no way to check.” This is, of course, only ever selectively applied.
No one ever says, “there are different ideas of the shape of the world. Some people believe it’s a globe, some that it’s flat, and some that it’s shaped like a velociraptor. The only way to know for sure is to go to space and look, and no one’s flying into space right now and I couldn’t afford the tickets even if they were.”
There are proofs that the earth is a globe available to us here on earth, of course, but there are proofs for God available to us here on earth. The people who apply this kind of argument reject the idea of following arguments because not everyone does, which, if applied consistently, would eliminate quite a lot of knowledge.
Do you believe vaccines work? Guess what, there are people who don’t. Do you think that astrology is bogus? There are people who believe in it. Do you think that the earth orbits the sun? There are people who don’t.
I think that the real answer to this lies in who the person considers part of his society and who he rejects; the people to whom this argument appeals cannot bear of the idea of standing apart from his society, so he falls back on only believing whatever is common to everyone that he considers part of his society.
Which brings me back to temperament; I just don’t get the appeal of that.
A friend of mine gave me this link for the first episode of the current (and final) season of Star Trek: Discovery. It starts partway into the episode, but I don’t think that matters. It’s also almost irrelevant who all of the characters are to the plot, which you can take as a bad sign but can also be a criteria of writing that an episode allows new viewers to come on without having to do a lot of reading first.
What really struck me about the episode was the degree to which the writers made decisions which moved the plot forward right before they needed it. Very little was set up beforehand, so everything felt contrived. And stupid.
The episode is mostly a chase for a McGuffin and so the bad guys need to get away a lot. I mean, they don’t need to, per say, but the episode wanted to go with the high-tension constant-near-miss type of chase, so the bad guys had to be always within sight so we could have chases and fast-moving CGI on screen. This meant that the bad guys had to get away a lot, and this was never accomplished through good planning on the bad guy’s part, or superior skill on the bad guy’s part, or really much of anything that the bad guys did right or the good guys did wrong. It was always just a random plot contrivance.
When the bad guys roll some kind of explosive at Captain Burnham, does she move? No. Does she have the ship transport her somewhere else (they have instant teleportation since this is set 800 years later than TNG)? No. She just watches until it cuts a hole in the ship straight through to outer space and sucks Burnham out. Which isn’t a problem because her CGI space suit instantly deploys from her uniform. She then rockets over to the bad guys’ ship (it’s small and nearby, there are only two of them), then magnetizes her boots onto the ship’s hull and stands on it as it goes to warp. She calmly starts using her hand phaser to disable the ship’s engines, which are on the outside for some reason, though nothing ever comes of this because another star trek vessel (who was sent to go on the mission with Burnham’s ship) shows up and puts the ship in a tractor beam. While both are at warp speed.
Which is fine, but apparently the warp bubble is in danger of collapsing for some reason and so Burnham spends a minute or so yelling at the captain of the other ship to disengage while she continues to phaser random stuff on the hull of the bad guys’ ship to no discernable effect.
Then she finally yells at the other captain enough and he terminates the tractor beam and everyone comes out of warp for some reason and Captain Burnham gets off of the bad guys’ ship for some reason and the bad guys deploy warp decoys and warp out, and now it will take too long to track them all down so Captain Burnham has to bring in an old smuggler friend because it takes a thief to catch a thief. Fair enough, though it loses some of the punch when he picks out the correct warp signature in about five seconds.
Then they go to Tatoine where they get to have a speeder bike chase with the bad guys who they narrowly missed (by actually plausible timing) and then somehow the bad guys are on their ship which is flying through the atmosphere and the speeder bikes are keeping up. The bad guys are headed for a tunnel system which will allow them to come out someplace else and then they can go to space and warp out without being detected because the star fleet ships (the same two as before) can only track a ship which is in visual range of the camera, I guess. They say it breathlessly so we’re supposed to not notice. Why no more ships have been assigned to this super important mission (which is revealed to be hundreds of years old) is also not explained.
Then someone identifies the tunnel that they’re going to use because there’s an explosive charge on it and Captain Burnham is against shooting it because there’s a 30% chance of it causing an avalanche which would kill lots of innocent people somewhere and the other Captain thinks it’s the only way and orders his ship to do it and things are fine but then the bad guys use a photon torpedo to trigger an avalanche and Burnham blames the other captain, saying, “you gave them an idea” as if the bad guys aren’t the ones who planted an explosive charge on the tunnel.
Then the avalanche happens and for minutes heads over across a flat plain towards the Tatoine settlement that they had been speeder biking away from for the last several minutes and now are speeder biking towards and all of these innocent people will be killed unless both star ships shove their noses into the ground and merge their shields and oh man is it really stupid.
I can’t say for sure whether there’s some possible way for an avalanche (of rocks and dust, not snow) to travel at full speed along a plain to a place so far away that the mountains look small, but it certainly isn’t plausible. Moreover, with the absurdly advanced technology of Burnham’s ship, it’s a bit ridiculous that putting both ships in the way is the only possible way to save the settlement. They don’t even try phasering the avalanche, they just state it won’t work. But, dramatically, it really should work. It really just feels like they need something to happen so damn it, this is the way things work this minute.
And then, after this ridiculous maneuver where both ships slam their noses into the ground for no obvious reason and the merged shields hold and the settlement is saved, as the dust settles the bad guys warp out and oh well, the ships couldn’t track them because… we’re not told.
And then Captain Burnham and her smuggler friend just sit around for a while and talk about old times as if the episode is over and we’re in a post-credits sequence. It makes no sense why there’s zero urgency to do anything about the McGuffin anymore. Including from the guy in charge of the centuries-old super-secret code double-red mission who’s been laser-focused on the galaxy-shattering consequences of getting the McGuffin before the bad guys do and who has emphasized that lethal force is authorized because it’s this damn important.
Characters’ motivations last only as long as the scene they’re in requires, technology only works whenever the plot wants it to, Bad Guys who will blithely kill (or at least endanger) thousands of innocent people set their weapons to stun when shooting our heroes, Captain Burnham has the priorities of a 1980s Sunday morning cartoon super hero, which wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t done with no humility and everyone likes her anyway despite her being basically an anti-social narcissistic egomaniac. And also being a soldier on a mission.
The thing is, 1980s cartoon superheroes had the priorities they did because they were essentially reactive. Life was going on and then a super-villain endangered innocent people and so they went and protected those innocent people. That’s good and morally coherent.
This can be complicated by introducing other factors, like a much bigger threat to far more people that the superhero needs to stop, and so he may not have time to rescue just one person. That can make for painful dilemmas where the hero needs the maturity to recognize that no everything is given to everyone and maybe saving that one person wasn’t given to you even though, if you forsook what was actually given to you, you could have done it. Captain Burnham just ignores the bigger issues whenever she doesn’t feel like paying attention to them, which is extremely immature and irresponsible.
It’s good to stop and smell the flowers, but not when you’re rushing a transplant organ to a recipient and it needs to get there within the hour or the organ will die and then the recipient will too.
It’s weird to me how utterly bad this writing is. It would not have been hard to make the script a thousand fold tighter than the plot-hole-ridden contrived mess it was.
Also, and this is related to the entire series, they’ve cranked the technology level up so high that location barely matters anymore. People hold conversations with other people around the universe in realtime, people can find and bring aboard people from far-off planets in minutes—basically, location barely imposes any restraints anymore. And the result is that nothing feel real. It takes on an almost dreamlike quality to it which is not pleasant. (It’s also responsible for the plot being lace, since without limitations it’s impossible to have logically consistent problems.)
It’s really cool for people to be able to teleport around like Q, but the problem with the rule of cool is that you have to be careful with it or you’ll get frostbite.
I recently saw a story going around about a grandmother who wanted to pass on the sets of fancy plates which she inherited from her parents and her children rejecting them as to her children they were just fancy display items in a case near the dinner table but not actually involved with dinner. There’s a lot of commentary on this, but I think apart from whatever side one wants to take it does highlight the problem that fragile things don’t work well as inter-generational traditions.
I learned this myself with some cherished toys from my childhood which my parents had saved for my children. They were called Construx—they’re somewhere inbetween Legos and Erector Sets but was better than either. The problem, though, is that they’re no longer made—they haven’t been for decades—and so they are irreplaceable. The other problem is that they’re delicate, especially now that the plastic is thirty years older and spent that time in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. This might not have been a problem if I’d only had one child, or if I had all of my children as triplets, but with them being more spaced out than that, I couldn’t really give them to an older child to play with without them being accessible to the younger ones, and that would have resulted in breaking quite a few pieces.
So the result is that my children barely played with them.
It’s a pity, but I also don’t see what else I could have done. It would have been very sad to have little children accidentally destroy them, and since they’ve got different personalities than I do they probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much as I did, anyway. I’ll probably have more fun pulling them out and playing with them myself after my children are grown.
Fancy dinner plates have the same kind of problem. It’s way too easy to break them by dropping them—sometimes moreso than normal plates because they are often particularly thin—but it’s also way too easy to damage them through simple use. I’ve encountered fancy plates which would easily be scratched by knives and even some whose delicate gilting could be rubbed off by overly vigorous cleaning.
Fancy dinner plates also suffer from the problem of their virtues only being appreciated by generations now gone.
As far as I can tell, fancy plates were a kind of luxury good that became popular among the middle class during the Victorian period, when the newly growing middle class wanted to ape the aristocracy and did so with fancy clothes and fancy plates which were, because of the same economic developments which produced the middle class, now expensive but affordable. Expensive but affordable is a sweet spot as far as signifiers of social status goes. The latter makes them possible and the former keeps them from being so common that they lose all status.
Fancy plates are, of course, pretty in themselves, but they’re actually not great at showing that off since their function is to be covered with food. (Fancy wine glasses do a better job since they can be seen even when filled with wine.) And their function as signifiers of wealth and importance are basically over since economic progress has made similarly pretty things cheap and easily accessible to everyone.
There are things which you can pass onto your children, but if they’re delicate things they need to be replaceable things; things which cannot be broken cannot be used. (There is an exception, of course, for purely decorative things such as paintings, since their use does not put them in jeopardy.) But it’s far more reliable to pass on things which cannot be broken, such as knowledge, skills, and wisdom.
My oldest son ended up reading the Dragonlance Chronicles in different copies than I did, since my omnibus volume had a weak binding and would not easily fit into his backpack to bring to school for reading during free time. It would have been cool if he’d read it from the same physical copy as me, but it’s far more important that he read the same story—which has enabled us to discuss it together.
Ultimately, physical things like plates don’t really last and it’s a mistake to look to them to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and they do, but ultimately things only last when put into a museum and preserved, and not many things are worth of being in a museum. So, pick wisely.
Conversations about feelings have something of a low reputation and not entirely undeservedly. People who are bad at emotional regulation will talk about little else besides feelings and generally in a very unproductive way. Further, self-control is an important skill which has been rightly lauded by religions and philosophical systems alike. If you want to do something which takes precision, such as building a bridge or disinfecting surgical equipment, “facts not feels” will lead to more success.
All of this is true, and I very much prefer conversations about facts, even if personal facts, to conversations about feelings. But all this misses something.
Conversations about facts and conversations about feelings can be the same conversation in different languages.
The reason for this is that emotions are, in their essence, a kind of sense perception. They’re not a bodily sense perception like sight, smell, etc. but they are a kind of sense perception. Fear is the perception of danger. Anger is the perception of injustice. Gratitude is the perception of received benefit. And so on.
Feelings can be mistaken, of course, but so can bodily senses. We can think we felt something small touch us but when we look there’s nothing there. We can think we heard somebody say something but when we ask them what it was they said that they didn’t make a sound. There’s an entire field of making things that we see incorrectly called “optical illusions.” Our emotions are not infallible, but neither are any of our other senses. All of life requires the humility to acknowledge our fallibility.
When you consider a discussion of feelings in this light, as long as the discussion is between two people with enough humility to admit they could be mistaken, a discussion of feelings is really a discussion of the things that the feelings are perceptions of. If an object caused high amplitude sound waves in the air, among non-narcissists, “a high-energy sound was just produced” and “I heard a loud noise” is saying essentially the same thing. It is true that the latter involves the first person singular pronoun, but that’s merely giving you the added information of what instrument registered the high-energy sound. This can actually be quite useful because every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses and knowing which instrument produced the measurement described allows the other person to calibrate accordingly.
This is true of feelings, too. “In the last month, you washed the dishes three quarters of one time and swept the floors one quarter of one time” and “I’m feeling alone with the housework” differ somewhat in their precision, but they are describing the same thing. (And before you get any ideas, I do most of the housework in my house.)
It is possible, then, when someone initiates a conversation about feelings, to have an actual conversation with them. That won’t work if they have no humility, but no conversations really work with the proud, since pride tends towards solipsism and conversation requires acknowledging the existence of the other person. But most people have at least some humility, and it just takes practice to recognize it in people who are talking about their feelings. In some cases people will even talk about their feelings in order to present their observations more gently; to continue with the above example, they would consider the recitation of facts about the frequency of housework to be likely to come across like a personal attack, whereas if they instead focus the conversation on their feelings they expect it to come across like less of a personal attack. This can work very badly when done with someone else whose conversational style takes facts as non-aggressive and discussions of feelings as nebulous and dire. (This kind of mismatch can happen between anyone, though it is most stereotypically between two people where one has a higher-than-average number of X chromosomes and the other a higher-than-average number of Y chromosomes. (Bear in mind that, across the entire population, the average number of X chromosomes is, roughly, 1.5 and the average number of Y chromosomes is, roughly, 0.5))
The good news is that, like all differences in language, it is possible to become “bi-lingual.” It takes practice and discipline, not to mention humility, but a person who tends to either communication style can learn to understand the other one, and even learn to communicate in that style. It’s ideal if both people learn it, of course, but if one isn’t strong enough to do it it will still work pretty well if the stronger one learns how to do it and condescends to the weaker one. (I mean condescend in the etymological sense, “to come down to be with”.)
I recently watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring the movie Riding With Death. Many of the movies featured on MST3K are weird, but this one was particularly strange. It was a made-for-TV movie created by editing together two unrelated episodes of the short-lived TV show Gemini Man.
Gemini Man was, according to Wikipedia, a replacement show for a previous show called The Invisible Man, except with cheaper special effects. made in 1976, Gemini Man centers around the federal agent Sam Casey, who in an accident while diving to retrieve something or other from a disabled nuclear submarine was cause in the blast of an explosion and turned invisible from the radiation. Fortunately, scientists were able to turn him visible again through the use of a “DNA Stabilizer.” It’s a temporary effect, though, and he can become instantly invisible by turning it off. He can safely do this for up to fifteen minutes per day (cumulative) before being invisible will kill him. Conveniently for him, the writers, and the special effects department, it’s not just his body but anything he’s wearing that turns invisible—I think it’s got to be something he’s touching (except the ground) when he turns invisible, since he can pick up a gun and it remains visible. The government agency he’s working for is a weird kind of high tech general do-goodery kind of government agency called Intersect. It’s reminiscent of the various shadowy government agencies that would be behind Michael Knight in Knight Rider and behind Stringfellow Hawk in Airwolf, except that it seems a bit less shadowy—the main Intersect building has a large “INTERSECT” logo above its doorway.
The studio show ten episodes of Gemini Man but it was canceled after the first five aired. Based on the two I saw, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It looks to be in a similar genre to shows like Knight Rider and Airwolf, or even The Incredible Hulk: highly episodic shows about a mildly super-powered hero who fights bad guys and rights wrongs throughout America. In the case of Airwolf and Knight Rider the mild super-power comes from having a high-tech means of transportation; in The Incredible Hulk it comes from being about twice as strong as a bodybuilder (they really toned down the strength of The Hulk in that show when compared to the comic books). In Casey’s case, it comes from being able to become invisible for short stretches of time. As super-powers go, you could do worse. During one of the host segments Crow’s short time spent as the superhero Turkey Volume Guessing Man—a man who can accurate guess the volume of turkeys which would fill any three-dimensional space—demonstrates this. That said, you could also do a heck of a lot better. Being invisible makes it harder for people to shoot you, lets you sucker-punch people better, and allows you to listen in to other people’s private conversations more conveniently. That’s mostly what Casey uses his powers for, and the action is typically resolved through Casey being above average at throwing a punch despite not having all that much mass behind it. Also, he’s apparently a very skilled driver.
All good things to have in a government agent, of course, but not very interesting in themselves. Invisibility is, by its nature, not visually impressive, and guns floating in the air pretty much have to look corny. So the result is going to depend almost entirely on the charisma of the characters. Ben Murphy, who plays Casey, is charismatic enough, but the character he’s given to work with isn’t. Casey seems to kind of enjoy being able to turn invisible, but that’s about the extent to which his character is affected by nearly dying and gaining a power that makes no sense which could kill him if his wristwatch ever runs out of battery.
I should mention that I don’t mean “a power that makes no sense” as a nit-picky criticism. In a show like this it’s fine to go with “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreampt of in your philosophy.” The characters do need to have a sense of wonder and mystery, though. Also, some apprehension is in order. If you don’t understand a thing and it seems to contradict what you do know, you should be aware that it could have “sharp edges.” Casey, by contrast, is easygoing and unaffected, he barely has a care in the world.
Then we come to the movie, which I really would love to hear an explanation for the existence of. Presumably it was a cynical cash-grab where there was a need for a TV movie for some slot and some entertainment hook where something about it—invisibility or trucking, for example—was hot for a few minutes and it takes a lot less time to edit together a TV movie from two fifty minute TV episodes than it does to cast and shoot something original. But it’s really weird how the two episodes were from opposite ends of the show’s short run. They were episode 1 and 10, in fact, and their plots were unrelated.
In the plot for the first episode, a scientist has supposedly invented a chemical additive to gasoline which can cause cars to get two or three times the miles-per-gallon they get with ordinary gasoline, and the big bad oil companies are trying to steal the formula and destroy it to protect their profits. Except it turns out that the additive is unstable and a powerful explosive which can be set off through fairly mild shock (such as dropping it from a foot or two). The scientist has embezzled the $10M in research money that INTERSECT gave him and has set up a plan to destroy the sample and pretend to be killed in the blast, blaming it on the greedy oil companies. This is supposed to happen while he’s riding with the sample in the back of a large moving van which Casey is driving to transport the two gallons of additive over to the department of transportation for evaluation, which has to happen by the end of the business day for some reason that’s never explained because there’s no possible explanation for it.
The scientist has several henchmen working for him and they smuggle him out while pretending to put some extra lab equipment into the truck at his facility and add a radio to the room in the back of the truck where he supposedly is. Then they get on their way for what should be about a thirty mile trip that takes many hours on highways through the mountains and when the bumps in the road don’t set off the fuel additive the scientist (who’s following by helicopter to stay within radio range so he can keep pretending to be in the truck) has one of his henchmen sabotage Casey’s brakes at a stop that he makes for no apparent reason. Along the way Casey meets another trucker nicknamed “Buffalo Bill” on the CB radio, rescues him from some highjackers, and then gets saved by Buffalo Bill who uses his truck to help Casey to stop as he’s coming down from the mountains. There’s also an “exciting” scene where Casey manages to navigate some hair-pin turns at sixty miles an hour due to his superb driving skills. Then the scientist decides that Casey as figured out that he’s not in the truck (which Casey has) and starts shooting at the truck with a sub machine gun from the helicopter. Casey drives the truck to a nearby empty field and gets out before the truck explodes, then subdues the scientist and his henchmen who landed to examine the wreckage.
If you’re wondering what Casey being able to turn invisible with the press of a button on his wristwatch has to do with any of this, the answer is not very much. Mostly it’s helpful for some fistfights and to prevent the guys with guns shooting him as he approaches. Not nothing, but it would have been very easy to work the plot to accomplish this without being invisible.
The second half of the movie is made up on a condensed version of the tenth episode of the series, where Casey runs into Buffalo Bill during an assignment. It turns out that Buffalo Bill has given up truck driving to try to live out his dream of being a racecar mechanic, and the arch villain of the series owns a race car which he personally works on and Bill just happens to have been hired by him. Bill’s girlfriend, “cupcake,” is a secret agent for the archvillain who was assigned to seduce the mechanic, for some reason never explained, and, well, let’s just say that with Casey’s help INTERSECT manages to capture the arch-villain and Buffalo Bill gets the singing career in a truck stop he’s always wanted. (It turns out that Buffalo Bill was played by a real-life country singer.)
I don’t know that I’ve done justice to how disjoint the two sections of the movie feel, or to how easily you could edit out all of the scenes of invisibility while losing very little. Not nothing, but very little.
Also, much of the first half of the movie is CB radio dialog because Casey (who goes by “Easy Rider”) and Buffalo Bill. I found this weird until I looked it up and found out that the hit novelty song Convoy was big on the charts in 1975.
While the TV series ran in 1976, the movie was edited together and released in 1981, by the way, so I suspect it would have felt a bit dated. And speaking of dates, it was set in the not-too-distant future, specifically 1983. I wonder if that was to make the “DNA stabilizer” seem very slightly more plausible.
Also, it’s incredibly jarring that Casey just happens to run into Buffalo Bill who’s made a career change right after Casey’s vacation. In the original filming, this would have felt so much more natural with eight other episodes coming in between. It’s also very strange to get a long-running arch-villain introduced two thirds of the way through a movie.
TV movies were sometimes quite good; I can only wonder what it would have been like in 1981 to have seen the absurdity that was Riding With Death. It made for a pretty good MST3K episode, though.
Chris Lansdown 
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