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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First is Nancy Earl, who goes by Nan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jessica watches her go with a look of perplexity.

And we go to commercial break.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The figure walks up and we see who it is.

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

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

Jessica replies, “You know I was.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we go to credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the twelfth day of January in the year of our Lord 1986, the Murder, She Wrote episode Trial By Error aired. It was the thirteenth episode of the second season. (I’m reviewing this one out of order because I just served on a jury, though in a civil trial, not a criminal trial, so I thought it would be fun to review this episode while the memory is still quite fresh.)

The show opens at the scene of an accident. A red sports car has slammed into a telephone pole. The driver is out, not very injured, and seems to have sustained only minor injuries. The passenger is his wife and is in very bad condition. There’s a tense moment as the rescuers use the jaws of life to remove the door so that they can get her out. When they get the door off, she’s alive but very injured.

She doesn’t seem able to move. They put her on a gurney and move her towards the ambulance. As they do, the distraught husband asks repeatedly if she’s going to die while no one answers him.

Laying on the gurney, she sobs to her husband, “I don’t understand.” He replies, “it was the kid on the bike. I swerved to avoid him.”

The scene then shifts to the hospital while some guy in green scrubs (possibly a doctor) talks to the distraught husband. He says that, according to the EMTs, he fractured his collarbone. The husband says that he’s fine. The doctor then asks the husband if he wants to be with his wife and he says no.

“I can’t look at her, knowing that I’m the one who…”

The doctor says that he understands. He then relays that if the guy’s wife wakes up, it won’t be for several hours. She does have a good chance of pulling through, but it’s also likely that she’ll never walk again due to severe spinal damage.

The husband, whose name turns out to be Mark Reynolds, exclaims, “Oh, my God!” and runs away.

We next see the husband in a bar. He takes a seat next to a woman in red, who is concerned for him.

She has absolutely enormous shoulder pads, since this is the mid 80s. As they’re talking to each other about the accident, a weird creepy guy comes into the bar and looks intently at them.

A few moments later, when a waiter comes up and asks for his order, he asks, “Who’s that talking to Becky Anderson?”

Several hours later Becky notices the time and says she has to go. She offers to give him a lift to the hospital but he says that he can’t face his wife until the morning. She then offers to make him a cup of coffee, and at first he refuses, but then he accepts and the two leave together.

The creepy guy comes and sits down where they were and we learn from the bartender that his name is Mr. Detweiler. He says that this looks like a sympathy jump in the making and the bartender disagrees. Detweiler asks for another beer then goes and makes a phone call.

The call is for the man in blue, whose name is Cliff. It turns out that Becky is his estranged wife on a trial separation and he’s very incensed when Detweiler tells him that she just picked up some guy at the bar and they’re going back to her place. As he leaves the apartment he announces that he’s going to “kill that broad.”

The scene fades to an establishing shot of a courthouse, then we go to the interior where a judge is charging a jury. Apparently, Reynolds is charged with the murder of Cliff Reynolds, while his defense is that he killed Reynolds in self defense. It’s a TV charging of the jury, containing information that the audience needs but making no reference to the law that the jury must consider, nor any instructions on how to consider testimony, etc.

As the judge is speaking, the camera slowly pans over the jury. Then we find out why.

Somehow Jessica is already the foreman of the jury, despite deliberations not having started yet. (That’s not impossible, since the jury could have decided on who their foreman was at any time when they were together outside of the courtroom, but I don’t see how the judge would have known that since judges are careful to not talk to the jury about the case except inside the courtroom and on the record.) The judge then sends them out to deliberations.

There is some initial discussion, wherein several people firmly express the opinion that it’s an open-and-shut case and they’ll be done with their deliberations very soon. Jessica then takes charge of the discussion since she’s the foreman—which, as far as I can tell, is just a TV thing. Perhaps it’s different on criminal juries, but our instructions were that the foreman’s only role was to write any questions we had for the judge (they had to be submitted in writing) and to read the verdict. Turning the foreman into an authority figure makes the scene more tense, or at least makes it easier for Jessica to take charge, but this seems to be purely a dramatic thing.

One of the jurors suggests that everyone is in agreement so they should just take a vote immediately. Jessica replies, “Don’t you think that we should examine the evidence first?”

This makes a ton of sense from the perspective of a TV show which skipped to the jury room and needs to tell the story in flashbacks. In real life it would be very reasonable for any of the jurors to reply that they already examined the evidence during the trial, as it was being presented. Important evidence does not go by in a flash during a trial. Trials are slow and methodical even when there is no repetition. If the lawyers involved are even slightly competent, any important evidence will be repeated and there’s plenty of time to examine the evidence presented during the trial itself, plus plenty of time to think about it after one goes home for the day. I found it hard to think about anything else when I went home, and that was just a civil trial over breech of contract.

That’s not to say that deliberation is pointless. On the contrary, thinking things through with other people can be highly profitable. My issue, here, is that Jessica says what she did as if no one at the table knows what the evidence is. That’s absurd. There were more realistic ways to try to get the flashbacks started.

Anyway, another juror declares that the evidence shows that Mark is innocent, and this begins some general discussion. One juror declares that the only thing that Reynolds is guilty of is picking the wrong time to go bed with another man’s wife. At this point another juror objects that this is putting too little weight on the fact that Mark was in bed with another man’s wife—and killed that man when he walked in.

They end this commotion by taking a vote. They do this anonymously, with folded pieces of paper. I’m not sure why they do this; presumably because it’s more dramatic. In real life, since the next step is for people to try to persuade each other of their point of view, it’s very helpful to know who you’re talking to and of whom you’re asking questions. It is the duty of a jury to try to reach a verdict so it’s not like staying out of the fray is a responsible option. And once you start arguing for a conclusion, everyone will know how you voted anyway.

The vote is nine in favor of not-guilty, two in favor of guilty, and one undecided.

Jessica suggests that they start reviewing the evidence now that they know where they stand. Finally, the flashbacks can begin.

They start with a flashback to some testimony about how Mark Reynolds felt and why he went to the bar. He felt guilty and wanted to die and went to the bar to get drunk and drown out reality. On cross-examination, the DA asks him why he went to that particular bar, since there were six closer to the hospital. He asks if it was to meet Becky Anderson.

Several jurors discount this for some reason which is not clear to me, then they move on to recalling Mark’s later testimony. He and Becky went back to Becky’s place, then as they were naked in bed together they heard a noise. Mark got up and put his pants on, then Becky’s husband barged through the door holding a gun. Mark fought him for it.

They struggled into the next room and over to the fireplace. In the struggle the gun went off, then Mark picked up a poker from the fireplace and hit Cliff on the head with it, hard. Then Becky called the police and they came and picked Mark up. He used his phone call, not to call a lawyer, but to call the hospital, where they told him that his wife had died without regaining consciousness.

We come back from the flashback to some fighting among the jury. One of the jurors is utterly convinced that Mark Reynolds is guilty as sin and lying, though he only knows it by his gut. He says that they can stay there until Christmas if everyone wants, but he will never change his mind. (They go to commercial break on this statement.) I wish I could say that this part sounds like dramatic exaggeration but something similar happened on the jury on which I served. It didn’t have as much impact because the jury in a civil trial in Pennsylvania only requires ten jurors to agree in order to reach a verdict, but I can say from experience it is possible to have people who are convinced of a conclusion and will neither listen to persuasion nor attempt to persuade others, and their inability to even begin to try to convince others (possibly due to a lack of relevant social skills) can make them angry. I could easily see how the heightened tension of a murder trial could make them even more angry.

Anyway, after a bunch of angry shouting, Jessica talks them into reviewing more evidence.

They go to a flashback of Becky Anderson’s testimony. Becky says that not only was she separated from her late husband, but she had a restraining order against him. This is a bit remarkable since a restraining order generally requires evidence of physical danger to get. Further, the DA presses her on the reason for the divorce. She says that it was irreconcilable differences but the DA then asks if Cliff counter-sued for divorce on the grounds of infidelity. All of this is dramatic, but at the same time hard to square with Cliff having believed that they were only on a trial separation. I don’t see how one can counter-sue for divorce on the grounds of infidelity and expect that you’ll remain married and get back together in a few months. The existence of a restraining order is also hard to square with a “trial separation.” There’s then some pointless questioning about how many men she’s picked up from bars. The defense objects and the judge sustains it, admonishing the DA. The odd thing about this is that the only point which makes sense for the DA to make is that she never picks up men, making his theory that she and Mark already knew each other more likely. It’s played as if he was trying to paint her as a slut, but that’s the opposite of what he would want to do.

Back in the jury room they fight a bit more. Someone refers to Mark as rich and used to having his own way and another juror objects that it was the wife who was rich, not Mark. After some bickering and insults, they go to a flashback of the testimony of a Mr. Fenton Harris (played by Alan Hale Jr. who is probably best known for playing the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island).

Incidentally, while this part of my experience is not something to generalize from, while some jurors did express offense, none of us ever insulted any of the other jurors. The one juror who picked her words badly and gave offense made a point, after she realized it, of being more careful. This is only practical; in order to get out of deliberations and in order to get a verdict which one thinks is just, one needs to persuade the people to whom one is speaking. Open insults are too obviously a way to spend a long time then return no verdict, making the whole thing a colossal waste of time. It’s one thing to give up a lot of time and inconvenience one’s family and co-workers to help justice be done. It’s another thing to do it for no benefit to anyone. That said, after we decided on a verdict and were waiting around to return it some people compared this experience of jury duty to other times that they’d served and one told of a time she was on a criminal trial where some of the jurors were openly accusing other of the jurors of being racists. (They did not return a verdict and it was declared a mistrial.)

Mr. Fenton runs a motel called the Bide-A-Wee. It’s located about fifteen miles out of town, on Route 37. In his business it’s a good practice never to recognize the customers, but he does recognize Mark. He came to the hotel somewhere between four to six times. He thinks he saw Becky once with Mr. Reynolds, but she didn’t come into the office; she stayed outside in the car.

This generated a ton of talking in the courtroom and the judge had to bang his gavel, calling for order in the court. (I don’t know if the judge in our trial even had a gavel; he certainly never banged it nor did anyone lack the self control talk audibly about what a witness just said.)

The DA concluded by asking about the timing, which put it about three months before Mark Reynolds and Becky Anderson claim to have met for the first time.

We then come back to the jury room, where they discuss the fact that Mr. Fenton only thinks that he saw her but isn’t sure. I’m not sure why no one brings up how difficult it would be, from inside an office, to recognize someone sitting in a car. For one thing, this would require the office to have a clear view of where Mark parked. This would be entirely under Mark’s control (assuming he was driving), which would mean that Mark was unbelievably careless while trying to be discrete. Even apart from that, seeing someone you don’t know, inside a car, well enough to be able to recognize them months later, in a different context—that’s really hard to do even under favorable circumstances.

Anyway, they argue and bicker for a while.

Eventually Jessica points out that if Becky and Mark knew each other beforehand, that their pretending to meet at a bar where Becky was a regular and where many of Cliff’s friends were known to hang out meant that they meant to be seen and to attract Cliff’s attention.

They then flash back to the testimony of the guy Cliff was living with (they were fishing buddies). When questioned, he said that Cliff had no gun when he left to confront Becky.

Jessica says that this is puzzle piece number one: where did Cliff get the gun? It was midnight when he got the call. He couldn’t have bought it.

With the help of some flashbacks to the testimony of a ballistics expert as well as just general recall, Jessica establishes that the gun had the fingerprints of both Mark and Cliff on it but no other fingerprints, that a nitrate test showed that both men had held the gun when it was fired, that only one shot was fired, and that a matching bullet had been taken out of the wall.

After some more bickering and insults (which, frankly, are beginning to feel like an attempt to pad out the episode), they then proceed to consider the testimony of Becky Anderson’s neighbor.

When he came home Cliff’s car was in the way and he had to park in the street. He didn’t say anything because Cliff Anderson had a volatile temper; it was a good thing that Mark Reynolds grabbed that poker because if he hadn’t, when he looked through the window a few hours later it would have been Mark’s body taken out on a stretcher, not Cliff’s.

No one remarks on the several hours between when the guy tried to park and when he was looking through the window and seeing Cliff’s body being removed. Instead, we just get some remarks on how reliable it was to get Cliff to show up angry, then a flashback of the DA’s closing argument where he gives his theory of what happened. The two were not in bed, they were waiting for Cliff. Cliff came in, then as he went to talk to his wife, Mark killed him in cold blood. Mark had the gun, not Cliff, and used it after Cliff was dead to create a claim of self defense.

We come back to the jury room and as people are starting to agree that it was murder, Jessica says that the one thing that she’s willing to believe is that Cliff did bring the gun himself. She reminds them about the testimony of a traffic officer from a year ago who stopped Cliff and confiscated a gun in his glove box. Jessica says that a man like Cliff would almost certainly have gotten another gun soon after. Jessica doesn’t explain why she’s only just thought of that now when she listed it as a puzzle piece only a few minutes before.

After some more bickering and insults, which have crossed the point of being tiresome, Jessica points out that they’ve been overlooking something. According to the paramedics, Mark had broken his collarbone in the accident. How, then, was he able to successfully struggle with Cliff for the gun? The paramedics testified that his left arm was practically useless, yet the powder traces were on his left hand.

They then go back to a bunch of angry bickering.

Then Jessica says that one of the people made a good point, that it seems a bit ludicrous that these two people with Mark’s wife lying critically ill in a hospital bed chose this particular night to lure Becky’s husband to his death.

They then go back to a bunch of angry bickering.

Jessica then says that there is a third possibility between Mark murdering Cliff and Mark killing him in self defense, which none of them have yet considered. Instead of stating it, she brings up the time discrepancy between Mark and Becky’s timeline and what the neighbor said. She then says that this leads to only one inescapable conclusion, and only one possible verdict.

We then go to the court, where the jury returns the verdict of Not Guilty.

They get the basic procedural stuff wrong, I think just because they want to skip it for the sake of brevity.

Jessica then approaches the DA, who says that he guesses he might as well not bother going after Becky Anderson. Jessica says that it’s more important now than ever and asks if they can meet in his office in thirty minutes. She then asks him to have Becky and her lawyer present. He asks what this is about and Jessica explains off-camera.

The next scene is thirty minutes later, in the DA’s office. Jessica is late for some reason which is never explained and doesn’t add anything. They might really have wanted to pad this episode out, which is the opposite of most episodes of Murder, She Wrote where they don’t have the time to fit everything in.

The DA’s office has a curious layout, with his desk in an anteroom to the conference table (I think that this is just a standard Murder, She Wrote set that they repurposed to be the DA’s office). Anyway, over a fairly protracted discussion with a lot of interruptions by Becky and her lawyer, Jessica explains what really happened. For brevity I’m going to present it together with bits that Becky added toward the end:

Mark and Becky were lovers but Mark’s wife of less than a year had all the money. Mark wanted both, so he tried to murder his wife, who never wore a seatbelt, by slamming their car into a telephone pole, passenger-side first.  This is what she meant by asking him “Why?”—she was asking him why he tried to kill her. Later, at the hospital, when he heard that she might regain consciousness (and incriminate him), he panicked and called the one person whose help he could rely on—Becky. They arranged to meet at the bar then for her to take him home so she—a supposed stranger—could give him an alibi for when he had to go back to the hospital and finish his wife off.

Unfortunately for them, Cliff found out and came to Becky’s apartment demanding to know where the man was. When he finally believed that no one was there, he demanded to know who the man was. Cliff became abusive and threatened to find the man and kill him, and then to kill her. As part of this, he threw Becky to the ground she picked up the poker and struck him in self defense. Half an hour later Mark came back from finishing his wife off in the hospital by smothering her with a pillow. He told Becky that, in his wife’s weakened condition, she died almost instantly. Their problem now was that they couldn’t let anyone know that Cliff had found Becky alone so they came up with the idea that Mark had been the one to kill Cliff in self defense. In fact, this was an even stronger alibi than just spending time with her.

Becky admits everything and takes a plea deal from the DA because he really wants Mark.

After this, in some building which I assume is meant to be the same building as both the courthouse and where the DA’s office is, Mark runs into Jessica and thanks her for her verdict. She says that there’s no need—the satisfaction is knowing that the right thing has been done. Mark then says that he’ll always remember her. Jessica replies, “Oh yes, I’m quite sure you will.”

He makes it about ten steps towards the exit when two police officers arrest him. He looks over his shoulder at Jessica.

She looks at him.

Then she turns and begins to walk away and we go to credits.

This was an interesting episode, and not just because I got the chance to compare it with my recent service on a jury. As Murder, She Wrote goes, it’s more of a pure puzzle than many of the episodes are. As a puzzle, it’s well constructed. The story is set up in such a way that we’re operating within a framing that the murderer chose, though with some additional clues that came about despite the murderer’s efforts. Within the framing the murderer provided, the story together with the facts the murderer tried to exclude don’t really make sense. That’s an excellent setup for a murder mystery.

My biggest complaint about this episode is the incessant bickering. It got so bad that they even gave one of the characters the role of the audience in telling one of the worst offenders to shut up. To some degree this is an artifact of the medium; television needed to be maximally compelling at all times out of the constant fear that viewers would change the channel. One way writers tried to cope with this was to create as much conflict as possible, since conflict tends to demand the attention of people who see it and makes us want to see if it’s resolved. It’s a cheap trick and hurt the episode, but the temptation to it was, perhaps, understandable. It’s a good lesson, I think, in how the accidents that can give rise to good things can also impose limitations on them.

A much smaller complaint is that the episode didn’t entirely take its premise of being about jury room deliberations seriously. This is always forgivable in little things for practical reasons, such as the judge’s instructions being for the audience, not the jury. A skilled writer could have done a better job making it for both, but forgiveness is a highly practical virtue in a fallen world, and this is a very minor thing, more or less on the level of how characters don’t need to use the bathroom on television. Less minor is that the jury tended to act like they hadn’t heard a piece evidence until a flashback of it happened. This was practical, but false to how juries actually work. Unless jurors are shirking their duty, they are actively listening to testimony and trying to fit it in and make sense of it as they hear it. This is part of why each side in the case has an opening statement—in their opening statement they explain the framing of the evidence that they propose so that jurors can do this kind of analysis. The jurors in this case, except for Jessica, had conclusions, but no independent thoughts.

Well, that’s not quite true. A Mr Lord made the point that picking the night of Mark’s car accident which killed his wife to lure Cliff Anderson to his death would have been a crazy plan. He didn’t explain, but he was right that it was too filled with contingencies that had to happen correctly for Cliff Anderson to die at all, and if they didn’t work out, the couple would have then been in a terrible position to try to kill Cliff again.

Other than that, I can’t think of an example of a juror having an independent thought from Jessica. Which is a pity, because Jessica navigating actual thoughts instead of meaningless ranting and insults would have been more interesting.

All that said, the presentation of the case was quite interesting. We get about six minutes of the case as it happens, which throws a lot at us, then we move to a retrospective examination in the jury/court room. This change of perspective is, on its own, an interesting setup. There’s less to keep track of and it presents itself as more of a challenge to try to remember it. The flashbacks which follow, and present further evidence, are also very clearly delineated as evidence being presented. In a normal Murder, She Wrote episode, while clues are given, they are disguised as being part of the action which is there to move the plot forward (while red herrings tend to be held out as obvious evidence). In a normal episode it’s easy to sit back and watch the action, as it were. Here, our attention is focused.

I also like how the episode misdirects us on the question of who the principle murderer is and who the accomplice is. With the initial setup, if Mark and Becky had actually planned to kill Becky’s husband, she would be the murderer and Mark the accomplice. The reversal to Mark being the principal murderer and Becky the accomplice, and for a different death, was an extremely well-done bit of misdirection.

I’m not sure whether a jury-room setting could be made to work for a novel. As I’ve mentioned, TV is really, structurally, a short story. I think a jury-room short story would be very doable. It would be difficult to actually get a detective on to a jury for a murder trial—previous experience that might bias you is a for-cause strike and both sides have an unlimited number of for-cause strikes. Still, it could be fun. I think that the main thing to take from this episode in terms of story construction—since very few people are writing short stories these days—is the interesting structure of the framing provided by the murderer vs. the correct framing, especially with regard to a putative victim and a real victim and a putative principal murder vs. the real principal murderer.

Just as a side note, I found it amusing that two of the witnesses had Maine accents (Mr. Fenton and the next-door neighbor) while the rest had standard Californian accents. That’s typical of Murder, She Wrote episodes set near Cabot Cove. So few people try for Maine accents that it sounds a bit weird when someone actually does one. It makes me wonder how the few guest actors who did Maine accents ended up doing them.

Oh, one final thought on the episode: a big part of the mystery and twists and turns of the case was done by how the episode directed our attention throughout.  We saw Mark when his shoulder was injured but then we saw him months later, healed up, before we saw the flashback in which we saw the actor (with a perfectly good shoulder) wrestling for the gun. This made it a lot easier to forget this crucial piece of evidence and for it to be a revelation when Jessica reminds us of it. It’s a good lesson in the importance of being careful to direct the audience’s attention away from the important things so they will feel fooled when the detective reveals the solution.

A second final thought on the episode: while most episodes feel rushed, this episode actually took its time, which I think also helped. It took its time so much it may have run into the opposite problem of a normal episode, and actually included things for padding. Towards the end the bickering felt really pointless. That said, the bickering was annoying but not too hard to ignore, and I really appreciated the less rushed pace. It could have been used better, but it gave characters more time for characterization, making the episode feel a bit richer, I think.