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.

Next week we’re back in Cabot Cove for Hit, Run, and Homicide.