Howdy, folks. I haven’t been reviewing MSW for a month, I think, due to life and adult stuff. Yippee. Welcome back to me?
So this episode, “Seal of the Confessional” (season 6, episode 2 of “Murder, She Wrote”) comes with a spoiler warning for this review, and also a possible trigger warning for some people. There is reference (although nothing is shown, thankfully) to a stepfather trying to sexually abuse his teenage stepdaughter, and a flashback does show him trying to attack her, although she manages to stab him and escape. The episode just made me feel all sorts of icky. I’m going to try to do a bit of play-by-play reviewing this time, as I actually don’t have plot holes or other issues to pick at. My main issue is the camera work and some of the actors, as I’ll cover at the end. So this post will be longer than my other reviews so far.
The episode opens with people at the Maine beach, such as Jessica Fletcher, fellow jogging enthusiast and teacher Donald Barnes, and mentally handicapped Eddie Frayne. After a conversation, JB and Donald agree to meet for breakfast in the morning and discuss teaching and books. That evening, someone is lurking about the church in town, but this figure in a black cloak is better suited for lurking about the Shire and Bree, rather than the hamlet of Cabot Cove. (Yes, that is a Lord of the Rings reference.) The cloak wearer comes into the church for confession, and the young Farah Fawcett lookalike is surprised to find that FATHER Donald Barnes (yes, the guy JB met earlier) is filling in while Father Molloy is on vacation. She dramatically puts a blood-stained hand to her chest (with a dramatic camera zoom-in) and asks to confess. In the confessional booth, she admits to killing a man in self-defense, and that “I swear I didn’t mean to kill him, but I’m not sorry I did it. He was evil. He deserved to die.” She cannot go to the police, although Father Barnes asks her to, because someone would not be able to withstand the revelation. She immediately regrets having come and runs out.
The next morning, JB meets Sheriff Metzger, who asks Father Barnes a very important religious question about bingo. (Metzger goes like full Comedy Central in this episode, but to me, it doesn’t jive well in this dark episode.) Father Barnes is on edge, as he doesn’t know what to do about the young woman’s murder confession. He manages to convey to Jessica that since the Catholic Church abides by the seal of the confessional (meaning that whatever is said in the confessional booth stays in the confessional booth), he cannot go to the police and tell them anything. And since he doesn’t know who the woman was, he can’t try to persuade her to go to the police. JB intuits that he’s talking about someone confessing to murder (seriously, does she have ESP or has she simply lived in Cabot Cove long enough to know that another murder has to have happened?), and that he wants her help, but cannot say anything. He says that they don’t teach things like this in seminary, which makes me wonder why not, because this seems like it would come up occasionally.
Next scene takes place on the beach again, where a dead body is found. Metzger is still surprised at the communications system in the small town, as JB is there without being summoned, having heard passersby hollering at each other. Father Barnes comes to perform last rites, as the dead man, Evan West, was relapsed, but his wife Doris is a devout Catholic. Seth Hazlitt, MD, is also there, and when asked what the cause of death was, says it was likely the massive stab wound in his chest. Seems clear-cut to me. Seth knows that the new guy is Father Barnes, simply because he’s the new face in town.
Metzger is admittedly quick to jump to conclusions, but I appreciate seeing the rough New York cop trying to be sensitive and talking gently to the new widow, Doris Evans, who is totally broken up over her husband’s death. She is in a wheelchair, which is an important plot point. We see her daughter, Kelly, come in, who we as viewers recognize as Father Barnes’ late night confessor. Seeing how much Doris is grieving, and how much she had loved Evan, we get a sense of why Kelly had felt she couldn’t go to the police about killing Evan. So now we begin to get into darker waters in this episode.
Eddie Frayne, the mentally handicapped man, shows his new knife to a guy he knows. The guy recognizes it as belonging to Evan West, the latest murder victim, because this guy had given Evan the knife a while back. Eddie insists that it’s Eddie’s knife, because he found it and cleaned it up. And then I went into full rage mode, because this man proceeds to grab Eddie like he’s fighting for his life, and declare that Eddie must be the murderer. This was not only unnecessary, but… OOOOOOhhhhhh. Eddie is mentally handicapped, you piece of week-old trash, and you know this. You could have asked him to talk to the police, but you treat him immediately like he’s a dangerous criminal! And that’s on top of treating him like a total nuisance when he came to see if he could help you with your catch. And please pardon me as I go off into a rant, but very few people in this episode treat Eddie like an actual human being. They refer to him as “the little guy” or “the little fellow”, like he doesn’t even have a name or real existence instead of calling him “him” or “Eddie.” My younger sister is also mentally handicapped, and yes, sometimes she’s annoying, but SO IS EVERY OTHER FRICKIN’ PERSON I’VE EVER MET. Just because your brain doesn’t work the same as the majority of the population doesn’t make you less human. JB, Kelly and Father Barnes are the only people in this episode who treat Eddie like he’s an actual human with emotions, and it grates so severely on my nerves. *hhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa* *deep breath in as I step down off of my soapbox*
Anyhoo, Eddie also somehow knows that Evan West wasn’t the good guy he pretended to be. JB decides to go to the West household, which requires her riding her bike while in a tight skirt and dress jacket, so mad props to her. Marilyn the registered nurseis cleaning the extra wheelchair in an effort to keep busy, which draws a suspicious camera zoom-in and Kelly fussing ostentatiously over. JB and Doris engage in some comforting widow talk, which seems not necessarily necessary, as this is the second time Doris has been widowed (the first was Kelly’s dad Tom), and JB talks like it hasn’t happened. Then the scriptwriters get very conniving, as Father Barnes is coming in, Kelly can’t escape through the sliding glass door because it’s stuck again and Doris hasn’t called anyone to fix it yet, and JB happens to be there. It may sound better in my paraphrase, but it’s very obviously contrived in the episode. JB pursues Kelly outside, where Kelly learns that Eddie has been arrested for Evan’s murder, and the evidence seems pretty damning. She is distraught, but firm in her refusal to confess.
JB goes to talk to family friend Jack, who had left as JB arrived at the Wests, and they reminisce over how he had once been very close to Doris, but she chose to marry the “cooler” Tom; we also learn here that Kelly had abruptly left sophomore year to attend school in Vermont, to which Jack claims he doesn’t know why. We get some more much-needed Seth time, as he is having breakfast with JB, as he delivers the news that Evan had drowned. In spite of being stabbed, and receiving blunt force trauma to the head, Evan’s cause of death was drowning. While Seth finally gets a chance to eat his now cold eggs and toast, JB fills him in on the seal of the confessional, or as much as she is able to. Seth appreciates her predicament, saying it’s similar to the doctor-patient confidentiality, except that the Church answers “to a higher authority than the state medical board.”
JB goes to the police station to deliver comic books to Eddie, and learns that George Woodward, the West’s attorney, has been asked to defend Eddie. JB pretty quickly figures out that Kelly had asked Doris who had asked George to do this, but now we learn that Marilyn the housekeeper had witnessed Eddie prowling about the docks the night of Evan’s murder. She says she heard arguing, which for Metzger and George means further proof that Eddie is the killer. JB and George then walk downtown and talk, and George remembers a time he and Evan had been out drinking and Evan had said that he “had married the wrong Barrett.” George is pretty sure that Evan was drunk then, because Kelly had only been 16 and it was “just sick to think about.” JB then learns that Evan was broke and sponging off of Doris.
Back at the West house, JB arrives to see that Jack is giving Kelly an alibi, so supposedly there’s no way she could have killed Evan. Marilyn lives out back, on the cliffs overlooking the beach, and affirms that she saw Eddie by the docks, and that since Kelly has come back and taken over, she isn’t really needed as a nurse anymore there. JB then goes out to the docks and to the West family boat; through the magic of TV, the empty dock in one shot has a boat at the end in the next shot. JB finds a large dried smudge of blood on the wall by the coat hooks, and with yet another dramatic zoom-in, Jack comes and finds her on the boat. When he escorts her away, JB finally gets a nearby Kelly to tell what had happened the night of the murder. She had gone to the boat, which originally belonged to her father before Doris gave it to Evan, and Evan had caught her. He ran out to the docks after her, and she fought him away, grabbed his knife from a nearby tackle box, and he came after her again and impaled himself on the knife. After he toppled off the dock into the water, Kelly ran away and had unthinkingly dropped the knife on the beach. Jack may or may not have known about Evan’s attempted molestations before Kelly had gone to Vermont, but he knows now, and wanted to protect Kelly by giving her an alibi.
JB convinces Kelly to talk to Metzger, and then explains to both of them that Kelly wasn’t the murderer. Based on Kelly’s description of the fight and Seth’s explanation of Evan’s wounds, JB realized that Kelly had only stabbed, not killed, Evan in self-defense. Kelly had scraped Evan’s arms in her fight, which meant he hadn’t been wearing his bright red windbreaker during their fight, but he had been wearing it when his body was discovered. Metzger admits that since the windbreaker was only partially zipped up and the stab wound was above the zipper, he had assumed that Evan had been wearing it when someone went all Stabby McStabberton on him. JB points out the blood smudge she found on the boat, then surmises that Evan had not died when stabbed, but had pulled himself back on the boat and put on his windbreaker since it was cold, and went to get help for his stab wound. They reason that he wouldn’t have gone to Seth or the hospital, because it would have raised too many questions. And then they realize that the boat was very close to the house, where help was.
We next see Marilyn the registered nurse hurrying into a cab taking her away from the West home, but Metzger, his deputy, and JB arrive just in time to block the driveway. Marilyn denies everything at first, but FOR ONCE, MSW has concrete evidence in the form of blood specks in the wheelchair she had been cleaning. Marilyn breaks down and admits it, as per MSW norm. Evan had come to her for help after getting stabbed, and while she was trying to stop the bleeding, he had moaned about Kelly stabbing him and how she was probably going to tell her mother. Marilyn then scolded him for again going after Kelly (RAGE), and he said that she was no longer a kid (MORE RAGE), and said that maybe it was the end of the road for him. Marilyn agreed, then offed him with a fireplace poker to the head. She used the extra wheelchair to take his body out to the cliff and dump him over, then cleaned up as best she could. When she learned that Eddie had been accused of the murder, she said she had seen him because she thought that “Kelly had been through enough.” She admits that Evan and she had once had a good thing going, but that night, she suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of him ever touching her again.
The episode ends with a nice palate cleanser to Eddie and Father Barnes playing beach-side football with some town kids. Seth and JB agree that it’s wonderful to see Eddie laughing again, and Seth imparts some town gossip that Father Barnes may be taking over for Father Molloy more permanently and teaching in town. When JB expresses surprise at Seth’s knowledge of local gossip, he smugly tells her that if she would get her hair done more often at the hair parlor, she might know some of these things too.
So I think I’ve mainly covered the relevant points and tangented enough, so for scores:
Plot: 9/10. There were a few tiny holes, and I would have like to see how Doris took the news and how Kelly managed to move forward. But for the most part, there wasn’t a lot of red herring misdirects, and there was solid evidence to lead to the conclusion, but the normal “killer makes a small mistake when talking to Jessica.” It all sits together nicely as a mystery, and moral dilemma.
Guest Stars: 7/10. The actors mostly did well. Father Barnes’ moral agonizing was clear to see, Eddie was likeable without being pathetic, and George’s apathy was clear. But the actors for Kelly, Doris and Evan, the main weight-bearing actors, felt like they were playing more of a soap opera overblown style, instead of a more somber tone that would have carried the subject matter better.
General Enjoyability: Ehhhhh…. 8/10. As I mentioned before, this episode made me feel all sorts of icky, but it tackled the subject matter with a fair amount of respect. I felt the score was lowered by the aforementioned “dramatic camera zoom-ins” and overblown acting of some of the main actors.
Solveability: I think this would rate a 8/10. The red windbreaker is such a great clue that is visible and noticeable, and that provides the impetus to think further than just Kelly as the murderer. If they had focused a little more on the fact that Marilyn was a registered nurse, and not a housekeeper, I think it would have been easier to solve. As it is, there’s barely a breath between talking about Evan looking for help and Marilyn heading to the cab to show the audience who the killer is. With a bit of finangling, it would have been better.
So that is the long-awaited MSW review. I make no promise about what’s going to be posted next week. I’ve learned better. So for now, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
Random English Major Thoughts 