Howdy, y’all. Welcome back to another overexplained review of “Murder, She Wrote,” this time season 6, episode 3, “The Grand Old Lady.” This is another bookend episode, where we unfortunately see Jessica Fletcher only at the beginning and the end of the episode. And apparently, this is one that people dislike, as the plot is confusing and blah, blah. I’mma just review it according to what I think. I’m not gonna go beat-by-beat reviewing, like I did for the last episode, as I have much more to nitpick about the episode. Anyhoo…
This story is supposedly told by JB of the legendary mystery writer, Lady Abigail Austin, who had once been involved in a real-life mystery. It took place “A couple years after the war ended,” which to be fair, it was never mentioned by JB which war ended. By 1989, when the episode had aired, the USA had been involved in the Korean War and the Vietnam War; so we’re left to gather clues from the episode that it was just after World War II, which ended in 1945, so this might have taken place in 1947 or thereabouts. It’s fairly obvious to anyone who knows about clothing (or like in my case, knows about clothing simply from having watched a lot of movies 🙂 ) that it takes place in the 1940s. Speaking of clothing, I adore Lady Austin’s green embroidered robe and her earrings that she wears during most of the episode. You can see the robe in the picture above, but not really the earrings without squinting. I am all about the cool clothes made between 1900 and 2000.
To try to summarize the episode is almost like herding cats. Lady Austin and a radio show magnate, Mr. Chancellor, are on a huge ship, the Queen Mary that is almost arriving in New York. A guy named Peter Daniken, a Dutch wine merchant, is stabbed and collapses by Lady Austin and Chancellor. A newspaper crossword puzzle maker, Christopher McGinn, manages to get assigned to write about this case, because his father, Detective McGinn, is assigned the case while the ship is quarantined for the investigation. Chancellor is a major egomaniac who tries to solve the case while eavesdropping like a semi-pro, but because he is a giant jerk, eventually embarrasses himself. Lady Austin convinces young McGinn to assist her, because she is a mystery writer and he is a super smart detective, although unofficially because he can’t join the police because he has been classified as 4F (probably due to his glasses). Due to plot points with a telegram, a counterfeit $5 bill plate, chess games, and a lot of suspects, we find that the victim Daniken is actually an ex-Gestapo officer named Kreitzman, who was smuggling said counterfeit $5 plate into the States. After red herrings and side plots, young McGinn solves the case.
Okay, so let me tackle these two side plots one at a time. The first one concerns Army nurse on furlough, Eleanor Cantrell (Joan McMurtrey), and eyepatch-ed Army Major Daniel McGuire (Gordon Thomson). We find out most of the way through the episode that Daniel had been in hospital in Europe, apparently recovering from injuries during the war, and Eleanor was his nurse. They fell in love, even though Daniel was married, but Daniel was sent home, and Eleanor followed even though she couldn’t really afford the trip. Chancellor (Robert Vaughn) suspects them, as he had seen them arguing over a filled envelope, and thought that the plate was in it. The envelope had actually been full of $600, because Daniel felt responsible for Eleanor taking the trip, and tried to repay her for the ticket. There’s more to Chancellor’s theory, but it’s a moot point, because they’re proven innocent. As red herrings, they’re not really great, because it’s obvious that they’re in love with each other and not guilty. As story elements, they’re not too bad, in my opinion. Because the episode is written as a sort of reminiscing over how WWII affected people, we see the whole “forbidden love with a married man” scenario told through somewhat sympathetic people. Eleanor is polite to Lady Austin (June Havoc)’s questioning, instead of getting upset like most people might be, and Daniel leaps overboard to try to apprehend a fleeing suspect (and that was a long leap overboard, with the height of the ship!). And we wind up with a happy ending for them, as we find that Daniel’s wife had left him for a lumberjack, so they’re free to be together. So they add to the flavor of post-WWII, in a sense.
The second side plot, so to speak, concerns Henri and Paul Viscard (Dane Clark and Mark Lindsay Chapman). Henri is in a wheelchair, and his son, Paul, had decided last minute to accompany his father on the trip because his father wasn’t feeling good. They really are suspects only because Paul boarded after Daniken/Kreitzman (Wolf Muser), leading to the idea that he was following D/K. As plot points, I think they are really great. Young McGinn (Gary Kroeger) questions them a second time, and their story lends so much to the main plot of this episode. These guys are basically victims of the war. Henri says that he was crippled, his other son was killed by the Nazis, and Paul was forced to become a killer before he had ever had a chance to fall in love. Henri was nervous around the police mostly because he was hiding morphine (an illegal contraband) in his wheelchair to help with his chronic pain, and because he had lied about being a wealthy banker going to visit his daughter who had married a GI, when he really was almost broke and just wanted to go to America to live out the last little bit of his life in peace. And although this conversation with them may seem to be just wrapping up the red herring plot, it actually provides a lot for the actual solution. Paul had recognized Daniken/Kreitzman, and knew that he was responsible for the death of Henri’s other son, so that was why he had actually boarded at the last minute. And since Henri said that Paul knew how to kill, and so that lends to the fact that Paul killed the ex-Nazi.
So… now that I’ve tackled the side plots(ish), let’s focus on the main thing. As a murder mystery, this episode isn’t the best. There are too many detectives lurking about for anyone to really feel an attachment to. We see Christopher McGinn as a young man who apparently has JB Fletcher-level of sleuthing. We see Lady Austin as an older lady writer who apparently has JB Fletcher-level of imagination. But the problem is that they don’t necessarily work together as detectives. Setting aside Chancellor as the conniving detective trying to steal credit, and Detective McGinn as the exposition revealer, McGinn and Lady Austin are supposed to be the main detectives. And yet… I think that they would have worked so much better as the detective in their own separate episodes. Lady Austin admires McGinn’s previous work in detecting and his crossword puzzles, and that’s why she wants to work with him. He didn’t really want to work with her in the first place, but humors her by listening to her ideas and letting her bounce ideas off of her. And this is what irritates me. She figures out a solution to the crime that is difficult to prove, as she thinks Bishop is the murderer, and he died after trying to jump overboard and swim to shore. McGinn knows that her solution is wrong, but doesn’t tell her when she’s presenting her idea to the police, because he “doesn’t want to hurt her feelings.” Granted, it wouldn’t be nice to say this in front of all these people, but he’s like, “Let’s pander this old lady by letting her believe that her solution is right, instead of respecting her enough by telling her the truth.” And MSW rarely ever does this pandering to the elderly person. JB is supposedly a little elderly, although she probably is only supposed to be in her 50s? And with the other people around her age or later in the episodes up until now, they have shown respect to these characters in almost every instance I can think of. McGinn not telling Lady Austin the truth seems to smack MSW tradition in the face by doing this. Granted, Lady Austin is no JB Fletcher, as she is more theatrical and less down-to-earth. Their personalities are very different, but it still rankles me. And then the whole instance of Lady Austin looking up at Christopher after he agrees with her solution and saying, “You made this old woman feel young again”? I don’t think these characters actually spent enough time together to make this feel earned, plus this line is cliche as all get out.
That all being ranted, the hiding place of the counterfeit $5 plate is actually pretty good, if a little unbelievable for such a hurried hiding place. But then, since Kreitzman was an ex-Nazi, maybe this was something he was used to? I dunno.
Some last notes from my notebook:
I like that Lady Austin turns down Chancellor’s offer to write for his radio show by saying “I know nothing about… radio.” The pause and the look on her face implies that she’s dissing his show without being open about it.
After guy dead, Chancellor- “Who is he, Captain?” “Not who is he, but who was he. He’s dead.” *side eye* Really, Captain? It’s a little early for the bad jokes. He literally just died.
McGinn hears that Lady Abigail Austin is there. !!! Bugs out of the meeting he just barged into. Huge fan.
Lady Austin is my brain on too much coffee when she gets going. How in the world is she an honorary constable with Scotland Yard???
This ship’s Captain apparently has forgotten all about the “Loose lips sink ships” slogan. I agree that Chancellor is insufferable, but still.
The barman has a better British accent than all the other “Brits” combined. He has like 3 lines!
Chancellor unveils his solution to the crime like he is narrating a radio play. Nice characterization.
The garden JB is narrating from is absolutely gorgeous. But I refuse to believe that it’s her garden in Cabot Cove. If it is, this show has been cheating us.
Final Scores:
Plot: 7/10. Not bad when you consider how the plot all ties together with the murder and the smuggling. But it’s not the best, because of all the time spent on the lovers and Chancellor’s conniving.
Guest Stars: 9/10. All of the actors did a good job with their material, doing a good job of bringing these characters to life. But I have to knock a point because of their accents.
General Enjoyability: 7/10. When viewed as a story about people right after WWII, I think it’s good, if not the best. When viewed as a murder mystery, I feel like it gets too sidetracked in various ways to be effective. If they had instead spent less time on something and showed even a cut of McGinn looking at Chancellor’s room number where the audience could actually see the number, I think even that would have helped both the solveability and the enjoyability.
Solveability: 6/10. Again, while McGinn deliberately asks Chancellor about him leaving his room unlocked, thus providing a clue to the audience, we don’t see the room number very well. The barometer was not featured at all before in the episode that we saw. That’s a clue that could have been worked in by someone using it to check the weather forecast or whatever. There were so many chess clues that my brain couldn’t keep up, and immediately started accepting Lady Austin’s theory of it being Bishop rather than focusing on the strategy “Mate in Seven.” It’s like the clues were all there, but not in a way that helped the viewer see them.
Use of JB Fletcher: 6/10. She appeared at the beginning and end. She was narrating something that happened to someone she admired. But this is where my brain got stuck- apparently McGinn never wrote about the murder. JB never met any of the people involved in this case. While she may have read about the event in like archives and things, how does JB know that Paul Viscard was the real killer? How does she know where the plate was hidden? It doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m going to call out the writers for when they do something like this.
All right. So that’s it for this week’s post. I should hopefully be back next week with something, so catch you on the flip side.
Random English Major Thoughts 