Episode 107 Morals

In plain English, these are the morals from Episode 107:

Going Out With A Bang

Let me say right away that I don't think the puzzle idea here would result in any useful conclusions for a real detective. It was just a way of keeping Cole and Malcolm busy doing something silly to build suspense, which is all it looked like they were doing today.

I agree completely with `Bartram116' on the soaps newsgroup when she observes that there was very little suspense in this storyline because we have known since the outset that Veronica was a potential killer, that she wasn't gone, that she was still mad, that her disguise was flimsy, that Nikki would remember, and that it would come to a showdown in which Nikki would not be killed.

I think either the audience has to not know who is going to attempt the shooting (which wasn't the case here) or else the audience needs to not know how the rescue will be accomplished--which was done here in a very contrived way. We didn't know if Cole or Victor or Miguel or Malcolm would come up with the answer, but none of them did anything very interesting by way of foundation, so ultimately it was a disappointment. You really need something like Columbo does in the way of "dancing" between the villain and the investigator, and we got very little of that. We saw Veronica dance on her own a lot -- and that was great. But then we saw a sudden almost deux ex machina ending out of the blue with little buildup of any interesting kind. Cole's bumblings were not elaborate enough for the conclusion of 1.5 years of tedium. We needed more. Something to surprise us--something we didn't expect. My ending may have been silly, but at least you probably didn't expect it. So I hope I scored a victory with it. If not, maybe I'll try again in another episode with some `other ways out'.

I'm assuming, though I haven't seen the trigger pulled or the rescue that is sure to come, that Veronica's plotline is just about over. Pity. I'd much rather have seen her reformed, for a while, perhaps to take on a different target. I actually thought they were going to do that lately as she's been talking about being a different person. I was sad when she started to see things closing in. I was hoping she'd go on to menace someone else in a way that was less predictable.

By the way, I got the idea of having her fall asleep as I cringed at the idea of the story being retold and wondered if I would fall asleep during its retelling. Actually, it was very visually interesting and not boring at all. But it was better for not taking a year to play out.

Actually, the one thing I didn't like about the retelling of the story was that it messed up the pace of Veronica's speech. I didn't put parody of that into my story because it would have messed up my pace, but the problem was that Veronica was in the middle of this nice impatient choppy dialog with a very tense tone in her voice, and suddenly she relapsed into more complex phrasings and misty-eyed blathering that, while artistic, made it sound like she could turn her impatience with Nikki on and off at will. But since we think she's psychotic and can't control her feelings, that didn't play with me.

That's all for Episode 107's morals. Don't miss Episode 108 and its morals!
If you missed any older episodes, see the index.