Jessica has advanced at "Manhattan University" from teaching a criminology class to teaching an English course on creative writing with the focus, at least in this episode, on writing murder mysteries.
The script centers on the Latino community, particularly around St. Julian's Church, run by Fr. Michael, who is seen playing basketball on the church's indoor court with other young adults. We get introduced to a family he knows, headed by Maria Galvan, who runs a flower shop with her young adult sons, Jose and Tony. Jose is one of Mrs. Fletcher's students.
Near the beginning, this family is shaken by a "not-guilty" verdict for Frank Fernandez, who was charged with killing Maria's husband Roberto, a city councilman, whose body has not been found. Frank has a grown son, Ray, who helps him as a landlord of low-cost housing units he is said to not keep up properly.
It is said that Mrs. Galvan pressured the district attorney to go ahead with the charges despite considerable lack of evidence. During the course of things we see much arguing among the families, as it appears the younger son Tony might seek revenge against Fernandez on his own, while his older brother, who intends to become a policeman, is quieter about such matters. Joseph, as he calls himself on his papers presented to Jessica, is seriously dating a young girl named Ruth. Meanwhile, Frank has learned that Ray is peddling hard drugs, including to many of his tenants.
Then the councilman's body is found, dead with a bullet that came from Frank's gun. Now the Galvan family is taught about "double jeopardy" because apparently they not only never watched any police/lawyer/detective show in their lives, but also went to poor schools that never taught this basic protection in our legal system. Jessica does point out that even if their hadn't already been a trial, that there would still be no proof that Frank fired the shot that killed Galvan.
The episode moves on to Frank phoning Fr. Michael, telling him he wants a private confession, and they agree to meet in about an hour. We see Frank entering the totally empty church and going into the old-style confessional where he is shielded from seeing the priest in the next booth by a heavy screen. Frank begins talking when the door opens and some sort of gas is transmitted causing him to gag. He staggers out of the confessional, followed by a figure wearing a "St. Julian's" athletic-style jacket, noteworthy because the letter "I" is missing, who runs away. We see that Ruth was the only other person in the church and she reports seeing the backside of the man with the "St. Jul_an's" jacket running away but could not see the man's face.
Seconds later, Fr. Michael shows up, just a moment late for his meeting and he gets Frank to the hospital, where he later dies.
Of course Jessica and the friendly police sergeant suspect poison and that is found to be the case, so they next focus on a text book called the "Toxic Handbook" which is one of the sources on reserve at the university, for the use of Jessica's students and they find that a Jose Galvan checked it out.
As Jessica investigates, she learns that this big-city university library allows students to check out reserve items by simply signing their names on a sheet of paper, without showing any form of identification. Indeed, Jose's name wasn't a signature, only printed letters.
One of my biggest complaints with this script is, like others, the killer was the absolutely most likely and obvious choice right from the start.
We also get a killing done in such a way that only a very few people would have had a chance to know that Frank had phoned the priest to arrange for a confession to take place an hour before it happened. There was no way the killer would have known the priest would be a couple of minutes late. Through the heavy screen window, blowing enough of the poison to kill the victim in just a couple of seconds seems quite unlikely.
Again the writers show to pay no attention to Jessica's methods of writing mysteries by doing careful research to portray things accurately. Here, they missed out on some basic things about Catholicism, like they have done in the past. Ten years before this takes place, a change in Canon Law prohibited priests from running for public office. Now in this episode's "goofs" section, one person has seen fit to suggest that this episode might have been set before that change took place, but that would mean that it happened not only before Jessica was a mystery writer, but a decade before she became a college instructor living in New York half the time. Sorry, but the episode is set in the mid 1990s, when it aired.
It would also be unlikely to meet the priest for a privately-arranged, after-hours confession in the otherwise empty, almost empty church instead of at the rectory, or somewhere else. Indeed, a face-to-face confession would have been, at least, more likely since anonymity was not possible here.
The biggest problem with this week's script is exactly what reviewer "The Little Songbird" wrote, calling it "a depth-of-a-saucer soap opera." All of the family arguing that consumed way too-much air time was a big bore, seemingly full of cliche-characters. We even have a laughably false confession by someone who obviously was trying to protect a loved one who was a suspect.
Once you see Jessica seeming to be friends with the Galvans, the list of suspects is amazingly short. Perhaps the writer wanted 99% of the fans to feel good by saying, "Hey, I picked out the killer for once!" The other one percent picked the priest. Spoiler-it wasn't him. I think a 2 is the deserved score here.
The script centers on the Latino community, particularly around St. Julian's Church, run by Fr. Michael, who is seen playing basketball on the church's indoor court with other young adults. We get introduced to a family he knows, headed by Maria Galvan, who runs a flower shop with her young adult sons, Jose and Tony. Jose is one of Mrs. Fletcher's students.
Near the beginning, this family is shaken by a "not-guilty" verdict for Frank Fernandez, who was charged with killing Maria's husband Roberto, a city councilman, whose body has not been found. Frank has a grown son, Ray, who helps him as a landlord of low-cost housing units he is said to not keep up properly.
It is said that Mrs. Galvan pressured the district attorney to go ahead with the charges despite considerable lack of evidence. During the course of things we see much arguing among the families, as it appears the younger son Tony might seek revenge against Fernandez on his own, while his older brother, who intends to become a policeman, is quieter about such matters. Joseph, as he calls himself on his papers presented to Jessica, is seriously dating a young girl named Ruth. Meanwhile, Frank has learned that Ray is peddling hard drugs, including to many of his tenants.
Then the councilman's body is found, dead with a bullet that came from Frank's gun. Now the Galvan family is taught about "double jeopardy" because apparently they not only never watched any police/lawyer/detective show in their lives, but also went to poor schools that never taught this basic protection in our legal system. Jessica does point out that even if their hadn't already been a trial, that there would still be no proof that Frank fired the shot that killed Galvan.
The episode moves on to Frank phoning Fr. Michael, telling him he wants a private confession, and they agree to meet in about an hour. We see Frank entering the totally empty church and going into the old-style confessional where he is shielded from seeing the priest in the next booth by a heavy screen. Frank begins talking when the door opens and some sort of gas is transmitted causing him to gag. He staggers out of the confessional, followed by a figure wearing a "St. Julian's" athletic-style jacket, noteworthy because the letter "I" is missing, who runs away. We see that Ruth was the only other person in the church and she reports seeing the backside of the man with the "St. Jul_an's" jacket running away but could not see the man's face.
Seconds later, Fr. Michael shows up, just a moment late for his meeting and he gets Frank to the hospital, where he later dies.
Of course Jessica and the friendly police sergeant suspect poison and that is found to be the case, so they next focus on a text book called the "Toxic Handbook" which is one of the sources on reserve at the university, for the use of Jessica's students and they find that a Jose Galvan checked it out.
As Jessica investigates, she learns that this big-city university library allows students to check out reserve items by simply signing their names on a sheet of paper, without showing any form of identification. Indeed, Jose's name wasn't a signature, only printed letters.
One of my biggest complaints with this script is, like others, the killer was the absolutely most likely and obvious choice right from the start.
We also get a killing done in such a way that only a very few people would have had a chance to know that Frank had phoned the priest to arrange for a confession to take place an hour before it happened. There was no way the killer would have known the priest would be a couple of minutes late. Through the heavy screen window, blowing enough of the poison to kill the victim in just a couple of seconds seems quite unlikely.
Again the writers show to pay no attention to Jessica's methods of writing mysteries by doing careful research to portray things accurately. Here, they missed out on some basic things about Catholicism, like they have done in the past. Ten years before this takes place, a change in Canon Law prohibited priests from running for public office. Now in this episode's "goofs" section, one person has seen fit to suggest that this episode might have been set before that change took place, but that would mean that it happened not only before Jessica was a mystery writer, but a decade before she became a college instructor living in New York half the time. Sorry, but the episode is set in the mid 1990s, when it aired.
It would also be unlikely to meet the priest for a privately-arranged, after-hours confession in the otherwise empty, almost empty church instead of at the rectory, or somewhere else. Indeed, a face-to-face confession would have been, at least, more likely since anonymity was not possible here.
The biggest problem with this week's script is exactly what reviewer "The Little Songbird" wrote, calling it "a depth-of-a-saucer soap opera." All of the family arguing that consumed way too-much air time was a big bore, seemingly full of cliche-characters. We even have a laughably false confession by someone who obviously was trying to protect a loved one who was a suspect.
Once you see Jessica seeming to be friends with the Galvans, the list of suspects is amazingly short. Perhaps the writer wanted 99% of the fans to feel good by saying, "Hey, I picked out the killer for once!" The other one percent picked the priest. Spoiler-it wasn't him. I think a 2 is the deserved score here.