Dumbest way a TV detective has solved a crime [open spoilers]

Cafe Society
21

That’s sort of alarming! (But I guess it shows that you are Not Alone, in a good way.)

I’ve been trying to come up with a more on-topic contribution to this thread. Watching, in recent weeks, a PBS showing of Vienna Blood, season 4, I was not thrilled with the way the mystery was solved:

ETA: Is there a text-length limit on the spoiler tags? When I edit out nearly all the text, it shows properly blurred, but with the original two paragraphs, no blurring!

I’ll try doing just a bit at a time: It was solved by

the perpetrator confessing to the detective, for no particular reason. Maybe just to gloat, and because the perpetrator was confident of status

(with the government) high enough so that the detective couldn’t do anything.
Now, this is an acceptable plot for a drama. But is it really a detective story?

The detective came up with some “clues” AFTER hearing the confession, but didn’t, you know, detect the solution to the mystery.

Okay, that seems to work. :sweat_smile:

Anyway: maybe it’s not supposed to be a detective show at all; maybe it’s supposed to be straight drama.

22

A couple where the clues were found that make no scientific sense!

Detective Goren got a key piece of evidence by getting the name, address and credit card information from a hotel key card..

Riptide pilot episode has the detectives track the receiver of a listening device miles across Los Angeles.

Monk had one that hinged on the “fact” that Australian Shepherds are born without tails.

There’s willing suspension of disbelief, and then there’s “my eyes rolled into the back of my head”.

23

I ran the grime from the perp’s sandal soles through the fluoroshpecitoscope database. There are traces of mime facepaint matching the same lot and batch sold near the store where the confidential informant buys granola bars! They wouldn’t have had time to visit the florist if they stopped to kick mimes on the way to the baby’s christening! Get the car!

24

Ha, I see what you did there! (I didn’t get the ‘Not Alone’ reference and Google wasn’t much help there, but I’m sure it was funny too).

25

There’s other Monk episodes with implausible solutions.

He’s not Columbo. The enjoyment comes from the characters working with Monk and not quitting because of his extreme OCD.

Sometimes the Captain’s face turns three shades of red. But he knows Monk will solve it when others can’t.

26

Although I really like the Monk series, there was one episode that left me apoplectic. I think it was the one called “Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame”.

The victims use a GPS system to find their way to a resort, but it mysteriously directs them to a dead end where they are ambushed. It turned out that, according to Monk, the crook swapped out the data disc of the GPS unit and swapped in a different one that gave erroneous instructions. He said that so casually, like it was something a hobbyist could rig up in an hour or so.

My jaw dropped. I was, exactly at that time, working on the data for car navigation systems in my day job. So, I knew how ridiculously hard it would be to make a disc that seemed to work fine, but actually led the wrong way.

27

I was also disappointed with that episodes ending.

Did the early Garmins allow sd cards for different maps? I didn’t buy one until later when they had internal storage.

I vaugely remember Garmin charged extra for maps outside the customers area. If someone lived in Georgia, maps for Ohio would cost extra. I never dealt with that problem. My first Garmin had enough storage for multiple maps.

28

Far worse in Johnathan Creek was the one with the booby-trapped bathtub. It was fully operational, etc. for something like 60 years or so? And yet Creek figured out the whole story based on a leaky ceiling, some bugs and such. IIRC

29

I liked Monk for what it was too, but yeah, there were some ridiculously implausible scenarios. The one Darren_Garrison posted upthread:

…has got to be the all-time stupidest example of the “hidden gold” trope in the history of all of Western fiction. And that includes the Speed Racer “Race Against the Mammoth Car” episode where a giant, train-like multi-segmented car (with stolen gold molded into its frame) enters into a race alongside Speed Racer, for some reason.

30

It would be easier to spoof GPS signals than hack the car’s nav for the reasons you said. Not EASY but at least within the scope of an actual hacker’s toolbox. I forget the details but didn’t something similar happened with the altimeters in Die Hard 2?

31

This is from an old Ellery Queen mystery, The Chinese Orange Mystery. While it did have some validity when written, it’s absolutely ridiculous when read today.

A man is found murdered, with all his clothes on backwards.

The upshot is that the man was a Catholic priest who wore a priest’s color. The killer didn’t realize this until the deed was done. Knowing the man was a priest would have given everything away. The killer couldn’t remove the collar, because not having one would have been suspicious. He couldn’t turn the collar around, because the man had no tie, which also would have been suspicious. So the killer reversed all the clothing.

Queen eventually realized all that.

32

Every episode of “Angie Tribeca” would for the description of the OP. But it was a comedy of course.

33

You could probably fill a whole thread with examples from the “Encyclopedia Brown” books (he just about qualifies for this thread, thanks to his short-lived TV adaptation), but this one is far and away the most baffling:

34

My pick for a feeble Columbo solution is the two-step in the ‘dentist’ episode; I kind of have to spell out the whole thing to really do it justice:

So this dentist has racked up a ton of gambling debts — we hear about a number of investments he lost money on, and we see him gambling on horses in one scene and playing poker in another — and he uses his knowledge of chemistry to adhere a lethal dose of digitalis in a time-release coating under the porcelain crown in the mouth of the patient he’s anesthetized. Let me repeat that: the killer gambles even when he shouldn’t, and he knows chemistry. Those are, like, his only traits.

Years ago, his wife and her first husband were making love, and then she gave him a lethal dose of digitalis, and then he was dead and she insisted she hadn’t wanted to kill him and her wealthy father “put her” somewhere for a while upon concluding that “she was sick, mentally ill.” So, her two traits: occasionally kills a lover with digitalis, and then gets judged to be crazy when claiming she had no intention of doing so.

Anyhow, the dentist correctly figures his wife will have that patient over for drinks and adultery that night, which is when the poison will kick in and she’ll freak out; the dentist then arrives to do a half-assed job of covering up what’d look like her latest killing, and does a whole-assed job of putting digitalis in the guy’s glass and the blender she made the margaritas in.

Columbo, though, “absolutely” rules her out as a suspect, because (a) there was no poison in the bottle she opened, but there was in his glass and in the blender; and (b) she poured a margarita from the blender into his glass, and he drank it and didn’t die, and later she poured a second margarita from the blender into the glass, and he drank it and died. Columbo’s conclusion: “he would’ve been dead after the first one! According to the coroner, the amount of poison in that glass, he’d have been dead in a minute. So what does this all mean? It means there was no poison in the blender when he drank the margarita! None! The poison was put in the glass and the blender after he was dead!”

Columbo hasn’t yet thought of the time-release possibility. But, a while later, he does, and tells the dentist: “the tiniest bit of digitalis will turn porcelain enamel blue when catalyzed by moisture heated to body temperature … when we pull that porcelain crown from the right side of Adam Evans’s mouth, you can bet your eyetooth that the underside of it is gonna be stained blue.” He prepares to look; the dentist tells him not to bother, and surrenders. Columbo was, of course, lying; the chemistry doesn’t work like that.

That’s a lot, I know. But, to sum up: the ‘gotcha’ only works because the guy who didn’t know that Columbo was wrong about chemistry didn’t gamble that Columbo was wrong about chemistry; and, again, he only has like two traits. But the way Columbo first establishes the innocence of the other suspect strikes me as making zero sense, because we actually see her open the bottle in front of the victim, who doesn’t look away as she then puts its contents to use in the blender; he still doesn’t look away as she pours out that first glass for him. But, for all we know, he does look away from her and that blender before she later pours a second batch from the blender to a glass that he maybe never looked away from. So: why absolutely rule out the idea that a woman with two whole traits added poison to the blender after pouring the first drink, but before pouring the second? As far as I can tell, it could’ve made 100% more sense to do it easily then, instead of having a harder time doing it as he watched.

35

A little ot maybe, but… can Perry Mason take credit for all those instances when a random person stood up in court and confessed? Because it happened every other episode. It’s no wonder he had such a stellar record.

36

At that: is that when the prosecution drops the charges? Because if you’re ever on trial, and I can save you by just standing up n court and confessing, it seems like I could then go on trial and have a buddy save me by standing up and confessing…

37

There would be objections because of you turning the proceedings into a circus.

38

But that’s sort of what I’m asking: when someone stands up and confesses in a Perry Mason episode, are there objections or does the prosecution drop all charges against the defendant?

39

I don’t remember any follow through at all. Maybe the new confessee was cuffed but I don’t remember.

40

The Ur-example is the James Stewart movie Call Northside 777.

My most supidest, “Didn’t do the homework” episode is the one where Monk recognizes Trudy’s eyes in another woman, and it turns out that she received Trudy’s donated corneas.

Putting aside the fact that Trudy was killed by a car bomb, and that even if they could find her corneas, the medical examiner probably would want them kept with the rest of the body.

OK: I love this show, and am continuing to suspend my disbelief.

Then Monk has a conversation with the woman, and she *names the disease she had that was cured by the corneal transplant (it’s part of a whole thing where he hears about the beauty of Trudy’s gift, yada yada): the disease is Retinitis Pigmentosa. > KLUNK < RP is a set of diseases of the retina, not the cornea. It’s an unusual coincidence for someone with RP to ALSO have corneal problems
and it would be unusual for someone losing retinal ability to receive a corneal transplant-- and at any rate, a corneal transplant will not fix Retinitis Pigmentosa! Period. Not even Trudy’s corneas.

Another “didn’t do the homework” ending that had me tearing out hair was the second episode, “The Locked Room,” of *My Life Is Murder." I hate picking on this show, because not only is it a show I love, as the show Lucy Lawless is doing currently, but further, this show reunited Lucy Lawless with Danielle Cormack, who played the Amazon Ephiny on Xena.

But this episode blew it.

The solution to a locked room mystery was that the killer had drilled (with a hand tool, yet, to avoid noise) two small holes in an adjacent wall, and shot through one hole while looking through the other-- the “looking” hole was several inches above the “shooting” hole.

Anyone who has ever fired a gun can see the problem there. It’s only marginally better than shooting blind. You can look at what you want to hit, and kinda try to point the gun that way, but unless you actually have the target in the gun’s sites, or you are aiming for, say, the side of a barn, you won’t hit it.

I suppose those are dumb solutions, not dumb methods-- the method in My Life Is Murder was fine, and she couldn’t help that the writers didn’t do their homework.

I don’t even remember the crime in the Monk RP episode-- recognizing Trudy’s corneas was part of the solution, somehow, though, but even if you’ve suspended you disbelief through that, there’s no way to believe that corneal transplants cure RP. The writers could have invented Ophthalmologic Phlebotinum, or something, or called up an ophthalmologist, and asked what things are fixed by corneal transplants.

I don’t know how they came across RP. but if somehow, it was “No one will notice, and it sounds good,” Sorry.