This episode marks the last appearance of Shawn Phelan, after a very brief six-year acting career in film and television.
Doctor Seth Hazlitt (William Windom) appears briefly, he questioning Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) about the development of video gaming, before transporting her to Boston Airport, her to travel to Silicon Valley, California, to prepare for a reception honoring the adaptation of her mystery "A Killing at Hastings' Rock" to a 3-dimentional participatory game.
The son of her friend Kylie, Michael Burke (Kevin Sorbo) heads Marathon Images operations, along with developers James Lindstrom (Ramy Zada), Kate Walden (Kate McNeil), Sharon Baskin (Julia Campbell), Alex Hooper (Shawn Phelan), and David Salt (Phil Morris) as developer/business manager.
As the team explains technical methods, Jessica applies her electronic goggles and gloves to experience her book's coming to life, with characters providing clues to a murder mystery, intended for the participant to solve.
Often in film and television, we observe the plot structure of "a play within a play," with characters portraying performers, who assume the identity of a stage character. Here, we find a video game within an episode, with performers' portraying animated figures, such as Jeremy Hastings (Art Cohan), Mr. Townsend (Danny Woodburn), Colonel Fleming (Wayne Bolton), Carrie Brandeis (Shoshana Henri), Servant Girl (Heaven Brooke) and Man in Restaurant (Ryal Haakenson).
But the program contains a glitch, causing Servant Girl to skip and repeat in place, along the lines of a broken record. James and Kate begin to cast blame around the room, each pointing to Sharon, Kate especially because of jealousy over shared designs on Michael Burke.
Young Alex volunteers to assist the agreeable Jessica in a script rewrite, thus providing the easiest resolution to amend the program in time for tomorrow's open house reception. However, one of the doors inside the virtual reality room remains locked, and Jessica asks for it to be remedied, lest tentative participants believe it to remain a shelled clue and, therefore, a rip-off.
That evening, Dan Porter, P.I. (Thomas Ryan) trails James Lindstrom to the offices of John Crowley / Charles Crowe (Allan Miller), at Redwood Concepts, a rival company of Marathon Images, with David Salt's following James to join in the meeting with John Crowley, to wheel and deal over the source codes which provide the basis for the video game. When he reports back to Michael Burke, Dan Porter ups the fees instead of revealing the identity of a new file (on David Salt).
Alex and Jessica rise to the challenge, as the team amends the game's problems in the nick of time for the reception unveiling. Everyone attempts to locate James Lindstrom's source codes' diskette, but as Michael Burke searches through James' desk, he handles a 22-calibre pistol beneath pages in the top drawer of the desk, when James enters his office to confront him.
When John Crowley shows up as an uninvited guest at the reception, Michael Burke has him ushered away from the premises. But, back inside the institute, when Kate ushers guest into virtual reality booths, the second door doesn't open. Alex Hooper, succeeds to unjam it, to reveal a body, which falls into the presence of the gathering.
Sergeant Ignacio Delcanto (Richard Yniguez) and Officer Rossi (Sherman Augustus) investigate the murder, with Sergeant Delcanto's expressed delight to meet a famous author-now-turned-video-scriptwriter, whom he encourages to assist in the investigation, but who has a plane to catch back to Boston, before she hears that Michael Burke has been arrested because the murder weapon contains his fingerprints.
Jessica, again, enlists young Alex's capable assistance in studying the institute's pager system and program for clues, by trying to unlock the virtual door, to identify virtually any suspect of "A Virtual Murder."
13 out of 17 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink