User Reviews

Sheriff Mort Metzger is the star in this episode, beginning with him stopping a speeder who proceeds to offer him a $100 bribe while showing clear signs of being drunk when the sheriff pulls him over.

Now one thing that was a bit troubling is that the sheriff didn't act professionally when he brought the man in to be jailed. Instead of getting him booked and jailed while staying calm, he lost his cool, telling the young man to forget about making bail. Of course, that not only was improper for him to say, but not at all possible-bail was then, before, and since then an almost automatic thing for people charged with the three crimes Metzger was pressing. At this point no physical harm had come to anyone.

Mort was upset for a couple of reasons. One was the lousy attitude of the man, Brad Hellman, played by David Lansbury, nephew of our series star. The second was that this young man had been driving drunk four years ago in New York, killing an off-duty police officer friend of Mort's and the man's family in a car accident. He got off because his father was said to be a powerful ambassador.

When Ambassador Chandler Hellman and his wife Meredith (Susan Clark) arrive, Chandler is most threatening to the sheriff, and although unseen, even went to the lengths of clobbering his kid in his cell so he could emerge later and threaten Metzger with police brutality, claiming Metzger hit the kid.

Because charges were being leveled against the sheriff, the state government sent a state trooper down to investigate. Now this man, Lieutenant Avery Powell seemed efficient, but he seemed to have a bee in his proverbial bonnet from his initial meeting with the mayor and the sheriff. Sheriff Metzger seemed to think there was no reason he couldn't investigate the matter, which makes no sense-how could he investigate charges against himself?

Before long we had a dead man found on the side of the road. Jessica was doing all she could to find out what really happened, but didn't start making headway until focusing on why the young man had come to Cabot Cove in the first place.

With Seth still away (while William Windom was on the series Parenthood) almost the only humor was with Mayor Sam Booth's weak support for the sheriff. He backed him, but was trying not to offend the ambassador, his wife, the state investigator, or anyone, so he said things such as, "He's always done a good job as sheriff...so far."

There was also a cute scene at the hotel where Jessica couldn't get the desk clerk to openly reveal anything to her, but he was willing to scratch his ear when she said something that was correct about who stayed there and when.

The two biggest problems are the ongoing writing that has the sheriff be somehow serving under the town's mayor. Sheriffs are in charge of county law enforcement, not a part of city government. That's OK, they did the same thing back in Mayberry 30 years before this episode aired. The other thing, as pointed out by another reviewer, is this notion that everyone was terrified at offending this "powerful ambassador." He was an American, so he certainly wasn't the "Ambassador to Maine, or even New York." Other than having friends who had power, he had no way to bully people into doing what he wanted. This series and others have done the same thing for years, but it's just such a stretch.

There was a very well-done dramatic scene involving Mort contemplating retirement, frustrated at the politics going on, something he wanted to get away from when he left New York. Overall, a solid 8 out of 10.

Well, there's a turn-up for the books. Rather than Jessica trying to get one of her endless parade of nieces and nephews off a murder charge, this time we find out that a character played by Angie Lansbury's real-life nephew was responsible for the deaths of four people a few years ago. He's an arrogant, mollycoddled young man (and clearly still very dangerous behind the wheel) so it won't come as a shock to anyone when he ends up the murder victim.

This episode is a decent one. Susan Clark is great, particularly at the end. I always like seeing Jack Colvin and Stephen Macht, even if they don't actually get too much to do. The story is interesting, with a lot of twists and turns. And finally, Sheriff Metzger gets to have a decent storyline of his own, rather than just being there to arrest the wrong people and be set straight by Jess.

But there are problems which bugged me: The ambassador (ambassador to where, exactly? What power does he have in the US?) spends ages talking to his son in the jail cell, then storms out yelling police brutality. Does he think anyone's going to believe that he walked in, saw his son with blood on his face, and didn't come out to make his accusation instantly?

I've never been a fan of Mayor Booth, but in this episode he's irritating beyond belief. I know he's supposed to be comic relief, but his utter stupidity, spinelessness and sycophancy are so overdone that he's a cartoon character and just not funny. So an episode where he has more screen time than usual, like this one, is going to go down in my opinion.

Finally - and worst of all - we have the trope that MSW writers have used all too frequently; someone, for no reason at all, suddenly launches into a ridiculously detailed description of the crime scene in front of Jessica. As soon as the person starts talking, anyone who's seen any more than a few episodes will realize they're looking at the culprit and that one of the details they're giving will end up being an "only the killer could know that" piece of information which will condemn them. It's just far too easy/lazy a plot device to use this frequently. For casual viewers, it won't matter because they won't have picked up on it. But surely the writers hoped to also attract and keep long-term viewers, who might eventually tire of seeing exactly the same trick so often and knowing who the killer was before even the half-way point.

Six good but over-used stars.