The original post: /r/television by /u/sephstorm on 2024-04-23 11:25:18.
So I recently started watching Perry Mason and I enjoy it. But I just watched “The Case of the Runaway Corpse” And it vexxes me. It seemed like there were numerous gaps and incomplete storylines that just didnt make sense.
I’ll try to summarize as much as possible. The victim Ed Davenport gets a sandwhich tested at a lab and aresenic is found. He runs home and accuses his wife Myrna of poisoning him, with her is her cousin Louise Ansel. When he comes home he immediately gets a shot of liquor, accuses her and leaves to a motel where he gets sick and “dies” under a doctor’s care and then his body disappears. A bunch of weird stuff happens like Davenport’s secretary getting involved in trying to throw the wife Myrna under the bus. They very pointedly show her saying that the wife will “get what’s coming to her”. We also see cousin Louise turn on Myrna out of nowhere and accuse her of the killing even though she was the one who seemed suspicious at the beginning.
Now in the second half of the show we see cousin Louise turn to a PI that is involved in the case and suddenly have a change of heart, trying to get him to pin everything on the secretary. This PI seems to be okay with it but then refuses and says he will go to the DA with this.
In the end of the show we find that the PI was in on an attempt to frame the wife with the husband but then decided to kill him legitimately. And this is pretty much the end of it.
What is vexxing here? Well we never got to any questioning of why a man who thinks his food is being poisoned will rush home and immediately drink possibly poisoned liquor. That should have come out. Also I failed to mention that the coroner and other characters make it clear the suspected item that killed him is aresenic from chocolates his wife gave him (or later on from liquor - but not the liquor he had at home), why does a man who knows he is supposedly is getting poisoned by his wife bring chocolates from her, to the hotel where he’s escaping her… And this is NEVER brought up in the show…
Also never wrapped up, the role of the secretary… Were she and Davenport having an affair? They claimed she was taking money from him but at the end of the show they say it was Davenport taking money so he could run off, and the money was taken from him by the PI. So why was the secretary involved at all? I would figure maybe she knew about the scam and wanted to run away with Davenport but that never really came up.
And ofc cousin Luise’s role in this is weird AF and never resolved. She seemed at the beginning to be tying to get Myrna to leave her husband or something, then turns on her, then tries to get her freed by framing the secretary. But NOTHING happens with this story. We don’t see if the PI went to the DA we dont know if she was arrested for attempted framing, we dont see if she is back in court afterwards, whether she made up with Myrna or why she did what she tried to do.
I just dont get it. If anyone wants to check it out, it should be available free of FreeVee. Maybe someone there will notice something I missed.