Harper's Island

Give me a good old fashioned whodunit and I'm a happy man. It doesn't have to be a good one either. Give me any whodunit and I'm there.

This would explain how easily I became hooked on "Harper's Island," the blatantly derivative whodunit it extravaganza that just concluded last Saturday on CBS.

I grew up watching Perry Mason, which, to me, is still the best whodunit TV series ever made. Yes, it's a lawyer show. But the whole premise was that the excruciatingly incompetent DA -- named Hamilton Berger (of all things!!) -- couldn't have won a case even if the defense didn't offer counsel. So you knew that whoever they arrested was NOT guilty. Which made Perry Mason a glorified whodunit.

But a good one nonetheless.

You want a good whodunit author? Agatha Christie springs to mind. Her murders were neat, sophisticated and unintrusive; and the killer was never a dead giveaway. Arthur Conan Doyle ... another one. First, there was Sherlock Holmes and Watson (who was played as a buffoon in the movies by Nigel Bruce, but wasn't anywhere NEAR as dumb in the books). The plots were intricate, and, like Christie, the killers were never obvious. I've see "Hound of the Baskervilles" about 600 times and there's still a point, every time I watch it, when I'm totally clueless as to the murderer, even though I KNOW who it is!

For my money, the single most artful, and most FUN whodunit ever was "Ten Little Indians," based on Agatha's "And Then There Were None." Imagine, 10 people on some little island, all of them bumped off one by one, until it's down to the final two characters (in this case, Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne). Each suspects the other, because neither -- as it turns out -- is the perp.

I won't be the spoiler just in case you never saw it, but the ending will give you a jolt or two. I'll also say that the book and the movie have different endings. Same perp, but different endings.

"Harper's Island" owes a lot to "Ten Little Indians." Where the 10 victims were invited to the island by "Mr. U.N. Owen," in the earlier work, About a thousand potential victims (or so it seemed sometimes) sailed off to Harper's Island -- which is just off the Puegot Sound in Washington, apparently -- for a destination wedding.

And that's the first real weakness in this miniseries. There are just too many damn people to keep track of and care about. Ten -- as in the number of Indians -- was a nice little number. In Harper's Island, there were people crawling out of every corner. And once the show got going, they started dropping off faster than you could either count or absorb.

This was necessary, I suppose, to plow the field so that the cast characters who really mattered got their famous final scenes. And once the incidentals were winnowed out, THAT's when the thing finally got me hooked.

Another problem with this show was the absolute overkill of horror/slasher movie cliches. There was the obligatory creepy kid (you know, the precocious little twerp who seems to know way more than she chooses to tell, and has this "Lizzie Borden" look about her that makes you think that SHE has somehow pulled off this trainwreck of a wedding).

It was her voice that intoned the creepy "one by one" that served as the signature line in the opening credits. Some of the killing was rather derivative of whodunits of yore.

And it was too freaking BLOODY, even for a 21st century murder mystery. Here, I have to say that you're either a good, pot-boiler murder mystery or you're a slasher film. But you can't be both. "Harper's Island" tried to be both. I call this the "kitchen sink" method of TV production. Just get EVERYTHING in there so that when it's all over, you can say you had it all covered. In this regard, "Harper's Island" was no different than "Forest Gump" and "Mr. Holland's Opus" -- only with a lot more blood than both.

But the biggest complaint I have is that unlike "Ten Little Indians" they took the absolute cheap and easy way out. At least in "Ten Little Indians" the murderer WAS part of the group that got invited to the island. In Harper's Island, the murderer (or one of them, anyway), pulled a Lazarus and rose from the dead.

A little backtracking here. Seven years prior to the time period of the show, some guy named John Wakefield terrorized the island with a serial killing spree. One of the victims' daughters, Abby Mills, is returning to the island for the first time since the killings to attend the destination wedding. Even before she gets there, she's haunted by the memory.

The reason she's going is that her best friend, Henry, is getting married to Trish, the daughter of a rich businessman. Henry coaxes Abby back to the island.

Henry and Trish make the perfect Yuppie couple. Good looking (almost TOO trendy looking, actually), they look to be custom made for each other (even if Trish's father doesn't like Henry).

Anyway, Abby's father is the sheriff of Harper's Island, and -- supposedly -- he shot and killed Wakefield and that ended the spree.

But as soon as the wedding party arrives on the island, the murders begin anew ... each one more grisly than the last. Trish's father's murder is particularly gruesome.

Week after week after week, we get it POUNDED into our heads that John Wakefield is about as dead as Jacob Marley was. And that would be dead ... as in doornail.

Soon enough (but not soon enough for me!) the incidental characters were killed off -- some spectacularly and some off camera -- so that we were down to manageable cast. There were, of course, Abby, Henry and Trish; Jimmy (Abby's former boyfriend); Madison (the creepy kid) and her mother Shea; Chloe and Cal (the hottie and her English lover), Sully and Danny (Henry's best buddies) and Sheriff Mills.

The first to go is the sheriff, and what do you suppose happens after that? We find out that Wakefield is ALIVE!!! No shit! After more than 10 weeks of wondering WHO THE HELL could do something like this and still look everyone in the eye, we find out ... NO ONE!

This did not make me happy. I figure if CBS is going to make me sit through 10 weeks of blood, guts, bad dialogue, and a plot that -- at least in the beginning -- crept along slower than rush hour traffic in Manhattan, there should be some spectacular payoff ... not ... the dead guy wasn't dead!

Boy, did that piss me off. So OK, I figured, he couldn't do this all by himself. He HAD to have help. That much was obvious. There were still three episodes to go, much to early for a denouement.

But here, this just started getting ridiculous. Just about everyone on the island ended up wielding shotguns trying to catch this guy, and NOBODY COULD HIT HIM. Unbelievable. You'd think SOMEONE could have filled him up with buckshot.

Second, and let's not be too snide about this, if we'd sent John Wakefield over to Afghanistan, he'd have single-handedly killed the Taliban and captured Osama bin Laden. I mean, this guy was the commando's commando. Where the island denizens couldn't have hit water if they'd fallen out of a boat, this guy committed all his murders with NO WASTED MOTION. He went around with this boarding knife, while all the islanders had shotguns. He stayed alive; they got killed.

This actually led ME on a hideously wrong course because I got the bad feeling that we were going to be Victoria Principaled (remember ... she wakes up in Dallas to find out that Bobby's death -- and the subsequent year's worth of episodes -- was just a bad dream?).

Chloe and Cal were next, and their scene had some BALLS (one of the few that did). One of the games the writers in this series played is that every time the islanders split off in their efforts to find Wakefield (or whichever of the victims he'd spirited off to the underground tunnels -- another cliche) they were paired off differently. This -- obviously -- was done to divert suspicion from any single member, and I can understand that. But it often took on the characteristics of a Keystone Kops movie. You couldn't tell the players without a scorecard.

Anyway, Chloe goes missing and Cal goes off with Henry and Abby to find her. THEY go off in another direction, leaving CAL to rescue Chloe and propose marriage (kind of an odd place to get into all of THAT).

They have just enough time for one little kiss when WHOOOOSH, along comes Wakefield. Now, Cal SEEMS to be a pretty normal guy. He's smart ... he's a doctor ... he's good LOOKING ... but damn, he's standing about 10 feet away from Wakefield with a loaded gun ... and MISSES. I mean .. Come ON!

Naturally, he runs out of ammunition and tries to butt-end Wakefield (he of the boarding knife longer than a porn star's pecker) with the rifle.

Forget it. Wakefield easily disarms him, throws the rifle into the water, and in no time rams the knife through Cal, killing him (and throwing HIM into the drink too).

What follows is EASILY the best scene in the entire 13 weeks. Chloe tells Wakefield that he'll never have her (I suppose, meaning that she won't give him the satisfaction of killing her), leans backwards and falls into the water blow ... right next to Cal.

Even more annoying than the in-again-out-again antics of the cast (you go with him ... I'll go with her ... you stay ... and the next time we do all this we'll reshuffle the deck and play MORE musical chairs ...) were the obligatory red herrings. Most of them concerned Jimmy, who'd had a tough time adjusting when Abby left the island following her mother's murder.

Throughout all of this, the absolute ROCK of the group was Henry, the groom-to-be. He just seemed to absorb what needed to be absorbed, and he emerged as the voice of reason when everyone else was in full panic. In short, a real mensch.

But ... but ...

Well, they finally catch Wakefield ... and have another GOLDEN opportunity to kill them and put themselves out of their misery. And they elect NOT to. Instead, they tie him up with belts (are these fucking people SERIOUS????) and throw him in jail.

Here, we learn that Wakefield is bitter because Abby's mother -- with whom he'd had an affair years earlier -- gave up their son for adoption ... and to him, that was as bad as throwing him away. So he came back to the island to kill everybody all over again out of some sense of vengeance. And not to give anything away too soon, but this whole story line is absolutely preposterous if you can do even simple math.

These stumblebums, none of whom should have ever attempted law enforcement had they gone on to live through this, manage to allow Wakefield to escape, and he kills Danny (who at least puts up a good fight) with a paper spike. Shea and Madison (manning the fort with Danny while the others are out hunting around for God knows what) escape, Trish and Henry go back to the hotel for a shower and some sex, and Abby and Jimmy are paired off doing something else.

Henry and Trish are spooning on their bed when they hear a sound. Henry heroically goes off to investigate and Wakefield bangs the door down and goes after Trish, who is decked out in the wedding gown she WOULD have worn had the marriage ever taken place.

Trish breaks a window and escapes ... running into the arms of Henry ... who informs here, at this precise moment, that HE is Wakefield's accomplice. She cries, calls him a bastard, and he stabs her to death. Just like that. The anticlimax to end ALL anticlimaxes. We still have FIVE PEOPLE (not including Trish and Abby) alive and we already know who the killers are.

I suppose in the minds of the writers, the rest of the show had to have some kind of a denouement where the whole things was explained. Bullshit on that. I wanted it to go down to the wire, and have the killer and the lone survivor go mano-a-mano ... a fight to the death. That sort of thing. Either that, or I wanted one of these people to FIGURE IT OUT without all of them getting killed. Whatever, I didn't want the fucking KILLER to tell me with SEVEN PEOPLE STILL ALIVE!

Sadly, Sully's the next to go. Sully started off being an obnoxious frat boy and ended up tragically heroic. Yet Henry gets him alone, unburdens himself with some of the creepier aspects of his sociopathology, and stabs his erstwhile best friend to death.

What an asshole!

I don't even have to tell you this, because I know you're not this dumb, but for the sake of being thorough, Henry is -- of course -- Wakefield's son. And he staged this whooolllllle thing just to get Abby on the island ... presumably so she could watch as he and "dad" picked everyone off "one by one."

Henry, however, has one more trick up his sleeve. He kills WAKEFIELD instead of Abby (he backshoots Jimmy and thinks he's killed him, but dammit all if Jimmy doesn't turn up ALIVE). Oh, and I forgot ... Creepy kid and her mother got off the island in a motorboat that they just happened to find (golly, gee, look at THAT!!) in a deserted boathouse. The boat is gassed up, the motor works ... voila. As the Church Lady might have said, "how conveeeeeeeeenient."

I think I'll stop here for a second and offer this observation: These freaking people were just too NEAT for a bunch of scared shitless spoiled rich kids forced to run for their lives for all this time. Not a hair out of place, clean clothes, no brown spots anywhere in telltale areas, no stubble on the guys ... nothing. But you know ... if you're going to die, at least leave a good looking body behind. Right?

OK. After Henry kills Wakefield (he "chooses" Abby over his long-lost dad ... the same guy he's done all this killing for), Abby (FINALLY!!!!!!!) puts two and two together and gets the right answer. Henry flips over over so violently she hits her head and passes out ... and wakes up in some strange house. And for a fleeting moment, I'm saying "Shit! Fuck! NO! Not a dream! Goddamnit. If this is a dream I'll be so PISSED I might break my brand new LCD 42-inch flatscreen!!)."

Thankfully, no. Not a dream. But just as bad. Henry, as it turns out, is a RAGING sociopath (he says he always had these FEELINGS, but reconnecting with his father the serial killer just, you know, made it all make sense) who staged this whole thing, and got everyone from his previous life as an adopted son, out of the way so he and Abby (his half-sister as it turns out) could live happily after after. He also stages a church fire and fixes it so everyone's presumed dead. So he's a sociopath ... but he's a THINKING MAN'S sociopath. Uh huh.

Well, OK. They're supposed to be the same age, so HTF can they be half-siblings??? Somehow, the writers didn't exactly think that one through, ya think?

Abby, not surprisingly, wants know part of this lunatic. She escapes (more people escape in this damn show) and runs into the barn next door, where Jimmy sits, bound and gagged. Henry and Abby go into this whole song and dance about Jimmy, and why is he still alive, and how come you didn't kill HIM, and yada yada yada. Then she goes to kiss Jimmy goodbye and slips him a piece of metal so he can pick the locks of his handcuffs, which are behind him.

Jimmy turns into a contortionist and a locksmith and frees himself (again, if this were a creative writing course, this writer would have FLUNKED due to the sheer implausibility of the crap he wrote). Henry goes down by the water and threatens Abby, but Jimmy manages to jump Henry and they both fall over the cliff. One thing leads to another, and Abby -- who had Wakefield within her sighs about six dozen times and couldn't pull the trigger -- runs the boarding knife through Henry and kills the pathetic sonofabitch.

And she and Jimmy leave the island in a coast guard boat ... presumably headed for a life filled with group therapy, alcohol and drug abuse, and cursed with NEVER BEING ABLE TO EVER HAVE A NORMAL RELATIONSHIP AGAIN.

Despite all these criticism (and there were certainly enough of them), I watched every show, hung on every word, and tried to see through all the red herrings and other idiotic crap and find my killer. I had a sneaking suspicion Wakefield was going to turn up alive, but I didn't want to believe it, so I kept telling myself that it wasn't going to happen. They weren't going to be this cheap. But they were.

I also disregarded totally any suspect who was painted negatively during the course of the show, because that's Cliche No. 1 in throwing off whodunit aficionados. The bad guys are NEVER the killers. Ever. So JD (Henry's brother) and Jimmy (who was kind of sleazy) never crossed my mind as suspects.

Henry makes the most sense in that he controlled the levers here. It would be way too far fetched to think that any of the friends were involved, because how would they get everyone in one place? But for all I didn't like about the show, it's a credit to the writers that they put so many plot twists and red herrings in there that it wasn't BLATANTLY obvious that Henry was behind it all.

But as I said right up top, even BAD whodunits can hook me GOOD. And this just proves it.

What am I going to do on Saturday nights now??