Good-Bye Charlie

This episode has Angela Lansbury telling us viewers the plot of her latest mystery masterpiece. This particular episode tends heavily toward the comic and it should with married couple Bill Maher and Faith Ford as stars.

Maher is a private detective, but hardly any Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler type hero. He's from the snap and trap school of detective with his ever present camera working divorce cases hoping to find an errant spouse cheating.

But one day a lawyer drops in and tells him that he could be a secondary heir as he is trying to locate his Uncle Charlie who was a real sponge of a relation while he was alive. But now some woman has left him a seven figure estate and it goes to Maher if he can prove his uncle is also no longer among the living. As he was last heard from near Reno, Nevada, they decide to head there and claim a body which was found near railroad tracks 30 miles west of Reno as dear old Uncle Charlie.

Maher and Ford work a good con. But two others made the same claim that this mangled corpse is one of their relatives.

I can't say much more other than in the process Maher helps Sheriff David Huddleston solve another murder. And there's a delicious double ironic twist involving Maher and Huddleston as a climax.

Lots of humor is laced into this Murder She Wrote.

Jessica introduces the viewers to her latest story, a tale of inheritance and lies. If this is the standard of Jessica's writing, I'd sooner stick to the books of Eudora. Joking aside, this is an incredibly poor episode, and once again proves the point that the series should have been made shorter to allow Lansbury to enjoy a well deserved break. This just isn't up to much as a story, it's one of those that should it have featured Jessica, you'd have said, it wasn't good, but at least it featured Lansbury, who elevated it somewhat, without that the only thing of interest we have here is the leading man's mullet. Almost everyone is a caricature, each character is utterly over the top, and impossible to take seriously. If you're a casual viewer, this is one to avoid. 4/10.

This was shot as one of the shows that where shot to allow Angela Landsbury a break from the fast pace of doing a series. Well if she was going to be absent from an episode this was the one to do it! It was shot as a pilot for an incompetant private eye (Bill Maher) and his girlfriend. Dreadful story telling, dreadful acting except on the part of the "guest" stars. You'd think Levinson/Link with their success with tv shows could have written one successful pilot to try out during these special Jessica episodes. Only the Law and Harry McGraw got a nod and (sadly for fans of Jerry Orbach and his character Harry McGraw) made it to full series albiet shortlived. Just skip this episode and don't look back.

An unidentified man is found dead on the railway, prompting three people to claim the body, turning this episode into a morbid farce. There's some coffin-humour here, and the plot is twisty enough to keep you watching, and it morphs into a mystery at the end. It's not a bad one, though I think they should have picked a different leading actor who plays the PI. He looks too much like Freddie Krueger, it can be distracting.

This episode marks one of the last appearances by Robin Bach, who began his career in film and television in 1970, and who has roles in five "MSW" episodes. Stanley Grover and Ronny Graham have also since passed.

Although Angela Lansbury appears in each of the 264 episodes (265 hours) throughout this series, there are sixteen episodes in which Jessica's participation is minimal. In Season Three, we see the first of these, in which Jessica introduces an "adaptation" of one of her mystery books. Two additional such episodes follow in Season Six. In Season Four, we see an episode regarding Emma McGill without her cousin Jessica. In Season Six, we find an episode in which Grady and Donna discover a body while watching Aunt Jessica's residence while she is off to visit Cousin Emma in London. The remaining eleven of these episodes lie toward the center of the series and have come to be known as "Bookend Episodes," in which Jessica introduces a guest detective and later usually summarizes with an epilogue.

"Goodbye Charlie" is one of the three "adaptations" from the mysteries of J.B. Fletcher presented as an episode. For those keeping a body count, these three "fictional" accounts apart from Jessica's "reality" may or may not count among them. But writing about murder is Jessica's forte, and so onto her story....

It all begins in Hollywood, California, where a Businessman (Stanley Grover) escorts a Bimbo (Elizabeth Holmes) into a hotel room, but they are halted by the flashing of a camera bulb, aimed by private detective Frank Albertson (Maher). Jessica describes him as "a lost soul looking for one shot at the brass ring." (Why Jessica would name a character after a Classic Film actor remains a mystery in and of itself.) A defeated Frank returns to his apartment to feel salt in his wounds upon his discovering his wife, Sunny Albertson's (Faith Ford) speaking with a gentleman, Raymond Fleischer (Scott Palmer), in their private quarters, going through monogrammed personal effects belonging to Frank's uncle. Raymond, however, represents a legal firm handling the will of an Elizabeth from Detroit, who has left a sizable amount to her former beau, Charles Kenneth Albertson (John Finnegan). Frank and Sunny remain the only surviving relatives of their missing Uncle Charlie, who came to visit with them five years prior and stayed for three years, but has now been missing for more than two years, and was last heard from when staying in Reno, Nevada.

After Raymond tells them to get back to him in five years (because a person must be missing for seven years before being declared legally deceased), Frank comes up with an idea after reading a newspaper account of an unidentified body which had been hit by a train and discovered upon the railroad tracks in Huckabee, Nevada. He convinces Sunny to go along with his scheme to claim the body as their dearly departed Uncle Charlie.

From Hollywood, they telephone the office of the Huckabee County Coroner, Jack Yamoto (Clyde Kusatsu), to receive his assistant, Lon Ainsley (Robin Bach), to chart clues from alternate calls by Frank and Sunny.

But after Frank and Sunny head to Huckabee, Nevada, to represent themselves as the body's next of kin before Sheriff Ed Ten Eyck (David Huddleston), the Sheriff informs them that two other parties have also lain claim to the body. Aside, Frank tells Sunny that he could accept either party's claim, but, because there are two, somebody is lying, so now he must get a cut of the action.

Marcia Mae Bailey (Lisa Melilli), who reports her father missing, is represented by shyster attorney Bart Mahoney (Michael Callan), who pulls all of the punches to maintain that "poor little Marcia Mae" could make a jury weep as an orphan child. Bartender Jake (Ernie Lively) overhears the conversation and later provides Frank and Sunny a clue toward Marcia Mae's abandonment of innocence.

Tillie Bascomb (Lise Cutter) also claims the body as that of her husband, Mort Bascomb, who owned a micro-chip computer company with the assistance of her cousin Jerry Wilber (Bryan Cranston). Mort's wallet was obviously thrust from his pocket by the impact of the locomotive, she decides, giving Frank and Sunny an idea to scatter Charlie's monogrammed personal effects around the railroad tracks later that evening.

Frank then convinces Sheriff Eyck to enlist his son-in-law, Coach Lyle Coogan (Don Brunner), to employ the local youth team to scout the railroad tracks "to discover" Charlie's personal effects, thus giving the Sheriff an excuse to close the case in favor of the Albertsons, until he changes his mind and arrests Frank, tossing him into the slammer with hobo Clarence (Ronny Graham), who gives Frank an idea about the victim's shoes, which were discovered beside the body.

Sunny, too, gets into the act of investigating, and acts upon Jake's insinuation to trail Marcia Mae to the market, thus giving Frank a chance to investigate Tillie and Jerry, while the Sheriff continues to investigate everyone, thus leading to the discovery of another body, deciding that the second and the first are both victims of murder.

This episode begins with Jessica's describing one of her characters as "Bimbo" and ends with a very similar character named Doreen (Tessa Richarde).