Jessica and a slew of passengers are forced to take refuge from a storm at a remote diner when one of the passengers is found stabbed in his seat on a bus to Boston.Jessica and a slew of passengers are forced to take refuge from a storm at a remote diner when one of the passengers is found stabbed in his seat on a bus to Boston.Jessica and a slew of passengers are forced to take refuge from a storm at a remote diner when one of the passengers is found stabbed in his seat on a bus to Boston.
Photos
- Gilbert Stoner
- (as John Chandler)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe music heard as the bus drives through a thunderstorm at the beginning is patterned after Bernard Herrmann's main title cue for the movie Psycho (1960), though it doesn't quote Herrmann's music directly. In the Hitchcock film, Herrmann's theme recurs as Marion Crane ( Janet Leigh ) drives through heavy rain and ultimately finds the Bates Motel - a possible inspiration for the musical reference.
- GoofsDon Stroud's character describes being on the CB radio when he was hit from behind during the period that the lights were out, but since the power was out at the time and the shot was fired just before the lights came back on, the power had to have been out while he was supposedly on the CB radio and the radio needed power to operate.
- Quotes
[first lines]
Jessica Fletcher: Oh, did you reach them?
Sheriff Amos Tupper: Yeah, said we'd be there about 8:00. Probably miss the hors d'oeuvres.
Jessica Fletcher: Well, no serious loss, I'm sure.
Sheriff Amos Tupper: Ms. Fletcher, the Main Sheriffs' Association lays out the finest spread east of the Alleghenies.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Haunter (2013)
- SoundtracksMurder She Wrote Theme
Written by John Addison
The bus driver is unknown to our heroes, telling them the regular guy is sick. He is played by Room 222's Principal, Seymour Kauffman (Michael Constantine). Other passengers leaving from Cabot Cove are an old man name Cyrus Leffingwell (veteran actor David Wayne, best known for portraying Inspector Richard Queen, on the sadly-short-lived series Ellery Queen in the 70s, also created by Levinson and Link), a sea captain named Joe Downing, a middle-aged couple, the Radfords, played by Rue McClanahan and MASH's Frank Burns (Larry Linville), and a young couple, Steve and Jane Pascal, (St. Elsewhere's Dr. Peter White (Terence Knox) and Linda Blair.
As they are going, a man hails the bus from just outside a state prison and climbs aboard paying the driver for a ticket. Shortly after that, another man with a car off the road does the same. Along the route, a terrible rain storm forces them to take an alternate route. At some point, the bus driver says he has a mechanical problem and he stops just outside a roadside diner run by a man named Ralph. Almost everyone goes inside to wait while the driver, Ben Gibbons tries to fix the engine.
They all get better acquainted inside. Jessica observes through the window that two men appear to be having an argument inside the bus-Steve and that first man who boarded while the bus was on the road. Later, she returns to the bus and finds a dead man-I guess that's no spoiler on this series.
The rest of the episode deals with Amos and Jessica trying to solve the murder. Phone lines are down and the storm has caused so much flooding that trying to continue their bus route is dangerous. It seems the dead man was convicted of a big bank robbery over a decade ago, and had two helpers, one of whom is believed to now be one of the people involved with his death-someone inside that diner.
Now the one bad thing about this episode to me is the Miriam Radford character. She is supposed to be a librarian. She acts panicky about almost everything, frequently telling everyone that if the killer isn't caught, they'll probably all be killed. If this was one of those shows where almost everyone gets killed, I'd have voted for her to be the next one offed, just for our own sake.
Otherwise, I think this episode stands as one of the very best in the series. It has a really good mystery, with no obvious killer. More than one of the people is not what they first appear to be. We really were shown an important clue early on that could have led us to the killer long before Jessica figured it out. But when watching you don't feel dumb for not letting the clue lead you to the murderer because it wasn't painfully obvious, like they sometimes are. Amos appears to be a clever sheriff throughout, unlike a couple of the earliest episodes.
I think a roomful of, oh three dozen people watching this for the first time, if you could stop the tape just after the body is discovered and ask them who they think the killer is, would likely find everyone in the episode except Amos and Jessica getting at least 3 votes. Once they start revealing more information about the dead man and the people who were on the bus, there were reasons to shift your vote from A to B...or C...etc.
There was the threat of danger to the people in the diner, lots of clues to lead you one way and then the other, and plenty of decent suspects-all adding up to a 10 from this viewer.
- FlushingCaps
- Dec 8, 2022