Date: 2009-07-10 09:15 Subject: Harper's Island and Chekhov's Gun Security: Public Location: In my chair Tags: chekhov's gun, harper's island

For the last couple of months, I've been following a murder mystery/horror show titled Harper's Island.  It's about a wedding party at a secluded island being picked off by a serial killer and his accomplice.  It was a fun show to follow, particularly since the twists and turns were able to have me constantly guessing and reguessing.  I also think I set a record for having my suspects of choice killed off within two episodes of my making the guess.  The last two episodes, in which all was revealed, were aired last night.

Now, some of the people reading this journal may be Harper's Island fans in the United States, which means they're not getting the episodes until tomorrow - so I'm not going to have any spoilers.  I am, however, going to mention that while the accomplice ended up being a nice, chilling psychopath, when it came to his motivation, the series fell flat on its face.

It's not that the motivation was unrealistic.  I've read enough about psychopaths that I know the motivation itself was quite reasonable for one.  There's an old story about how psychopaths think and how different it is from normal people, where you have a girl at a family member's funeral who sees a cute guy there - and a week later she murders another family member so that she can see the guy again at the next funeral.  As creepy and chilling as the motivation was, it was actually realistic.  That's what makes a psychopath a monster.

The problem was that there was no way anybody could possibly have guessed that motive, because it isn't even mentioned - or hinted at - until the last episode.  All the murders are ultimately about a conversation, and a single line in that conversation.  But, since we the viewers only find out about that conversation at the very end of the series, it ends up feeling like something the writer pulled out of his hindquarters.

This brings me to an important storytelling concept named "Chekhov's Gun."  The concept goes as follows - if a pistol appears on a table in the first act of a play, it has to be fired by the end of the last act of the play.  Going in the other direction, if somebody is going to be firing a gun at the end of a story, the gun has to show up earlier.  If you just have a character pull a gun out of nowhere, it will pull the reader/viewer out of the story.  If you're going to have a murder mystery, there has to be some clues as to the murderer's identity.  They can be subtle clues, presented with lots of misdirection, but they still have to be there.

With Harper's Island, the motive just wasn't handled all that well.  There should have been a hint of it right at the beginning of the show.  It could have been something as simple as a throw-away line, but it should have been there.  As it stands, it came across as jarring and artificial when it was revealed, rather than chilling and horrifying as it should have been instead.