The Case of the Meddling Medium

So I’ve decided to start a community on Livejournal for Perry. I keep finding fans there and I determined we need a place to play. If you’re on Livejournal, drop on by! http://perrymason-lj.livejournal.com/profile In fact, if you’re not on Livejournal, come sign up! It’s awesome.

And I’ve finished the Halloween story. That’s definitely a weight off my mind, and off the month’s schedule. It should be easy to just work with blog posts and the remaining pieces of the ten-part writing challenge, particularly since the latter will be spread throughout the rest of the month.

Meanwhile, I’m putting up the Halloween story in several parts, since it ended up way too big to be a long oneshot. It’s an ensemble piece, but Della seems to have become highly prominent. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8583453/1/

Also, you may notice I changed the blog’s background. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, and thus spotlight characters from all throughout the series run and not only the original Core Five. It seems highly appropriate, especially since two of my favorite characters are not part of the original Core Five.

I determined to take the paranormal episodes of Perry in the order they aired. But since The Dodging Domino has no supernatural elements and instead takes place right at Halloween, I’m undecided whether it will be a part of my series or if I’ll spotlight it later, perhaps on Halloween.

The first time Perry delves into the paranormal is season 5’s The Meddling Medium. And I think it is rivaled only by The Fatal Fetish for a creepy and chilling presentation of the paranormal.

The Meddling Medium takes place at a large and isolated mansion. The lady of the house, Sylvia Walker, is consumed by a desire to contact her dead son Thomas. Her nephew Philip Paisley shows up and promptly seems to go into a trance, delivering a message from Thomas via automatic writing. The message consists of a poem Thomas wrote right before his death, which only his mother Sylvia ever saw. Immediately she is convinced that Philip has really been in contact with Thomas. Over the ensuing months, Philip moves in and repeatedly goes into trances and delivers further messages.

Sylvia’s daughter, Bonnie Craig, is not convinced in the least. She is certain that Philip is pulling off a cruel fraud for reasons of his own, but she can never prove it.

One evening, when Perry is visiting the house at Bonnie’s request, it all comes to a head. Philip goes into a mood and refuses to keep trying to enter the trance that night. He tells Bonnie that she should do it instead, if she’s so convinced he has no powers. And, hoping to prove him a fraud, she goes to the table to do so.

She ends up in a trance-like state herself, and writes a verse, backwards to boot. Perry holds it up to the mirror and reads what sounds like a warning on Philip’s life. Philip leaves in disgust to take the in-house elevator to the bottom of the hill. Thomas was killed in that elevator before Philip insisted it be repaired. But tonight something has gone wrong again. Philip dies the same way Thomas died before him. And Bonnie is accused, especially after it’s revealed that she was seen going in the direction of the elevator with some tools.

There’s the matter of her death note, too. Of course, there’s no way for Perry to prove that Bonnie really went into a trance to write it. But he learns he may be able to legally prove whether Bonnie has ESP, and hence, may have written her macabre message after sensing the thoughts of someone else in the room. With the help of a parapsychologist friend of David’s (who played himself, by the way; he really was a parapsychologist!), an elaborate test is prepared and okayed by the judge. It does eventually prove that Bonnie has miniscule ESP abilities, and due to an electric Faraday cage, reveals the true murderer—an electrical expert—to boot.

Hamilton’s opinion on the paranormal is consistent throughout the series, which, while being a little detail overall, is something I’m impressed with the writers for remembering. The great Samuel Newman wrote two of the paranormal episodes (in fact, the two I find the eeriest), but he did not have any involvement with the other two. In this episode, Hamilton makes a hilarious quip about Perry utilizing ectoplasm and other macabre methods to build his case. And throughout the subsequent ESP test, Hamilton looks very skeptical, although he says very little.

The uncut version of the episode reveals to the audience from the beginning that Philip is faking his trance. The usual, syndicated version of the episode leaves this out, making the audience unsure of whether it’s real or not. But in any case, Bonnie’s trance is very much unexplained until the very end when her ESP is confirmed. The scene where Bonnie writes her mirror message of death is, I think, the creepiest scene in any of the paranormal episodes. The last thing the audience is expecting is for her to space out, let alone to write something like The fraud whose hoax turned hope to dread, shall take his place among the dead.

Even the house looks eerie. The exterior shots of the mansion on the hill, complete with a raging lightning storm, look like something out of an old horror picture.

I wonder to whom the title refers, anyway. “The meddling medium” could either be Philip, meddling by pulling off his fraud, or Bonnie, meddling by unwillingly inserting her own trance in place of Philip’s. Or it could even be, I suppose, the medium Philip asks for help in faking a trance.

The Meddling Medium was most likely intended to be a Halloween episode. It even aired towards the end of October. And I give it a very high approval rating. It’s a perfect Perry episode to watch on a dark, cold autumn night.

Amory and Andy

QUICK EDIT: For the last couple of hours I've been playing with this: http://lucky-ladybugs-lovelies.tumblr.com/ I'll be posting a lot of random pictures of Perry actors, and some Perry episodic pictures, so it may be of interest to readers here. I do squeal and fangirl a bit, which I try to avoid doing here, but come for the pictures!

This is a problem I’ve been running into repeatedly while working on The Malevolent Mugging. It pertains to episodes as much or more than one fan story, and I thought I might bring some of my ponderings here.

What is Amory Fallon really like?

In The Impatient Partner we see an agonized, highly stressed, and excitable man. He suspects his partner Ned of embezzlement and arson, and worse, trying to murder him in the explosion at the plant. He thinks Ned is having an affair with his wife, Edith. And as his life spirals further out of control, he only becomes more and more upset. Being accused of Ned’s murder does not help.

Well, who wouldn’t be upset under those circumstances?

Most anyone, naturally. But Amory seems to have a knack for making molehills into mountains. Perry points out to him that he could be mistaken on just about every one of his suspicions, which are based around odd coincidences. And his brother-in-law Frank tells Paul that there has never been anything between Edith and Ned, but that it’s a suspicion that keeps building up inside of Amory, tormenting him beyond reason.

The indications are that at least the latter problem has been going on for a long time, only getting worse. We’re never told what triggered it. We only see Amory accusing Edith of the affair while in a highly wound-up state, already stressed from everything else piling on him. Seeing Ned appear on the company building’s back stairs, where Edith came to see Amory, is the last straw. In Amory’s already tortured mind, it’s logical to think that Edith is there for Ned and not him.

Maybe Amory has a bit of an inferiority complex. Maybe he’s just plum paranoid. Maybe it’s a bit of both in addition to the agonies of everything else that’s happening.

In The Malevolent Mugging, I try to explain Amory’s hysteria with the idea that he suspected Ned for a long time of doing shady things with the company, and that his suspicions about Ned and Edith only started after that, while he was already feeling a deep-rooted sense of betrayal. That is possible.

But it’s also equally possible that he suspected the affair first and only later started suspecting Ned of betraying the company. It seems to be hinted at by Frank that the suspicions of the affair have been going on for ages. That could mean it came first, especially if Amory only started suspecting Ned of shady business practices within the past month or two.

We don’t really have a clear picture one way or the other, however, making it fair game for pretty much any idea one wants to come up with.

Edith is frantic to help Amory as everything falls apart around him. She exclaims that his behavior isn’t like him at all. Does that mean that Amory is not generally a high-strung person? Or does it merely mean that it isn’t like him to ignore her and not call her, despite being a high-strung person?

There are some interesting clues in court that may further clarify the matter. Vivian Ames, the secretary to both Amory and Ned, tells in her testimony that Ned wanted her to avoid Amory if she found the file Ned wanted and came to bring it to him. Amory was hanging around the building and had tried to force his way inside Ned’s apartment, Ned said. He had been drinking and was in an ugly mood.

It could be interpreted from that, that Ned knew Amory is not usually like that. Amory rarely drinks, so explaining his especially bad mood as the product of his drinking suggests that it was the only possible explanation. Of course, he was already in a terrible mood before that, but the drinking certainly heightened it. And I wonder if Ned had seen Amory drunk before and was aware that he gets into his worst moods when that happens.

In any case, Amory’s expression when Vivian Ames tells what Ned said is interesting and possibly telling. He looks very mild, very meek, and perhaps somewhat surprised or guilty. He certainly doesn’t look like a high-strung, hysterical person. He looks very sweet and gentle.

Of course, he could be both gentle and anxious, swinging from one persona to the other as his moods change. And he might be realizing in court just how uptight and stressed some of his behavior has been and be feeling guilty over it.

Also, the episode shows us that this is a man descending into desperation and despair. Amory starts the episode much like Andy, in a suit and tie and with his hair perfectly combed. As everything starts to collapse around him and his mood grows worse and worse, we eventually see him drunk and disheveled, with a loosened tie and wild hair (which he later tries to comb at least somewhat to see Perry). By the time he knows Ned has been murdered, he’s taken off his jacket, loosened his tie and his shirt even more, and his hair is a complete mess. Clearly he was running his fingers into it. Would he behave that way if he didn’t have some high-strung tendencies to begin with?

It’s possible, especially if he’s supposed to be a man coming apart at the seams whereas before his life seemed perfectly normal and happy. Everyone reacts differently to high levels of stress; I think each defendant, when their reaction is shown, has a unique way of handling their problems. Amory could either be high-strung in general or just be falling apart in spite of previously showing few to no signs of this. Or he could just become stressed in certain intense situations, rather than being that way much of the time.

Tentatively, I would say that I kind of picture him as being prone to more mild levels of stress in general, but that it becomes intense when things are going extremely wrong. No one other than Edith seems that surprised by Amory’s mood swings, making me conclude that Edith may have been mainly talking about the way Amory treats her and not about him being stressed overall. And she also could have meant that it was unlike him to be stressed to that extreme.

(Also, something interesting and also a bit sad that I noticed. I’m not sure Perry even likes Amory that much. In general, unless I haven’t been paying attention, I thought Perry usually addressed the defendants with their proper titles—Mr., etc.—at least in court. Perry repeatedly refers to Amory as just “Fallon”, both in and out of court. I realize Perry even refers to people he knows and likes on a surname basis, especially Hamilton and Paul, but the key is, he doesn’t do it in more formal situations. And even if on occasion a usage of “Drake” might slip in court, it’s not steady.)

Then there’s a whole other issue. Amory and Andy have some traits and speech patterns that are similar. How does one successfully contrast the two and make them come across as the very different people they are? Not even Amory’s stress levels can fully help there, if we’re taking Andy’s season 8 behavior into the equation. Andy is very capable of becoming stressed as well, albeit he hasn’t ever been shown going to the extreme levels Amory can attain. But we don’t know if he couldn’t eventually get there.

I’ve been tinkering with this issue as well as trying to more fully flesh out Andy’s personality. Steve is honestly less of a mystery to me than Andy. Steve makes sense to me, while Andy, with his series of odd and contradictory behavior, is an intriguing riddle. Which is the real Andy? He’s easy-going. He’s stressed. He’s friendly. He’s stern. He visits Perry and company in connection with cases. He doesn’t associate with Perry and company in social scenes. He’s been on the force for fifteen years, a seasoned and mature man. He idolizes Lieutenant Tragg. He’s usually very sharp. Sometimes he has very cringe-worthy moments.

Putting it down on paper, so to speak, just makes it sound like Andy is a very multi-faceted person. Actually watching his behavior onscreen is what leaves me scratching my head. It’s one thing to make a character multi-faceted; they did that with Steve very well. All of his various behaviors can be ultimately traced back to traits he showed right from his first episode. But with Andy, I really get the feeling that the writers often didn’t know what to do with him, and that they pretty much had him do whatever they wanted at the time, whether or not it made sense with prior characterization. If so, I wonder if that was also a source of frustration to Wesley. Wesley was so good at playing every type of character imaginable, and he did wonders with Andy too, but it must have been exasperating if the writers couldn’t agree on what the character was like.

So rises the dilemma of exactly how to portray Andy and make him multi-faceted but not absolutely inconsistent. Since I am still confused on what is and what is not out-of-character behavior for Andy, the only way I know how to solve the issue is to try to cram in everything the writers wrote for him and try to somehow make it make sense.

It certainly isn’t easy. I tried writing a private, experimental, extended conversation between Della and Andy, just as an exercise. The thing meandered all over the place as I desperately groped for a lost and forgotten train of thought on what they should talk about and had Andy try to explain why he avoids social scenarios with Perry and company. I’m concerned over whether I was really able to give Andy his own unique voice or if it sounds too much like conversations I’ve written between Della and Hamilton.

Andy is easy to write when just keeping to the ideas the writers had about him at first: that he is an amiable but businesslike introvert, seeking to catch the criminals and not liking Perry and Paul’s law-bending, but not trying to trap them in it. Trying to peel back those layers, as well as to add what the writers threw in around season 8, makes it all very complicated. I’m up to the challenge, though. I want to portray a character befitting Wesley’s wonderful depiction, while connecting the dots in a way the writers didn’t.

Andy as I write him has all of the basic traits. His stress in season 8 is explained as coming into play when Tragg was nearly killed and Andy had to temporarily accept many of his responsibilities. He doesn’t join Perry and company in social scenarios—a particularly baffling thing in light of his friendliness—because he holds them at arm’s length, not wanting to become too close due to his concern over not becoming privy to any law-bending activities. And perhaps also because he fears it would become too awkward and straining on their friendship, were he to have to arrest one of them.

I’m not sure if I’ve strung everything together well, particularly on the latter points. But it’s visible for everyone to see that Andy never has lunch or dinner with Perry and company, whereas Steve and even Tragg often do. There has to be some reason for the omission. All I can do is draw on canonical knowledge of Andy and try to knit something out of it.

In the story, Amory muses to Edith on some of the differences between him and Andy. He feels that he would not have been able to concoct such a complex escape plan as Andy did while being held prisoner. He also thinks that if he had, the vicious dogs would have made him surrender. Amory is not a coward; he simply isn’t trained as a police officer and likely would not think of some of the same things Andy would. Amory is a businessman, which is a world likely foreign to Andy.

Amory is rarely in dangerous situations, while Andy faces them every day. Amory says in the episode that when he was nearly killed in the explosion, he stood by his car, shaking, for a few minutes. He, very likely as a common everyman, doesn’t quite know how to handle it. But he does well, all things considered. Instead of hiding away, he immediately sets out to solve the mystery, despite not having any experience in such a field.

In the story, he is held at gunpoint and, mistaken for Andy, told to get his hands in the air, “Cop”. Amory is too alarmed to spend time saying he isn’t a policeman (probably a smart decision, taking the assailant’s mood into consideration), so he puts up his hands and plans to reveal his true identity at that point—although he isn’t given the chance.

Later on, while recovering from the resulting attack, he is stressed by both that and the realization that he is still in danger. Finding out that Andy was abducted by people really wanting Amory doesn’t help. And he is only thrown further into turmoil and conflict by a surprising letter Andy was given that Ned wrote right before he was killed.

Amory never descends into the extreme stress of The Impatient Partner episode, though. Edith is standing by him, and with his faith in her long restored, he has her to lean on for support.

(. . . And who is “The Impatient Partner”, anyway? I’m not sure it’s ever clear whether they mean Amory or Ned.)

I’m planning that Amory will play an active role in the rest of the fic, helping the police and becoming involved in the various convoluted events. He and Andy have only met once so far, and they’ll have many more meetings before it’s over. I’ve tried to contrast them in every one of the scenes in which one or both of them appear. Hopefully it will be even easier to show their differences, in spite of some similarities in speech patterns, in their scenes together.

The Case of the Positive Negative: Positively Wonderful!

First, before I get to the topic of this post, I want to share a comment I received on an older post:

Hello Lucky Ladybug and fellow Masonites
My name is Bob Siler and I'm a long time Perry Mason fan, and at 53, thats really a long time. I've recently put together a list of places where the stars of the show lived, which I call "The Perry Mason Tour". Ms. Ladybug, would you or any of your viewers like a copy? If so, my e - mail address is  burbank1000@comcast.net
I'd be more than happy to send out copies.
I love this site and it would be my way of saying thanks for the great site.
Take care
Bob

I have contacted this thoughtful and generous fan and have received and enjoyed “The Perry Mason Tour.” It’s a very good resource and fun for anyone who may live or vacation near some of the locations. I want to get out to at least some of them sometime!

As Bob has kindly offered to share the list with all interested parties, I encourage readers to contact him at the provided email address. Thank you, Bob, for your wonderful and thought-out “Thank you”!

Today’s topic was just decided on yesterday. When it comes to excellent episodes from season 9, I can’t believe I mostly forgot The Positive Negative. I believe that one was the first season 9 episode I found I really liked last year. (I hadn’t quite warmed up to The Twice-Told Twist then, although I did later.)

The plot involves a small community in Los Angeles County that’s run by a shady businessman. A committee is formed to try to oust the man, consisting of two men in the community, Perry, and a retired General. But the General is being blackmailed to refuse becoming the head of the committee. His wife and his aide are both set up and thrown into an embarrassing situation which, while actually innocent, could easily be twisted around and seen as them having an affair. Pictures were taken by a mysterious party and sent to the General with a note to decline heading the committee or the pictures will be printed.

Naturally everyone thinks the crooked businessman is responsible. The aide goes to his house in a fury, demanding the pictures. But instead the gun he brought is taken from him and he’s forced to leave. The gun is later used to kill the man and the General is implicated. It’s his gun. And he was there after his aide left.

The story is twisted and intense, following Perry and the others as they try to clear the General’s name and figure out who’s responsible. The way it’s set up is very reminiscent of early Perry ventures, such as in seasons 2 or 3, which was one thing that drew me to it the first time I saw it.

Another thing that excited me was the portrayal of Hamilton. While in season 9 you never quite know what you’re going to get or what kind of hand poor Hamilton will be dealt, here it was just flawless. Hamilton is depicted with fairness and maturity. He doesn’t want to prosecute the General, who was a noted military hero during earlier wars. He expresses his reluctance in his opening statement and continues to show it in various ways throughout the hearing. His quiet voice when he first says, “Cross-examine,” tells so much, just as his agonized looks do in Paul Drake’s Dilemma. This is Hamilton Burger at his finest: torn between his personal feelings and his job, and his desire to see justice carried out. My congratulations and thanks to the writers!

I couldn’t remember who the bad guy was, but I was happy it wasn’t either the wife or the aide. Sometimes I get tired of seeing marriages or close platonic relationships falling apart on the show. Here, the General and his wife have a good marriage and truly love each other, and the aide is honestly a friend who hasn’t been mixed up in any shenanigans.

I was also pleasantly surprised it wasn’t the aide’s uncle, who runs a photo shop owned by the crooked businessman. Dabbs Greer, a very prominent recurring guest-star on the series, plays the uncle. Usually when he pops up he seems to be playing the villain, or occasionally, the murder victim. Here, he’s neither.

The solution to the mystery is very intriguing and involves one messed-up negative that a clear print can’t be taken from. However, another kind of clear print is lifted from it—a fingerprint, left by the murderer when he had held it while it was still wet.

I was honestly surprised by who the murderer actually was—one of the other two men on the committee, and the one I found least suspicious. The whole thing was, I felt, very well-done. The man was actually Mr. Big in the community, and the crooked businessman everyone had thought was running things was actually just working for the real controlling force.

I only had one quibble with the episode overall, and that was an exchange between Perry and Lieutenant Drumm. When Steve says that the General made a statement, Perry wants to know if he made it before or after he was given his rights. Steve emphasizes, “After, Perry. After.” Steve is very by-the-book and upright. Perry himself has said that Steve is an honest cop. Why would he need to ask such a question, and in such an accusatory voice? That ends up being more of a blight on Perry than Steve. And Steve handled his reply perfectly. The scene did serve one purpose; with Steve’s portrayal in it, it made me love him even more. He’s such a sadly underrated character.

My ultimate verdict on The Positive Negative is that it was one of the best of season 9, preserving many things that made the series great. There were more of those in season 9 than it sometimes may appear offhand. Sometimes that’s forgotten amid the strange things season 9 offered as well.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone! Or, for those who don’t celebrate Christmas, Happy Holidays! This will probably be a short entry, as I’m sure most of us are rushed today. I still have presents to wrap! And to make. Yikes.

I decided Christmas would be a good time to share several Perry-related things I’ve done over the past weeks. First, this is a trailer I made at the beginning of the month to promote my latest Perry story, The Broken Ties.

 

This is the story I mentioned in my last fanfiction post. So far I’ve just uploaded chapter 4 and it’s moving along very well. I’m happy with it and I hope my readers are too, despite how unusual it is (or in spite of it, even).

As you all know, I love Hamilton Burger. I wish he had a larger fanbase. I’d been considering writing a sort of essay on why he’s a wonderful character, and why the put-downs he sometimes gets from some Perry fans really aren’t fair (and often don’t have much, if any, basis in fact), for quite some time. For some reason, it was watching The Lonely Eloper that spurred me to actually get it done. I wrote this for a community at Livejournal.com that was specifically created for characters who are often misunderstood or outright detested: http://hated-character.livejournal.com/438282.html

On websites such as Livejournal, as well as on message boards and even here at Blogger (albeit to a lesser extent), people often like using little pictures called avatars or icons on their profiles or in their posts and comments. These pictures can be anything that represents the user or something or someone they like. I’m nuts about them. As you can see, I use an icon of Hamilton on my account here at Blogger. I made it myself, taken from my lovely copy of The Twice-Told Twist on the 50^th Anniversary Edition DVD set.

I made many other Perry icons as well. Many are for my own amusement, but I wanted to have something that the mainstream fans would enjoy too. I took some nice pictures of the other characters and crafted some other icons. They’re all simple, mostly with just the coloring and focus slightly adjusted. Oftentimes, icons are very fancy. Aside from the fact that I don’t have the skills needed to make fancy icons, I think these look better the way they are. I only even put text on one of them. They are here: http://insaneladybug.livejournal.com/327159.html I think the icons of Della are my favorites after the ones of Hamilton. I’m also happy I managed to get in one of Steve.

I should probably mention, no copyright infringement is intended in the least. These are a non-profit celebration of the show and its characters. And all images were taken directly by me. If anything, I hope the pretty icons encourage people to buy the DVDs wherever possible. The image quality is just gorgeous!

(A few pictures were also taken from a couple of season 1 episodes available for streaming on CBS.com. However, I think those are only open for people in the U.S. to watch.)

I hope Livejournal is in a cooperative mood if anyone clicks these links! I plan to back up the icons and my essay/defense of Hamilton elsewhere, perhaps on Dreamwidth.org.

Once again, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you! Next week I plan to kick off the New Year by doing some more episode reviewing. I’ve seen some season 8 gems that deserve the spotlight!