TV is the New Reading

Leaving ‘Eli Stone’

on ‘Harper’s Island’

First and foremost, congratulations to my colleague, Minot Daily News education writer Andrea Johnson, not just for her new blog “Andrea’s Agenda” which you can check out from the home page at minotdailynews.com, but also for figuring out whodunit in the CBS murder mystery thriller and gorefest “Harper’s Island.”

Well, they'd already revealed his accomplice, the not-quite-dead John Wakefield (Who’s buried in his grave? Oh wait, who cares?). What’s truly impossible to ignore is that more people would know about Henry, the groom, actually the whodunit among the wedding party who to her credit Andrea had been suspecting since the pilot episode five or six years ago.

Oh, it held the attention. And yeah, I’m a little peeved that my guess for whodunit was so wrong – my money was on the innkeeper to be revealed as John Wakefield's crazy secret wife, rather than a hanging victim and complete red herring.

But I think I enjoy these things more because I’m so easily duped. I almost never know whodunit until the final reveal, and if I have figured it out then I know it’s a bad mystery.

Mostly I’m angry that in order for this to work, Wakefield had to be almost magical, faking his own death, eluding capture for more than a decade of just bopping around, and then this Henry kid, so obsessed with Abby, his bff from way back, killing his bride, hell, faking a wedding “Hey, I’m getting married! Everyone come back with me to this creepy old island – you too, John, it’ll be just like old times. You can kill everyone I don’t and I’ll make off with Abby in all the confusion. Now if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have to drug one of my groomsmen before the opening credits and lash him to the rudderworks of the ferry that’s taking us all there in the first place and give him a tank of oxygen so he stays alive long enough to be torn to shreds! It’s going to be frightfully complicated and it will be virtually impossible for people not to notice how completely I’ve lost my mind so everyone play dumb – perfect!”

Fortunately, Abby is tolerably sensible and together, she and her newfound boyfriend whatshisname thwart Henry’s evil scheme and live happily ever after … after just about everyone else is shot, strangled, drowned, impaled, hanged, vivisected and burned alive. Nice show, CBS!

'Eli Stone'

If nothing else, the series finale of CBS’s “Harper’s Island” was more interesting than the series finale of “Eli Stone,” also last weekend on ABC.

That was an hour of Eli trying to convince everyone for a second week in a row and for the umpteenth time in the series that a plane was going to crash. His visions and machinations ultimately secured a heart transplant for the girl of his dreams, a Grace someone played by stunt cast Katie Holmes, who we haven’t seen since the character moved to Kenya last fall and I guess was unavailable for the series finale.

It was a cute little show. It got annoying at times because Eli had to keep convincing people about his visions, even though they’ve saved a suburb and countless lives time and time again. I will say Eli’s opportunity to connect with his estranged father, played reasonably well by Tom Cavanagh, was a nice moment.of closure, and it was satisfying to see Eli reconnect with his brother and friends again and for his lawyerly chutzpah to save his law firm.

But as I’ve said before, this show needed a little more substance to carry off the style, which was as ephemeral as fireworks – spectacular, but fleeting. Character development was virturally nonexistent in an ensemble cast of pretty people with admittedly strong voices.

It was entertaining, it was emotionally engaging, it had some wizardry to it, but ultimately it’s not a show I’m going to miss very much.

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