The detective work continues to come across as half-assed.
- The motive, as many have pointed out, is very weak and bizarre. The director of the observatory was haunted and ashamed by the massacre his father committed 10 years ago, so he committed yet another murder? How is that going to fix the problem? Even when he gets away with it, the observatory will be stuck with an even worse reputation as a site of two separate murder cases. And to achieve this goal, he not only accepted help from a super-secret criminal organization, but was prepared to swallow fake poison and get himself smuggled out of the island?
- The actual mechanics of the murder rely on one too many coincidences and assumptions to have a decent chance of success. It required the victim to: go for the light switch AND try the door lock AND press the dome control panel AND stand still on a specific spot while the dome opened. If she deviated from even ONE of these steps, the murder would not have occurred. If she tried the door lock TWICE, then the lock would have been first locked and then unlocked again, and the "sealed room" would have fallen apart (I would think most people will turn the lock back and forth more than once in that situation).
- The staging of the murder scene is also way too risky and labor-intensive. So the murderer moved Ron's drugged body from his room to the dome, without being seen by anybody. Immediately afterwards, the murderer managed to find the victim alone and isolated (did he know beforehand she'd do that?), successfully subdued her and moved her to the dome; again, without being seen by anybody. He also had enough time to set up the fishing line and the gun (how did he even aim the gun that accurately from across the room?) AND glue the door shut afterwards.
- The murderer also thought to "use a smaller dose" on the victim, an exact amount, so that the victim would have woken up before Ron but not after the meteor shower was over. It would have been awkward if Ron woke up first, or if the victim woke up the next morning. I imagine this would be difficult to pull off, unless he was an anesthesiologist.
- No one noticed the snapped fishing line? I understand that the room was dark because it had all of its lights broken, but since it was originally tied onto the telescope and the gun in the wall, it would have been draped across half the room. It's possible that the murderer quickly cut off whatever section he could reach and shoved it in his pocket when no one was looking, but when would he have found the time to do that? Also, if the tension on the line shifted the gun even by a hair before it was fired, it would have missed the target...
- The gun on the scene was a "fake", and no one noticed this either. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understood that the gun on the floor next to Ron was the fake one from the display case, while the real one was retrieved by the murderer from the vent. Did the murderer expect two genius detectives and one not-so-genius police detective to fail to recognize a fake gun? Did the murderer swap out the fake gun with the real one before anyone realized? I don't think so, because he used the real gun again to commit the second murder.
- On the topic of the gun, the detectives never examined the murder weapon in any meaningful way, as far as we the viewers could see. We also don't see them look for the bullet (was it lodged in the victim's body? or on the wall behind her?) and figure out where exactly the gun was fired in which direction. Wouldn't that be basic police procedure to establish the murder scene? If they did that, they might have considered and examined the vent earlier, too.
- The detectives also just let everyone roam around the building after a murder has been committed. Even if he already handcuffed Ron as the prime suspect, I could not believe that Grizzly of all people would believe that the case was closed and everyone was safe. This guy was Ron's mentor from an elite detective agency and has just witnessed a murder in a sealed room on an isolated island, in the presence of one of the world's smartest people, and he didn't think to keep everyone in one location?
- This is more a complaint on the writing side, but this arc, and the show as a whole, did not seem interested in helping us understand who these characters really are, how exactly their alibis hold up, and what their motives might possibly be. We the viewers get the most basic characterization for the suspects, so we generally don't care who dies or who turns out to be bad. When the culprit is revealed, it doesn't really mean a lot, because it could have easily been any one of these people; what's so special about this one random guy being the murderer, instead of that other random guy? This goes for the victim, too; until the case is solved, we have no idea who she is and why anyone would want to see her dead. Also, we only get a rough summary of the characters' movements leading up to the murder, and we don't revisit their testimonies ever again. In the end, things are just explained to us, and we're left with no strong feelings one way or another, other than vaguely impressed by how complicated everything is.
The more I think about it, the more glaring and frustrating issues I find. And for me, the main characters' charm, the comedy, and the Holmes/Moriarty reveal are not enough to compensate. Pretty disappointing show, despite the interesting initial premise.
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