Simon & Simon

A TV show that went off the air 20 years ago, Simon & Simon, recently came up in conversation.  I didn't have time then to explain why I'm so pissed off at that show, so I thought I'd take a moment now.  It really came down to episode #24:  Murder Between the Lines.  I saw I think half of that episode back in 1983 as a little kid, but I never saw the end until  about 20 years later.  Here's the thing, it opened with this shot of the bottom of a swimming pool that looked a lot like the pool I used to swim in, and these black-gloved hands slip a book with a big skull on the cover into view on the bottom of the pool, then handcuff a playfully swimming woman's leg to a grate in the bottom of the pool.  Watching somebody drown while first nobody notices and then can't help was pretty freaky at that tender age.  As it turns out in the episode, this author wrote a book where he based his characters on real people, and then killed those characters off, but now the real people are dying exactly like their literary counterparts, with a copy of the book left at the scene of each death.  The author then warns A.J. Simon that the next character to die in the book is based on him.  Then they get stuck in an elevator together, and A.J. asks how his character dies, and is told electrocution, right before live, sparking wires drop from the ceiling of the elevator, and the claustrophobia and electricity were way too much for me as a child watching this alone in the dark, so I turned it off.

Here's the reason I'm pissed off.  I saw it again 20 years later and I thought I really wanted to know how it actually turned out now that I was significantly less frightened of electricity and fictional stories in general.  Some of the idiocy of the plot was more apparent, like for instance a guy wearing the signature black gloves of all 70s-80s TV murderers while in the bottom of a pool full of people.  What I missed was Rick and A.J. cleverly escaping the elevator deathtrap, figuring out who the killer was, and showing up at his house to confront him, finding the killer having breakfast on his luxurious back terrace.  Within moments, A.J. and Rick are hiding in the house and the guy's prowling around it with a flamethrower firing burning jellied gasoline at them, and all over his house.  If that wasn't a sufficiently idiotic climax, it turns out to all be a dream that A.J. was having as he fell asleep at his desk after dealing with some banal matter for the author of the book.  20 years was a lot of build-up for something I remembered as a little kid when I was too young and impressionable to know how stupid TV was in the 80s (Michael Mann excepted), so it had to be a bit of a letdown no matter what, but my god, I felt dumber just for having seen that.  And so should anybody who actually took the time to read this.