#mo beats

First off, it has to be said: As someone with a decade-plus-long hatred for the term “lover,” Shipwrecked were so real for that whole running bit. I’ve never related to our detectives more.

Now onto slightly more substantial matters: I really was right about Sheilah and Mel’s affair! Huzzah! And, frankly, good for them. Get it, girls! My whole original theory extending the affair into the murder motive doesn’t really seem to hold much water, though. Sheilah claims that she and Mel were together all night, and frankly I believe her. Something about how how she still couldn’t help but doubt Mel’s innocence just makes her story feel all the more real and reliable. But it does beg the question—who was Mel talking to on the phone that night? Leery, perhaps? Or what about her sister, the one with connections to the mob, connections Leery’s family happens to share? Did Mel’s angry phone call have had any actual impact on the events leading up to Fitzgerald’s murder?

Meanwhile, Mo has managed to get his grubby little mitts on Scotty’s tapes. While I don’t think he’s going to make any huge breaks in the case with them, I’m interested to see how he proceeds. They’d certainly be useful in what looks like his attempt to frame Barnaby on Vivian’s behalf. Speaking of Mo and Viv and whatever little devil’s bargain they’ve got going on, I once again have to wonder: what role exactly, if any, did they play in the murder? Why was Mo covering it up at the start of this whole thing? Was he doing it as a favor to his future business partner, and Leery’s brother, Luigi? He may have been covering up the murder so that Leery could go free. But if that’s the case, what did Mel have to do with it? Is their business relationship a red herring that has nothing to do with the rest of Mo’s plots? Regardless, how is Mo planning to balance his murder cover-up with whatever campaign he and Vivian seemingly are waging to put Barnaby behind bars? I suppose if his main motivation is to make sure that Leery doesn’t go down for murder, arresting Barnaby would do the trick just as well as refusing to admit that a murder even occurred….

I do enjoy that we’ve gone from Fig and Ford being hired to prove Barnaby murdered Fitzgerald, to them inevitably having to scramble to prove his innocence in the finale.

Though that assumes that Barnaby is, in fact, innocent. Cause here’s the main question: Is Leery actually guilty? The episode’s big reveal unmasks Leery as our murderer, but I’m not sure I’m fully onboard yet. The case against him certainly feels compelling, but we have a whole episode of reveals and twists to go and so far all the evidence remains quite circumstantial. I did suspect Leery awhile ago, purely on the basis that he didn’t have much of a role in the show and I couldn’t figure out why they even included him, much less cast someone as iconic as Carlos Alazraqui in the role. I largely set that theory aside due to lack of motive, and I’m still running up against that wall now. Obviously he wasn’t a fan of Scott’s treatment of Zelda, though perhaps that rant to her was more about other hidden issues, but that hardly seems like a motive for murder. He loves to sing about his broken heart—did Fitzgerald have some role in that? Has Leery secretly been in love with Zelda or Sheilah from a distance? That doesn’t feel likely. Or is Fig right, and he’s also the letter writer and his reason to kill is no more complicated than a secret hatred of adaptions? Maybe his mob-ties taught him to respond to such problems with a certain… violent je ne sais quoi. Or maybe he thought Fitzgerald had uncovered something about his criminal brother and murdered him to prevent the secret from leaking into the Greater Gatsby script? We know that Leery’s part of the Brigade, so perhaps Fitzgerald discovered some secret through that connection. I dunno; any of these theories is possible but so far none of them are really clicking with me yet. Thoughts?

I’m also not sure that he’s the one behind the letters. Why would Leery hate adaptions? He seems to have one foot out the acting door anyways, wanting to focus on his music career instead, and Grapes of Wrath has proved that anything can be turned into a musical. Or is he leaving acting for music specifically because of a secret hatred for the direction the industry is going? Maybe he misses the days when original screenplays ruled the roost, assuming that such time ever existed. Or perhaps he murdered Fitzgerald for some other reason, and the letter campaign is just one long, extremely elaborate distraction and cover-up. I will say that the awkward writing style used in the letters does match up with his attempts at songwriting. We’ve known that Leery is a bad writer for quite some time.

But does that make him a killer?

I guess I’ll find out for sure tomorrow.

Okay, so Mo Beats is very clearly involved in whatever happened to F. Scott. Since we first see him exiting Mel Hammermeister's office, and she obviously has some connections to whatever was going down in Bixby's back room in "A Long December," things aren't looking too good for her.

But also there's apparently 20+ episodes and we're only on episode 2 so the fact that she's looking so guilty already is kinda' a major argument for her innocence...