‘Professor T’ & the Invisible Women of “Ghostwriter”
Jasper wonders how a relationship soured without realizing how it mirrors his own with Helena.
Professor T echoed Patience this week in its use of scopolamine, as well as notes from Marble Hall Murders, where an author gets run down by a car. Murder by car or scopolamine is not particularly uncommon in TV plots, and maybe I’m only noticing the repetition because those were the last two shows I recapped. Does “Ghostwriter” present a compelling story? Yes, but they veered away from a plot that I thought could have been even better.
The initial murder by car is almost comical because they speed up the footage of the impact in a cartoonish way. When we see a second victim walk himself off a roof, the voice instructing him on the other end of his cellphone sounds hypnotic and, honestly, my first guess was AI. Despite the flattened pedestrian being killed by a real human, I really thought this was going to be a timely piece about bots and the spate of AI-influenced suicides. Alas, I was wrong and slightly disappointed in the case solution.
Jasper nearly dies after deliberately putting himself in harm’s way to catch the murderer. When Helena finds out, she’s shocked, vexed by his inability to consider them a team (or give her the basic courtesy of urgent information), and is ready to call it quits on the relationship. Instead, she floats the possibility of a sea-change: a move from the UK to the USA, where Jasper’s been offered a position in Boston.
