Hello!
Welcome to the blog series where I (the writer) write commentary on each episode of Roy Kaplan. These are all written with the assumption that you’ve listened to the episode (and the ones preceding), so if you haven’t listened to (or read the transcript for) Murder By Proxy, check it out here!
Let’s hop to it!
Murder by Proxy is the first episode I edited together, long before the things that happened with production happened and I ended up needing to edit all the episodes together. At that time, it was just a test for me so I could get a feel for how my script sounded when edited together and Murder By Proxy just happened to be the episode we had the most complete set of voice files for. For me, who primarily writes prose, the very aggressive linear nature of a script can cause a few hiccups. When I edited it all together the first time, there were definitely parts that didn’t sound good–sure enough, I ended up having to shuffle the script around in a couple of scenes just so things would sound more natural. Scenes that come to mind are the part where Roy is on the intercom with Burgess, or when he’s startled in the park by Salman. Fortunately, I voice Roy, so it wasn’t too cumbersome to change the script a bit to fix things.
Murder By Proxy is also the third episode I wrote for Roy Kaplan, all the way back in 2019. Later on in production, when we rearranged the episode order, I decided to move Murder By Proxy from third to second because I thought it would be better to front-load the cyberpunk aspect before expanding more into the ghost stuff–it is, after all, a cyberpunk detective series, so it would be remiss of us to not capitalize on the cyberpunk part of that.
I think one of the most important guiding principles when coming up with situations for Roy Kaplan is that I wanted to write mysteries that could not exist in another property. While an episode like Bomber Blackout could pretty easily be transposed to the modern day without making too many major changes to the plot, Murder by Proxy would need some pretty significant reworking because the surrogate robotic body is critical to the mystery, and that’s by design.
I started Murder by Proxy specifically with the goal of creating a future crime that could only exist in a future cyberpunk setting. My friends and I discussed a lot of potential ideas for what an interesting future crime could be, including things like identity theft and memory manipulation. We eventually came around to the idea of identity theft by effectively bodysnatching–to steal someone’s body and use that to commit a crime. This somewhat evolved in the planning stages to more mind control, where someone would compromise a person’s robot body while they’re still using it. They could use that control to commit a horrible crime and make that person think they did it.
Typically, when I write these mysteries, I start with the scenario and then build characters and a plot that will make that scenario occur. Naturally, for this situation, I needed three main players: a murder victim, a person with a robot body getting framed for it, and the culprit. The culprit needed to have a compelling reason to frame the person for murder as well as have physical access to this person’s real body in order to compromise them. I originally had the idea of a son trying to secure an inheritance, but decided against it because I’d already written an episode that features a son and an inheritance. The next idea I had was someone who’d been shafted by the other two and had their work unjustly used as the basis for an extremely influential discovery–the Rosalind Franklin to the others’ Watson and Crick. From there, I decided to have these guys be cybernetics researchers largely to introduce the fact that cybernetics exist in this setting. I also needed someone to report the crime to Roy so that he could actually start investigating–naturally out of these three, the most likely one would be the victim, except for the fact that he’s dead. That would be an issue in most cases, but not for Roy, since he can talk to ghosts.
One of the things I frequently say is that the first step to writing a mystery is to solve the mystery–you have to know how the crime was committed before you can have someone come around and solve it. Inevitably when it comes to science fiction and fantasy, there’s a certain amount of black box involved–elements that we have no way to understand how they work except that certain things go in and come out. This is fine, but a mystery should have as few black box elements as possible–we the readers have to understand how someone would commit the crime, to a high enough level that at least some people can guess how it happened before the detective explains the plot in the last act. Could I say something like “yeah, this person jumped into the network and hacked Burgess’s body and had him kill someone while thinking he did it”? Yes, probably, but that’s not a satisfying solution on its own, and from a worldbuilding perspective it would be ridiculous to have robotic surrogates that weren’t protected from hacking.
I had to break that black box down into as small pieces as possible: how the culprit gained access to the body, how he made Burgess believe he was the one who committed the murder, and how the culprit had the skills and resources to pull this all off. So I established rules up front about Burgess’s robot surrogate–it’s quantum encrypted so there’s no way to intercept data midstream, Burgess’s physical body and medications still affect him, and the data stream transfer occurs downstream of the brain, not within it. With that, I make it so this crime requires physical access to Burgess’s body and/or surrogate to circumvent encryption, and so that there’s no mechanism to magically mind control Burgess by hacking him. Creek couldn’t just hack Burgess, he had to find the right time and place to do it, he had to get access to the body without anyone seeing, and administer a drug to Burgess’s actual body to invoke a physical reaction and alter his mental state, then take control and commit the murder. That’s a more physical solution to this mystery, one that can be followed and which leaves evidence for Roy to find.
I think of all the villains across this season, Oskar Creek is probably the most intelligent and cold-blooded of them. This is not a crime of passion–he is patient and he has been planning this murder for several months if not years, and he had the knowledge and skills to make it happen exactly the way he wanted it to. Even when Roy confronts him in the final scenes and accuses him of committing the crime, he maintains his composure right up until Roy brings up extremely personal information that should be impossible for him to know. There are a lot of cases throughout Roy Kaplan which could be solved by someone else if they tried to look into it, but not this one. Without the literal ghost of the victim going to Roy and voicing his suspicions, then telling Roy personal information about Creek’s history, Creek would have gotten away with the murder and Burgess would have been arrested for the crime and believe for the rest of his days that he’d murdered his best friend.
I like this case a lot. I really do. The novelty of having a case where a murder victim asks Roy to prove that the person who murdered him is innocent is really exciting, and the exact intersection of these elements is something that couldn’t exist in a story that wasn’t Roy Kaplan.
(Fun fact: Marius Burgess’s last name was originally Berger, but I realized that with Roy’s tendency to refer to everyone by last name that would end up sounding very silly.)