Hello, friends!
This is 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) Family Dysfunctions, check it out here!
Here we go!
When I make the lineup for a season of episodes, I do my best to make the episodes as varied as possible. I’ve said in previous installments of this blog that my goal is to write episodes that couldn’t exist in a different property, and that’s no different now with Family Dysfunctions. The ability of the detective to talk to ghosts really changes the dynamic of a murder mystery, because the victim is now a possible witness. While we had a ghost witness back in Murder by Proxy who was fairly reliable, Miles O’Shaughnessy here is…somewhat less so.
Writing this episode, I wanted a case where a ghost went to Roy for help but it turned out that the ghost was actually the guilty party and/or had it coming. It was actually pretty difficult to come up with a situation that would work the way I wanted it to–I was waiting for a plane that had been delayed four hours and spent a lot of that time going through ideas of situations that could possibly deliver the exact dynamic I wanted.
Looking back at my notes, it looks like I considered plots involving life insurance payouts, or a character who was terminally ill and decided to try and take someone down with their inevitable death. I also considered that the living character would have killed the ghost character in self-defense, and Roy would go “yeah you’re kind of a sack of shit so maybe you had that one coming”, as well as find evidence that the ghost had been planning to murder the living character. The exact dynamic between the characters I was looking for was a situation where publicly they have to act friendly but privately there were major hostilities, whether from abuse or blackmail or just hating each other’s guts. I considered having the characters in a teacher/student setup, or a business owner/apprentice arrangement before eventually settling on a parent and two siblings who were fighting over the inheritance.
So that’s how I ended up with a wealthy and hateful family. I named them the O’Shaughnessys as a reference to Brigid O’Shaughnessy from The Maltese Falcon, and Wes’s comment about knowing an O’Shaughnessy back in the day who was a chronic liar is meant to reference her directly. By a similar vein, Miles was named for Miles Archer from the same book (who dies in the beginning of it), and Ingrid was named after Ingrid Bergman, the actress for Ilsa in Casablanca, another film that featured Humphrey Bogart. Eoin was named Eoin because I figured he should get an Irish name. There’s not really any connection between this case and The Maltese Falcon besides references to the names, which I mostly mention because there definitely are a couple of episodes that are pastiches of other works.
Over the course of this series, Roy confronts a pretty wide variety of criminals, and when it comes to murderers, Miles is not a very good one. His plan isn’t amazing and he doesn’t really cover his tracks or even realize that his sister might have an alibi when he tries to set her up. But, y’know? That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think that everyone who commits (or attempts to commit) a murder really thinks everything through all the way. In a series where the mystery needs to be introduced, executed, solved, and explained all in half an hour, some people are just gonna have to make really obvious mistakes. And Miles is an extremely rash and easily-provoked person. I don’t think it’s in his nature to think things through methodically.
One of the things I like about this episode is how much Roy really just doesn’t give a shit. It’s alluded to in previous episodes, but Roy makes almost no effort to hide his psychic abilities–he will talk to ghosts right in front of other people and not care what they think of him. And why not? There’s no real reason why Roy shouldn’t be open about his abilities…at least, none we’ve seen so far. He’s also extremely irreverent–we already know from Foul Spirits that Roy won’t turn down an opportunity to cause problems on purpose, but here we see more Roy’s lack of decorum especially when it comes to people who annoy him. He’ll take his job seriously no matter what it is, but he’ll definitely be a bit of a dick about it. It’s probably for the best that he’s working a private practice, or he would have gotten fired ages ago.
I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about this by now, but this episode wasn’t originally this late in the season–it used to be the fifth episode in the series, right after Bait and Stitch because when I finished writing that episode, I went to my friends and gave them a list and asked what episode should I write next? And they told me to write an episode about a ghost who’s a lying liar who lies. I say this because Family Dysfunctions in writing order was the first episode where we actually got to see a ghost touching things after Roy implies in Bomber Blackout that it’s impossible. In the new order, Random Access Memory shows Wes flip a light switch before we get to this episode and find out that ghosts with certain traits can interact with the living up to and including choking people out. I won’t elaborate at this time, but suffice to say it’ll be relevant in future episodes. So maybe keep it in mind.
Cover art for Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight. Art by Jesse Peng.