I'm slowly working my way through the output of Stephen Kandel, versatile and prolific writer of episodic television. The IMDB doesn't list all of his many credits, but covers most of his career from the '50s into the late '80s. I'm not watching them in chronological order, so it's interesting to see his favorite tropes pop up in each decade with fresh twists. Hard-working genre artists are always trying to put a fresh coat of paint on their pet clichés. Kandel, with his quirky sensibilities, certainly writes a lot of great "guilty pleasure" episodes for a wide variety of TV series. Unfortunately, "Murder by Mirrors" isn't one of them. Mind you, it's perfectly entertaining, but I wouldn't rank it among his best, perhaps because Kandel only has a co-write credit on the story with Herman Groves, who wrote the teleplay.
I happened to watch this early '80s Vega$ episode back-to-back with Kandel's late '60s Mannix episode, "A View of Nowhere." Both open with very similar teasers: a character in an aircraft witnesses what looks like a murder being committed and, by the time they land and rush to the scene of the crime, the bad guys have covered up the evidence and proceed to convince the cops that the witness is either mistaken or crazy. The witness then spends the rest of the episode doggedly trying to solve the puzzle of what exactly happened. It's a classic mystery trope; if this were Agatha Christie, the witness would be on a passenger train or something. But this is late-century network TV, so vacationing detective Mannix is riding in a helicopter and Vega$'s Bea is landing a single-engine plane.
When I saw the Mannix teaser just after finishing the Vega$ ep, my first thought was, "I hope I'm not about to watch the same script twice." Fortunately both plots play out very differently. And both are worth your time, though the Mannix is definitely the better of the two. And you might actually enjoy watching them consecutively as I did, just to enjoy the chefs' skill at turning the same eggs into different omelettes.
I happened to watch this early '80s Vega$ episode back-to-back with Kandel's late '60s Mannix episode, "A View of Nowhere." Both open with very similar teasers: a character in an aircraft witnesses what looks like a murder being committed and, by the time they land and rush to the scene of the crime, the bad guys have covered up the evidence and proceed to convince the cops that the witness is either mistaken or crazy. The witness then spends the rest of the episode doggedly trying to solve the puzzle of what exactly happened. It's a classic mystery trope; if this were Agatha Christie, the witness would be on a passenger train or something. But this is late-century network TV, so vacationing detective Mannix is riding in a helicopter and Vega$'s Bea is landing a single-engine plane.
When I saw the Mannix teaser just after finishing the Vega$ ep, my first thought was, "I hope I'm not about to watch the same script twice." Fortunately both plots play out very differently. And both are worth your time, though the Mannix is definitely the better of the two. And you might actually enjoy watching them consecutively as I did, just to enjoy the chefs' skill at turning the same eggs into different omelettes.