Tucker's Witch, Ep. 3, "The Corpse Who Knew Too Much"

It's a busy morning in the Tucker household. Rick bemoans his lousy gambling luck. Amanda uses her witchy powers to make sure the toast doesn't burn. (Which, to be honest, has got to be safer than jamming a knife in the slot of the toaster.) And everyone's favorite mom-in-law, Ellen, celebrates the viciousness of nature.

Suddenly, gunshots ring out!

See…told ya!

It turns out that the Tuckers' next-door neighbor, Larry Shears, was forced to draw down on the milkman. (Hey, when the guy drops off sour cream instead of yogurt, he better start duckin', I say!) Soon thereafter, ol' Lar goes missing, and Rick and Amanda, along with Larry's out-of-the-loop wife Debbie, begin to dig into the life of Laurel Canyon's most lactose intolerant resident. Needless to say, once the Tuckers start pulling on the thread of Larry's story, things start to unravel pretty quickly.

Just who is Larry? What's his deal? Who are the guys in the van camped out in front of Larry and Debbie's abode? How drunk can you get from eating old, fermented apricots?

Lotta questions...lot o' questions...

First, I think it should be pointed out that Larry is damn lucky that his milkman wasn't Reid Fleming. You pull a gat on that fellow, you better be prepared to empty all the chambers. Cuz if you don't, you're liable to be found stuffed into the drop-off box next to the front door!

This episode follows the now time-honored Tucker's Witch tradition of the why-dun-it as opposed to the who-dun-it. We see who is pulling the strings on the attempts on Larry's life — why, it's good ol' TV mainstay Lawrence Pressman as "George Fowler" — but we don't know why. Over the course of the episode, we see George sneaking around the Shearses' house planting bugs, stabbing guys with a screwdriver in the back of a van, skulking around the windmill at the Sherman Oaks Castle Park miniature golf course in the hopes of scoring a (bullet) hole in one. He ain't a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination. The pleasure in this episode, then, is discovering who George Fowler is and what's he got against a guy just trying to enjoy a bowl of cereal in his kitchen.

There are some fun mystery tropes happening in this episode, too.

1.) The ol' fake-office-in-a-warehouse gag.

Larry tells his wife that he works for Amalgamated Leasing. Now, has there ever been a company that is on the up-and-up that had the word "amalgamated" in its name? I think not. So, when Rick and Amanda take a drive over to Larry's office, they discover that Lar's story is anything but "amalgamated"...if you catch my drift. The offices of AL are behind the fences of a huge, windowless, drab-looking, soul-deadening facility.

Oh! I get it now...Larry works for Amazon!

2.) The ol' coroner-eating-while-working bit.

This one is an oldie but a goodie. When Amanda and Rick stop by to find out more about the milkman Larry plugged, Stucky the coroner is stuffing his face. When they go into the cooler to take a look at the body of dead Miami mob hitman, Tony "The Ferret" Landis (yeah, you read that right — The Ferret!), the Stuckmeister reveals that he's got a whole fridge worth of food and drink in one of the drawers! I'd love to take a tour through Hollywood history and get to know all the coroners in the movies and television who never let a cadaver on a slab come between them and a good pastrami on rye.

(Side note: you do NOT want to know where they keep the mustard!)

3.) The ol' trick of the cemetery-with-the-names-of-the-very-much-alive-characters-on-the-gravestones.

Sure, maybe this one is a little harder to come by in your average mystery show, but I still dig it. Why? Because sometimes it opens the door to...the supernatural! Is Larry a ghost? Has he been dead this whole time? That would be something, huh? Unfortunately, such is not the case here. But this trope does point to the fact that Larry is not really Larry at all. Who is he, then? And who is the Larry Shears buried in the cemetery?

Speaking of just who is buried in the cemetery — it looks like Rick is checking out the gravestone for...Count Dracula?

Now, I know that we are only three episodes into the series, but we have to assume that Rick and Amanda have known each other for a good long while. We aren't sure about how long they've been married, but I think it's safe to say that they've been (legally) sharing a bed for at least five years? That's a conservative estimate. So, if they've known each other that long, and Rick is fully aware of Amanda's extrasensory powers, then why is he always so dismissive of her intuitions? If I had a wife that could unlock a door simply by looking at it or get a glimpse of an important clue just by handling a client's magnetic key card, I'd find her little hunches and what-not to be a bit more credible. Alas, Rick always seems to find his wife's visions to be a cute, if creepy, diversion from the actual case and its clues.

Amanda: You know, there's something else. When I touched that card, I got a flash of an old steeple in a cemetery.

Rick: Aw, swell, that's all [the cops] need.

Amanda: There's more. I saw a tombstone. It had Larry's name on it.

Rick: Terrific! That's a real cheerful intuition you got going there.

Dammit, Rick! Trust your wife, for the love of Mike! Ask better questions! Heck, ask ANY questions!

Our beloved side characters get the short shrift in this episode, it's sad to say. Alfre Woodard's Marcia is given only a single scene, and it's your standard clue and exposition drop, but she does get one good line in:

Marcia: The warehouse is a dead end. Amalgamated Leasing rents it. They pay on time, and they pay by mail.

Rick: They also like to hire people who've been dead for thirty years.

Marcia: Yeah, I heard of hiring the handicapped, but this is ridiculous.

Marcia also gets to wear one of the ugliest dresses these eyes have ever seen.

YIKES! How can you do that to woman as beautiful as Alfre Woodard? For shame, Costume Department, for shame!

Barbara Barrie as Ellen gets a bit more screen time. At the beginning of the episode, while Rick is trying to drown his sorrows in a bowl of cereal over the baseball scores, Ellen is pretty pumped up that the birds are duking it out in the backyard.

Ellen: Oh, the bluejays are fantastic!

Rick: Oh, two unearned runs in the ninth — big deal!

Ellen: I mean the birds. They are battling the sparrows over food.

[Sound of milkman being shot next door.]

Rick: They get mean when they're hungry.

Later, Ellen has to pull a Florence Nightingale (avian pun!) and nurse a few of the birds back to health. Were they injured on the battlefield? Not quite...

Amanda: Oh, the poor thing. It's not dying, is it?

Ellen: No, it's drunk.

Amanda: Drunk?

Ellen: He gorged himself on old apricots. You know the ones beginning to ferment? Then, he got drunk and fell out of the tree.

Well, if I were a bird, and it was my time, getting blotto on old fruit would not be the worst way to go, amirite?

Even good ol' grumpy Lieutenant Fisk (Bill Morey) isn't around much in this episode. He grumbles at Rick over the dead milkman at the beginning, and he grumbles at Stucky (who looks to be eating a box of Entenmann's donuts) over the current case's latest corpse at the morgue, but he does come good at the end and saves the Tuckers' bacon. Although, if the traffic on Sunset Boulevard had been any thicker, who knows what would have happened!

Time for a trip to the "Hey! It's that guy!" Department: as I stated above, the bad guy in this episode is played by Lawrence Pressman. Name doesn't sound familiar to ya? Well, you just might find that the guy's got a face like a clapper — because it's gonna ring a bell.

Lawrence Pressman started his acting career on The Edge of Night. Premiering on CBS in 1956, Edge was a daytime television soap opera with a noir sensibility. It was created by Irving Vendig, a writer for the Perry Mason radio show. The Edge of Night (or just plain Edge of Night as it became known in its final few years) featured loads of murders and masked killers. Sounds like my kind of soap!

Pressman also appeared in episodes of such shows as Marcus Welby, M.D., M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O, Cannon, Murder, She Wrote, and others. He never seemed to stick around these shows for more than an episode. If he did get a second episode, it was usually as a completely different character. (The memories of TV audiences weren't nearly as long as they are now.) He did star in a 1977 TV dramedy about a blended family called Mulligan's Stew. It ran for seven episodes. Later, in 1981, he starred in a sitcom called Ladies' Man about a male journalist trying to make it at a woman's magazine. That one lasted for sixteen episodes. It wasn't until the late 1980s that Pressman would finally strike gold with a series that lasted for more than a single season. In 1989, he began a five year stretch (that sounds like a prison term, but it's not!) as Dr. Benjamin Canfield on Doogie Howser, M.D.

Well, that's it for this episode of Tucker's Witch. Overall, I like "The Corpse Who Knew Too Much" because it moves all over the place — we're in Laurel Canyon, then it's the miniature golf course in Encino that I see all the time when I merge off of the 101 and onto the 405, then we head to the morgue, then to Lt. Fisk's office. Lawrence Pressman is a good villain, too. He's got such a friendly face, but when he starts getting all stabby with a screwdriver in the back of a van — look out!

Stay tuned for our coverage of episode four of Tucker's Witch, "The Curse of the Toltec Death Mask." In the meantime, maybe it's time to make the switch to alternatives to dairy? There's just too much lead in the milk nowadays.