It’s all over but the critiques, so be forewarned that this post has spoilers in it.
I was intrigued by Harper’s Island when I first heard about it. A wedding party was going to a remote island off the coast of Washington. One by one they would be murdered until the final week, when the killer would be revealed. The show promised that at least one person would be killed every episode and that the cast and crew did not know the next episode until the scripts were distributed.
It obviously reeked of And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, who in 1939 published a novel of 10 people stranded on an island where a killer is bumping them off one by one to match a nursery rhyme.
Within the first ten minutes, you got the feeling that this was more Saw or Friday the 13th than a gentle homage to Christie. The bride’s cousin is missing and the camera slowly glides under the boat, where Cousin Ben is tied to the propeller shaft. Of course, as soon they decide to leave without him, they really are without him.
The plot revolved around Abby who was returning to the island for the first time since her mother was murdered by madman John Wakefield. She has a strained relationship with her father, the island’s sheriff, and she left a boyfriend who still carries a torch for her.
By the end of the first episodes (which are named after the sound the victim makes at death – “Gasp”, “Gurgle”, “Seep”), we’d also lost Uncle Marty and seen the beginning of a “superman” type killer than can avoid gunshots at close range.
By the third or fourth weeks, it appeared that Harper’s Island was about to meet the same fate as the cast of characters. The network pulled it from the Thursday night schedule and moved it to the graveyard that was Saturday night at 9pm. However, apparently enough people with DVRs were caught up in the show that they didn’t pull it altogether.
The saga continued, revealing that John Wakefield was still alive, that he’d had a child with Abby’s mom and that it was likely that this child was assisting Daddy in this homicidal spree. The body count continued too, as cast members were decapitated, harpooned, hung, sliced in half, and set on fire. Despite the continually shrinking cast, the main characters didn’t seem to notice that anyone was missing until about episode 5 when the bride’s father is killed by a booby-trapped chandelier.
Too much time was spent searching the island by characters who — in 2009! — still want to split up and take their chances alone against an insane killer. Too little time was spent developing the characters, so that in many episodes there was no incentive to root for any particular victim. It wasn’t until the penultimate week, when fan favorites Cal and Chloe died in a confrontation with Wakefield, that people really began to care about the victims.
Unlike the Christie novel and subsequent movies, the producers of Harper’s Island indicated that no characters would return from the dead. This was a bad idea, in that the ever-shrinking cast had to include the killer. In And Then There Were None, the number of suspects always stood at 10, no matter who was killed. On Harper’s Island, the number of suspects shrank each week, until guessing who did it was not all that difficult.
By the end, many people had honed in on the key clue, which was that only two people are really responsible for the selection of where the wedding takes place. Granted, I had my money on the wrong one, but by then the show was gone.
Having said that, the show did a good job of not leaking the killer’s identity until the very end. Harper’s Island appeared in Canada on Thursday, and the plot was revealed then to those who couldn’t wait, but before that point, there were no leaks from the show.
The producers had expressed interest in doing a series of mysteries like Harper’s Island, but given the tepid response, that seems unlikely. The show itself was the last victim of its killers.
