i think everyone in the whole world forgot that mystery doesn’t have to equal crime
sometimes it’s just like. what happent ?
i love when a mystery story has the detective investigating what appears to be a heinous crime, but the reveal at the end is that… nobody dunnit. there was not a crime. the entire thing was a hilarious misunderstanding, including all the clues, and all the ways they got interpreted with increasing confirmation-bias-fueled suspicion as the story progressed
i have not actually seen many examples of this, though.
the ones I can think of are children’s books. (which says something about society always wanting to convince children that everything’s actually ok and bad things don’t actually exist. but i digress).
adults are the ones who mostly need to learn that malice shouldn’t be the first assumption for things that can be explained by incompetence or just plain chaos. I want Hercule Poirot playing this story with 100% dead seriousness
I guess I have seen one non-childish, non-comedically-intended version of this
which is one of the few episodes of House MD that I have seen.
And, knowing that House was meant to be in the mystery genre, specifically riffing on Holmes– despite being in a setting where the answer to the mystery usually wouldn’t be a crime– I suspect it probably had more than one episode like this?
this one is not exactly what I was thinking of, but close… in ways that I think are important.
it’s the one where a kid is born intersex, and raised as a boy
(spoilers below, as well as several triggers related to that type of storyline…)
[[MORE]]…and the kid has a healthy enough childhood, until suddenly going into some sort of health crisis, while participating in some sort of athletics (details are hazy it’s been a long time)
and when taken to the hospital, the kid gets treated in multiple inappropriate ways, all of which assume the problem is in some way caused by being intersex (reasons ranging from “uterus problems” to “kid was emotionally troubled due to not being masculine enough and did drugs and/or attempted suicide”)
but in the end it turns out the problem was “too much physical activity while not being hydrated enough,” which is an easily treated problem that can happen to absolutely anyone.
And they should have just given the kid some rest and some water. But everyone assumed that these new symptoms had to be related to the patient’s already-known condition.
…Which is, in my observation, a mistake that doctors make A LOT.
Ranging from “she has all the obvious symptoms of mono, but we won’t test for mono because she also has a rare blood disorder and it’s gotta be something caused by that”
To, “she’s acting in a way I personally consider unusual, so this is obviously a new bad behavior related to her autism diagnosis, and she needs more lecturing on how to follow social rules”
…I think, in addition to all the kinds of prejudice and bigotry that come into play here… it’s also pretty strongly influenced by how most people are just generally kinda bad at probability and statistics
and the very common assumption that any two deviations from any perceived norm must be connected, or else it would be “too much of a coincidence”
when really– counterintuitive as it seems to most people’s minds– a die that’s already rolled a six has the same chance of rolling a six as any other die. And a patient with a rare diagnosis has the same chance of ordinary, everyday ailments as anyone else.