WARNING! There are multiple plot spoilers in this post. Forewarned is forearmed.
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The claim has been made, in more than one place, that season nine's episode "A Christmas Secret" is the only episode of MSW that didn't have a murder in it. But is this really true? There was an interesting thread going on over at the Biography Channel message board awhile ago discussing this very topic. Here are some snippets from that conversation:
Cabot_Cove posted, "I think I've heard that only one episode did not have a murder, maybe a Christmas episode. However, I think that no murder takes place during the first episode of Season 7 ... Somebody dies during the episode and people think it was a murder, but it turns out not to have been a murder. ... Then again, maybe the claim I heard before was that there is only one episode in which nobody dies. In that case, somebody did die in the first episode of Season 7."
judya responded, "Actually, there are at least 3 episodes with no murders. One is where a man commits suicide, ... one is [a] dream, ... another is an attempted murder but the victim survives ... that is the Christmas episode."
The posters are correct - if you take a strict view of what constitutes an "actual murder" in MSW (one that happens in the "real time" of the series), then there are several episodes in which no actual murder is committed. There are some in which the death was determined to be a suicide - "To the Last Will I Grapple With Thee" in season eight is the prime example. There is season nine's "The Petrified Florist," in which the murder never really happened because the whole plot was confined to Jessica's dreaming. And there is "A Christmas Secret," which was an attempted murder that the victim survived. And there are the various "cold case" episodes in which the murder took place years before the present time, as was the case in "The Days Dwindle Down." Going by this strict interpretation you can add more episodes to the list: "Murder in a Minor Key" and "Good-bye, Charlie" make the cut because the murders take place only in the plots of Jessica's books by the same names. "The Grand Old Lady" qualifies because it is a reminiscence episode from the past. And what are we to do with all those other bookend episodes that happened to other people? Are the murders in those episodes "actual murders" or are they also exceptions to the rule?
The Definitive Guide chose its words carefully when it made the following claim on its Statistics page:
Episode with the lowest body count: “A Christmas Secret,” in which the victim survives.
Body count - that's nice and vague. I avoided using the word "murder" because there are so many exceptions to the "actual murder" rule. I'm going by a much broader definition of "murder" here. By my reckoning, any episode that deals with someone who is dead by unnatural causes counts, regardless of whether that unnatural death was in the past, in a dream, or in a book. By this definition I think that "A Christmas Secret" endures as the only esxception to the rule. That being said, if this is still incorrect, even by the broad definition I've employed, post and let me know about it.
