Remember the time Jessica Fletcher wrote a virtual-reality game for the Oculus Rift?

Don't feel bad if you don't. The episode "A Virtual Murder" (available on Netflix) aired in 1993 during the tenth season of Murder, She Wrote, a popular show about an elderly mystery novelist (Angela Lansbury) who stumbled onto what I will only call a disproportionate number of murders in the sleepy New England town of Cabot Cove. Set in the heady days of the early '90s, a year after the release of the VR horror film Lawnmower Man and two years before Nintendo's failed Virtual Boy headset, it involves Jessica scripting a murder mystery game called *A Murder at Hastings Rock *for a VR headset startup. The result is both very stupid and very amazing.

The episode begins with Angela talking to her BFF Seth in Cabot Cove about her game, which basically turns into a conversation between an Oculus enthusiast and your grandpa. Seth:

Now let me get this straight—you've made up an arcade game, is that it? What is it, one of those mind-numbing blast-all-the-enemy-ships games? Or perhaps it's the one where the little face goes around eating all the other little faces?

I'll grant Seth the space shooters, but the second option is either a terrible description of Pac-Man or a great description of a bad acid trip.

Although Jessica insists that virtual reality is "very fresh" (as so many things were in the '90s), Seth continues to pooh-pooh Jessica's work as a "children's game," to which she quickly gets as defensive as a reddit commenter: "This isn't just for children. It's partly a game, partly an environment. It's really quite an experience. You wear these electronic googles that are really rather like little TV screens... and suddenly you're in this world that exists only in a computer, except it feels quite real. It's a bit disorienting, as if you're visiting this strange, almost alien space. It's rather wonderful. You're completely surrounded by it, moving through it, but you're simply standing there."

Which honestly sounds almost exactly like what I said after I tried the Oculus Rift.

After a harp glissando and a quick video clip of an airplane, we're told Jessica is flying off to a magical land called SILICON VALLEY CALIFORNIA, where the game is being developed by a young programmer named Michael (aka Kevin Sorbo, aka Hercules) at a studio called Marathon Images Inc.

Image: CBS

Soon, Jessica is standing in a white VR containment chamber wearing a headset that looks more like a pair of Ray Bans than Oculus or Morpheus—as well as not one, but two Nintendo Power Gloves. As Kevin Sorbo and his friends watch from a retro-futuristic office full of inexplicable red lamps and monitors covered with giant text, Jessica enters the virtual world of Hastings Manor, which looks like kind of like a cross between 7th Guest and the Tex Murphy adventures, run through a Mosaic filter in Photoshop.

She soon encounters a glitch in the game, which makes her recoil with exaggerated horror in a way that would make an excellent animated GIF. This bug is apparently a pretty big problem, causing the one guy in a suit to immediately fume about money while all the programmers look horrified; one of them suggests that maybe they should have beta-tested the game at some point. You think? Murder, She Wrote: an alternate world where the QA process is both nonexistent and terrifying. They say that if they try to fix it, they could "hit a cascade" that would create even more bugs and that there's "no time" to fix it. No time! Cascades! Bugs!

The young teenage intern, Alex, suggests that they simply change the script and remove the character that keeps glitching, which everyone greets as a brilliant and elegant solution even though I'm pretty sure that also constitutes fixing the bug? It also sounds way more complicated, since Jessica says the character is woven integrally through the story, but fine. At least it gives Jessica the chance to solve a programming problem with her typewriter, which is kind of amazing if you think about it.

"I'm going to do my best to fix your program," says Jessica, and all the programmers heave a sigh of relief because the magic teakettle from Beauty and the Beast is ON IT.

Image: CBS

There are a few other subplots involving two female employees competing for the love of Kevin Sorbo, corporate intrigue with a competing game-design firm, and the teenage intern who won't call his mom no matter how many times she pages him. Skip these, because they are not Angela Lansbury in VR goggles.

With an investor presentation looming within hours, Jessica heads back into the game for a final run-through. She wanders down a hall exploring room after room until suddenly one of the doors—one she doesn't remember writing—won't open. Jessica asks them to remove it for the legitimately good game-design reason that "a locked door that can't open is unfair to the players. They'll assume it holds some significance."

Old Jerkboss says this is impossible since the door is an "integral part of the structure" and will involve "major reprogramming." (Unlike removing a major character and giving all her dialogue to different characters in a game based on the real-life performances of actors, hours before a preview.) He also has a hilarious conversation with Jessica that I think is supposed to critique tech culture where he announces that "the beauty of the binary system is that everything is reducible to zeros." When Jessica asks how that applies to feelings and emotions, he informs her that "eventually we'll codify all of it... Won't that be far more preferable than the chaos in which we now exist?" Which I think was in a Deleted Scene from Every Sci-Fi Movie Ever, but hey.

Who cares, though, because a few minutes later Old Jerkboss is found dead in a VR booth. This is a big problem because he carried the only "sources codes" on a floppy disc that he kept in his shirt pocket at all times, and now it's gone. Dun dun dun.

Image: CBS

Soon a hardboiled detective arrives to string together odd insults about tech culture in what he calls "the Valley of the Klingons." "I've been working in this Valley for 17 years. Everyone once in a while one of you guys will flip out and attack somebody with a spinach salad or a floppy disc," gruffs the detective. He goes on to describe the murder as the sort of thing that would happen "up on the Embarcadero in Frisco by the wise guys," a phrase no one from San Francisco has ever said.

After Kevin Sorbo is wrongly accused of the crime, Jessica decides that the answer lies behind that locked virtual door, so she enlists Alex the intern to help her. Although we're told Alex is currently on probation because he hacked into the New York Stock Exchange when he was 11 and has never met a password he can't crack, Alex can't seem to get past the encryption on the door.

Fortunately, Jessica Fletcher's homespun wisdom prevails. She muses that Dead Jerkboss was a genius, and that one of the characteristics of genius is the ability "to reduce the complex to the simple, to the obvious. What about something basic, like OPEN DOOR?" asks Jessica. "That's it!" exclaims the intern. "We're in!"

Jessica Fletcher laughs.

Image: CBS

Behind the door, a virtual version of the Dead Jerkboss is floating cross-legged in the clouds, unctuously announcing that they have found a door into his paranoid mind. He reveals that he's added hidden programs like this to everything he's ever created, and says that his true genius will be revealed if they can solve a riddle: "What purpose can be served by the mind of man that cannot be better served by the binary brain?"

It's less a riddle and more the literal theme of the entire episode spoken aloud, which is probably why they never solve it. Instead, Alex makes up a completely different riddle to trap the killer, who turns out to be one of the women in love with Kevin Sorbo. During her confession, she speechifies (in a perfectly on-theme way) about how her motivation for murder is inspired by the binary system. "Zero or one," she says. "I promised myself I'd never live in the gray world between. It's either everything or nothing to me. I really had no choice."

More importantly, we get an amazing flashback to her blowing away a guy wearing VR goggles, which would also make a pretty excellent animated GIF. (Seriously, send me links.)

Image: CBS

The show finishes with Jessica literally stopping to smell the flowers and musing folksily about whether "a computer can ever be programmed to enjoy something as simple and beautiful as this." And isn't that really the answer to the riddle? Or something?