MovieChat Forums > The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962) Discussion > Why do some episodes end so abruptly?

Why do some episodes end so abruptly?


I was watching Triumph and at the end when the man lifts the net off his dead wife's head, we don't see any kind of reaction from him. No look of surprise, no anguish, nothing. We just hear him calmly say his wife's name and that's it.

This is the third or forth time I have seen something like this happen on the show.

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The ending of "Triumph" is very weird.

********SPOILERS AHEAD********

You can't really tell whether or not the young husband is surprised to find that it's his wife, and not Mrs. Fitzgibbons, that he shot. It seems like we're supposed to think he is surprised, thus making it a "twist" ending for him as well as us. But that would mean he had thought his wife's body was in the grave he dug up, which doesn't make any sense - he looked in the coffin, so how did he not see that it was Mrs. Fitzgibbons? Unless they had purposely disfigured her before burying her to make her unrecognizable, which I guess is possible, but in that case the writer(s) should have made that clearer, IMO.

Furthermore, as you said, his reaction at the end seems very understated: If he'd thought it was Mrs. Fitzgibbons he was shooting at, you'd expect him to be much more shocked and upset when he saw that he'd killed his wife. I actually kind of like the idea that he did know it was Mrs. Fitzgibbons in the grave, and that he shot his wife on purpose - it gives his character a more interesting and sinister arc. Tom Simcox gives a very good performance as the young missionary, but without the necessary clarification in the writing his motives can be read either way.

The death that occurs midway through is also rather strange and unclear in the way it's presented.

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I don't think that's unusual for anything Alfred Hitchcock did. He seemed to love abrupt endings.

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