Cruel Doubt
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 9, 1992
IT'S difficult to say much about this excellent two-hit mini-series without giving things away. The plot turns and spirals at every opportunity, and just when you think it's all sorted out, a new layer is added.
What can be said is that there is a dead stepfather, a barely alive mother, a slightly guilty-looking daughter and an odd, nervy son. Somebody has broken into (or is it out of?) the family house, hurtled up the stairs and dealt out some fairly unpleasant blows with a baseball bat and a knife. Beyond that, it's labyrinthine.
Supposedly based on a true story, Cruel Doubt has a pleasing feeling of reality to it, of loose ends that are never properly tied up and uncertainties never dissolved (hence the title). If there is any problem with this otherwise gripping program, it is that it seems, to this viewer at least, to spend a lot of its time blaming Dungeons and Dragons for the attempted double murder.
Let's be fair. This is a lot like blaming Monopoly for WA Inc.
D & D is a game. No more, no less. If there is something wrong with it, as it seems many people in the US and Australia would have us believe, if it must be banned, then it's time to ban the books of Tolkien for inspiring it. It's time to ban The Catcher In The Rye, the favourite book of many murderers(remember Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's killer, who, after dropping the gun, whipped the paperback out of his pocket for a quick chapter before the police arrived). Hamlet had some pretty unsound moments. And while we're at it...
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald