The Final Mystery (Show)

Saying goodbye to the best podcast ever

Welcome to the Brown Barge. I’m Spencer. This essay is the last of a six-part series about the best podcast of all time, Mystery Show. Mystery Show has a simple premise: to solve mysteries that can’t be solved by simply sleuthing around on the internet. 

The first essay in this series was featured on

Substack Reads

! It is about a disappearing video store, my first memory, and the way that our brains turn us all into liars. Each essay is a self-contained exploration of a single episode of Mystery Show, so you don’t need to have read any of the previous essays to enjoy this one. But if you do want to catch up (or revisit your memories) you can find all of the essays here.

Bus Stop

The lunchbox is one of the least mysterious objects in the world. Sure, lunchboxes can have interesting designs and they may carry mysterious items, but viewed in practical terms the lunchbox is a simple tool, not an object of mystery. So when I heard that Mystery Show’s final case revolved around a lunch box I was initially skeptical. But then I reflected on the previous five episodes and I realized I was missing an important lesson that Mystery Show has taught me: to unearth a good mystery all you need is the child-like curiosity to look at the world and ask questions. 

As I’ve re-listened to Mystery Show and written this accompanying essay series, I’ve come to appreciate how child-like questions can bring joy into my life simply by forcing me to take the world seriously, while taking myself lightly. As I listened to Mystery Show’s sixth and final case—titled “Kotter”—I found myself reflecting on recent joys and why it is so hard to embrace the world with the sincere earnestness of a child. 

Home Room

Mystery Show’s final case starts with a call from a man named Jonathan. Jonathan is a superfan of the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, so obsessed with the show as a kid that he recorded episodes onto an audio tape recorder to “listen to them again later as though they were radio plays.” 

I have a few vague memories of watching reruns of Welcome Back, Kotter in the 90s, but I had to consult Wikipedia to refresh my memory. Here’s the refresher: Gabe Kotter is a wise-cracking teacher who returns to his alma mater in Brooklyn ten years after graduating to teach a remedial class with four prankster students who call themselves the Sweathogs. The show aired from 1975-1979 on ABC, and it was a huge hit that helped launch the career of John Travolta.

Pop culture hits also mean reams of merchandise. I don’t actually know how much merchandise spun out of Kotter, but, thanks to Mystery Show, I do know that a lunchbox manufacturing company called Aladdin Industries licensed the rights to produce a lunchbox featuring Kotter characters, which is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Jonathan immediately lit up when he encountered this Kotter-themed lunchbox on display, but his glee turned to confusion when he started to closely examine the lunchbox. According to our resident Kotterhead “there was something in the image that made no sense.”

The lunchbox is still on display at the Smithsonian, as evidenced by this picture I took of it yesterday. 

The lighting, combined with my subpar photography skills and rudimentary knowledge of the Kotter-verse make it a bit hard to tell what is going on in this scene, so I’ll let Jonathan identify the who, the where, and the what for us:

In the scene you see all four Sweathogs and Mr. Kotter. They are all standing outside a locker bank and Juan Epstein and Vinnie Barbarino look as though they are about to get into a fight. And that is the moment immortalized on this lunchpail. I was like that is really odd Juan would never fight with Barbarino they were all friends. I looked at it more closely and I realized Juan Epstein was holding a jacket, a jean jacket, the kind of jacket a juvenile delinquent in the 70s might wear and the sleeves of the jacket have knots in them. Like someone has taken the length of the sleeve like a length of rope or shoelace and has tied knots in it.

These knotted jean jacket sleeves are central to Mystery Show’s final case. Jonathan has two direct questions. First, was there a nationwide craze of young people knotting each other’s sleeves in the 1970s that somehow bypassed Jonathan? And second, if this jacket-knotting scene isn’t from the show, then who dreamed this scene up and left it as a monument to represent Jonathan’s beloved TV show for generations to come?

But before we answer those questions, I have to take a brief detour. You see, I re-listened to the Kotter case along with my partner during a portion of a 10-day road trip we just took to spend time with family in New Hampshire. We spent time on this trip with many generations of family and celebrated both a marriage and the life of a recently departed cousin, while also hiking on the highest mountain peak on the Eastern seaboard. Inevitably, this environment infused its way into my re-listening experience. 

In this frame of mind I was primed to ponder the larger mysteries that have beguiled generations of humans: why are we all right here, right now, living together on this planet? Writing that out feels a bit trite to me, but I really think that feeling, which I’ve labeled triteness, is just fear. Fear that the questions are too big and undefined—that to even ponder them is both useless and self-aggrandizing. But also fear that asking such basic questions will make me seem stupid. Hiding behind that fear shields me from embarrassment, but it also shields me from joy. But discarding that fear opens the door to experience the kind of joy I felt during the everyday moments of our trip, when I acted like a child and took my time and company seriously, while taking myself playfully. 

Recess

Here’s what I mean by taking the world seriously and myself playfully. On one of the early nights of our recent road trip my partner and I went to dinner at her cousin’s house. Her cousin and his wife have two young daughters, ages five and two. They are both seemingly boundless fountains of goofy energy. After running around the house, inside and outside, playing with toys and turning household objects into toys, the eldest, who I’ll call Aisling, picked up a toy remote control. My partner asked her what she would control with the remote if she could choose anything in the world, to which Aisling answered: you! 

My partner, being a loving and playful person, immediately took Aisling’s suggestion seriously and started to play along. One button press and my partner froze. Another button press and she started to dance. I saw this going on across the room and also saw that perhaps it was getting a bit tiring, so I subbed in. In the process of freezing and unfreezing, dancing, carrying random objects, and chasing spirits, I sort of tweaked my knee a bit. And yet this mild knee tweak was a small price to pay for a period of time that we all spent together, time in which we did not try to impose an adult’s stern view of the world (remotes cannot control people) onto a child’s earnest joy at pointing an object at someone, saying silly words, and having them dance like a robot. 

Of course, the world doesn’t actually play out according to a child’s fanciful imagination. But it doesn’t exactly play out according to an adult’s serious certainty either. After all, a toy remote control may not actually contain the power to make you dance like a robot, but the device that you’re reading this on is just a small step removed from a remote control, and my phone has certainly shown itself capable of controlling my behavior at various points in time. 

Listening to the Kotter case with this sense of child-like curiosity also allowed me to once again appreciate why I will forever cherish Mystery Show, because it celebrates the sincere, earnest, and vulnerable connections between strangers. And so to wrap up our final tribute to the greatest podcast ever, let's return to the Kotter case and savor the human connection on offer one last time.

Lunch

The quest to answer Jonathan’s lunchbox mystery takes Mystery Show’s host and lead detective, Starlee Kine, on a journey that includes 1584 minutes of eagle-eyed viewing of multiple seasons of Kotter, as well as entertaining but ultimately unhelpful interviews and email correspondences with Kotter’s two co-creators. What started out as a small case that Starlee was sure she’d be able to crack in no time starts to sprawl. And as the case sprawls, Starlee and her team capture the tender moments of human connection that make me love this show so much. We also get to see the joy that can be found when we explore the world with curiosity. 

My favorite moments in this final Mystery Show episode come when Starlee goes searching for the illustrator of the Kotter lunchbox, who turned out to be an unassuming artist, craftsman, and former professional wrestler named Elmer Lenhardt. Elmer was a longtime artist at Aladdin Industries. According to Starlee: “Aladdin made lunchboxes, lots of them. If you were a child before you were an adult and you relied on food for sustenance, chances are good that you carried a lunchbox illustrated by Elmer.” 

After doing a bit of my own sleuthing, I found that Aladdin produced around 550 lunchboxes from 1952-1989. Elmer worked at Aladdin from 1960-1985, making him one of the company’s longest tenured and most prolific lunchbox artists. I didn’t start carrying a lunchbox until about 1992, so I don’t think that I ever owned a lunchbox illustrated by Elmer, but I appreciate the kind of wry sense of humor that led Elmer to draw a scene like this one into a lunchbox meant for kids.

Starlee tries to reach out to Elmer, but sadly Elmer is dead. And so Starlee starts to “assemble a dossier based on eye witness accounts,” starting with a woman named Beverly. Beverly started working with Elmer in 1976 when she was just 23. Beverly describes Elmer as “very demanding” and “gruff,” but ultimately concludes that “Elmer was a teddy bear.” 

Elmer seems to embody the ideal of taking the world seriously, through his demanding nature, while maintaining the gentleness and playfulness of a teddy bear. Through conversations with Beverly and others Starlee pieces together the mystery, answering both of Jonathan’s questions. I won’t spoil all the twists and turns. It is worth taking the time to listen to the Kotter episode to experience this journey yourself.

But even more than not spoiling the mystery, I don’t want to do a simple play-by-play because this podcast and this essay series is about far more than entertaining mysteries. Mystery Show is about exploring the world, about treating our fellow humans with the earnest curiosity of a child, about pondering the vastness of the universe through the tiniest coincidences. 

Final Bell

Writing this six-part essay series has been one of the highlights of my year, bringing me closer to my partner, my parents, and strangers who have given me the gift of their time. So as we wrap up I want to try and make you feel a bit of what I have felt writing this series—a warmth radiating from my gut, chills dotting my arms, a wide smile punctuated by the occasional joyful tear, escaping from my eyes into the world. 

Revisiting Mystery Show has been joyous and transformative for me, but it hasn’t always been easy. Some essays, like the first, flowed effortlessly, while others, like this one, took odd shapes, causing periods of unease or frustration when I couldn’t quite patch everything together. But in each of these essays I have relied on a key element, an element that is at the core of Mystery Show—caring. 

Caring can mean many things, but in this particular context what I mean by caring is giving a shit. Giving a shit is hard. Unbearably hard at times. It is so much easier to detach from the world, to hide behind irony, cynicism, and self-deprecation. My own particular route out of that trap was to recognize that my cynical armor was actually just an attempt to protect myself from my own uncertainty, insecurity, and fear. But falling back into the false sense of security that lurks behind the veil of ironic detachment still remains alluring. Writing this series and caring enough about it to put everything I have into each essay provided a constant reminder that the path to becoming a person is to embrace the difficulty of life. 

And so let me wrap up this series by returning to my favorite moment in our last Mystery Show case, when Beverly relays a story about Elmer. It is worth going and listening to Beverly tell the story in her own voice, but even reading the words I think the power comes through.

‘Don't run away from something you are good at. Go at it, learn it.’ Like when I was building my house, I said ‘Elmer I need to build a retaining wall.’ So Elmer brought me in a book how to lay block and brick. And so then I studied how to lay brick. One night my dad was calling me about midnight saying ‘what are you doing, Bev?’ And I said ‘I am pouring footing for my retaining wall.’ And he went ‘you are doing what.’ My father went through World War II, the man was the head of the household, and I never resented my father for that it is just that is the way he was brought up. But when Elmer came along in my life he convinced me there wasn't anything I couldn't do.

That final message—to run towards the hard things in life—is one that I both firmly believe and also often lose sight of. Listening to the episode, I felt how much of an impact Elmer had on Beverly’s life by helping her see the ability that she had laying dormant within her. It also made me reflect on my own dormant abilities. About the people in my life—from my partner to my parents to my friends and even strangers—who have put a mirror in front of my face and said, simply, look at the wonder that lurks within. 

Looking—carefully, honestly, and earnestly—in the world’s mirror is terrifying. After all, the reality of our world, such as it is, lives somewhere in the tension between what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can’t yet fathom. This is the world where you and I live and the world that Mystery Show explores. Somehow, despite re-listening to each of Mystery Show’s six episodes between three and five times over these past couple of months, I didn’t actually recognize that Mystery Show is also about these big mysteries until this essay. The clue that I’d overlooked for months (or years really, dating back to my initial time listening in 2015) was right there in the theme song, “Those Mysteries,” by the band Sparks.

The song starts with these four lines:

Why is there time?

Why is there space?

Why are there dogs and cats and trees and the human race?

And why am I here and not over there?

Mystery Show didn’t bring me any closer to answering these ancient mysteries, but it did, over and over again, make me feel alive, joyful, and whole. Let yourself be seen in Mystery Show’s reflection and you will find that you too are whole.