Review: 'I Warn You Three Times' - CBS Radio Mystery Theater

This episode, 'I Warn You Three Times', follows the story of a couple who seem to deeply distrust each other, and a journalist who picks up on their strange situation... And it has a splash of the supernatural!

Episode Plot (Spoilers)

A beautiful woman is driving, stops at a red light, and holds up traffic when it turns green. When a police officer drops by to tell her to get driving, she tells him that her husband was just there with her, and that he went round the back to wipe the rear windshield. The only problem is - there is no husband, nobody at all round the back of the car! The police officer tells her to stop holding up traffic, and she tells him she can't drive.

The woman, Hetty, reports her husband, Tom, missing. He shows up at the police station, utterly confused and states that he was certainly not with her in the car. She meets a reporter, Fred, who is interested in her story, and she warns him to stay away from her and Tom because it could be dangerous. Naturally, this only serves to intrigue Fred even more. Hetty keeps warning Fred to keep out of it, emphasizing that she trusts Tom and loves him deeply, but that he can get confused sometimes, and that it isn't the first time he's done this to her. Fred won't let it go, though, and soon ends up talking to Tom, who tells him that his wife is in fact a witch. 

According to Tom, when Hetty gets bored of her current husband, she gets another man to worry over her and her safety, and ultimately has them kill the current husband only to become her new husband. It's what Tom did with her previous husband, and now Fred is going to do it to him. Tom also urges Fred to look into Hetty's past - and tells him that he won't find anything. Naturally, Fred doesn't believe any of this, but he's so confused that he seems to step away from the situation. He asks his connections to look into Hetty's past, anyway, and gets into conversations with his colleagues about whether or not he would be helping Hetty if she wasn't as beautiful as she is.

He receives a phone call from a frightened Hetty at work, and rushes over to find her shaking terribly. She gives him a receipt that states Tom bought himself a revolver, and she's scared. Tom pops up, revolver in hand, seemingly at wit's end with Hetty's witchy ways. A scuffle ensues, and the reporter kills Tom with the gun. As he calls the police to report the incident, they tell him that Hetty's past seems to be a complete blank.

Fred asks a sobbing Hetty who she is. Hetty, no longer sobbing, ominously tells him that she warned him three times. (Well... that's fair, I guess...)

Overall Thoughts and Review 

I like the concept of the sort of black-widow witch character. I think a dangerous woman is often an intriguing character when done correctly, but I wanted to know more about Hetty. The episode is meant to leave you in suspense, to keep her shrouded in mystery, but I'm not entirely frightened of Hetty by the end of it. Maybe it's because I don't understand why everyone seems to have such a hard time getting rid of her (as if she's impossible to kill?). 

I suppose Hetty is supposed to be a Circe-type character, which is interesting in and of itself as well. While I wish there was more to this episode - that we could get just one step closer to Hetty's true identity, her true self - I'm also starting to understand that (apart from time constraints on the episodes) this radio series focuses a lot on trying to find the creepy in the domestic and familiar, and I suppose they did do that with this episode, too.

But it certainly left me with lots to think about!