Chekhov’s Gun in a Doll’s House

If you look up the idea of Chekhov’s Gun, you read about how a writer should avoid making false promises and should not write checks the story never cashes.

But I think the bigger mistake would be more like having pennies from heaven. I thought of this today when I watched the first episode of Maid on Netflix.

The show involves a character called Alex and her two-year-old daughter Maddy. Alex is in an abusive relationship. One night, Maddy’s father, in a drunk rage, throws a glass, which shatters against the wall. Later, Alex finds shards of glass in Maddy’s hair. It’s the last straw. She leaves in the middle of the night.

Late in the episode Maddy is holding her Little Mermaid doll, which she calls Schmariel, out the car window, making her fly (which I just noticed as I am typing this is full of meaning!) when she accidentally drops it.

Maddy cries and screams for the doll. Alex is rushing to make a ferry. If she doesn’t make it, she will probably lose her job. Despite the risk, Alex turns the car around and goes searching the median of the highway in the dark to try to find the doll.

It’s a heart-rending moment. But it’s made powerful by having been set up earlier. Before this incident, Alex had explained to another character that “It’s an Ariel we got from a Dollar Store, so we call her Schmariel.” It sets up that this doll is important to Maddy, a treasure, maybe even her favorite toy. And anyway, it’s one of the few things Alex and Maddy were able to take when they fled.

So it makes sense that Alex would turn back to look for the doll. Without having been set up that way, it would seem random, out of nowhere, and unbelievable, in the same way it would be unbelievable in another story if the main character suddenly produced a pistol that had never been shown before in the story, like pennies from heaven. If you pay something off without having set it up, you’re using counterfeit money.

Had the writer come up with some other reason to delay Alex getting to the ferry, I could have let go the earlier conversation about the doll. But it would not have worked the other way around.

I suppose this is taken as a given in the Chekhov’s Gun principle, which is the admonition against setting up something and not paying it off. But I had not really thought about approaching it from the back end before.

Photo from Netflix