Mysteries: Plan Versus Reality

"Does anyone have a plan like ours?"

Dr. Sloan doesn't pretend to be dumb. His intelligence is a given (doctors honestly aren't any more intelligent than other people but they are perceived that way). 

Most importantly, like many detectives, Dr. Sloan is a realist. He takes people and things as they are. He doesn't imagine conspiracies and murder until he is forced to imagine them. 

Consequently, he approaches a crime with few preconceptions. He isn't easily fooled because he isn't playing by a rule book to begin with. 

One of my favorite Diagnosis Murder episodes, "Till Death Do Us Part," starts with the murderers--a spoiled daughter and her clueless fiance--imagining the murder they have planned. They imagine themselves as slick operators who impress the wedding guests at their upcoming nuptials. They imagine the victim, the father, as a jerk. They imagine his second wife, the woman they intend to frame, as snide. They imagine the murder going off without a hitch as the detectives find all the clues they planted.

The episode then switches to the actual day. The couple are vain, pompous, disorganized, and kind of stupid. The father is kindly. The stepmother smooths things over. The two murderers keep making mistakes. Items that were supposed to be in certain places get lost. The dog laps up part of the poison. The maid vacuums. And so on.

 

The imagined plan extends to the murderers' self-delusions. The groom resents his father-in-law's rejection of his completely ridiculous business proposals. The bride asks her stepmother to fetch nail polish that is already sitting on her vanity (she never bothered to check the set-up). They don't see their own arrests coming because they believe so thoroughly in their smug version of reality. 

Dr. Sloan naturally finds out the truth. He was never party to the story the murderers invented about themselves. What he sees is not what they wish to impose on others' perceptions but what they actually did. He deals in reality.