Question One: At the beginning of the semester I wrote in my personal information handout that I felt that what set the mystery genre apart from all other genres was its ability to hold the reader /watcher with bated breath wanting more information. Those mysteries are unpredictable, forcing the reader/watcher to stay until the end because they have to know the ending. I still think so, but my understanding of this concept has certainly evolved and refined. First, the concept of keeping the audience on the edge of their seats wanting more is driven by epistemic sequence. This concept, described by Talmy, is the idea of ​​“who knows what when” and is very crucial to the mystery genre and to keeping the audience wanting more (Talmy, 473; PDF 12). We see an epistemic sequence in almost every mystery story, Talmy describes epistemic structure as a “system by which the author takes narrative actions such as creating a mystery, leaving clues and false leads, introducing a succession of apparent explanations that do not prove, and putting off the explanations until the final resolution” (473; PDF 12). This is clearly seen in the first two episodes of Harper's Island that we watched in class. "Who knows what and when" is absolutely essential to keep the plot alive and above all to attract the viewer. As an audience at home we see more than the characters on the show see and that's what keeps us occupied. In the case of Harper's Island, after the first two episodes we know who was killed and where, while the characters have no idea. This is incredibly important for the viewer playing the detective and keeps us on the edge of our seats. It helps us think: who will find... middle of paper... only Sherlock Holmes who knows the word “Rache” in German means revenge and only Holmes has the Mormon knowledge that helps him solve the case (Conan-Doyle ). In The Murders in the Rue Morgue only Dupin manages to understand that not all the windows are nailed up and that the hair found is certainly not human hair and the language that the neighbors heard was not a language at all. Dupin, the detective, is the only person who realizes that the knot was a sailor's knot and is able to conclude that an orangutan committed the murders by accident because it was copying its owner, a sailor (Poe). century, I learned that the detective is the central character of the mystery genre, without them the story could not be told. Without the detective the blanks would not be filled and the audience would never find a solution.