Pretty predictably, “ABC’s ‘Quantico’ gets the Mormons all wrong”

Quite by chance, I actually caught a few minutes of the first episode of Quantico, in re-run.  I saw what happened to the Mormon character, though I wasn’t quite as irritated by it as advance notice had suggested that I, as a Mormon, might be.  (I mean, I don’t think it’s altogether impossible that a returned missionary could have some dark secret to hide and, eventually, trying to protect it and ridden by guilt, turn into a homicidal loon.  After all, as my Malevolent Stalker would point out, look at me.)

Of course, I wondered how he could have done all of those things on his mission without his companion noticing.  But non-Mormon writers rarely get the companion thing right.  Consider, for example, the opening moments of the smash Book of Mormon musical, in which Elders Price and Cunningham are at the Missionary Training Center.  Elder Cunningham is hoping to be assigned to Orlando, Florida.  Instead, though, the two are paired as companions and sent from the MTC to Uganda.

The nuances are just a bit off, wouldn’t you say?

But that’s nothing compared with the sloppy research of some other writers.  I recall looking at one mystery novel several years ago — I never read it, and have long since forgotten both title and author — in which the heroine, looking at the Salt Lake Temple, was trying to figure out exactly why the building left her with such a creepy feeling.  And then it dawned on her:  It had no windows!  It’s like a solid block of granite!

Speaking of the Salt Lake Temple, I missed the part in Quantico, alas!, about the wedding reception held there.  That would have been very enjoyable.  I wish my wife and I had known about the possibility of reserving the temple for receptions back when we were planning our wedding!

Novelists and screenwriters rarely get the Mormons right.  (Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 A Study in Scarlet, in which he introduces a detective named Sherlock Holmes, wasn’t the first grossly inaccurate representation, and it certainly hasn’t been the last.)

One of my favorites is a 1970 novel by “Henry Sutton” (David Slavitt), entitled Vector.  I came across it on my mission in Switzerland, of all things.  It’s been literally decades since I’ve seen the thing — I really need to look at it again — but, as I recall, a virus has been mysteriously released upon a small town in the desert west of Salt Lake City (called “Tarsus,” I think).  People are dying in droves, but there’s a government cover-up.  The hero, a biologist from (natch!) outside Utah, is trying to find out what’s going on.  Unfortunately, though, as his contacts in Salt Lake explain to him, the people of Tarsus belong to a religious group called “Mormons.”  And Mormons don’t cotton to outsiders.  So that complicates the hero’s task considerably.

Another one from many, many years ago:  For reasons that I no longer remember, a friend and I had dinner with Peter Bart just after his 1981 novel Thy Kingdom Come appeared.  He was genuinely puzzled as to why Mormons had, almost universally, panned his story.  I tried to explain that he got us wrong, time after time after time.  He just hadn’t understood what it’s like to be a Mormon.  For example, a crucial element of the plot (as I remember it nearly four decades later) revolves around an affair between the Church’s General Relief Society President and the official spokesman for the First Presidency.  I recall telling Bart that his depiction was essentially impossible.  That those two Church officers could have an affair, of course, was conceivable, if unlikely — humans are flawed — but that they could simultaneously be (a) deeply devout, believing, orthodox, and utterly sincere members of the Church and (b) completely without any sense of guilt or remorse or hesitation about their extramarital liaison was, to me, unthinkable and wildly implausible.  And that was just one of many problems.

Oh well.