A stairwell on campus is closed for painting, and when I noticed the yellow “CAUTION” tape blocking off the doorway, I suddenly thought about Season 3 of “Only Murders in the Building.”

Season 3, you may remember, is the storyline where the gang puts on a horror-musical titled Death Rattle Dazzle!, and former child star Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd), who as it turns out has a really sad backstory, gets pushed down the open elevator shaft by accident yet on purpose by (well, I won’t tell, in case you haven’t seen it and therefore don’t remember 🙂 ).

WHY was that elevator shaft so dangerously exposed in the first place? Yes, maintenance work was being done. But honestly, an “X” of yellow tape strung across the gaping, hungry maw of an open elevator shaft seems a bit insubstantial from a safety perspective.

I sort of questioned that deficiency the first time I saw the episode, but then I conveniently forgot (as the show’s makers surely intended) that any decent contractor would have covered up that elevator shaft opening with some plywood or other difficult-to-get-past barrier. In real life, the minute I saw something so potentially life-threatening, I would have immediately contacted the board president (whoever it was after Bunny was murdered in Season 2) to get proper safety measures put in place.

So why didn’t our amateur sleuths also notice the danger and do something about it?

Actually, they did notice. But they were too busy talking about other things and did not pay heed. I suppose this may have been a way to fool us into likewise noticing but paying no heed—because our discounting/forgetting of such an egregious safety hazard was, of course, absolutely necessary for the murder plot to make any sense.

Maybe that’s the magic of “Only Murders.” After a season ends, I start looking back and nitpicking, noticing all the plot holes. But during its run of original episodes, the show’s premise, its delightful cast, and the way its plot unfolds with a nearly perfect blend of comedy, pathos, and intrigue—they all come together in a way that keeps me completely enthralled.

This kind of magic is what English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan”) describes as:

that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith

The “X” of yellow tape is a metaphorical warning to me as an aspiring novelist not to undermine the “poetic faith” and “willing suspension of disbelief” that readers bring to a book. Too many inadequately safeguarded elevator shafts probably can’t overcome a clever premise for long, and once the enchantment is broken, and you can see the string and Scotch tape cobbling everything together, a story simply loses its ability to transport readers to another world.

And without that, really, what’s even the point?