Title: The Poison Death
Air date: January 30, 1938
Plot summary: A madman claiming to be The Shadow has terrorized the city with a poisoning campaign. He writes the mayor and, identifying himself as The Shadow, demands that he now be paid for all the good deeds he's done for the city. He wants $100,000, or he will keep on poisoning people.
Naturally this draws the attention of Lamont Cranston. Lamont's intuition pings when the faux-Shadow, who has been poisoning at random, switches to making a specific threat: he says he will poison Commissioner Brinkley of the Sanitation Department. He does, and Brinkley dies, but Lamont thinks this must mean that the poisoner knows Brinkley personally. Lamont then has a "Eureka!" Moment, where he considers the random nature of the poisonings in various apartment buildings and realizes that someone must be poisoning the water, and who better to do that than someone from the Sanitation Department, reading a water meter?
So Lamont and Margo Lane break in to the Sanitation Department, looking for the typewriter used to write the letter to the newspaper, which has distinctive misaligned E's and blurry A's. They succeed in finding the typewriter—and they they realize that someone is still in the building. Lamont decides that now it's time for The Shadow to find the fake Shadow.
Tropes:
- Disney Villain Death: Gerber dies by falling off the water tower, after unsuccessfully trying to take The Shadow with him.
- Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: Newspaper vendors hawking stories of the faux Shadow's poisoning campaign, which irritates Lamont Cranston.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: Lamont deduces that someone must be poisoning water supplies. Who could monkey around with the water to a home or an apartment complex without being noticed? A man from the Sanitation Department reading the meter, of course.
- Laughing Mad: Gerber laughs and giggles in a highly disturbed manner as he tells The Shadow that he killed Brinkley in order to take his job, and that now he's going to poison a water tower that supplies an upper-class neighborhood, just for the sake of killing rich folks.
- Narrating the Obvious: This trope is leaned on more than usual in this episode, like the whole dialogue between The Shadow and Gerber as The Shadow chases Gerber up the water tower. Gerber feels compelled to do stuff like narrate how he's pulling the stopper out of a bottle of poison or how he's going to shoot the lock on the access lid.
- Police Are Useless: One would think that the cops would have taken the initiative to search the Sanitation Department building and look at Brinkley's coworkers. Nope.
- Rooftop Confrontation: The climax of the episode comes when The Shadow confronts Gerber atop a high water tower, that Gerber wants to dose with poison.
- Water Source Tampering: Lamont deduces that the poisonings must be from someone tampering with the water supplies to apartment buildings. At the end he defeats the gad guy, Gerber, who was trying to dump poison into a water tower.
- Western Terrorists: A.D. Gerber, Chief Chemist for the sanitation department, who is on a campaign of terrorism partly for money, partly for personal reasons (he resents Commissioner Brinkley for getting a job that he wanted, and partly For the Evulz.
