The prince-and-pauper plot, delivered at the pace of a runaway train, sees Elena whisked away from serfdom and starvation, swapping lives with aristocratic Ekaterina.
The catch is that Broadway theater is exposed as a heterosexual male plot, delivering a very specific sexual subliminal message to the women in the audience.
Because his storylines originated in a weekly newspaper column, he was able to take the Dickensian formula of a labyrinthine plot, delivered in neatly topped and tailed chapters, and make it shorter, lighter - and, crucially, free it from the responsibility of ever having to end.
It is, of course, at this late point in the film that a cosmic threat and a big punch-up are shoehorned into the plot, delivering precisely the sort of action extravaganza that audiences (and studios) expect in a big-budget Marvel adaptation, while equally marking it as gratuitous, tacked-on, pathetically empty spectacle.
Meloy's restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible.
The DVH is used ubiquitously and plots delivered dose on the x-axis and percent volume of the structure of interest on the y-axis.
One plot quirk delivers them back to their 80s youth.
From the debut novel, The Memory Game, Nicci French has shown a strong grasp of the requirements of the genre: the need to combine convincing characterisation with a plot that delivers the requisite number of thrills and twists.
This information, and everything else about the plot, is delivered as breathless, overlapping babble rather than through clear exposition.
The entire plot is delivered, in sequence and in Hemingway's words, but with many cuts along the way.
