Insofar as The Twin Sister's Double series both flaunts and undermines the logic of scientific seriality as a dominant organizing principle in post-Enlightenment modernity, it emblematizes the central conceit of what I call the mystery-crime serial, arguably the most prolific genre in American serial film production between 1914 and 1924. Unexamined quality distinctions haunt his discussion, a hesitation one can hear in his description of the serial-queen melodrama as "an extraordinarily formulaic product"; this "bare-bones narrative structure-the repeated capture and recapture of the weenie, along with the entrapment and liberation of the heroine-afforded a sufficiently simple, predictable, and extensible framework on which to hang a series of thrills over fifteen weeks."