Sorry, Mama san -
- I did warn you it was a literary reference.
It's a quote from Anton Chekhov, specifically, "If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last."
- - - Anton Chekhov (advice to a novice playwright)
In other words, if you put something into a story and you make a point of pointing it out in the "first act" or the first few pages of a story, you have to use it by the time you get to the end.
In HPD, they make a big to-do about this mastermind criminal in the first few minutes of the film, who then disappears like he never existed, and then just turns up as a footnote at the end of the movie - it's like the quote - the gun - the mastermind criminal - wasn't used at all. Instead, the story took a complete left turn into something else.
This is a kind of writer's shorthand I engage in with my writerly colleagues, and I forget sometimes that not everyone is au courant with the references.
-TD, in literary mode tonight