handling unparseable remoting response

I had an update call to a record that was already in an approval process.  The response contains [] and : in a few places, and the JSON.parse() couldn't.  I'm guessing that's not the only unparseable scenario.
ahhh---it was an argument on the previous version but now seems to be gone.  We're in the process of doing that migration, sorry for the crap code.

I'm guessing 97 and 99 can go--I'll send a new PR and close this one once that's done and tested properly.