Murdoch Mysteries: Difference between revisions

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[[File:murdoch-mysteries_season-four_announced_2033.jpg|frame|This '''is''' your grandfather's ''[[CSI]]''.]]

 

{{quote|"Perhaps someday, everybody will be as fascinated with pathologists and police detectives."|Detective William Murdoch }}

 

 

 

The series was preceded by a trilogy of [[Made for TV Movie|TV movies]] in 2004, which were more direct adaptations of the ''Murdoch Mysteries'' novels. With Peter Outerbridge as Murdoch, [[Keeley Hawes]] as Dr Ogden and [[Colm Meaney]] as Inspector Brackenreid. Overall much darker and gritty than the TV series.

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* [[Abusive Parents]]: Murdoch's father is an abusive alcoholic {{spoiler|(or so Murdoch thinks, he was never abusive)}}; after his mother's death, Murdoch spent the rest of his childhood in an orphanage.

* [[Amoral Attorney]]: The Crown Prosecutor in "The Hangman", who does everything to make sure the defendant gets hanged, even the obviously innocent ones.

* [[Asshole Victim]]: A few, but especially the victim in Me, Myself, and Murdoch. {{spoiler|The prime suspect for his murder is his daughter, who has multiple personalities that resulted from her seeing her father hack up her mother with an ax, when she was a child. The man got another woman to marry him and pose as his original wife, and throughout the years he's been abusing his daughter and locking her up in the basement where he dismembered her mom. The murderer is his stepson from his first wife, who ran away as a kid and came back years later disguised as a farmhand, who was suspicious of why another woman was posing as his mother, and axed his stepfather to death}}.

** {{spoiler|Inspector Brackenreid even said he would do his best to avert the death penalty for the stepson, saying about his stepfather, "Bastard bloody deserved it"}}.

* [[The Bad Guy Wins]]: Most notably in {{spoiler|''Belly Speaker'', in which the [[Creepy Doll|puppet-wielding]] suspect [[Obfuscating Insanity|deceives]] ''everyone'' (including Murdoch) and ultimately escapes justice. There is no indication that he was ever caught afterwards. However, given his reasons for doing so and the truth later coming out about his twin brother, it's hard to not feel even a bit [[Sympathetic Murderer|sympathetic]].}}

* [[Beta Couple]]: Constable Crabtree and Dr. Grace seem to be heading in this direction in Season 5.

* [[Big Bad]]: {{spoiler|Sally Pendrick}} in Season 3.

* [[California Doubling]]: Set in Toronto, filmed in Cambridge, Ontario as none of the streets of modern Toronto looks like 1890s Toronto.

* [[The Cameo]]: By [[Big Name Fan]] Stephen Harper, the ''Prime Minister of Canada''.

* [[Cannot Spit It Out]]: It's pretty clear to anyone that Murdoch likes Dr. Ogden, but he cannot get himself to say it.

* [[Fake Nationality]]: Canadian Dr. Ogden is played by Australian actress Helene Joy.

* [[Five-Man Band]]:

** [[The Lancer]]: George

** [[The Big Guy]]: Inspector Brackenreid

* [[Gorgeous Period Dress]]: Lots of this, particularly in any scene where the characters dress up formally. The basic style of dress and hair seems to be early 1890's, with excursions into the 1900's (see the [[Anachronism Stew]] entry above).

* [[Hey, It's That Guy!]]: [[Alias (TV series)|Jack Bristow]] turns up in the series four premiere as Murdoch's retired predecessor.

* [[Historical In-Joke]]: Murdoch mentions the phrase "[[Call of the Wild]]" to Jack London.

* [[Hot Scoop]]: Ruby Ogden. Her first appearance on the show involves her playing magician's assistant to Harry Houdini.

* [[Hospital Hottie]]: Subverted with Doctor Ogden, who works in a morgue. Also played straight in the sense that the show is set well before doctors were wearing scrubs; she performs her duties in [[Gorgeous Period Dress]].

* [[Idiosyncratic Episode Naming]]: The writers are quite fond of using anachronistically modern expressions for episode names

** The one about a man who was murdered on an elevator is called aptly [[Spinal Tap|"This one goes up to eleven".]]

** The episode where Murdoch wakes up to find himself in the wrong country, with no memory of how he got there and everyone trying to kill him is of course, named "[[The Bourne Identity|The Murdoch Identity]]" (the episode even included a character called Treadstone).

* [[Intrepid Reporter]]: Paddy Glynn frequently pops up at the Toronto Constabulary during the fourth season looking for a [[Going for the Big Scoop|Big Scoop]] and usually irritating Inspector Brackenreid in the process. {{spoiler|In the penultimate episode of the season, he's unmasked as the Kissing Bandit, a thief who has been [[Just Like Robin Hood|robbing banks and giving the money to an orphanage]] and [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|kissing women during the robberies]]. He tells Murdoch and Brackenreid that he did it to ''make'' the news instead of just reporting on it.}}

* [[It's Personal]]: For Inspector Brackenreid, when his son is kidnapped and held for ransom.

** In one episode Crabtree explains how he used tracing paper to follow a telephone line, and find out where the call came from. Nobody's interested.

** Even Murdoch gets in on the game, when he scoffs at Crabtree's idea of a board game (basically, ''Clue'').

* [[Short Run in Peru]]: Despite being a Canadian-produced series, new episodes air much earlier in the UK.

* [[Slow-Loading Internet Image]]: Played with, for one case, Murdoch needed a photograph of a kidnapped woman, but the closest photo is in Paris, France. So Murdoch had the Paris police overlay a grid on the photo, assign a number to the colour in each grid square, then telegraph the number to Toronto (i.e. a jury-rigged fax). The final "paint-by-number" job took 2 days to do, slowing yielding more clues until the case was solved, when the entire painting was done.

* [[Spin-Off]]: 'The Curse of the Lost Pharaohs', a 13 part web series based on the mystery novel Crabtree's written.

* [[Steampunk]]: A couple of episodes toy with this, before the Season 3 finale goes full-tilt into it with {{spoiler|Tesla's microwave death ray}}.

* [[Sweet Polly Oliver]]: A woman basketball team's worth. And back then, cross dressing was considered quite scandalous.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Canadian Series]]

[[Category:Crime and Punishment Series]]

[[Category:TV Series]]