Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Season 1 Episode 1
So I watched the first episode of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. It was good. Predictable as hell--we'll get to that--but it kept me entertained for an hour. The visuals were lovely. The story was 1000% better than the tedious lump that comprises Kindle's sample of the beginning of Cocaine Blues, the first book in the series.
The story opens outside of a place that I immediately thought of as "Downton Abbey-lite." A woman named Alice is leaving, and a maid named Dot is running after her. Alice seems eager to leave. Dot gives her a small box of...something. (I thought it was a lump of whitish powder. mctabby says that it was baby booties. This should give you an idea of how good my eyesight is.) Alice refuses the box, saying she won't need it.
While the women are talking outside, a balding, fiftyish man chokes to death in the upstairs bathroom. I thought that he had overdosed on the titular cocaine. Like the first book of the series, this episode is called "Cocaine Blues."
So Phryne Fisher gets off a ship in what I knew to be somewhere in Australia looking absolutely elegant, which is easy when you have a porter with a dolly wheeling all of your immense suitcases after you. She's met by a female friend, Doctor MacMillan, who is wearing what I think is a trilby hat, a waistcoat over a long-sleeved white shirt, and a pair of plaid tweed trousers. Let's see--female doctor in the 1920s, wears trousers...yeah, she has to be Phryne's lesbian friend that I've heard about.
After a conversation in Phryne's hotel room to establish a) how her name is pronounced (FRY-nee), b) why she came to Australia (to get away from her parents and despite the fact that, to quote Dr. Mac, "you can't bring Janey back") and c) that she has a habit of getting into trouble, Phryne gets an invitation to a fancy party. Like, within five to ten minutes of getting to her hotel room. And she just takes this as a matter of course.
Meanwhile, I was wondering how anyone knew what hotel she was at, never mind what room, since she literally just arrived in the country. I was sure that the party was going to be a hideous trap, possibly involving Phryne's dead lover Janey.
It wasn't. And it didn't.
Phryne gets to Downton Abbey-lite and learns from Dot the Maid that the party has been called off because of "a tragedy in the family." Seems the guy we saw in the bathroom--whose name is John Andrews--is dead. John, his wife Lydia and Phryne's Aunt Prudence were throwing the party.
Phryne manages to wangle her way into the Andrews' house. Lydia is as pale as if she's been eating arsenic and red-eyed in the bargain. Um...the police just removed the body, Lydia. We saw them leaving with it. Shouldn't you be in shock or denial instead of looking as if you've been weeping for hours on end?
When the police ask Lydia to answer a few questions (because they already know that Andrews died of poison), Phryne takes advantage of the opportunity to suss out the crime scene. She doesn't do it very well, since all she does is tell the constable blocking the stairs that she absolutely has to go to the bathroom. The constable is not very bright and doesn't tell her that a house this size probably has more than one toilet. Instead he gets flustered and says that he has to go ask the inspector what to do, and once he leaves his post, Phryne high-tails it to the upstairs loo. Of course, she conveniently has long white gloves on, so when she filches something that looks like pink saccharine packets from a bathroom cabinet, she doesn't leave any fingerprints.
I thought that the pink packets probably contained either powdered toothpaste or the 1920s equivalent of Excedrin. I really couldn't see why Phryne assumed that was the poison.
And here come the cops, banging on the door of the loo. The inspector, whose name is Jack Robinson (really? REALLY?), chews out Phryne thoroughly for possibly contaminating the crime scene. Since he reprimanded her, is moderately attractive and about the same age as she is, we now know that he is the future love interest.
I yawned at this. I am so fucking TIRED of male love interests telling women what to do.
Change of scene! Alice is bundled into a cab. The driver (Bert, the older of the two) and his friend (Cec, the muscle) realize that Alice is bleeding very badly. Bert catches a glimpse of a man watching the cab before he and Cec take Alice to the hospital.
Phryne takes the stolen pink packets to Dr. Mac. Dr. Mac doesn't bother to analyze the packets, though. They both taste the powder instead. According to them, it's cocaine. Well, no surprise there, given the episode's title. But I would prefer it if Dr. Mac would use her scientific training. It's not as if I can break down every single ingredient in my food just by tasting it.
Also, from what I can tell, selling cocaine without a prescription was made illegal in the 1920s in Australia. But Australia's use of cocaine in the 1920s and 1930s? Highest in the world. So maybe people weren't being arrested for possession or for use. Not then, anyway.
And remember, Andrews died of what the police think is poison. Wouldn't you think that Phryne and Mac would be careful about putting anything from the Andrews' home in their mouths?
Well, right after they finish sampling the cocaine, Dr. Mac gets summoned to the Women's Hospital--ah, that pins things down a bit; they're in Melbourne--for an emergency operation. It's Alice. When Dr. Mac gets to the hospital, she looks Alice over and tells Phryne, in euphemistic language, that Alice is suffering from a botched abortion. Her expression adds that Alice may not live.
Cabbie Bert says that he can identify at least one man who was interested in what happened to Alice, so Phryne takes him to the police station. After looking through some photos, Bert I.D.s the man's photo; he's known as "Butcher George," and apparently he's an absolutely horrendous back-alley abortionist. Inspector Jack walks in on this and, after a slanging session to establish that he doesn't like Bert for being a communist, says that even if Butcher George was delivered to the police wrapped up in brown paper and string, the cops couldn't arrest him. Bert makes some Tumblresque comments about cops not helping the working class--and I have to say I agreed with him--but Inspector Jack and Phryne explain that the penalty for obtaining an abortion in Australia is 10 to 20 years. (Hmmm. Why do you know that, Phryne?) Obviously, no one alive is going to say a word if it puts them in prison, and the dead can't testify as to who did the butchering.
What follows is jumbled in my mind. I'm not sure what came first. I think that Alice woke up and told Phryne (WHY?) where she'd been taken. She was in the back of a truck, so she didn't see the location, but she remembers a smell like a bakery and the door to the abortionist's being green.
Then there's a party to cheer up Lydia. Wouldn't want a sick woman mourning because her husband died. I mean, GAWD.
Three things happen at the party: a) Phryne is introduced to Madame Breda, who runs a Turkish bath palace (which, like many 1980s' massage parlors, is suspected of being a brothel); b) Dot the Maid is arrested on suspicion of having poisoned John Andrews, and Phryne gives her the name of a woman (lawyer, presumably) who could help her (how does she KNOW all these people??); c) Phryne reunites with a Franco-Russian dancer named Sasha whom she met in Paris. Sasha charms her completely and then steals her diamond earrings to buy cocaine in what looks like a pawnshop in an alley somewhere. Phryne follows on foot, because she is an idiot, and is just in time to see Sasha get beat up and shot. She watches him hide from the two guys after him, and then steps in front of his hiding place and disguises herself as a streetwalker by...speaking in a slightly deeper voice and taking off her fur-trimmed coat. I facepalmed at this. I really did. And the hitmen's eagerness to trust a random streetwalker they didn't know made me do so a second time.
Phryne takes Sasha the thief back to her hotel room and patches him up, because of course she knows how to extract bullets. Sasha admits that he stole her earrings to buy cocaine, and he wanted to buy the cocaine because he wants to find and kill the "King of Snow." Exactly why he thinks that the drug kingpin would be selling coke in a pawnshop, I don't know. I also don't know why he believes that the dealers in the pawnshop would have a hotline to their boss. Apparently Sasha is pretty but dumb. As for Phryne, she's less concerned about Sasha than she is about all the blood she got on her new evening dress.
We now take a break from...well, reality...for Phryne to visit a guy in prison. His name, though it's not revealed in the episode, is Murdoch Foyle. He looks like an older version of Mikkelson's Hannibal Lecter, only wearier and less slimy. What he's in prison for, I don't know, but Phryne believes that he's responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of her sister Janey. Foyle says that he didn't kill Janey, that he is not guilty of the crime Phryne wants him to be guilty of, and that he's never confessed to this crime. So, basically, "GET OFF MY BACK." Also, he's due to be released soon. Infuriated, Phryne tells him that she's here to see to it that he NEVER gets out. Foyle just sighs and says nothing.
Phryne gets back to her hotel room and finds Dot waiting for her. (I'm not clear on how Dot got in.) She wanted to thank Phryne for the woman lawyer (who seems to have gotten all charges dropped) and managed to mend Phryne's silk stockings and get the blood out of her designer gown while she was waiting. Dot doesn't want to go back to the Andrews' residence; apparently Andrews had very active hands and Lydia Andrews is NOT pleasant to the staff. But the biggest problem Dot has is a fear of electrical appliances. She's a very trusting Catholic girl, and her priest is a Luddite who has convinced her that every time an appliance is turned on, an electrical bolt shoots through the molten center of the world and that, eventually, this will make the world blow up. Phryne offers Dot a job on the spot and tells her that the only electrical appliance she'll have to deal with is the telephone. Dot isn't thrilled at the notion of touching it, but it's one electrical item instead of many, so she agrees.
Next Phryne pulls something I consider unforgivable. Having figured out by now that Madame Breda is into prostitution, cocaine distribution and back-alley abortions, Phryne gets naive little Dot to contact Madame Breda and tell her that she (Dot) needs an abortion. Phryne figures this will be believable since Andrews knocked up Alice, so why not Dot as well?
Dot is given directions to be at a certain corner early the next morning wearing a red rose. Phryne is with Bert and Cec in Bert's cab, watching all this. By now I was convinced that the title should have been "Baby Blues." The cocaine seemed incidental.
This plan goes about as well as you'd expect. Of course the bad guys show up and of course Bert's cab stalls just long enough for Phryne and her minions to almost lose sight of the truck Dot's in, and of course they have to manuever through narrow alleys, and of course Butcher George is a complete sadist who wants to feel Dot up before using his antique, dull and rusty tools on her, and of course Dot panics and blows her own cover, and of course Phyrne and her minions hear Dot screaming and burst through the door just in the nick of time. Everything happened predictably, right down to Dot telling Phryne with shining eyes that she'd never been in so much danger in her whole life. And Butcher George is arrested because Cec is willing to testify to everything he overheard George say to Dot. Through a solid wooden door. Yeah, that's not going to be a charge that a first-year law student could get dismissed. I'm pretty sure that talking about abortion wasn't a crime, and Dot wasn't aborted or even hurt. I'm sure he intended to kill her, but there isn't any evidence of that. The only crime there IS evidence for is assault; Cec knocked out Butcher George, who wasn't menacing him in any way, with one punch.
Meanwhile, Sasha is still insisting that he wants to meet the King of Snow, because getting shot and almost murdered wasn't enough. He's told to come to Madame Breda's Turkish Bath Palace, that night and, because the plot says so, Phryne goes with him, after telling Dot to call the police station at midnight if she isn't back by then. Yes, please rely on the girl with the electricity phobia to use an ELECTRICAL APPLIANCE.
Once Sasha and Phryne arrive at Madame Breda's, it is revealed that the King of Snow is actually a Snow Queen--Lydia Andrews. After monologuing about how she poisoned her husband (for wanting to get out of the drug business) and how she built an empire all by herself, Lydia orders Phryne and Sasha stripped and locked in a sauna to cook to death.
(This is not really the greatest of villain plans, because some people do stuff like this for fun. Until 2010, the Finns had a World Sauna Championship in which the idea was to see how long you could sit in a sauna before succumbing to heat stroke.)
It doesn't take long before Sasha passes out. Phryne finds a bobby pin and tries to pick the sauna door's lock, but this doesn't work. Meanwhile, Dot is home, staring at the telephone as if it's about to morph into a black mamba.
Bert storms into the police station and tries telling Inspector Jack that Phryne is in trouble. Jack doesn't believe a word and thinks that Bert is talking about "a commo friend of [his]." I honestly can't blame Jack. I mean, Phryne is a rich girl who's the daughter of a lord. With her wealth and social position, she's everything that Communists are supposed to be opposed to.
Phryne finds a vent from which all of the hot steam is pouring. Naturally, she has no trouble removing the metal vent cover with her bare hands. Only when she tries to turn off the steam valve does she realize that she needs something to protect her hands. Of course, she grabs Sasha's towel and turns the valve. Instantly, the steam stops pouring in.
Midnight comes. I just knew that Dot wasn't going to be able to make the call without a horrendous struggle...
...oh. She just picked it up and made the call. No problems using the phone at all. And once she makes the call (which the constable who was guarding the loo picks up), Jack has to admit that Bert is telling the truth. Bert gives him a definite "told you so" glare. Moments later, everyone is arrested, including Lydia. Why everyone else was still hanging around the saunas is beyond me. And wouldn't it have been more fitting for Lydia to inject both of them with enough cocaine to kill an elephant?
Everything wraps up in a neat little coda in a restaurant. The constable and the inspector walk in (how did they know where Phryne was?) just as Phryne, Dot, Bert and Cec--I don't recall Sasha being there, but maybe he was--are toasting Phryne's new business venture. She is going to be a lady detective.
The inspector looks as if he has just bitten into a lemon.
The episode was pretty good. I enjoyed it for what it was, despite facepalming now and then. But it didn't make me want to FIND ALL THE FIC or to write stories in that universe. In this, it affects me rather like Princess Tutu does. Very pretty. Okay story. I like the female lead, despite, in Phyrne's case, her wealth; I'm not going to get into that now because that would be a rant in itself.
But I'm not driven to find out what happens next.
I feel bad about this. There are some fandoms that people connect to that I really, really want to love. (There are also some wildly popular fandoms that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, but we won't get into those right now, either.) But when I want to love a canon and don't, the problem is usually what I think of as lack of immersability--or, if you want to be sillier, no Velveteen Rabbit moment. If I can't immerse myself in the world or in the character's point of view, the characters and the world never quite become real.
And that's where I am with Phryne Fisher. She's entertaining. I'd watch the show again. But not fervently. She's very obviously someone's fantasy--rich, beautiful, healthy, agile, stylish, able to MacGyver herself out of a bad situation, titled, unbelievably lucky, with a poor and tragic past, possessing friends from all walks of life who would risk their lives for her at a moment's notice, and having the cooperation of the police so that she can get away with anything.
I can't picture Phryne Fisher having a problem that she had to work around rather than leap over. Even Janey's death doesn't register with me as an ongoing trauma that's still affecting her in terrible ways but as something for her to angst.
And frankly, I don't have much use for protagonists that don't have actual problems. I tend to ignore rich characters because, as far as I'm concerned, most of the problems in life can be solved by having money. Rich people can buy food, clothing, shelter, transportation, top-notch medical care, top-of-the-line education, technological toys, political and judicial offices, and the favor of the police. That may not be happiness, but it sure looks a lot more joyful than poverty.
So Phryne is not a character to whom I can easily relate. She stirs no emotion in me save disbelief. She is entertaining...but I do not believe in her universe. And I do not believe in her.
And to all of her fans, I am sorry. I wish that I could believe in her. I wish that I could believe in her as fervently as you do.
The story opens outside of a place that I immediately thought of as "Downton Abbey-lite." A woman named Alice is leaving, and a maid named Dot is running after her. Alice seems eager to leave. Dot gives her a small box of...something. (I thought it was a lump of whitish powder. mctabby says that it was baby booties. This should give you an idea of how good my eyesight is.) Alice refuses the box, saying she won't need it.
While the women are talking outside, a balding, fiftyish man chokes to death in the upstairs bathroom. I thought that he had overdosed on the titular cocaine. Like the first book of the series, this episode is called "Cocaine Blues."
So Phryne Fisher gets off a ship in what I knew to be somewhere in Australia looking absolutely elegant, which is easy when you have a porter with a dolly wheeling all of your immense suitcases after you. She's met by a female friend, Doctor MacMillan, who is wearing what I think is a trilby hat, a waistcoat over a long-sleeved white shirt, and a pair of plaid tweed trousers. Let's see--female doctor in the 1920s, wears trousers...yeah, she has to be Phryne's lesbian friend that I've heard about.
After a conversation in Phryne's hotel room to establish a) how her name is pronounced (FRY-nee), b) why she came to Australia (to get away from her parents and despite the fact that, to quote Dr. Mac, "you can't bring Janey back") and c) that she has a habit of getting into trouble, Phryne gets an invitation to a fancy party. Like, within five to ten minutes of getting to her hotel room. And she just takes this as a matter of course.
Meanwhile, I was wondering how anyone knew what hotel she was at, never mind what room, since she literally just arrived in the country. I was sure that the party was going to be a hideous trap, possibly involving Phryne's dead lover Janey.
It wasn't. And it didn't.
Phryne gets to Downton Abbey-lite and learns from Dot the Maid that the party has been called off because of "a tragedy in the family." Seems the guy we saw in the bathroom--whose name is John Andrews--is dead. John, his wife Lydia and Phryne's Aunt Prudence were throwing the party.
Phryne manages to wangle her way into the Andrews' house. Lydia is as pale as if she's been eating arsenic and red-eyed in the bargain. Um...the police just removed the body, Lydia. We saw them leaving with it. Shouldn't you be in shock or denial instead of looking as if you've been weeping for hours on end?
When the police ask Lydia to answer a few questions (because they already know that Andrews died of poison), Phryne takes advantage of the opportunity to suss out the crime scene. She doesn't do it very well, since all she does is tell the constable blocking the stairs that she absolutely has to go to the bathroom. The constable is not very bright and doesn't tell her that a house this size probably has more than one toilet. Instead he gets flustered and says that he has to go ask the inspector what to do, and once he leaves his post, Phryne high-tails it to the upstairs loo. Of course, she conveniently has long white gloves on, so when she filches something that looks like pink saccharine packets from a bathroom cabinet, she doesn't leave any fingerprints.
I thought that the pink packets probably contained either powdered toothpaste or the 1920s equivalent of Excedrin. I really couldn't see why Phryne assumed that was the poison.
And here come the cops, banging on the door of the loo. The inspector, whose name is Jack Robinson (really? REALLY?), chews out Phryne thoroughly for possibly contaminating the crime scene. Since he reprimanded her, is moderately attractive and about the same age as she is, we now know that he is the future love interest.
I yawned at this. I am so fucking TIRED of male love interests telling women what to do.
Change of scene! Alice is bundled into a cab. The driver (Bert, the older of the two) and his friend (Cec, the muscle) realize that Alice is bleeding very badly. Bert catches a glimpse of a man watching the cab before he and Cec take Alice to the hospital.
Phryne takes the stolen pink packets to Dr. Mac. Dr. Mac doesn't bother to analyze the packets, though. They both taste the powder instead. According to them, it's cocaine. Well, no surprise there, given the episode's title. But I would prefer it if Dr. Mac would use her scientific training. It's not as if I can break down every single ingredient in my food just by tasting it.
Also, from what I can tell, selling cocaine without a prescription was made illegal in the 1920s in Australia. But Australia's use of cocaine in the 1920s and 1930s? Highest in the world. So maybe people weren't being arrested for possession or for use. Not then, anyway.
And remember, Andrews died of what the police think is poison. Wouldn't you think that Phryne and Mac would be careful about putting anything from the Andrews' home in their mouths?
Well, right after they finish sampling the cocaine, Dr. Mac gets summoned to the Women's Hospital--ah, that pins things down a bit; they're in Melbourne--for an emergency operation. It's Alice. When Dr. Mac gets to the hospital, she looks Alice over and tells Phryne, in euphemistic language, that Alice is suffering from a botched abortion. Her expression adds that Alice may not live.
Cabbie Bert says that he can identify at least one man who was interested in what happened to Alice, so Phryne takes him to the police station. After looking through some photos, Bert I.D.s the man's photo; he's known as "Butcher George," and apparently he's an absolutely horrendous back-alley abortionist. Inspector Jack walks in on this and, after a slanging session to establish that he doesn't like Bert for being a communist, says that even if Butcher George was delivered to the police wrapped up in brown paper and string, the cops couldn't arrest him. Bert makes some Tumblresque comments about cops not helping the working class--and I have to say I agreed with him--but Inspector Jack and Phryne explain that the penalty for obtaining an abortion in Australia is 10 to 20 years. (Hmmm. Why do you know that, Phryne?) Obviously, no one alive is going to say a word if it puts them in prison, and the dead can't testify as to who did the butchering.
What follows is jumbled in my mind. I'm not sure what came first. I think that Alice woke up and told Phryne (WHY?) where she'd been taken. She was in the back of a truck, so she didn't see the location, but she remembers a smell like a bakery and the door to the abortionist's being green.
Then there's a party to cheer up Lydia. Wouldn't want a sick woman mourning because her husband died. I mean, GAWD.
Three things happen at the party: a) Phryne is introduced to Madame Breda, who runs a Turkish bath palace (which, like many 1980s' massage parlors, is suspected of being a brothel); b) Dot the Maid is arrested on suspicion of having poisoned John Andrews, and Phryne gives her the name of a woman (lawyer, presumably) who could help her (how does she KNOW all these people??); c) Phryne reunites with a Franco-Russian dancer named Sasha whom she met in Paris. Sasha charms her completely and then steals her diamond earrings to buy cocaine in what looks like a pawnshop in an alley somewhere. Phryne follows on foot, because she is an idiot, and is just in time to see Sasha get beat up and shot. She watches him hide from the two guys after him, and then steps in front of his hiding place and disguises herself as a streetwalker by...speaking in a slightly deeper voice and taking off her fur-trimmed coat. I facepalmed at this. I really did. And the hitmen's eagerness to trust a random streetwalker they didn't know made me do so a second time.
Phryne takes Sasha the thief back to her hotel room and patches him up, because of course she knows how to extract bullets. Sasha admits that he stole her earrings to buy cocaine, and he wanted to buy the cocaine because he wants to find and kill the "King of Snow." Exactly why he thinks that the drug kingpin would be selling coke in a pawnshop, I don't know. I also don't know why he believes that the dealers in the pawnshop would have a hotline to their boss. Apparently Sasha is pretty but dumb. As for Phryne, she's less concerned about Sasha than she is about all the blood she got on her new evening dress.
We now take a break from...well, reality...for Phryne to visit a guy in prison. His name, though it's not revealed in the episode, is Murdoch Foyle. He looks like an older version of Mikkelson's Hannibal Lecter, only wearier and less slimy. What he's in prison for, I don't know, but Phryne believes that he's responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of her sister Janey. Foyle says that he didn't kill Janey, that he is not guilty of the crime Phryne wants him to be guilty of, and that he's never confessed to this crime. So, basically, "GET OFF MY BACK." Also, he's due to be released soon. Infuriated, Phryne tells him that she's here to see to it that he NEVER gets out. Foyle just sighs and says nothing.
Phryne gets back to her hotel room and finds Dot waiting for her. (I'm not clear on how Dot got in.) She wanted to thank Phryne for the woman lawyer (who seems to have gotten all charges dropped) and managed to mend Phryne's silk stockings and get the blood out of her designer gown while she was waiting. Dot doesn't want to go back to the Andrews' residence; apparently Andrews had very active hands and Lydia Andrews is NOT pleasant to the staff. But the biggest problem Dot has is a fear of electrical appliances. She's a very trusting Catholic girl, and her priest is a Luddite who has convinced her that every time an appliance is turned on, an electrical bolt shoots through the molten center of the world and that, eventually, this will make the world blow up. Phryne offers Dot a job on the spot and tells her that the only electrical appliance she'll have to deal with is the telephone. Dot isn't thrilled at the notion of touching it, but it's one electrical item instead of many, so she agrees.
Next Phryne pulls something I consider unforgivable. Having figured out by now that Madame Breda is into prostitution, cocaine distribution and back-alley abortions, Phryne gets naive little Dot to contact Madame Breda and tell her that she (Dot) needs an abortion. Phryne figures this will be believable since Andrews knocked up Alice, so why not Dot as well?
Dot is given directions to be at a certain corner early the next morning wearing a red rose. Phryne is with Bert and Cec in Bert's cab, watching all this. By now I was convinced that the title should have been "Baby Blues." The cocaine seemed incidental.
This plan goes about as well as you'd expect. Of course the bad guys show up and of course Bert's cab stalls just long enough for Phryne and her minions to almost lose sight of the truck Dot's in, and of course they have to manuever through narrow alleys, and of course Butcher George is a complete sadist who wants to feel Dot up before using his antique, dull and rusty tools on her, and of course Dot panics and blows her own cover, and of course Phyrne and her minions hear Dot screaming and burst through the door just in the nick of time. Everything happened predictably, right down to Dot telling Phryne with shining eyes that she'd never been in so much danger in her whole life. And Butcher George is arrested because Cec is willing to testify to everything he overheard George say to Dot. Through a solid wooden door. Yeah, that's not going to be a charge that a first-year law student could get dismissed. I'm pretty sure that talking about abortion wasn't a crime, and Dot wasn't aborted or even hurt. I'm sure he intended to kill her, but there isn't any evidence of that. The only crime there IS evidence for is assault; Cec knocked out Butcher George, who wasn't menacing him in any way, with one punch.
Meanwhile, Sasha is still insisting that he wants to meet the King of Snow, because getting shot and almost murdered wasn't enough. He's told to come to Madame Breda's Turkish Bath Palace, that night and, because the plot says so, Phryne goes with him, after telling Dot to call the police station at midnight if she isn't back by then. Yes, please rely on the girl with the electricity phobia to use an ELECTRICAL APPLIANCE.
Once Sasha and Phryne arrive at Madame Breda's, it is revealed that the King of Snow is actually a Snow Queen--Lydia Andrews. After monologuing about how she poisoned her husband (for wanting to get out of the drug business) and how she built an empire all by herself, Lydia orders Phryne and Sasha stripped and locked in a sauna to cook to death.
(This is not really the greatest of villain plans, because some people do stuff like this for fun. Until 2010, the Finns had a World Sauna Championship in which the idea was to see how long you could sit in a sauna before succumbing to heat stroke.)
It doesn't take long before Sasha passes out. Phryne finds a bobby pin and tries to pick the sauna door's lock, but this doesn't work. Meanwhile, Dot is home, staring at the telephone as if it's about to morph into a black mamba.
Bert storms into the police station and tries telling Inspector Jack that Phryne is in trouble. Jack doesn't believe a word and thinks that Bert is talking about "a commo friend of [his]." I honestly can't blame Jack. I mean, Phryne is a rich girl who's the daughter of a lord. With her wealth and social position, she's everything that Communists are supposed to be opposed to.
Phryne finds a vent from which all of the hot steam is pouring. Naturally, she has no trouble removing the metal vent cover with her bare hands. Only when she tries to turn off the steam valve does she realize that she needs something to protect her hands. Of course, she grabs Sasha's towel and turns the valve. Instantly, the steam stops pouring in.
Midnight comes. I just knew that Dot wasn't going to be able to make the call without a horrendous struggle...
...oh. She just picked it up and made the call. No problems using the phone at all. And once she makes the call (which the constable who was guarding the loo picks up), Jack has to admit that Bert is telling the truth. Bert gives him a definite "told you so" glare. Moments later, everyone is arrested, including Lydia. Why everyone else was still hanging around the saunas is beyond me. And wouldn't it have been more fitting for Lydia to inject both of them with enough cocaine to kill an elephant?
Everything wraps up in a neat little coda in a restaurant. The constable and the inspector walk in (how did they know where Phryne was?) just as Phryne, Dot, Bert and Cec--I don't recall Sasha being there, but maybe he was--are toasting Phryne's new business venture. She is going to be a lady detective.
The inspector looks as if he has just bitten into a lemon.
The episode was pretty good. I enjoyed it for what it was, despite facepalming now and then. But it didn't make me want to FIND ALL THE FIC or to write stories in that universe. In this, it affects me rather like Princess Tutu does. Very pretty. Okay story. I like the female lead, despite, in Phyrne's case, her wealth; I'm not going to get into that now because that would be a rant in itself.
But I'm not driven to find out what happens next.
I feel bad about this. There are some fandoms that people connect to that I really, really want to love. (There are also some wildly popular fandoms that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, but we won't get into those right now, either.) But when I want to love a canon and don't, the problem is usually what I think of as lack of immersability--or, if you want to be sillier, no Velveteen Rabbit moment. If I can't immerse myself in the world or in the character's point of view, the characters and the world never quite become real.
And that's where I am with Phryne Fisher. She's entertaining. I'd watch the show again. But not fervently. She's very obviously someone's fantasy--rich, beautiful, healthy, agile, stylish, able to MacGyver herself out of a bad situation, titled, unbelievably lucky, with a poor and tragic past, possessing friends from all walks of life who would risk their lives for her at a moment's notice, and having the cooperation of the police so that she can get away with anything.
I can't picture Phryne Fisher having a problem that she had to work around rather than leap over. Even Janey's death doesn't register with me as an ongoing trauma that's still affecting her in terrible ways but as something for her to angst.
And frankly, I don't have much use for protagonists that don't have actual problems. I tend to ignore rich characters because, as far as I'm concerned, most of the problems in life can be solved by having money. Rich people can buy food, clothing, shelter, transportation, top-notch medical care, top-of-the-line education, technological toys, political and judicial offices, and the favor of the police. That may not be happiness, but it sure looks a lot more joyful than poverty.
So Phryne is not a character to whom I can easily relate. She stirs no emotion in me save disbelief. She is entertaining...but I do not believe in her universe. And I do not believe in her.
And to all of her fans, I am sorry. I wish that I could believe in her. I wish that I could believe in her as fervently as you do.