Murdoch Mysteries (a babble post)

May 21, 2013 12:10

Veggie and I have been watching this set-in-1890s-Toronto murder mystery series. It is sometimes the bad kind of terrible (film students as extras, I suspect, and they are not very good yet at cadence and emotion.  >.>) and they sort of cliffhangered us at the end of the netflix run (season 3) in a way that the wikipedia articles on the following seasons say will not be resolved.  ARGH.  If I accidentally wind up with a new set-in-deaths-'verse story I'm going to grumble lots.*

I mean, it's terrible. We're presented in the first episode with a coroner who's manifestly a doctor, and also female. And upper class, but that sort of goes along with the whole 'doctor' thing.

There is no explanation for this. Nor for the relatively modern set of morals and ethical behaviour displayed by the framing character of Murdoch, the Detective. (Especially considering we meet his father in the series and there is no reason for that man to have produced that kid. [Twice. Did I mention this was a kind of terrible series? Random brother was random. And a Mountie.])

On the other hand, Season 3 presented us with a couple who could, in fact, be some sort of OTP of Crime.

He's a brilliant tinkerer who's bored out of his flipping SKULL in Toronto (seriously, he was designing self-sufficient skyscrapers with rooftop gardens and tower-tower enclosed walkways for something to DO), and she's a Terrifying Blonde and a relatively brilliant liar.  Who loves art.  Enough that her using her husband's money to buy a Rembrandt (Bathsheba at her bath) was annoying to the other art collectors, not a shocking upset.

In their introduction to the series we mostly learn that he's bored, and she loves art. In the course of the episode she gives Murdoch a geometrics portrait of herself.  In the nude.

His boss and his minion hang it up in his office.  Because it is a landscape, y/y?

(His lady doctor says '.... well that's intimate' when she sees it and Murdoch is obliged to flail badly about pyramids on a landscape because AUGH nude AUGH boss AUGH terrifying blonde lady AUGH AUGH AUGH)

He managed to return the nude painting to the terrifying blonde lady at the end of the episode.  He was VERY RELIEVED.

I think she was deeply amused by this.

(Veggie and I were hoping she and her husband had engineered the theft of the Rembrandt as a way of being not-bored together.  Sadly, it was actually her trying to raise money to have a minion build a death ray.  She was later obliged to frame him for several murders and an attempt on her life so she could get at the accounts and properly fund the death ray.  He was a couple weeks from being hanged when it became obvious that no, no, that HADN'T been him, he was in jail for that last set.

So he escaped and went to track her down.

She shot him.  As one does when one's husband tracks one down in the midst of an escape to Istanbul with a death ray and says he loved you.  Like, properly loved.  [Terrifying blonde, come HOME. We can do SO MANY THINGS TOGETHER NOW.])

*: That would actually be kind of fun, if you assumed the gentleman tinkerer had been a soldier as a younger man, and his terrifying blonde had had several husbands before him--two natural or unaware-sparked deaths live together! Do they ever discuss it? Before or after they take up a life of crime to stave off the boredom?

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babble, death be not proud

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