Murdoch enlists inventor Nikola Tesla to help investigate the murder of an inventor who was experimenting with invisibility, in Murdoch And The Undetectable Man.
The episode begins with a man going into an arcade and paying to see a short film through a viewer. In the film, a man is covered with bandages and is holding up a sign that says “Now you see me”. The next time we see the man, he is dead and Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Crabtree (Jonny Harris) are in a lab, standing over his body. They find a bloody fingermark on a metal shelf.
Tesla (Dmitry Chepovetsky) arrives and tells Murdoch he and Bosworth had corresponded with each other. Bosworth had been looking for advice because his investor was about to pull his money from his invention.
Bosworth had wanted to share his invention with Tesla, but when he arrived to meet with him, Bosworth was already dead and some of his equipment was missing. Murdoch asks what the dead inventor had been working on.
“Professor Bosworth was working on a device to render objects invisible,” Tesla says.
Season 12, episode 13 is Tesla’s return to Murdoch Mysteries, the real-life historical character was last on the show in The Tesla Effect in 2010.
The Brack Is Back!
Also returning for this week’s episode is Inspector Thomas Brackenreid (Thomas Craig). He tells Crabtree he’s happy to be home but is not actually living at home. He’s staying in a flat in a house further down his street.
There is a very sad and telling moment of how far the great man has fallen when he’s in his new flat, pours himself a drink and then toasts himself, while looking into a cracked mirror. But not all is lost, he gets a visit from attractive widow Verna Jones (Anna Hardwick) who welcomes him to the neighbourhood with a ticket to the opera.
Murdoch and Tesla speak to Brackenreid about the murder and about invisibility. Incredulous, Brackenreid says “it’s all bollocks if you ask me.”
When a woman named Fioni Rossini (Tara Yelland) shows up at Station House No. 4 to report Bosworth missing, she is asked to identify his body. Surprisingly, she says the body is not the professor’s.
Murdoch identifies the bloody finger mark left in the professor’s lab as belonging to thug Sam Marshall (figure skater Elvis Stojko) and brings him in for interrogation. Marshall refuses to confess to the murder, until Murdoch shows Marshall a picture of the dead man. Then he tells him he was hired by the dead man to kill Professor Bosworth.
Murdoch And The Undetectable Man
Murdoch and Brackenreid need to find out who hired the thug to kill Bosworth and who actually killed the man who was found dead. When another body is discovered, it starts looking like Bosworth could be the killer, but is he?
Later, Fiona Rossini is back at the station house and tells them she smells Bosworth’s cologne. Some papers ruffle and this sets the scene that there is an invisible man on the loose in the station house.
In the meantime, Tesla and Murdoch invent a device they call tele-vision, to help them solve the case.
“Everyone in the world could have tele-vision,” Tesla says.
“I think it’s best not,” William quips. “The weak minded would waste half of their lives observing it.” Touché, William!
George The Editor From Hell
Crabtree makes some comical observations to Brackenreid on the drawbacks of invisibility. Julia (Hélène Joy) asks him to take a look at the book she’s writing with William and when her husband finds out about it, he is not pleased.
Murdoch presses the constable for details on any rewrites, saying, with a pained look on his face, that he realizes Julia wants to make it more entertaining. And apparently, George doesn’t think much of either of their writing skills.
“This is the dullest thing I’ve ever read in my life,” George tells him. “And I’ve read telephone books, at your insistence.”
William presses his lips together and disapprovingly says that his wife’s solution is to “inject her writing with puns.”
“Her jokes are terrible sir,” George counters. “Your writing makes me want to fall asleep and hers make me want to light this document on fire, for the good of humanity.”
George then gives him a valuable piece of advice. “Instead of giving us detailed instructions on how to build a transmitter receiver, tell the story behind it. That you and Mr. Tesla built such a device to elicit an actual confession in a real murder.”
Later on, Crabtree comes up with a name for their book that is absolutely spot-on!
Murdoch Mysteries airs Monday nights at 8 p.m. on CBC. You can watch Murdoch And The Undetectable Man here. Make sure you also check out Greg David’s interview with Elvis Stojko, on his portrayal of thug Sam Marshall.
Ms. Byrne’s synopsis of this “Murdoch Mysteries” episode has a couple errors. She notes that Inspector Thomas Brackenreid receives a visit from the “attractive widow” who brings him a gift of opera tickets. However, the opera tickets were sent to him later when he was in his office. In his room, she brought him a meat pie.
Ms. Byrne further states that when the “invisible man” is in the station house after Fiona Rossini arrives, Ms. Rossini tells them she smells Bosworth’s cologne. Actually Fiona says she smelled his distinctive pipe tobacco.
Duly noted! Thanks for your comments.