Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e06 – Death at the Grand

It’s a single location mystery, which is always a lot of fun on “Miss Fisher’s.” Though this single location mystery turns out to be an incredibly dangerous one. It’s the local Grand Hotel, which is no longer as grand as it used to be; someone throws the concierge (Nick Mitchell) off the roof and he’s holding onto a bag belong to one Miss Phryne Fisher, which is a big surprise to everyone. Including Essie Davis, who didn’t even know the bag was missing.

It doesn’t take long for Davis and sidekick Nathan Page—seriously, it’s fine, but Page really doesn’t get anything his own this season—to discover the mystery involves theft, gambling, and one Baron Henry Fisher (Pip Miller). Miller’s Davis’s estranged father, who’s supposed to be being responsible with his money but instead losing it in a rigged poker game to intensely creepy poker hustler, Goran D. Kleut.

Kleut wants the money Miller owes him and is apparently willing to get violent to get it. Hotel owner Nell Feeney is little help to the investigation, so Davis installs Ashleigh Cummings in the lobby to actively snoop. And this time, new constable Henry Hammersla is more than willing to learn from Cummings’s superior detecting abilities. Maybe a little bit too willing to learn… especially since Cummings hasn’t heard from Hugo Johnstone-Burt lately.

But while Davis and Fisher are convinced the murder has something to do with hotel-related Feeney, Kleut, or maid Michala Banas, the audience knows it’s creepy Colin Moody. Moody always in the background, lurking, as he starts stalking Davis, who’s got zero idea she ought to be worried about him. Moody’s less creepy than Kleut, which affects the tension, but not necessarily in a bad way—delaying Moody’s extremes just make them all the more effective later on.

Excellent direction from Mat King. There’s a phenomenal poker game sequence and he really does well giving the hotel a personality.

There’s a charming finish and a surprising development in Cummings’s lessons—it starts with her picking out her preferred gun for her adventurer career; plus Miriam Margoyles is around quite a bit, including some wonderfully comic moments.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e05 – Death & Hysteria

Even for an episode dealing with institutionalized misogyny, which are often the heaviest “Miss Fisher’s,” Death & Hysteria is close to the heaviest because it’s about a group of women being persecuted and threatened with forced hysterectomies for… enjoying orgasms. Ysabelle Dean’s script never gives a full exposition dump—in fact, the foreshadowing to what’s going on is just an expression from Tammy Macintosh—but once it’s clear what’s actually going on, the whole episode changes gears quite a bit.

It starts with Essie Davis very suspicious of doctors Philip Quast and Damon Gameau, who have set up in Miriam Margolyes’s house and turned it into a sanitarium for women suffering “female hysteria.” Margolyes—Davis’s aunt and one of the show’s most successful recurring characters—is loaning it to them following Quast’s successful care of her son, who’s recently passed away. We met the son in an episode first season. It’s real sad, particularly since we find out about it three weeks or so after his death; we don’t get to see Davis’s mourning, for instance. Instead, she’s just suspicious Quast is taking advantage.

Quast’s immediately suspicious because he and sidekick Gameau don’t charge any fees—they only take donations from their patients, who are exclusively wealthy women. More, once one of the patients dies, it turns out they’re also really big into getting estates left to them. For various reasons, no one is being forthcoming in the investigation—Quast and Gameau immediately lawyer up (a perfectly icky Gareth Reeves)—and Nathan Page’s breaking in a new constable, Henry Hammersla, who screws up the investigative team.

Hammersla believes women are inferior to men and doesn’t think Page ought to be listening to Davis, much less telling him to work with Ashleigh Cummings (Hugo Johnston-Burt doesn’t appear this episode, off somewhere fishing and trying to figure out his life).

It’s a complicated mystery, with lots of unsettling historical details about the “medical” treatment of women in 1920s Australia, high society or not.

The best part of the episode is Margolyes and her mourning arc. The show may’ve skipped the straight drama but integrates its aftermath quite well here, also giving Travis McMahon some to do. Davis had McMahon and Anthony J. Sharpe helping out Margoyles and there’s some wonderful stuff with McMahon and Margoyles.

There’s also a fantastic moment when Macintosh embarrasses Page for Davis’s benefit. The episode ends positive but it’s a heck of a trip getting there.