Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s02e12 – Unnatural Habits

The episode opens with Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Ashleigh Cummings on their day off, Johnstone-Burt in his civvies somehow clashing with Cummings in her regular clothes; they’re fishing and dreaming of their honeymoon.

Rude awakening when they discover a dead body in the water. Even ruder awakening when it turns out to be the latest in a series of dead girls who worked at a Catholic convent’s laundry. Somehow the convent’s abusive treatment of the girls, which horrifies touring Essie Davis and Nathan Page—the show takes a deep stab at Catholic hypocrisy (well, some of them)—but then it manages to get even worse as we slowly find out what’s happening to the girls and who’s doing it to them.

But running up against the Church means Page’s ex-father-in-law and boss Neil Melville gets involved, especially since he’s just gotten a promotion; Melville bans Davis from investigating and reassigns Page.

Also back this episode are Page’s ex-wife, Dee Smart, who’s openly hostile to Davis at this point, and her cousin fiancé Daniel Frederiksen. Miriam Margolyes is around too—turns out her cook was one of the missing girls—and has some great scenes with current girl-in-crisis Alice Cavanagh. Very nice work from Margolyes this episode. Shayne Francis and Sally-Anne Upton are excellent as the meanest laundry bosses.

There’s eventually a big action sequence where Davis and her sidekicks arm up—turns out butler Richard Bligh has been assembling an arsenal for just such an occasional—and try to save the day while Melville has the cops dillydallying in fear of upsetting the Church.

All the outstanding story threads from the season get resolved here and the episode ends on quite the tease. Writer Ysabelle Dean does a good job fitting in a bunch of content but it some of it is still very rushed. The investigation leads Davis all over the place, from the laundry to high society to the docks and so on. Nice direction from Tony Tilse, who’s really able to ratchet up the tension in that big action finale.

One of the two main villains—motivated by pure greed—doesn’t get the best performance, while the other one gets a phenomenal one. Though maybe the suspicious behavior is less obvious when the solution is confirmed instead of suspected….

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s02e06 – Marked for Murder

Confession: I had no idea what they were talking about with footy. I assumed Australians played football—as in association football—but it looks like a big American football. My wife thought they were talking about rugby. But apparently there’s Aussie rules? Or footy?

The episode’s about two footy clubs and their hooligans and a dead player. We see the player hanging in the cold open, specifically his very hairy butt. Turns out he had just changed teams, which meant he had more haters than the usual player would. But even some supporters of his team—like Nathan Page—think the victim was an opportunist. Though it turns out said victim, Benjamin Rigby, switched teams because Page’s ex-wife’s cousin and lover (Daniel Frederiksen) bribed him to make the change.

It’s a fine episode with lots for all the characters—Hugo Johnstone-Burt goes from being an unthinking footy supporter to having to consider that support, Travis McMahon comes to realize Page can’t be all bad if he supports the right team, Ashleigh Cummings shows she actually listens to Johnstone-Burt’s nonsense. We get some more of Page’s ex-father-in-law boss (Neil Melville) being a snake (he likes the wrong team after all). And we finally get to see Page’s ex-wife hang out with Miss Fisher. There’s a lot of fun in the episode, but there’s never any more tension than when ex-wife Dee Smart and Essie Davis are alone. It’s nearly nerve-racking.

Though there might be more tension in the scene where Page very subtlety asks Davis to stay and watch a match with him. It’s basically their first official date. Particularly cute because Davis has a character detail about why she gave up footy supporting in her youth.

Excellent supporting performances from the team captains, Damien Garvey and Robert Morgan. It’s a complicated resolution to the mystery but well-handled and acted. Though it does feel a little like they tried to do an episode for the boys.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s02e01 – Murder Most Scandalous

Season Two starts off with a bunch of flashy character reveals, with finally meeting Nathan Page’s ex-wife (Dee Smart) not even being the main one. Very prim, very proper, very Catholic Ashleigh Cummings’s sister, Anna Bamford, is a sex worker and works in a brothel where one of the girls has just turned up dead. So Bamford hires Essie Davis to investigate, with Davis not realizing the victim was found dead in a locked room with anti-sin copper Neil Melville, who survived.

Turns out Melville is Smart’s father.

And Page’s ex-father-in-law.

“Miss Fisher” does an amazing job with the pro-sex worker stuff, giving Cummings a great couple scenes throughout as she processes the information. It makes up for Davis’s episode long Hispanophile arc, which has her going from learning the tango at the beginning of the episode to impersonating a Spanish exotic dancer when she goes undercover at Bamford’s brothel.

The accent is a lot.

Though Davis has been supremely unproblematic so far in the show, so giving her an “mkay” character detail like this one is long overdue given she’s still an infinitely wealthy White woman in the 1920s.

The mystery is better than the resolve, which is nowhere near as interesting as a locked room mystery, a hypocrite bureaucrat suspect, and a madam’s blackmail stash.

Davis’s gets a cool Catwoman sequence where she has to climb up to get to the stash room, then has a fight scene with madam Belinda McClory. Oh, and there’s also Davis doing a fan dance, unintentionally to most of the supporting cast, shocking Cummings and sensationalizing Hugo Johnstone-Burt.

What also stands out about the resolution is it seems more like there’s season subplot building with is-he-or-isn’t-he suspicious Melville and then a creepy young, buff priest, Lyall Brooks, not to mention Page getting attacked on the street by thugs left unidentified.

Maybe the most impressive thing about the episode is how well it defers Davis and Page’s chemistry, post-divorce—Smart’s already engaged again, which solves the moral dilemma—and there are some great Phyrne and Jack chemistry moments throughout. But where it’s all going is a left for another day… and episode.