Murdoch Mysteries and the Listener Spoilers

Last night the new season for both of these series began, saving Wednesday night's TV viewing for me.

And yes, there are spoilers, but who cares? It's Canadian TV. But in the remote chance that you in fact care, you could just stop reading. Don't push that tempting red button. Just ignore it...

Well first of all, the means by which they get Murdoch back is...total bullshit. Maybe they should have just had him wake up in one of those old-timey bathtubs and realizaing that it was just a dream. He broke out of prison and let a murderer go. Then ran off to prospect for gold in the Yukon for months. Defective cell doors just ain't gonna cut it. Ah well, it's done. Let us never speak of it again. Like that time Worf resigned from Star Trek and then at the end of the episode came right back with no consequences. Except damn it, now they have a new recurrent antagonist out to ruin Murdoch and Brakenreid for it despite how easy that should be. Imagine how it would have screwed things up if a Starfleet Admiral had been on the ship's case for a year after Worf pulled that stunt.

That being said we get to see how well Crabtree handles being the lead detective on a case. It's fair to call his efforts mediocre but barely adequate. We also get to see how Doctor Ogden deals with her new cute and perky sidekick about whom all I can say, if they have to give Crabtree a new romantic interest did she have to be another coroner? Aren't there other jobs hot women can do that involve discussing murders? Maybe she could have been a reporter or something.

Meanwhile Murdoch gets distracted from his gold panning (ten years too late for the actual Yukon gold rush) by the siren call of detective work when the owner of the hotel he lives in gets accused of murder. He is initially reluctant when she asks him for help but only verbally. He immediately goes out and starts asking questions about it and gets assaulted for his efforts then blamed and put in jail next to her.

When she discovers that he is a former police officer, she immediately freaks out over his reluctance even though *he has already been arrested trying to help her*. I mean, what the hell, lady? So he bails her and she immediately goes out and threatens to bludgeon the next best suspect unless he confesses. So he has her ass slung back into jail and she's surprised by this. Somehow I think that he may have made the right call when he decided not to take her up on her marriage proposal

Meanwhile on the Listener, Toby has moved entirely over to being for all intents and purposes a cop. Which means they have to work a little harder to keep his paramedic partner a part of the series, but he is in fact still there. The new boss knows that Toby is a telepath...but is having to learn the hard way that doesn't make things quite as easy as you'd think. Toby can't read people's memories. Often all he gets a few random images suggested to the subject's mind by the current conversation. The murder in this case can be divined by the age-old test, "What character appears to have no reason to be in the story?". But since it was a police official, it wasn't quite so obvious, because it could have been a set-up for something that developed later. Also explains why Toby didn't catch on to him sooner since Toby tries to keep a lid on his knack with his co-workers.

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