Reel Beach: After 300 episodes, what’s next for Murdoch Mysteries? Perhaps a trip on the Titanic?
By BERNIE FLETCHER
Beach Metro Community News’ An Evening with Inspector Brackenreid was a big success on Nov. 25.
An enthusiastic audience had plenty of questions for some of the stars of Murdoch Mysteries. We heard that the show may move from their Scarborough studio.
Avid fans are invested in the characters and there is lots of online chatter wondering where the CBC series is headed.
Will there be a season 19? Will the CBC be defunded? Will the show deal with the 1912 sinking of the Titanic or the coming storm in Europe? What happened to Brackenreid’s mustache?
One reader asked if Dr. Julia Ogden (Helene Joy) was coming back to the series. At the end of last season Julia and little Susannah were off to London, England to help open a women’s teaching hospital.
In real life the Australian actor has a three-year old child of her own and has also been off filming an eight-part adaptation of the Madison Knight crime novels by Ontario writer Carolyn Arnold. This time Joy gets to play the lead detective!
Spoiler alert if you haven’t watched this week’s landmark 300th episode: William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) visits England to see Julia as they celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. Far across the distance the couple are still in love, near, far, wherever they are, their hearts will go on and on.
This has led to speculation about a Titanic episode. The series is now up to 1912 and the “unsinkable” ship sank in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912. (Oops, I gave away the ending…and why didn’t Jack get on the door with Rose?)
With William and Julia in England it seems like an obvious storyline, but executive producer Peter Mitchell has said on social media that they are not going to do a Titanic episode. Will the show go on and on? Mitchell recently stated, “We’ve got history on our side. There’s no shortage of stories.”
In 1912, the women’s suffrage movement was fighting for the right to vote in the United Kingdom. Kingston, Ontario stands in for London, England with a bombing involving William and Julia who is a staunch supporter of the suffragettes. Does William want his wife and child back in Toronto on the next ship? How about R.M.S. Titanic or the Lusitania?
On the Titanic, the First Officer in charge on that fateful April night was actually William Murdoch. Imagine the possibilities of confusion over the name. Maybe Henry Higgins (Lachlan Murdoch) hears the tragic news and is confused (as he often is). Do William and Julia miss the maiden voyage of the ship?
There is still controversy to this day about the actions of First Officer Murdoch who heard the shout, “Iceberg right ahead!” Did he shoot a passenger? Did he shoot himself? The director of Titanic (1997), James Cameron, apologized to the officer’s family for his depiction of Murdoch. He may have been a hero. It’s a true Murdoch mystery.
In the 1953 film version of Titanic, a man asks stewardess “Emma” where “Julia’s” cabin is. The actual Emma Bliss (1866-1959) survived the sinking and lived out her life in the Beach with her adult children on Hubbard Boulevard and Balsam Avenue. She died at age 93 in a nursing home on Beech Avenue.
Constable George Crabtree (Jonny Harris) is a fan favourite. (Harris is busy filming his own CBC series, Still Standing). Crabtree has taken time off to write a novel. He once told Lucy Maude Montgomery to make Anne of Green Gables a boy, “but she wouldn’t listen”.
I imagine George is reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (serialized in the Strand magazine in 1912) and telling Higgins about a professor discovering living dinosaurs roaming the earth in South America, “We could make a moving picture and call it Jurassic Park.”
Higgins replies, “My Ruthie could play the professor, but how would we get the dinosaurs here?”
As the scene fades, George exclaims, “I could write about a small town that has fallen on hard times until they open up a dinosaur theme park!”
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