Murdoch Mysteries - Blood and Circuses, S03E07

Although I have really been enjoying this season of Murdoch Mysteries, this episode recovered some of the humour of previous seasons which had been lacking. It was nice to have a bemused smile on my face the entire time, not simply because I was excited and confused, but because there was something genuinely funny going on.

It started with a tiger attack, a beast killing its trainer and then going wild, but Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) is not the kind of man to simply allow the most obvious solution to pass by unexamined. No surprise that he found that the woman had been murdered, not by her tiger, but by a human. And so he had George (Jonny Harris) arrest the entire circus.

How could they not take advantage of the amusement of having an entire circus invading the constabulary? George and Higgins (Lachlan Murdoch) were equally intrigued by a pair of Siamese twins, and even Inspector Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) became attached to a monkey. Murdoch was the least amused of the lot, convinced that the fortune teller knew more than she was saying since her predictions were quite accurate.

By the end, 3 people were dead - two murdered (the tiger tamer and her fur-covered fiancé, Lionel) and one accidentally offed as a result of his involvement in those murders. Could those three deaths have been avoided? The cause was that Lionel had rejected the beautiful Knife Thrower at another circus he had worked at. He told her that, since he was a Freak and she was a Normal, their love could never be. When she found him at the new circus, he was pursuing a relationship with a Normal. Worse, she had sacrificed her beauty to be carved into a Freak herself, so that nothing would stand in their way.

Her obsession and insanity was undeniable, to do so much out of love for a man and to kill him when it was still not enough, but how much more twisted her mind must have become after she went through the pain of scarring her entire body so that his reason for denying her could no longer hold? And that betrayal could only be made worse by the fact that he now loved a Normal and his reason never had truth in the first place.

I pity her, for uncontrollably loving and for being rejected without proper cause. I could pity him, but his arrogance only made him seem like likely prey. Had he not died by her hand, he would have died by another's for a similar offence. Most of all, I pity the tiger tamer, who never knew that the love she felt was painful to a friend she cherished and died for it.