Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It’s the kind of encouragement you need after watching this brilliant Murdoch Mysteries episode about how, for a long time, women were not regarded as qualified persons under the law. It’s rare for a murder mystery show to leave you this conflicted: happy we got there in the end, discouraged it took so long, anxious about protecting that progress.

Name one other TV show that can hilariously send up everything that’s a lot of gas about modern culinary culture while solving the murder of a garçon de cuisine and exploring attitudes towards women in the pre-World War I era. Plus: Brackenreid in a toque. Oh, Thomas!

Detective Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) isn’t the only one with a mystery on his hands this week. I’m puzzling over why an episode with everything that makes for a great Murdoch Mysteries outing left me less than impressed. It features a fascinating figure from history, it’s often funny despite its grim subject matter, and writer Faisal Lutchmedial clearly knows his characters. It even has Murdoch Vision. Yet in the end, all these elements add up to no more than an okay episode. I blame the A/B story format.