As great as last week’s episode, The Wrong Man, was, it did little to lift the audience’s spirits. Fortunately, we can always count on Murdoch Mysteries to follow a gloomy episode with some brightness, both figurative and literal. A Murder Most Convenient is funny and entertaining—sunny and colourful. It makes for an enjoyable hour of television, where even the crime is committed out of love—albeit the murderous kind.

Perhaps inspired by last season’s episode Why is Everybody Singing?, the show has been moving away from sepia tones to a brighter look since the beginning of this 18^th season. In fact, this week’s episode is not unlike that musical episode—without the songs, of course. But if this were a musical, I’m pretty sure Detective Watts (Daniel Maslany) would be singing Marvin Gaye’s Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home). Watts laying his hat wherever he fancies has been done before and to great comic effect, but this time it’s taken to the max, with his hat popping up in the strangest places throughout the episode: an anatomy dummy, the morgue’s sink, a cake stand in a diner, a filing cabinet… The only time he takes a hat off an actual hat rack, it turns out to be Murdoch’s.

Quirks & Eccentricities

This subtly executed running gag is only one of a long list of Watts-related jokes. Writer Jenny Lee obviously enjoys writing for Watts; her previous outing, Gimme Shelter, also focussed quite a bit on his character. This time, it’s less of a character-driven exercise and more of a crazy comedy bit, with Maslany fully leaning into Watts’s eccentricities. At times, it’s like watching a highlight reel of Watts’s quirks, leaving you wondering what was in the script and what was added by Maslany. We get the familiar visual gags: Watts strewing scraps of paper everywhere to the bewilderment of bystanders; snatching things out of Murdoch’s hands; leaning on whatever object is around (even if that object happens to be a boiling pot); not so much walking down a slope as falling with style (as they say in Toy Story); and whatever it was he did with that teacup.

It’s all comedy gold, as is the look on Murdoch’s and Violet Hart’s (Shanice Banton) faces in response to this poetic gem: Perhaps the thought of winning over his lady made his heart skip a beat too many. And I haven’t even mentioned yet what is quite possibly the funniest scene ever done in Murdoch Mysteries: Watts, at Murdoch’s subtle urging, clumsily comforting the victim’s fiancée…while continuing to write in his notebook!

Sparkling Eyes

As usual, Yannick Bisson gets to play the straight man to Daniel Maslany’s craziness. With this week’s murder case taking place at a newly opened automat restaurant, there are also plenty of opportunities for them to compare and contrast their characters’ worldviews. While Watts finds the automat a heartless place and quotes Karl Marx, saying that machinery could undermine the dignity and value of human labour, Murdoch is a techno-optimist: Watts, be serious. Machines allow for sequential workflow, standardization and increased sales. There’s nothing inherently inhumane about that. I loved the way Murdoch’s eyes began to sparkle as he sang the praises of the automat’s efficiency and accuracy; it reminded me of the very early episode This One Goes to Eleven, where Murdoch raves about James Pendrick’s new building.

Comedic Pairings

Watts and Murdoch make a great comedic pair, and they are not the only funny duo in this episode. Constables Higgins and Roberts (Lachlan Murdoch and Kataem O’Connor) team up again, hoping to get rich quickly by investing with Mister Con—erm, excuse me, Mister Kahn (Fuad Ahmed). Roberts’s wide-eyed naiveté contrasts nicely with Higgins’s false belief in his own business acumen.

Then there are Effie Crabtree (Clare McConnell) and Iona Berger (Lucy Hill), squaring off against each other as Morality Officer Berger fines Assistant Crown Attorney Crabtree for reading a tabloid in public. It’s a storyline that’s not only funny but also manages to touch on many Murdoch-worthy themes: women’s rights, the three-steps-forward-two-steps-backward nature of progress, and the tension between morality and the law. From a visual standpoint, the scenes in the park, in particular, stand out, thanks to Effie’s wonderful outfits and to director Sherren Lee, who seems inspired by the (Post-)Impressionistic paintings On the Park Bench by Claude Monet and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. In terms of brightness and composition, there are worse examples to draw from!