The windbags are spouting off from the podium—the greedy agents of the Edison company and their political stooges are staging a phony demonstration on the dangers of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current. It’s Toronto in the 1890s and the contract to electrify Canada’s biggest city will be worth millions for either Thomas Edison or supporters of Tesla, his rival. When Miss Toronto Power and Light throws the demonstration switch, designed to electrocute a dog to warn of the hazards of AC, a shock of current charges through her body instead, killing her.
Toronto police detective William Murdoch had come to the demonstration to scoff at Edison’s claims. And then he suspects the death he just witnessed was no accident. So begins episode one of “Murdoch Mysteries,” a Canadian television crime program. Season one is out on DVD on June 16.
Although the acting seldom seems entirely convincing, probably through poor or hurried direction, the storyline is interesting enough to warrant a look. Based on a character in stories by Maureen Jennings, Murdoch is unflappable and sharp-eyed, cognizant of fingerprinting and all other advances in criminology, working his way logically through the sets of plausibilities left at each crime scene. Although he wears a badge, Murdoch could be called a Canadian Sherlock Holmes. In fact, he encounters Arthur Conan Doyle in one episode.
The season opener, however, testifies to the continuing fascination with Tesla, depicted as maintaining a laboratory in Toronto. An aura of magic clings to the workplace of the Serbian scientist-mystic, where radio is demonstrated, television is imagined and the recording device known nowadays to police as a “wire” is developed to crack Murdoch’s case. Although the real-life Tesla would be hounded into obscurity, his legacy in the popular imagination is his posthumous revenge.
