Tag Archives: Featured

Review: Det. Murdoch’s dark edge

The prevailing tone consuming the first two episodes of Murdoch Mysteries this season has been one of darkness. That’s a pretty odd thing to say about a TV series that deals with a murder of the week, but Murdoch Mysteries has always juxtaposed that with a pretty large dose of humour thanks to Crabtree and Higgins, and even a well-timed “Bloody hell!” courtesy of Brackenreid.

And while those two young coppers did supply a few chuckles–along with the fantastic Patrick McKenna as Inspector Hamish Slorach–much of “On the Waterfront” parts one and two showed darker sides to characters we’ve loved for eight seasons.

Leading the pack was, of course, Brackenreid. He’s always had an edge to him, a willingness to throw a few fists around in the interrogation room if it meant getting a confession. But his lone wolf act–seeking out the O’Shea brothers with nary a badge nor a care about his own well-being in their search–was very different. When those dastardly brothers ended up dead I must admit I wondered if Brackenreid had had a hand in it.

Story-wise, the tale of corruption at Toronto’s wharf took a horrible turn and delved into adult territory with the realization that overseas women were part of a human trafficking ring that was coming out of the city docks; pretty mature stuff for 8 p.m. on a Monday night.

Murdoch, rightly disgusted by the whole thing, took out his frustrations on one man by decking him. I like it when Murdoch is willing to get his hands dirty and use them instead of his intelligence, so I was more than happy to see him dole out some 10-fingered justice. That rough side came out later when Murdoch faced off with Leslie Garland, with the former telling the latter–who had just lost his job as a lawyer thanks to Julia–that if he ever showed his face around again Murdoch would take off his badge throw some punches. I’m secretly hoping Leslie drops by so I can see that happen.

And while the boys were getting physical, Murdoch’s girls were fighting with their minds. Things looked bleak after their arrest for staging a protest in support of the Suffragette movement and Emily’s assault charged hinted she’d be spending time behind bars. That was until Clara Brett Martin entered the fray. Murdoch Mysteries’ latest real-life historical figure, played by Patricia Fagan, is the first female lawyer in the British Empire. Her spunk, willingness to play the legal game–and use a little blackmail supplied by Julia–got all of the charges against the accused dropped. (I was hoping Leslie’s little game of scaring Julia into thinking James Gillies was still alive would come back to haunt him.) Clara, another high-ranking female in Toronto’s circles will no doubt inspire Julia and Emily to push women’s rights even further this season and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.

Murdoch Mysteries airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on CBC.

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Review: All roads lead to whoring – Strange Empire’s “Buckskin Princess”

Strange Empire’s second episode demonstrates that Janestown is the Hotel California of the wild west: even those who have the resources to leave end up back at the nascent town.

The Slotter’s maid says there’s no way out of this hellhole; Ling adds the only surefire way is a hole in the ground.

The women who have been stranded there after the stagecoach slaughter are frantic to leave or to find their missing men so they can. But with civilization comes an economy, and in this empire, until the mine or the railroad become more than a Slotter man’s dream, women are the product.

The women waiting for their men or for onward passage they can’t afford are offered whoring work in the house or the lower-class “cribs,” and told stories of the Indian savages who await them if they try to leave.

Before Isabella Slotter offers a little whoring work to Mrs. Brigg’s daughter, Mrs. Fogg — she of the outfits and psychic interests to rival Isabella but without the youthful beauty or megalomaniac husband — confesses to Mrs. Briggs that she was once a lady’s maid until the lady’s husband demanded more than a little darning. The grateful expression on her face at a hint of acceptance from Mrs. Briggs is poignant.

“Buckskin Princess” opens with Kat Loving smudging in the forest, believing she sees her missing husband Jeremiah stepping out of the mist. When the figure come into focus it’s only Ling, Isabelle Slotter’s mysterious henchman.

Kat is ruthless in defending her own and in telling her truth, but she won’t believe her husband is dead like all the other husbands. And since she isn’t like all the other wives, fair enough I guess. Without a body there is hope.

So she leaves her adopted daughters — dressed as boys, knowing that Slotter will be looking for them — while she searches for Jeremiah and their adopted boy Neil so they can continue on their way to start their own ranch. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout the episode the cinematography lingers on what should be the beautiful treed landscape, but the beauty is often marred by the threat of violence. Amid the pretty trees Kat finds more bodies, including Mrs. Briggs’ men and horse, and Jeremiah’s hat. She has money and a plan, but odds are she won’t leave without him.

The Blithelys have money too, enough to buy passage to leave, and Thomas orders Rebecca to arrange it in his usual charming way. Partway through the voyage, the driver demands more money and then a little extra — he tries to rape Rebecca in front of her injured husband. After a struggle with Thomas’s gun,  Rebecca shakily aims it at her attacker before Kat rides by to save the day, shooting the man’s hat off while declaring “I aimed high.” I believe her.

Melissa Farman plays Rebecca beautifully as a socially awkward, sheltered woman who is stepping into her own skin for the first time. The character could easily be a collection of ticks and Asperger’s cliches but in her hands she is someone learning to rely on herself instead of who she’s been told she is by first her parents, then her foster father-turned-husband.

She’s puzzling over the conflicting information she has about Captain John Slotter – did he order the attack on the stagecoach men, or are his offers of shelter a lifeline?  “You’ll end a whore. That’s all you need to know,” Kat tells her.

But what other option does Rebecca have with the rapist driver run off, an unknown route onward, and her husband incapacitated in the back of the wagon? “You able?” Kat asks before they part, the Blithleys on their way back to Janestown, and takes Rebecca’s word for it that she is. It’s a whole new world for the young Mrs. Blithely in many ways.

But it’s Kat who ends a whore first, trading herself for her girls when she shows up just in time — again — to rescue her girls from punishment for helping fix a card game, and Slotter shows up just in time to foil the rescue.

Slotter and Isabelle discuss their plan for world domination — or at least Janestown domination — which involves trying to entice a couple of investors to  back his mine so he has a legacy apart from his father’s railway.

John Slotter explains he intends to build an empire on the mining town. “Indians, Negroes and Celestials. Strange empire, yours,” replies the man. Slotter needs Isabelle’s wiles to beef up his sales proposition.

The Slotters’ discussion also involved a kiss where Isabelle looked like she wanted to crawl out of her skin. Isabelle’s social standing went up when she went from whore to wife but the transition might not have been too big a leap. Slotter even casually points out to her that Isabelle can be offered to the investors in the absence of another suitable whore.

With intel Ling gleaned from the telegraph, Isabelle conducts a seance to try to steer one of the investors to put his recently deceased father’s money into coal. It doesn’t work, but it turns out she does believe in spirits despite using the appearance of them for her own  devious purposes. “I believe there Is a world outside of this one,” she tells Ling. You’d have to, wouldn’t you, if this was your shiny new world.

The seance was just the appetizer of Isabelle’s deviousness, though. A disturbed girl left behind by her family can’t be put to work as a whore after all when it turns out she’s “already occupied.” Rebecca delivers her baby, saving her life but leaving her barren as Thomas is horrified to learn. Bad, science experiment. Bad!  He’d be even more horrified to learn she stabbed the wagon driver who’d attacked her on the way back from the birth, leaving him bleeding out on the ground. One of the Blithelys is starting to adjust nicely to their new circumstances.

When her investor plan falls through, Isabelle decides to take the girl’s baby as her own and present him to Slotter’s father as his namesake and reason to shower money on the happy family. Even babies are commodities, it seems.

Despite those demonstrations of evil power, Isabelle seems unable to exert it over Kat, even thought Kat has submitted herself to be a whore.  Mrs. Loving ends up choking her while calling her husband a murderer, which is possibly not the best negotiation strategy for a woman who could put you and your children to whoring.

Even the hole in the ground wouldn’t be an escape for Kat as long as she needs to pay off the two girls’ potential earnings. “Be informed, Mrs Loving, that if I have to bury you that’ll cost too,” Isabelle says.

Rebecca is horrified at the sight of Kat in whore’s clothes and takes the money Thomas has given her to provide for their passage to Toronto and gives it to Isabelle to buy Kat back. Isabelle arranges an elaborate plan to auction Kat off to the highest bidder, preserving the illusion to the investors that they are being offered the prime whore while using the card sharp Jack to outbid them, even when they’ve surpassed Rebecca’s funds.

Are we seeing a glimmer of kindness from Isabelle? Or self-preservation? “It’s for the best,” she tells her husband when she reveals Kat has been sold. “She troubles you.”

With the sisters’ shenanigans with Jack there was slightly more levity in “Buckskin Princess” but the show’s not in danger of making me laugh just yet

The episode ends with one of Slotter’s men burying Rebecca’s attacker and Kat staring at Jeremiah’s hat while the girls sleep — an echo of the first episode’s closing scene, but even less cozy. What do they now owe and to whom, and what payment might be extracted?

Kat and Rebecca can check out any time they like, but can they ever leave?

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Preview: Food Truck Face Off latest twist in double-parked genre

The food truck genre is one that’s quickly becoming as packed as a mall parking lot on a Saturday. Travel + Escape has Rebel Without a Kitchen, and Food Network is jam-packed with Eat St. and The Great Food Truck Race, and every cooking competition on the channel devotes at least one week to a food truck challenge. Is there really room for another one? Well, yeah.

Debuting Sunday on Food Network, Food Truck Face Off combines aspects of Dragons’ Den with the home chefs featured on Masterchef. Hosted by former Recipe to Riches host Jesse Palmer, this project from Peace Point Entertainment Group (Fresh with Anna Olson, Colin & Justin’s Cabin Pressure) awards one winning team their own food truck to operate for an entire year, a pretty unique twist.

Sunday’s first episode takes place in Miami Beach (future stops in the 13-episode run include Toronto, Austin, Los Angeles and Niagara Falls) as four teams of rookie chefs pitch their food truck ideas and business plan à la Dragons’ Den–along with samples–to a trio of judges (in this case TV and radio personality Steak Shapiro, Chicago restaurateur Alpano Singh and food truck owner Robyn Almodovar) before the quartet are trimmed to a duo. Those two final teams move on to the next test: manning a food truck for two services with the most amount of money raised by them winning the vehicle for a year.

These being home chefs or people who cook for fun, they’re quickly overwhelmed by A) shopping in bulk, and B) learning to make food on the fly while collecting money and keeping up a patter with customers. What entertained me the most about Food Truck Face Off was wondering whether I could do what these contestants were trying to. In short? Probably not. I like eating stuff from food trucks too much to be hemmed in by making my own. Palmer is an affable enough host, but he’s largely relegated to just announcing what wrinkle the producers are throwing at them and hitting the button on a bullhorn.

Of course, the show isn’t about who’s hosting; the real stars are the yummy-looking dishes being served up for hungry customers.

Food Truck Face Off airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Food Network.

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Preview: Undercover High returns to freak out more high schoolers

Normally, I don’t like watching television shows where people get pranked. I physically cringe when someone is put into an uncomfortable situation that lasts for what feels like forever, squirming, while a joke plays out. Turns out I have no problem with watching high schoolers be the targets in YTV’s Undercover High.

Perhaps it’s because host–and head prankster–Lisa Gilroy makes it a ton of fun. The petite blonde, who bears a more than passing resemblance to Kristen Bell, wins viewers over with her spunk, charm and unique ideas for pranking two groups of high school kids in each of the five new episodes. I’m pretty sure, despite what she claims on-air, she didn’t come up with the situations on her own, but that’s not important. What is important is pulling off the prank with style, and Undercover High does that.

It helps that Gilroy is aided by a handful of actors and actresses to fill a variety of fake roles and elicits the students’ actual teachers to aid in making it all seem real. Saturday’s first episode visits Cobourg District Collegiate Institute East and St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School for the Arts, where mayhem ensues at both locations.

At CDCIE, teacher Miss Norohna suggests pranking her Grade 9 business class and the Undercover High folks come up with a doozy. After claiming her friend needs their help with a world record, the group enters the school gym to construct a tower of items created by a 3-D printer. Suffice it to say the printer isn’t real, the world record attempt is fake and the people organizing the whole thing are in on the joke. What isn’t fake are the reactions of the students when things begin to go south. I’m pretty sure I saw some actual tears and trembling chins as the minutes rolled by and the situation deteriorated.

Things don’t improve at St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School for the Arts, where drama teacher Mr. Thomas pranks his kids by plunging them into a fake informercial where they find out–with seconds to go–that some will be reading Korean off cue cards while showing how an unknown kitchen item works. You can’t make up the red on the face of one lad who looks like he is going to pass out or throw up (or both) just before the cameras roll.

Kids are pretty savvy, and the secret to Undercover High‘s success is that the teachers–the people the students trust–are in on the joke. If they weren’t, the jig would be up within seconds. Luckily for us, they don’t catch on.

Undercover High airs Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT on YTV.

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Heartland’s Amber Marshall riding high in Season 8

Life is complicated for Amy Fleming. The beloved Heartland character has a lot on her plate so far in Season 8, including a rich Prince who keeps sending her presents, a fiancé who’s struggling to make ends meet in his first business venture and a girl whose vision of Amy has been shattered.

For actress Amber Marshall, having her character go through these struggles represents the natural evolution of Amy, a gifted horse trainer who isn’t without her flaws. Georgie (Alisha Newton) was crushed after viewing an online video of Prince Ahmed (Jade Hasounné) kissing Amy during a farewell party for his European Equestrian team. Now Amy is feeling the effects of tumbling off the pedestal Georgie put her on.

“The fans may not agree with it right now, but there has to be a moment when the characters that you’ve seen as heroic people need to fall,” Marshall says. “They need somewhere to climb back up to. If you just have your characters going on this nice, mellow journey where they’re the hero of the show … what is interesting in that? There is no real life. There are no lessons to be learned. I was so happy when the writers took Amy and threw her down to basically starting from scratch.”

Marshall has literally grown up on the set of CBC’s Sunday night stalwart and she’s gained an immense amount of knowledge since filming the pilot episode when she was 19. And, unlike shows such as Degrassi, where the setting is high school and the characters have to be kept in a certain age group, Heartland‘s young folks have gotten older, matured and moved on to new stages in their lives.

Marshall has evolved too, adding the title of consulting producer to her list of responsibilities on the family drama. The London, Ont., born actress explains she was already on the set and involved outside of her acting role anyway. An experienced horse person, she was there to help the show’s writers tweak scenes that dealt with those four-legged co-stars; a discussion with Heartland‘s producers led to the additional credit. When she’s not on-set filming, Marshall educates herself on all aspects of production, an easy thing to do when you’re surrounded by folks you’ve been working with for years. Can executive producing or showrunning her own project be in Marshall’s future? Not until she learns more.

In the meantime, Amy is getting an education in the dangers of the Internet and her naiveté when it comes to Prince Ahmed. His peck on her lips not only has driven a wedge between Amy and Georgie, but Amy and Lou (Michelle Morgan) too. It all comes to a head this Sunday when Amy is forced to make a tough decision that affects her relationship with not only the Prince but Ty (Graham Wardle) as well.

“There is some very interesting conflict coming up,” she teases. “It’s going to have a huge impact on the whole Heartland family, not just Amy and Ty.”

Heartland airs Sundays at 7 p.m. on CBC.

Do you think Amy should tell Ty about her kiss with Prince Ahmed?

  • Yes, it's better to get it out in the open now. (93%, 154 Votes)
  • No way, he'll get upset and possibly break up with her. (7%, 12 Votes)

Total Voters: 166

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