“Toronto’s Girl Problem” was notable for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it introduced viewers to another member of Inspector Brackenreid’s family. His nephew, Charlie (Charlie Clements, EastEnders), had come to the constabulary as a fresh start after witnessing the death of his partner back in London. It gave a fascinating tease into what sort of bloke Brackenreid is.

But Monday’s latest Murdoch Mysteries episode also brought Dr. Emily Grace’s sexuality out into the open. After allowing Lillian to undo her corset in “The Devil Wears Whalebone,” Emily went one step further at the end of last night’s episode, planting a romantic kiss on Lillian’s lips.

We got the episode’s writer, Michelle Ricci, to sound off on Emily’s sexuality and what it means for the future of Murdoch.

From what I understand, there were some notes from CBC regarding the scene between Lillian and Emily?
Michelle Ricci: I don’t know if it was CBC as much as it was everybody was a little bit nervous. There were discussions that I wasn’t a party to and Pete would come back and say, ‘These are some of the things that I’m hearing, but we’re going to stick to our guns and we’re going to do it.’ He did shoot the ending three ways. He shot it just with Emily walking in, he shot it with just the approach to the kiss, and he shot it with the full-on kiss. I’m glad that he used the full-on and that, ultimately, the network and Shaftesbury decided to trust us. We use kisses and physical contact so rarely on our show that when we do it, it really means something. That’s a part of the time—public displays of affection were not the norm—and it also goes to character. Our characters don’t run around making out all the time. It would feel weird in our world, so when we do do it it really means something.

I just think that, building all season to this moment and the corset being the pivotal moment—had we not gone for it and shown it on-screen—it would have felt like a bit of a cheat. I think it’s really important for Emily to go for it as well.

Do you think Emily realized what she was going to do in this episode, or was it at some other point in this season?
I think she was starting to figure it out in ‘Whalebone’ a little bit. When that corset comes off, you can see there is a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Georgina does such a good job in that scene, you really get the range of emotions that she’s going through in that scene. And it ends on an excited note rather than a nervous one. So coming into this episode, Lillian makes a couple of comments and Emily thinks, ‘OK, maybe this is something.’ But she’s still very hesitant until Brackenreid confronts her to grow up. She’s like, ‘Hold up, I am grown up and I’m going to do whatever I want.’ I think at that moment she decides to follow her heart. And her heart is with Lillian now.

I think it’s important to note that she isn’t falling for a woman. She’s falling for a person. She’s not turning gay on a dime. She isn’t all of a sudden discovering she’s a lesbian. This woman has opened her eyes to a whole world of possibilities. That’s an important distinction to not cheapen the relationships that she had in the past. She absolutely loved Crabtree. She was absolutely hoodwinked by Leslie Garland. This is a different person at a different stage in her life and a different journey for her.

It’s important that you say that. Is this an experiment on Emily’s part? How will this affect her relationship with George?
She really is falling for Lillian and wants to explore a future with her. Whatever form that future takes, she doesn’t know yet. It’s going to be difficult. And even though we have approached sexuality on the show before, we have never approached it from one of our main characters. It’s important that we do this. It’s a timely subject now, then, and forever.

We got a very touching note after the ‘Whalebone’ episode. A 14-year-old girl who, because of that episode, came out to her father. We were absolutely blown away and touched by that. You don’t realize, working in TV, how much power and influence you actually have on people, good and bad.

How do you feel about so much of a fuss being made about this storyline?
It seems like there are a lot of shows that are doing a lesbian storyline. We’re certainly one of the few that are treating it as an issue. We have to do that because of the historical context, but we’ve gotten some comments from people saying that because other shows have a lesbian storyline Murdoch has to do one. I actually think it’s great that we’re going gay, lesbian or transgender storylines in any capacity and not making it a big deal. That means that these people exist and live in our world and the way they live their lives is a valid one and it should be reflected on television. All aspects of life should be on television.

I am a bit sad when people tweet that if this is where we’re going with this character they’ll never watch again, but at the same time that’s kind of their loss. We make a good show and a lot of people work really hard to make a show that’s different, has something to say and tries to portray just how much we haven’t changed as much as how much we have changed.

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

If only Canadian history classes were as entertaining as an episode of Murdoch Mysteries. My favourite instalments are the ones that delve into real-life history or introduce actual historical characters into them, so I was positively giddy with “All That Glitters,” which managed to combine Ontario’s silver rush with Aboriginal rights and the Group of Seven.

Inspector Brackenreid’s paintings—done while he was convalescing following the harbourside beating—were given the spotlight when Julia entered one in a Toronto art contest.

“I see a creative vision taking hold. You seem to be capturing the essence of the north woods,” Julia told Brackenreid of his work, which featured abstract trees painted in oranges and yellows. The reason? He’d run out of green. Lori Spring’s energetic script called for the painting to be stolen not because of the canvas but the high-priced frame it was in. That didn’t deter a fresh-faced young man from paying $15 for the work, telling Brackenreid the work inspired him to walk a similar journey with his own art. The budding painter? A lad named Tom Thomson.

When Monday’s story wasn’t teasing with the fictional inspiration that led to the Group of Seven, it was grounded in many references to Ontario’s rail history, from the Don Station (which was located on Queen St. at the Don River), to the Northern Ontario Railway (which became Ontario Northland). The railway adventure for Crabtree and Murdoch began with “Eagle Flight … murder,” muttered from the mouth of a dying man on the steps of the Constabulary. Graham, the victim, had been a surveyor for the Northern Ontario Railway; a hidden compartment in his suitcase revealed a map and sent the coppers to Haileybury, Ont., where a burgeoning silver strike was about to consume the area.

There were plenty of suspects in Graham’s murder, from a railroad magnate upset Graham was planning to have the train trail moved to Mack, a strong-willed prospector who had the hots for Crabtree. The real killer led the story in a dark direction: Migize Pimise (Eagle Flight in English), an Ojibwe man who wanted the silver vein kept secret. His worry was that once the government discovered there was silver on their land, they would be forced to move off the reservation. Unfortunately, it proved to be true both in Spring’s script and the panel that was the final frame of the episode: “In 1903, silver was found near Cobalt, Ontario. The provincial government extinguished the Indian land title.” A sobering fact indeed.

Notes and quotes

• Continuity error! The flask Graham was carrying was much smaller than the one Murdoch and Dr. Grace examined in the morgue
• I wasn’t even a little surprised that Crabtree takes his own pillow when he travels
• “Nature. I’m not sure I care for it.”—George
• Question: Murdoch revealed he’d once been a lumberjack. Has that been talked about before?

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

William Murdoch, swashbuckling treasure hunter? Well, not exactly, but Toronto’s most successful detective did find himself in several tight spots during Monday’s newest episode while he hunted for the elusive Holy Grail. Paul Aitken’s script certainly tore a page from the Indiana Jones trilogy, right down to mysterious iconography, secret passages and deadly traps.

“Temple of Death” was also the latest instalment to employ the skills of Robert Crowther and his team over at Rocket Science Visual Effects, who have been working on Murdoch Mysteries for years. Some of the scenes Rocket Science has done for Murdoch include the outside of the temple in Monday’s storyline and the expansive Toronto waterfront from this season’s debut. We spoke to Crowther about the work he’s done on Murdoch Mysteries.

You’ve worked on several different projects over the years. Hannibal, Murdoch, The Listener, Todd & the Book of Pure Evil. It must be fun to jump back and forth among different genres.
Robert Crowther: It’s definitely interesting. Every day is a new problem to solve, really. Any dramatic project comes down to the same thing: how do we tell the story? And in visual effects there is a lot of problem solving. Something has been written and the first thing that runs through my mind is, “How the hell are we going to do this?” [Laughs.] So you have to go through a process of problem solving, really, to determine the best way to show it. And in all cases, even on a larger project, cost is always a factor.

How did you get into the visual effects game in the first place?
I kind of fell into it. I had an opportunity out of York University to do a summer internship at a visual effects company and it wasn’t really even something I was looking into at that time. Once I had some exposure to it I realized that it really fit the kind of talents and interests that I had. I had more than a better than average technical ability but also an interest in storytelling and picture. I thought I was going to be a director, but the reality of the world hits you and at that time there were definitely more opportunities in the visual effects industry. It’s something I found my way into at that time.

I really wanted to be in films and even back then I realized that being a member of a filmmaking team you are very, very involved in the way the story is told. Often, you can have your own level of influence. So though I never did become a director, I do find visual effects to be a very satisfying creative outlet.

What falls under your responsibilities at Murdoch Mysteries?
What’s evolved over the last few years is that rather than be involved in every episode there are a few episodes throughout the season that need a little more assistance from our side than the others. I’ll focus a little more on a certain number of episodes. In Season 8 there were probably four episodes that needed a little additional guidance. It starts with the script and I break down what I see to be an opportunity to use a visual effect or it’s not possible to get the shot through practical means. We’ll start with a read-through and then a meeting and discussion about the different options or approaches we can take to a problem. There is also a budget process as well, determining what the show can afford. Then we plan scene by scene what we’re going to do.

I go on the tech surveys as well in preproduction and I’ll go out to the locations and figure out what we’re going to shoot. I’ll consult on how a visual effect should be executed within the location or the set we’re in. I’ll go there on the shoot day as well to work with the director and director of photography to put the camera in the right place to get the footage we need. There are often camera details we need to get our hands on.

In Monday’s episode, there is that shot of the temple that Murdoch and Crabtree enter. How much of that had to be worked on by your team? What did you add that wasn’t there?
Most of the frame was modified by us. We had a real location for it. There is a beautiful cemetery mausoleum—The Thomas Foster Memorial in Uxbridge, Ont.—where we shot both interior and exterior. The exterior we shot as-is and we had the art department dress some vines and things on the building—it doesn’t have those now and it’s kind of in an open field—but we had to make it look like it was surrounded by 30 years of tree growth. So we had the actors do their dialogue do their lines with the set dressing around them and then we extended all of that. We added vines that go all the way up to the top, we didn’t replace the roof per se, we just integrated it better and replaced the sky. All the foliage around it is added by us as well.

Your team recreated the wonderful Toronto lakeshore for the season premiere. Can you talk about how you came to create that for the show?
That episode started with the script and Peter Mitchell had already mapped out what happened at the docks and wanted to create this sketchy part of Toronto. Most of the time Toronto plays as Toronto the Good. He needed this other place and had already set it up in the previous season. That was the central challenge at the beginning of Season 8, to make a new part of Toronto for the mystery to play out. I don’t even know where the initial thought to not shoot at dockside came from. It might have been Armando Sgrignuoli or Stephen Montgomery who sort of said to us, “Can you make this look like the waterfront of Toronto?”

After scratching our heads for awhile, we worked with some existing location photographs. We had some great footage from Season 7 where we had done the Keewatin crossing Lake Ontario. We had a lot of footage of Lake Ontario and we knew that any view from the Toronto harbourfront would look out on the islands. We took a lot of pictures and once we looked at them we realized we could create the harbour of the time. The other part of it, of course, is that today you have the island ferries and a few sailboats in the harbour. But in that time you had lake freighters coming in both directions and pleasure craft and the ferries, so we started working on CG vessels to populate the harbour and make it look busy.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?
I think it’s got to be having a final product that you can be proud of. In any creative process there is quite a lot of doubt and quite often we’re doing things we haven’t done before. If you’re not doubting what you’re doing, you’re probably doing something that’s too easy. I like to think that we challenge each other every time and the payoff is seeing that put to picture with all the sound added and telling a great story.

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