I couldn’t have picked a better episode to chat with property master Craig Grant. Grant, who has been working on Murdoch Mysteries since its first season, is the dude who creates and builds all of the funky things featured on the CBC drama. During Monday’s “High Voltage,” he manufactured everything from Thomas Edison Jr.’s Vital Motion Plus–the episode’s deadly weapon–to the robotic arm, that odd, nose-plug contraption and the electric wheelchair (who else caught Grant’s cameo as the driver of that wheelchair?).

Turns out Edison Jr. really did use his famous father’s name to sell weird items to folks back in the day, including the items featured during Monday’s instalment. We got Grant on the phone to chat about his gig and an intriguing storyline about Brackenreid’s painting.

Let’s use Monday’s episode, “High Voltage,” as an example of a week in your work life. How far in advance do you get a look at a script and know what you have to manufacture?
Craig Grant: It’s a hard question to answer. Technically, we get the script two weeks in advance. We shoot 13 days per block–two episodes per block–and we usually get the scripts for the next block at the end of the two weeks. So, the next day we meet the new director and have concept meetings. Because of some of the things that I need to procure, the writers usually sneak down to my office and give me a little, ‘Hey, we might need this!’ or ‘We might be doing that.’ Technically I get them two weeks in advance. Realistically it can be a couple weeks to a month in advance.

‘High Voltage’ was written by Carol Hay, so she had told me early on that she was writing this episode about Thomas Edison Jr. and one of the reference photos we had was this wacky medical device that Edison Jr. had flogged. At the Edison booth, there was this guy with a leather pad on his chest and in another scene he had this weird contraption on his head and in his nose. Those we built based on photos based on a real Edison device. I found photos of those and–because they were leather and I’m not a sewer–I took them to a shop to have them built. They weren’t functional but they were identical to the real Edison devices that we had in the day. With Edison Sr.–people used to see the name Thomas Edison and think it was him and would send the pieces back to him because they didn’t work–he would send letters to them saying, ‘It wasn’t me.’

So all of that part of the storyline was true.
Right down to Edison forcing his son to change his name so that he didn’t do that in the future.

Was the Vital Motion Plus an actual item too, or did you create that for the storyline?
That was something that we came up with. And in one of the original scripts it was more of an upright, strap yourself in type of thing, and I thought it would be a lot of fun if we could do a chair because if you could have the springs, it would have that vibrating motion. Make it an electric chair, but make it more fun. The original script had that there were these electrodes attached and I said, ‘When you find the dead body, is it more fun to have him standing up, strapped to something, or slumped over in a chair?’ That was actually a wheelchair that I took apart and modified to end up with the look that we got.

When it comes to turning the wheelchair into a device, does the idea just pop into your head? Do you get any feedback, or are you left to your own creativity?
I’m lucky enough on this show that the powers that be just let me go. I pretty much get to design and build all of the props that you see on the show from the airplane a couple of years ago, to the electric car to this chair with almost no interference. Sometimes there will be a little back and forth, but most of the time I’ll show them what it looks like as it’s being built. It just flows out of me. I can’t draw, so I don’t do sketches or schematics. I will just start building, and I’ll drive around to places like Lee Valley and look at what they’ve got. There were some lovely little brass bits on the chair that I 3-D printed, and other pieces as got as surplus parts that I thought looked like they looked like electrodes. It just kind of comes.

And sometimes they come up with ideas that are better. I was going to mount the control box on the arm of the chair and it was decided that it would be better if it was separate so that you could walk around with it. It’s a collaboration.

You mentioned a 3-D printer. Are you using that technology a lot now?
I built a 3-D printer between seasons 7 and 8 and started to learn how to use it. The first thing I was building for myself was a life-sized human robot. Just because I could. In ‘High Voltage,’ as we move down the block, you end up at the prosthetics booth. The arm that is in front of them, moving up and down, was 3-D printed and it has six or seven servo-motors inside it. I was off-camera, operating that by remote control. That was just something I happened to build in the off-season and then when they were writing the episode they said, ‘It would be great to have a robotic arm.’ I said, ‘I’ve got one guys.’ I reprinted parts in black so that they looked like cast-iron, added brass and wrapped the arm in leather and put a glove on it. I hope you can’t tell that it was 3-D printed, but it was an incredibly high-tech piece.

I was the guy driving the electric wheelchair and that was something from back from Season 1. I told them it would be nice to update it a little bit and see it again in the medical convention and they said it would be nice if it could be driven so I did that. In the shot with the arm moving, I had to drive the length of the hall and as soon as I was out of camera I had to jump out and whip around a corner, grab the remote control and start controlling the arm. It was a little bit of fun sleight of hand. I have printed a number of other items that will be seen in future episodes.

You must have a lot of fun.
I love the show because of the freedom they give me, because of the builds I get to do. That aspect is a lot of fun and there are very few shows that would give a prop guy the freedom that I have here. On the other hand, our budgets are tight and manpower is tight. It makes the show harder every year.

Who painted Brackenreid’s painting?
Brackenreid’s painting will figure heavily in an upcoming episode. We have a whole episode around Brackenreid and Tom Thomson. It’s a really funny little bit between Brackenreid, Ogden and Tom Thomson.

Our scenic painters painted that piece and they did a whole bunch of versions of it. We ended up needing four copies of it. In the very first episode he was painting it at his house and if you watch the episodes carefully it has progressed. More has been added to it and we end up with a finished product.

We’ve talked about the big-ticket items that you build, but what about the small stuff? Are you responsible for everything from the medical stuff in Emily’s morgue to, say, the ledger at the Windsor House Hotel?
Yeah, a prop is anything they handle. Now, I get the ledger and then I talk to our graphics department and tell them I need 20 pages that we can flip through and need stuff written on the pages. We have a graphics guy who will do the graphics or depending on what is required and our timing sometimes we’ll do the graphics. I have a guy I work closely with named Steve that does all of Murdoch’s handwriting on the blackboard. He’s always there and Yannick doesn’t really have the time to write that stuff, so we do it. In the morgue, I do all of the bodies and the body parts and all of the instrumentation. All of those things fall under my domain as well.

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

No one could have seen that conclusion coming. Monday’s episode of Murdoch Mysteries, “What Lies Buried,” featured the return of William Murdoch’s nemesis, Inspector Giles (Nigel Bennett). He, along with Brackenreid, were among the suspects after the body of a fellow police officer, Constable Finch, was discovered buried under the station house.

Fun facts from Brackenreid’s first days on the job as a copper–he met future wife Margaret when he arrested her and his nickname was “Tommy Two Cakes”–took a decidedly dramatic turn during Murdoch’s interrogation of Giles. It was there–under sparse lighting–that the two men exchanged secrets: Murdoch confirmed he’d helped Constance Gardiner escape from the jail and Giles revealed he was gay. That was shocking enough, but the uppercut to Giles’ initial jab was the realization Constable Hodge (Brian Kaulback) had killed Finch out of loyalty to Giles.

Giles’ outing meant he’s off the force and will no longer be part of Murdoch Mysteries. As for Hodge, well, we may see more of him yet according to the episode’s writer, Paul Aitken.

Why did you decide to cover homosexuality in this episode?
We’ve actually dealt with homosexuality several times throughout the series mostly because it existed. Even people at the time knew it was a thing and it existed. How they dealt with it then is very different with how we deal with it today and it’s always interesting to see the differences between now and then in terms of how homosexuality was understood.

Monday’s episode was what we call a bottle show. It was an episode that had to be filmed quite cheaply because we find ourselves in a situation–at least once or twice a season–where we have overspent or are concerned about overspending, so the whole episode was contained within the station house. To do that, of course, you need to have a mystery that is absorbing enough, so we came up with someone being buried beneath the station house and we had to build a mystery on that. I can’t remember who it was but someone came up with the very bright idea of Giles be very much involved in the original crime. There was always a suspicion amongst the writers that the character of Giles was possibly homosexual, and it could be just the way in which [Nigel Bennett] played him. It was a natural fit and once you introduce that into a character–him being a homosexual–then you become aware of the challenges that they face. You can build a whole twist on them wanting and needing to keep it a secret. We came up with that idea because it served the function of the episode.

The scene between Giles and Murdoch was very powerful. Two men admitting secrets to the other with just two spotlights over them in the darkened interrogation room. It was very effective.
At the end of Season 4, Murdoch has the secret of Constance and Giles knows about it. He can’t catch Murdoch at it so you have this cat and mouse thing and I’ve always wanted the confrontation scene. We were very happy with the idea of having these two things come together. Giles’ guilt caused him to do things by the book and defined him because of this great secret that he carried, and from then on he became very rigid in his adherence to how things should be done. That was why he was so hard on Murdoch. We see that come completely undone in the scene and I was very happy we were able to do that.

It was a very difficult scene for the actors because that was the first scene shot for that episode. There was very little preparation time, you couldn’t build up to it and it was a lot to ask, especially of Yannick, who is in most scenes in most episodes and doesn’t have a lot of time to prepare. I think Yannick was a little peeved at me before that scene was filmed, but everybody realized after it was filmed that it was an exceptional scene.

How will this affect Murdoch’s Roman Catholicism in the coming weeks?
We don’t know. I think this has been evolving since the series began. Over the seasons we’ve seen the effect Dr. Ogden has had on him. I think he is less rigid than he used to be and he is more forgiving. Obviously that exists within Catholicism, there is a capacity for forgiveness. I think we’re constantly seeing the clash between his faith and his scientific impetus and we’re seeing a different side of him when it comes to the law with Constance Gardiner.

Does this mean Constable Hodge is no longer going to be on the show?
Well, we don’t know. We gave ourselves an out at the end of the episode. Giles is gone because he is a homosexual and will pay the price for that. But Hodge … it could be argued that it was an unintended killing and it’s possible he won’t do much time. He’ll never be back as a constable but maybe he’ll have a bar. We don’t know. Brian gave a standout performance. We were very happy with it and I think he was happy too.

Talk about the Brackenreid’s back story. Last night was the first time we learned he and Margaret met when he arrested her. Was that in important piece to put in there to tie in more revelations about Margaret?
It was a completely fun addition, but you’ve just given me an idea. [Laughs.] Every time you do it you create a bit of history and hopefully you remember it so you can build on it later. We never thought about it before this episode and I kind of liked the idea that he was attracted to her because she was a spark plug.

How do you go about your writing process? Do you shut yourself off in a room and write? Are you superstitious and use a certain pen or have a certain drink?
Everyone has their different writing style preferences and I like to write in the room with everyone else. I don’t like to miss anything, so I’ll often write the script while I’m in the office. One thing that’s nice about writing in the room at work is that I can always try out different lines with people or ask the room if it’s working. It’s very helpful. I don’t think anybody writes a script totally by themselves, least of all me. I’m always seeking outside help in just about every scene I write.

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

I literally jumped up out of my chair and applauded when Inspector Brackenreid laid down the law [on Murdoch Mysteries]: no leaving the church until the ceremony was complete. Finally! Now to get Crabtree & Edna Brooks together.–Sue

It seemed to me like they played the wrong music for Julia’s walk down the aisle. The one played was Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” which is usually played after the ceremony. But I loved the show!–CW

In a series where Murdoch’s faith seems to be an integral part of his actions, it struck me as extremely bad writing to have them talk all the way through their vows and tell the priest to hurry up! I could see them realizing who the culprit was and leaving the church in haste after the ceremony and everyone in the dark as to why they left, only to reappear at the reception with it all solved and taken care of.–Merle

Got a comment or question about Canadian television? Send it to greg@tv-eh.com!