Spoiler alert! Do not read on until you’ve watched Murdoch Mysteries Episode 18, “Hell to Pay.”

Now that was one heck of a season finale, wasn’t it Murdoch Mysteries fans? It’s a good thing our favourite series has been greenlit for another season because there are a ton of questions to be answered! Will Julia be found? How will William get out of this scrape? Is Det. Watts really there to help William? Did Brackenreid fight off Davis, or is he injured or, gulp, dead? And, perhaps most importantly: did Higgins, Crabtree and Jackson all survive the gunfire?

We spoke to Murdoch Mysteries showrunner Peter Mitchell about that edge-of-your-seat instalment—the show’s landmark 150th—and where the show goes in Season 11.

First of all, congratulations on your writing win at the Canadian Screen Awards, as well as Murdoch Mysteries winning the Golden Screen Award. Is it important to you to win awards, specifically one for writing?
Peter Mitchell: Murdoch has never gotten a nomination for writing, so it was important to give a little shout-out to the writers. It’s nice to win an award, but it’s not why I’m here. I think I’ve been nominated 11 times or something and this is the first time I’ve won. Winning is better than losing. [Laughs.] I won’t deny that. It was nice of the movie to win too as a whole. Obviously, I’m biased but getting the award for most viewership is more important than anything else.

Let’s talk about the cliffhanger season finale, ‘Hell to Pay.’ I seem to remember Murdoch being framed for murder once before?
I believe he was at the end of Season 4 [“Murdoch in Wonderland”]. That was just before my time. I don’t think it was a cliffhanger, he was exonerated by the end of the episode.

At what point did you decide ‘Hell to Pay’ would be a cliffhanger?
I think it was around the time that we thought Trump was going to win [the election]. I just figured everything would go to hell both fictionally and in real life.

It was great to see Robin Dunne back on TV. I haven’t seen him since Sanctuary.
He was great. I had never met him before, actually, and he was a ton of fun. It was also especially fun to work with John Wildman, who was on a TV show called The Campbells a million years ago and I used to drive him to work. That’s the first time we had worked together in, like, 30 years.

You started out in the industry as a driver?
Well, as a production assistant. They didn’t have drivers back then. I was the general gofer guy.

How long were you a P.A.?
One season, and then I moved into the writing department fairly quickly once I got my foot in the door.

Did you take a TV writing course at the time?
I took one television writing course at York University for, like, a semester. My instructor was in the business, at CTV, and he got me a gig.

OK, let’s talk about the episode. Miss Cherry’s personality has certainly evolved. In last week’s episode, she was talking shit about William and Julia. There is no faster way to turn the fans on someone than having them do that.
Yeah, especially Julia. We learned that when one of the characters Emily was involved with called William a stick in the mud. That was basically her death sentence. [Laughs.] But we had portrayed Louise as being controlling over George throughout, but it was when she insults George’s friends that he can do better. I kind of knew what the reaction would be.

Is that it for Louise Cherry?
I wouldn’t say so, no. She performs a function in the finale and is not out of the picture.

With regard to Inspector Brackenreid … we hear a gunshot and last saw Davis aiming a gun at his head. 
We hear a gunshot go off and that’s the last we see of Brackenreid. I guess we’ll see what happens.

It appears we might be losing one of the constables. Murdoch is told that one of them is dead.
I think you have to think about the reliability of the narrator, the person who is telling him that. I don’t think we can end a season like that and have everything be tickety-boo. The show, in essence, has five cliffhangers: three constables, one Julia and a Brackenreid. And we don’t see any of them past the three-quarter mark of the show. And, why is Watts offering to be so helpful at the very end of the episode? Is he a good guy? I don’t know. Why didn’t he help Murdoch earlier? Why is he showing up now?

So, Watts may have ulterior motives?
Maybe. I never trust those Maslanys. They have many faces! [Laughs.] Daniel is fantastic; just a very pleasant young man.

You’ve created this mess with all of these characters. How do you clean it up going forward?
I think it’s a big enough mess that it will take more than one episode to clean it up. I’ve been studiously avoiding the hard work of making it all make sense. I think what I’ll probably do is use a couple of the early episodes to deal with the repercussions of last year and then bounce the show ahead three months in time because I don’t think we’re purpose built to go dark, dark, dark. We’re allowed to go dark on the show but I don’t think we can stay there.

Are there any historical characters you’re planning on bringing on board for Season 11?
I think we’re going to bring back good old Teddy Roosevelt. I think we’re going to bring Dr. William Osler back, one of the founders of modern medicine. I think we’re going to bring in Helen Keller, who will help solve a case. And, with Helen Keller, I think we’re going to get Alexander Graham Bell. That’s just in the early stages right now and I think we’re going to try and pay a tiny bit more attention to getting more historical characters in this year than we did last year. That might entail the return of Laurier and Terrence Meyers, of course, some of the regular characters we like to see every year.

In terms of the historical characters, they all seem to be in the world of medicine for some reason.

What did you think of the season finale? Let me know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of CBC.

Talk about a dramatic conclusion for Murdoch Mysteries. After setting up Julia’s potential demise at the hands of a ghostly Eva Pearce, William struggled to save his wife from the flames as The Great Fire consumed Toronto.

Also unveiled during “Great Balls of Fire, Part 2”? Crabtree and Nina are still going strong, so much so he invested in Sam’s garage, William has staked out him and Julia’s dream home and Henry learned his cigars were not the cause of the fire.

In the first of our season-long discussions with Murdoch Mysteries‘ writing staff, we broke down Monday’s episode with showrunner Peter Mitchell and got a hint into Episode 3.

Was there ever any talk that “Great Balls of Fire, Part 1” and “Part 2” be a two-hour movie instead of two episodes?
Peter Mitchell: Briefly, but I don’t think seriously. It easily could have been done, but it never came up as a serious request.

The scenes that involved fire were impressive. It looked as though you used a combination of CGI and real fire. Was that the case?
It was probably 70-30 real fire.

Safety would have been an issue, no?
It was dicey because, though you do a certain amount of flame retardant, there is always the fact that the bones of the set have been around for quite some time, so there is always a flammability factor in play. Not so much danger to the actors because long lenses and flame bars can disguise proximity. There is a bit more distance between the actors and the flame than the eye would tell you. There is always a tiny risk anytime you do anything, but our main concern was that we didn’t actually start The Great Fire of Scarborough. But we had fire engines on hand and all that stuff.

Did you build extra sets onto the original set that was part of the fire?
We built additions on to the existed set that could be used, especially for the after-effects of the fire. They were sort of modular pieces that could be put into play and then removed. We built a couple of sets that, even though they looked damaged, were remarkably undamaged after the fire effects were done. The CGI that was done after the fact lent to the slightly greater carnage.

I really enjoyed the moment where Brackenreid was narrating the toll of the fire while sepia-toned footage of fighting the blaze was shown. Did you use actual footage from the intermixed with the cast acting it out?
We used as much archival footage as we could find. There is actually some film of the fire from the time. We used the archival footage that we found and then shot some elements and then aged and treated them to look like they fit the archival footage.

Was it a challenge to not focus too much on the fire and stick to the murders when the fire was such a big event?
Quite frankly, the amount of resources it would have taken to do a full episode about the fire would have been beyond our abilities. I liked the idea of using the archival stuff and thought it worked really well. Because it is a murder mystery and it is a fairly well-known event, we acknowledged the one victim of the Toronto fire. We didn’t want to create a falsehood that the fire was used to cover up a murder. We wanted to be more journalist that storyteller in that moment.

Because of the extent of the blaze in real history, will it be referenced at all going forward?
We see that from time to time, in some places. If you look at the actual city maps and the areas that were affected, it was certainly considerable but there are large parts of Toronto that weren’t affected by the fire. We didn’t really want to do Murdoch Mysteries: The Dresden Files. [Laughs.]

What about Julia’s mental state? By the end of this episode, she recognizes killing Eva was necessary. Has that story closed for good?
I think it’s pretty much closed. It was a good opportunity to deal with it, but I think it runs its course. There’s always the danger when you have strong female characters of turning them into a damaged character. I want to stay away from that. Brackenreid got better after being screwed up two years ago; there’s no reason Julia can’t.

It was a nice full-circle moment when Julia told Elizabeth that killing will change her.
We all compartmentalize, right? Who knows, maybe it will pop out sometime, but not in the immediate future.

Crabtree and Nina seem to be going strong, especially after he invested money in Sam’s garage.
Crabtree is on the up part of the roller coaster right now. Then it goes down. [Laughs.] But then it goes up again! And down. What we’ve enjoyed about that is opening up that Star Room set to us. It allows us to have our cops because they are red-blooded males, someplace to hang out and give us some visual colour. We get to use the burlesque routines as a bit of commentary on the show. There is a debutante routine in the first part and a firefighter routine in the second part, which are just fun little bits and very much what burlesque vaudeville would have been at the time.

We got to see William’s plot of land where he’s planning to build the house. Will we spend much time watching it built?
I think there is enough of that on HGTV. [Laughs.] And things don’t always go as planned.

What can you tell us about next week’s episode?
George may be on the way to finally finding love, Julia may be on the way to being healed and Murdoch may well be on the way to a crushing mortgage.

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

Images courtesy of CBC.

Check out this footage of the 1904 fire

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.