Thoughts about Death at Victoria Dock

This episode is about Phryne helping a friend of aunt Prudence when his daughter goes missing. His dock workers are striking and while Phryne is at the dock, a young Latvian man is shot to death and dies in front of Phryne. Of course she gets involved in the investigation of his death and crosses path with anarchists and Jack. Even though he seemed to soften towards her in Green Mill Murder, he is most reluctant to do so now. Can it be out of fear that she will be killed? The anarchists tries to do so a few times during the episode after all.

I know people want to see Phryne as this "larger than life superhero" and of course I love that aspect of her too, but I love even more when she is human. When she allows herself to stop her otherwise hectic tempo and reflect and react with emotions to the things happening around her.

This episode is one of those times. She is deeply affected by the death of Yourka and I love to see here. She might not spend so much time reflecting over things and she does not look back towards her past, but she has emotions and she does care about others. She has a lot of empathy and I so very much love her for it.

"It'd be a tactical error to think you had me pegged just yet, Miss Fisher"

~ Jack Robinson, Death at Victoria Dock

Like I said above, Jack still tries to avoid working with Phryne in this episode and he is frustrated that she has constable Hugh Collins totally wrapped around her fingers. But in the end he tells her not to judge him yet, a sign that he is slowly accepting her more and more. He also acknowledge that he is aware of how he has treated her and that he deep down wants her to stick around no matter how ambivalent his feelings are towards her.

Thoughts about The Green Mill Murder

In The Green Mill Murder, Leonard Stevens is murdered in the jazz club The Green Mill which Phryne and her friend Charles Freeman visit. It turns out that Leonard has made a lot of enemies by blackmailing them about their biggest secrets. Among them is Charles and he is the first one to be suspected of murder since he flees the crime scene.

"As far as I'm concerned, everybody should be allowed to marry whomever they choose. Though personally, I'm not the marrying kind."

~Phryne Fisher

Like in Cocaine Blues this episode partly deals with issues regarding sexuality that was (and still is in some countries) regulated by laws and how this can be used to give some people a hold on others. Charles is homosexual and Leonard Stevens is blackmailing him and his lover Robert Sullivan after having found out. The episode also portrays an interracial marriage between Noreen and Ben Rogers. The former is also blackmailed by Leonard.

The camera turn into Jack as he is excusing himself through
the crowd at the Green Mill

I like this episode despite the fact that the method of murder is a bit unbelievable. I think that there are just too many factors that need to be right for it to work. This is also addressed more in the book as far as I remember. The book also looks more thorough into the First World War and how it still effects society and its members ten years later. Charles's brother Victor is still living alone and in secret far away from his family, but his PTSD (called shell shock at the time) plays a much more prominent role in the book.

I love Phryne's flapper outfit and how the camera turns into Jack as he excuses his way through the crowd at the Green Mill to get to Phryne and the dead body. He is still a bit standoffish, but particularly at the end of the episode, we get a glimpse that he likes and is far more interested in her than he lets anyone (and perhaps himself) know.

Phryne takes a small interest in Tintagel Stone, the band leader of the Green Mill and I think he, together with Lindsay Thompson from Murder on the Ballarat Train are the sleaziest of the men she seems to at least want to have sex with. I am all for her being sexually liberated and I do not want to judge her, but those two men in particular would not be my own first choice because of their sleeziness.

Thoughts about Murder on the Ballarat Train

The second episode of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries finds Phryne and Dot boardering a train to Ballarat where they are going to pick up Phryne's new car. On the way there, Mrs Henderson is murdered. Phryne also moves into her new house and hires Mr Butler and buys a new taxi car for Bert and Cec. This is also the episode in which we are introduced to Jane who is sneaking aboard the train, comes across Mrs Henderson's jewels and gets accused of murder before Phryne, of course, sorts it all out again.

I really enjoy this episode. The plot holds up pretty well and I like it how the "family" is united more in this one than in the first (even though Mac and aunt Prudence are missing).

After reading the book, one thing I like less about the episode is that they have sort of degraded Eunice Henderson, daughter of the murdered woman, to a woman dependent on both her mother and her boyfriend. Book-Eunice is much more independant and the one who provides for herself and her mother so the latter can continue to live a more glamorous life-style despite having lost her money due to bad investement.

Another thing that I find less good about the episode is that it is the only time we see Ruth, who Phryne adopts besides Jane in the books. It seems odd based on how close she and Jane are. I wonder why she could not be one of the flower-maidens in Queen of the flowers.

There is a big Hottie-momen in this episode when they meet in the hallway of the train. That is one of my favourite with those too loveable characters. Looking at these early episodes, you can really see how much Dot develops.

Jack is still quite grumpy in this episode. He is not used to Phryne and her ways yet. But we get our first Phrack-moment with the scene in the murdered woman's compartment on the train and this episode also has the first night-cap between them.

Thoughts about Cocaine Blues

All throughout January and in the first few days of February did I have my own rewatch of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries from Cocaine Blues to Death do us part. I watched one episode a day, but when I was done I realised I should have taken the opportunity to discuss them a bit on this blog too. Therefore I will be doing it now and also involve my Lego project. I will not be doing one episode a day, but I will try to at least do one episode a week and see how it goes. First up is of course Cocaine Blues. This was the first one I saw (almost two years go on 22 February 2016) and one of the episodes I have discussed the most in the past.

I did find the show through Essie Davis. I had become a fan of her after watching the Babadook back in December 2015 and started looking up what more she had done. Basically I was hooked from the very beginning. I loved Phryne Fisher from the moment she stepped onto that gangway and met Mac at the harbour in Melbourne.

The plot is about the honourable Phryne Fisher who gets back to Melbourne after some years abroad. She is met with her best friend Dr. Elizabeth “Mac” MacMillan who becomes her most trusted confidant throughout the first episode. The audience soon learn about Murdoch Foyle kidnapping Phryne’s sister Jane when they were kids and that Phryne’s main reason for returning to Australia is to make sure he will not get out of prison. Phryne is also invited to a luncheon at her old friend Lydia Andrew’s house, but Lydia’s husband has been murdered.

At the Andrews’s house, Phryne encounters some of the people who will be more and more important as the show goes on: Dot Williams, Jack Robinson and Hugh Collins. We are also introduced to Phryne’s aunt, Prudence Stanley. When Phryne gets there, Dot comes out of the house telling her that John Andrews has passed away and Phryne immediately gets interested. During a visit to the bathroom where he was found, she meets Jack for the first time. I have talked about their meeting before and I stand by what I said back then. 

Jack is easy to misjudge during this first episode. He is a bit arrogant and stand offish and I first saw him like a typical “cop” having troubles with the lady detective, but there is a twist to him and he grew on me as the series progressed. 

Dot is hired as Phryne’s companion and will also become very important to her. She is certainly the character who grows the most throughout the series. In my blog entry discussing Ruddy Gore I compared her to the invisible child Ninni who is brought to the Moomin family in Tove Jansson’s book with the same name.

Like with Jack it is so easy to misjudge her and she is timid and afraid of everything (especially electricity!), but under Phryne’s care, she grows into a strong, confident young woman over the first two seasons. In the third season she sort of regresses somewhat, but I will get into that more when we get to those episodes.

Through the Andrews’s other maid Alice who has been dismissed after John Andrews got her pregnant, Phryne also gets to know Bert and Cec and the social theme of the episode: illegal abortions. The episode shows that abortions will always happen no matter what the law says and if it is illegal, it can end up severely hurting women while no one will be able to charge the ones carrying them out so the women are often used and might even die. 

In one scene, Bert says that Lenin made abortion legal in the Soviet Union in 1920 and I thought I really had to look it up. It turned out to be true and one of the strangest things I have looked up. I really never thought it was a subject I would look into, but at the same time I am glad I did.

Even though dealing with the past is my profession, I have never really had an interest in the 20^th century. I more or less live by the motto: The older the better. I have always thought you should enhance the holocaust and the Second World War because it is really important that we never forget how horrible that was, but Phryne has given me a real interest in the century in a totally different way. It showed me that there are still stories that needs to be told and I am glad I found it.