Darkness Before the Dawn: Part 1

This episode, the first half of the season finale, is definitely full of intrigue, suspense and surprises! Practically every main character is involved one way or the other in the various events shown so far. We see pluses and minuses in character not previously expected. I feel the finale will bring a number of changes, especially if the series goes on to #13.

Of note, the cinematography started us off in the strange mystery mood of this episode. We see a scene shot at an angle (45 degrees) as well as the elevator shot of Detective Murdoch, shot from the floor up. Definitely suspense, waiting for the finale to come!

Well it's the last two Murdoch Mysteries episodes of the season, so it must be darker than dark and bleaker than bleak - at least this is both the pattern set for us over more than a decade of the long-running series and what is presented in Darkness Before the Dawn Part One. The episode opens with tragedy in the making and quickly flashes back and then catches us up on the darkness in everyone's lives. The thread which binds Brackenreid's marriage is more fray than line; young Brackenreid is in physical peril and in a messy romantic relationship with serious legal ramifications; Watts is investigating a case which is being shut down by another station; Julia has made a career decision which she may soon regret; Murdoch seeks the ever-eluding promotion (but those around him are manipulative); and the ambitious (but never fully trustworthy) Miss Hart clearly won't let anything stop her career plans. The only potential light-hearted aspect the episode is Crabtree and Effie (a potential paring which was foreshadowed many episodes back), but as they are seen largely sniping at one another in this offering, and so not much relief from the shadows that suffocate. On the positive side (scant as it may be), the episode packs a lot of storytelling and plot setup into its 44 minutes, so no one will be bored. However, since the series does have a history of this dark tone for the penultimate episode of the season, the viewer can only watch it with the distinct feeling that this is another in a long line of dark tunnels and that the majority of our characters will come through battered (with perhaps a key loss along the way) but ready to get back to the business of pedantic mystery solving by the beginning of the next season - and this is the problem as it reduces the feeling of true drama and turns it into a turn of the century soap opera. Perhaps a focus on a single problem or two would have heightened the sense of peril? ...something to consider for the end of Season 13...