by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
About the only thing I got to watch on TV last night —
Lifetime was doing an interminable documentary mini-series on the murder of
Laci Peterson by her estranged husband Scott (and the ominous decision to
charge him with two murders because Laci
was pregnant when she was killed — as an ardent pro-choicer I have a problem
with anything that hints that a
fetus is a separate being that has an actionable right to “life”) — was a Doctor
Blake Mysteries series episode called
“Mortal Coil.” It begins at a funeral during which the pallbearers are having
unexpected trouble with the sheer weight of the coffin — and when they drop it
on its way to the grave they find out why: it contains two dead bodies, the one they were supposed to be
burying and that of Sid Bartel (Bruce Gleeson), an old handyman in the village
of Ballarat, Australia where The Doctor Blake Mysteries are set (Doctor Lucien Blake himself, played by
Craig McLachlan, being a young man who grew up in Ballarat, went off to serve
as a military medic in World War II, then elected to return and resettle in
Ballarat in the late 1950’s). Of course this raises the obvious mystery-type
questions: how did Sid’s body get into that coffin, how did Sid die and, most
important, was it foul play and therefore something the police should work on
finding out and prosecuting? Later the police and Doctor Blake encounter another double-occupied coffin in which the unauthorized
occupant turns out to be Martin Callow (Andrew S. Gilbert), owner of the
mortuary from which the bodies were supposed to be buried. Doctor Blake,
despite the opposition of the local police (who at one point tell him to wait
in the police station while they check out the latest lead he’s given them —
which, of course, he doesn’t), stakes out the funeral home and finds Martin’s
widow Lydia (Esther Stephens) has been having an affair with the mortuary’s
delivery driver, which of course leads Blake to suspect that she and the driver
conspired to knock off her husband so they could be together.
But Dr. Blake
finally pins the murders on Harold Morris (Dennis Coard), a nasty guy we’ve
hated from the moment he was introduced and started bullying everyone, who
along with his two sons were once enforcers for an Australian labor union whose
job it was to beat up and intimidate scabs. Morris threatens Dr. Blake himself
but Blake gets the gun away from him, and just when (in the best-written scene
of Stuart Page’s script) Morris has taunted Blake with the idea that Blake
doesn’t have the nerve to shoot him, especially since as a doctor he’s pledged
to save lives instead of taking
them, Blake shoots him — not in the chest but in the knee to incapacitate him
so he can be arrested and held in the local hospital by the police. The police
finally get the evidence they need to convict Morris when his son Steven (Dan
Hamill) turns state’s evidence and confesses his own role in the crimes — the
other son having disappeared earlier and possibly, Page’s script hints, himself
having been “offed” by his father when he wanted to turn them all in. The
motive for the killings, as nearly as I could figure it out, was that Martin
Callow had been involved in Australia’s labor wars on the management side and
that Harold Morris had a vendetta against him and was determined to kill him —
and that poor Sid Bartel, a handyman who still transported himself in a
horse-drawn vehicle (itself inspiring some murderous rage among local drivers
who found his 2-mile-an-hour cart blocking the way of their cars on the road),
was just in the wrong place at the wrong time: he witnessed Harold shooting
Martin and therefore Harold shot him too. I have no idea if the history of
organized labor in Australia was anywhere nearly as violent as this episode
makes it sounds, and despite my opposition to terrorism in the service of any cause I still have a rather clammy feeling about a story
in which union activists are the villains, but this was a quite good Doctor
Blake episode in a show I’ve come to like
for its understated British-style approach to murder (the only on-screen scenes
of violence we see are Dr. Blake’s incapacitation of the villain and a few
flashbacks representing Blake’s speculations on how the murders might have occurred) and the cleverness of the writing,
even though in a few episodes (though not this one) the cleverness has got a
bit too clever for its own good.
