My Life Is Murder: "Fake Empire" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 5) I watched a delightful episode of the Australian policier My Life Is Murder in which heroine Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless), a recently resigned Melbourne Police Department detective who’s given a cold case to investigate by her former police partner, detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), is confronted by professional psychic Chloe Angel (Jane Harber) over a case in which a young-ish man was stabbed in the back and killed by an intruder in his home. The victim was Steven Harborne (Brian Brochmann), whom Chloe claims to be in contact with from the Great Beyond. She tells Alexa to tell Steven’s girlfriend, Jasmine Harris (Adrienne Pickering), that Steven was having an affair with a mystery partner. Steven had formerly taken nude photos of Jasmine right after they made love, but he’d stopped doing that and instead he was taking nude pictures of the woman with whom he’d been having extra-relational activities. Alexa finds Steven’s photos on the hard drive of his laptop, but he never showed his paramour’s face. Instead the sole distinguishing mark was a tattoo on the lower right end of her back, an unusual design of a bunch of flowers with a base made to look like the end of a lightbulb that fits into a standard socket. So Alexa has to try as best she can to sneak peeks of all Steven’s female acquaintances to see if they have that tattoo.

At first she thinks Chloe herself might have been Steven’s lover, but her back has no tattoo. Ultimately she traces it to the tattoo artist and between that and the visual evidence on her back, Alexa realizes that Steven’s extra-relational partner was Abby Williams (Danielle Horvath), a co-worker of Jasmine’s at a local hospital where they were both nurses. A third co-worker is a rather creepy male nurse named Adam Jaber (Hazem Shammas), who from the moment he turned up – tall, dark-haired, rather sketchy-looking – I suspected he’d turn out to be up to no good and possibly Steven’s real killer. That’s exactly what happened, though as the show lurched to a climax and Chloe promised to reveal the killer’s identity at her live appearance at a local theatre (where tickets had barely been selling until she got publicly involved in Steven’s case, whereupon the house sold out and she had to add two more shows to accommodate everyone who wanted to see her), writer Paul Bennett briefly tried to throw us a red herring by hinting that Jasmine had actually found out about Steven’s affair and killed him out of jealousy. (We see Steven actually get stabbed by a figure wearing a blue hoodie, the producers apparently copying Lifetime’s current gimmick of having its killers wear hoodies so it’s not immediately apparent what gender they are.) Only it turns out that Chloe exposes Adam as the killer after all, especially since Adam tried to take Chloe out while she was doing her day job as a groundskeeper at a city park by stabbing her with an EpiPen, so she would collapse and die while no one would suspect she was poisoned because her tox screen would turn up negative. (Bennett explained this by saying that epinephrine, which is what an EpiPen delivers, is a normal chemical in the human body.)

Not surprisingly, Adam’s motive was unrequited love for Jasmine, though much to his horror Jasmine remained loyal to Steven even after he died and then was exposed as a polyamorist. She even threw a memorial party for him! Mixed in with the story is Alexa’s acute skepticism towards all forms of psychic phenomena and specifically the people who claim to be able to speak with the dead. Alexa’s friend and associate Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans) argues with her about it and insists there is something out there beyond our knowledge of the physical world. Bennett also couldn’t resist the hint towards the end that Chloe has some real psychic power even though Alexa says that what alleged mediums do is simply ask leading questions – which Madison replies is exactly what Alexa does as an investigator, “Sure,” Alexa replies, “but I don’t claim to be able to talk to dead people.” At the end, after Hussey and a couple of uniformed cops have taken Adam into custody for Steven’s murder, Alexa references her late husband and the watch he gave her, which she still wears, which he had inscribed. “How did she know about the inscription?” Alexa asks about Chloe – though I would have expected Alexa to respond, “Because she went to see the jeweler and asked about it.”