Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries: "Space for Murder" (Every Cloud Productions, Seven Productions, Screen Australia, Film Victoria, All3 Media, GPB, WGBH, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Saturday, January 20) at 7:30 I watched the third episode of Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, “Space for Murder,” an awkwardly titled Australian TV show which debuted in 2019. It’s set during the so-called “Swinging Sixties,” and it’s a follow-up to Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, a previous Australian series that ran from 2012 to 2015 and featured a women-run detective agency solving crimes in the 1920’s. (The use of the term “Ms.” in the title is anachronistic since “Ms.” as a substitute for “Mrs.” or “Miss” didn’t come into use until the early 1970’s.) The show’s heroine is Peregrine Fisher (Geraldine Hakewill), and this episode starts with a prologue featuring a teenage couple, Tommy Vorton (Matthew Connell) and Tanya Doppler (Sarah Spiven), in a big-ass old Chevrolet convertible parking on a deserted bluff, clearly there to make out. Suddenly Tanya sees a bright light off in the distance and walks towards it, thinking it’s a UFO and the space aliens are going to pick her up and take her to their planet. Tommy is nonplussed by this, and he’s even more upset subsequently when Tanya disappears and Tommy is accused of murdering her. Then the show has a Lifetime-style chyron announcing we’re “One Year Later,” and one year later Birdie Birnside (Catherine McClements) is turning the talents of her all-woman detective agency to investigate the mysterious death of her best friend, Dr. Cecile Armand (Jane Bayly). Dr. Armand was found dead in her car, parked in the middle of nowhere, with an odd spider-shaped burn mark on her knee. Her skin was almost literally frozen. Dr. Armand worked as the director of a top-secret laboratory that was supposedly investigating UFO’s, and to infiltrate the place Peregrine Fisher gets a job there as a “tea lady,” pushing around a cart offering tea and various pastries and cookies to go with it to the predictably self-important and sexist men who work there.

One of the most obnoxious guys in the operation is German-born scientist Dr. Hans Peterson (Steve Mouzakis), who’s notorious for hitting on all the young and reasonably attractive women who work there. He becomes a suspect when Peregrine Fisher sees the space heater in his office and realizes that the grille on it could have made the burn found on Cecile’s leg, but his alibi turns out to be that he was at a whorehouse the night Cecile died. The intrigue turns out to center around a drug called “Azure 0693,” a derivative of ergot (a fungus that affects mostly rye grains; there’s a school of thought that the witchcraft scandals were actually caused by ergot, and the alleged witches were testifying accurately to the hallucinations they’d experienced while high from the LSD-like effects of ergot; I remember seeing a PBS documentary on the one witch scandal that actually happened during the 20th century, in France in 1948, that was attributed to ergot poisoning) invented by the CIA as a truth serum. The drug turns out to have effects similar to LSD, and when Tanya disappeared that evening a year before she had been secretly administered it and thought she was walking towards a spaceship when she was really walking nowhere in particular under the influence of a drug. The people at the research institute grabbed Tanya and held her there, telling her that she had to be kept in a clean and warm room or else her skin would turn blue – and one of the clues that led Fisher to the solution was a set of blue scale-like skin flakes on the floor of the research lab which she (and we) assumed at first were from aliens but turned out to be from Tanya under the influence of Azure 0693.

In one scene, Detective James Steed (the genuinely sexy Joel Jackson) is accidentally (or on purpose) dosed with Azure 0693 and, under its influence, directly comes on to Peregrine Fisher; it’s been established in the immediately previous episode, “Dead Beat,” that they’re attracted to each other, but he’d been diffident about expressing it until he got dosed with the drug and made an outright advance. Later on in the show another woman doctor at the institute, Elaine Montgomery (Jessica Grace Smith), is also found dead, this time in a tank filled with the blue liquid that contains Azure 0693. It turns out she was spying for the Soviet Union (ya remember the Soviet Union?) and supplying them with secret information about the lab’s researches, while her boyfriend, Charles Naylor (James Beck), was also a spy, only for the U.S. CIA. Charles also turns out [spoiler alert!] to be the killer of both Cecile and Elaine; he was a CIA agent involved in the MK-Ultra program (a real effort on the part of the CIA to use LSD as a weapon of war by secretly injecting it into U.S. military personnel and others – they even put it into the public water supply of Detroit – to monitor its both short-term and long-term effects). He’d discovered that Cecile was about to report what was going on at the institute to the Australian government and that could get the program shut down, and then he killed Elaine after finding out that the woman he was dating was a Russian spy. There’s also a maid at the facility named Rosemary Kowalski (Caroline Lee) who’s really a scientist refugee from Eastern Europe, though since all her records were embargoed the only work she could find was as a maid. I liked this show for its sheer cheekiness (the poignancy of Birdie and Cecile having worked together in clandestine services during World War II, which was only 20 years in the past when this series is set, and their reminiscences with their old “handler,” who now is apparently Birdie’s husband, adds drama and depth) and this episode in particular, even though it wasn’t as much fun as “Dead Beat,” for making the Americans the villains.