My Life Is Murder: "Another Bloody Podcast" (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, June 14) I watched a quite good episode of My Life Is Murder – apparently this show got a lot better once the writers realized they had to provide the principal investigators, retired cop turned private detective Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless) and detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), along with computer whiz and Indigenous person Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), with a few more suspects in each case. This episode was called “Another Bloody Podcast” and was one of the most compelling storylines in this series yet, at least in part because it dealt with Queer themes and issues. It opens with the (straight) wedding of Samuel and Cara Morgan (Ryan Corr and Maria Angelico), for which the best man is Sam’s brother Zac (the almost unearthily handsome Roby Favretto). Only Zac has forgotten to bring the wedding rings, which Sam and Cara had especially made out of white gold. The ceremony is disrupted when Tony Ryles (Andy Ryan) disrupts it and announces that Zac is Gay and he and Tony are lovers. This happened a year before the main action (though it was preserved on a wedding video that we get to see at least twice) and the police were unable to solve it at the time. So they let it recede into oblivion until a mysterious podcaster turns up and starts doing a series re-creating the episode and demanding the police re-open the case.

Kieran asks Alexa to start re-investigating and in short order she talks to Sam, Cara and Tony – though Tony walks away from her in disgust when she asks him about “André,” a hot young blond man who advertised on the Internet for a sex partner and to which Tony responded. Just about everybody except Tony himself assumes he killed Zac as part of a lovers’ quarrel gone terribly wrong, but Alexa is convinced otherwise. With Madison’s help, Alexa first determines who launched the podcast. Though the podcaster routed it through various Internet servers in different countries to make it as impossible as they could to trace, Madison is able to document that the podcaster is actually a woman using voice-altering software to make herself sound like a man. What’s more, Alexa is able to deduce who she is; the podcaster said there were 36 guests at the wedding but only 34 were on the official guest list. The other two were added later, and Alexa deduces from that that Cara Morgan is the mystery podcaster; she was the only one who could have known the guest list was increased by two more people, and since she makes her living using computer software she had the necessary expertise to fake sounding like a man for the podcast. To solve Zac’s actual killing, Alexa relies on an insignia on the forehead of Zac’s corpse, a cross with a circle around it.

At first she considers the possibility that this is a white-supremacist symbol and Zac was the victim of a hate crime, but later she realizes that this was actually a symbol on the mystery white-gold rings that were supposed to be used in the wedding of Sam and Cara. She receives a text from her assistant Madison informing her that, contrary to Sam’s account that after Zac lost the rings they were never seen again, Sam actually recovered the rings and had them melted down. With that information, Alexa is able to conclude [spoiler alert!] that Sam actually killed his brother; after the wedding Sam went over to Zac’s place, got into an argument with him, the two started to fight and Sam punched Zac in the forehead, knocking him down so hard he got a concussion and died from striking the concrete with his head. A nosy neighbor (Christine Lancaster) of Zac and Tony, whom we’d seen earlier noticing Alexa entering the apartment and probably wondering what a woman was doing at the home of a Gay man, had heard the brothers argue but had thought – and told the police – it was between Zac and Tony. There’s a bizarre and quite beautiful and moving ending in which Alexa is re-interviewing Cara when Cara’s water breaks – she’s pregnant and has been hoping the birth of their child, a son, would perk up Sam’s mood, which has been depressed since Zac’s death. Alexa rushes Cara to the hospital, where she gives birth to a boy in the emergency room and Sam comes to meet them and see his son. Alexa tells Sam, “You have to own this,” implying that because it was an accident and Sam didn’t mean to kill his brother the cops and the justice system will likely be lenient with him. After the first episode I wasn’t sure I’d want to keep watching My Life Is Murder, but the show got better as it continued and by this episode it had become a quite good whodunit policier with finely honed performances by Lucy Lawless, Bernard Curry and Ebony Vagulans.