My Life Is Murder: "Remains to Be Seen" (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 28) I watched the next episode of the fascinating Australian crime show My Life Is Murder, one of whose most creative tricks is the way they integrate the title of the show into the opening credits in a different way each episode. Here it turned up on an EKG monitor plugged into the show’s heroine, Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless), after she’s been taken to an emergency room after she collapsed from atrial fibrillation while on a jogging run. Alexa’s own bout with heart disease (even though it was considerably less severe than my own real one in December 2021 that forced my early retirement) makes her all too aware of her own mortality. Alexa is a retired police detective who’s set up shop as a private investigator and is routinely referred cold cases by her former police partner, detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). This time it’s the murder of Patrick Mandel (Damon Hunter), an investment broker and compulsive gambler (one could say they amount to the same thing!) until he lost his financial company by pursuing his gambling addiction. Alexa interviews his former girlfriend, mortuary operator Katrina Logan (Nadine Garner), and rejects the idea pushed by Alexa’s friend and assistant Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans) that Patrick was killed by a Russian gangster to whom he owed a five-figure sum of money. The reason Alexa is so sure the mobster didn’t kill Patrick was that he was clubbed to death on the back of his head, and dumped into a previously dug but unfilled grave intended for the wife of a local man who’d bought adjoining cemetery plots so they could have his-and-hers final resting places. Alexa realizes the gangster would have had one of his thugs shoot Patrick and display the body in plain sight to intimidate the other people who owed him money into paying up.

Katrina insists that she had no idea that Patrick was a gambling addict and certainly wasn’t giving him any money to gamble, but Detective Inspector Hussey turns up a photo of the two of them taking money from an ATM at a casino a year before his murder. Alexa also questions Katrina’s daughter and assistant at the mortuary, Gabby Logan (Lily Stewart). She steals the cremains of Katrina’s father and goes through them at her home, and she finds a shard of ceramic in the ashes. From that she’s able to piece the whole thing together: Patrick had sneaked into the mortuary one night after hours to look for valuables he could sell or pawn to pay off his latest round of gaming debts. Gabby caught him and clubbed him from behind – she didn’t mean to kill him, but she did – with an ornate ceramic teapot which she then hid in the casket containing her grandfather’s ashes. Then she relied on her boyfriend, Tye Danzinger (Richard Davies), a gravedigger at the cemetery where Patrick’s body was found, to move Patrick’s body and bury it for her in the open grave – only it was discovered when the widow of the original cemetery plot owner duly died herself and the site was being made ready for her burial when it was discovered that another body was already in that grave. “Remains to Be Seen” (a clever title) was directed by Ben C. Lucas and written by Tim Pye, to whom I’m grateful that his script included an explanation of the difference between a coffin and a casket (a coffin has six sides, a casket has only four). Pye came up with a credible mystery with an effective and believable resolution, and showed Patrick’s actual murder in a silent flashback sequence (much like the one in the Warner Bros. Perry Mason movie The Case of the Curious Bride from 1935, in which Errol Flynn made his U.S. film debut playing the victim) that explained why they needed an actor to play Patrick even though he’s supposed to be five months’ dead at the start of the episode.