Victor, Victorian

"Victor, Victorian"
Season	3
Episode	3
Airdate	March 28, 2010 (Canada)
Writer	Alexandra Zarowny
Director	Laurie Lynd
Guests	Sergio DiZio as Leonard Winters Angela Vint as Miriam Winters Mark Caven as Eugene Anderson Zoie Palmer as Katie Powers
Recurring	Lachlan Murdoch as Henry Higgins
Previous	The Great Wall
Next	Rich Boy, Poor Boy

"Victor, Victorian" is the third episode of the third season of the Murdoch Mysteries and the twenty-ninth episode of the series. It first aired on March 2, 2010 (UK).

Summary

A new member of Masonic lodge dies during his initiation. When Julia Ogden conducts a postmortem, she discovers that "he" is a woman. Suspicion initially falls on the treasurer of the lodge because another member, Leonard Winters, tells Murdoch that he had asked the dead "man" to try to examine the lodge's books. Julia goes "undercover" and learns that a club of women, led by Katie Powers and concealed behind a women's basketball team, dresses as men to experience the freedom that men enjoy.

Murdoch finds that Leonard Winters had often invited the dead man to his home. Mrs. Winters discovered that the man was a women and the two grew close. Mr. Winters, fearing that his wife was having an affair, contrived to kill the woman he still thought was a man.

Character Revelations

• George Crabtree and Thomas Brackenreid are both members of a local Masonic lodge; George holds a higher position than Brackenreid.
• Julia Ogden plays basketball.

Continuity

• William and Julia's romance stumbles when William does not actively support her in an argument with Brackenreid. He later explains that he remained silent because she is strong and for him to intervene would have weakened her in Brackenreid's eyes.

Historical References

• This episode takes place in Toronto 1897 – Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria 1819 - 1901) is Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and Empress of India.
• Freemasonry has long been linked to the Illuminati. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in fact a mason the last seven years of his life, and was a friend of Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt. Murdoch has the impression that the Illuminati's activities were officially suppressed, which they were, during Mozart's lifetime. But Boswell's ambiguous reply suggests otherwise.
• The Hippocratic Oath mentioned by Dr. Ogden promises confidentiality among other medical professional ethics.
• Early December 1891, Canadian physical education professor Dr. James Naismith was an instructor at the International Young Men's Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Seeking to find a vigorous indoor game to keep his students at proper levels of fitness during the long New England winters and after much trials, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot (3.0 m) elevated track – thus created basketball.

Trivia

• The episode title is an allusion to the 1982 Julie Andrews film "Victor, Victoria".
• The Masonic Code seen at the temple has been used by Freemasons and others as early as the 18th century; While it's true that the Masonic Cipher uses a different symbol-letter relationship, the more accurately termed Freemason Cipher uses the same relationship as shown on Murdoch's blackboard. One of the key revelations is that the symbols on the floor are decoded as GAOTU, an anagram of Great Architect Of The Universe.
• It's likely that all of the members of the women's basketball team, when escorted to the police station, would have been arrested. In Columbus, Ohio, an 1848 law forbade a person from appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” In the decades that followed, more than 40 U.S. cities created similar laws.

Errors

• Dr. Ogden was admitted entry to the Masonic Lodge under protest from Eugene Anderson and other members because of her sex. Yet moments later, Mrs. Winters and two other women are seen in the lodge with neither explanation nor commotion.
• While undercover Dr. Ogden tells the other women that her basketball skills were learned as a young girl growing up playing with country club boys, basketball wasn't invented until 1891 which is only six years from the time of this episode (1897).
• Murdoch states that the number of "combinations" of the various letters that are represented by the five symbols (shown on the Blackboard, image below) is "more than 2 quintillion." The number shown 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 is actually 20 factorial (20 x19 x18 ... x 1) which is way too large. Looking closely at the blackboard, we see there are only 3 unique symbols -- the third symbol is a rotation of the first and the fifth is a rotation of the second. So there are only 12 possible letters, not 20. The total number of different arrangements of 12 letters taken 5 at a time, where order matters and repeats are permitted is 12 to the fifth power or 248,832.

Cast

Main Cast

Yannick Bisson as William Murdoch
Hélène Joy as Julia Ogden
Thomas Craig as Thomas Brackenreid
Jonny Harris as George Crabtree

Recurring Cast

Lachlan Murdoch as Henry Higgins

Guest Cast

Sergio DiZio as Leonard Winters
Angela Vint as Miriam Winters
Mark Caven as Eugene Anderson
Zoie Palmer as Katie Powers
Martin Doyle as Elias Boswell
Kevin Dennis as Victor/Grace Reid

Gallery

Crime Scene

Blackboard: Breaking the code

Julia in disguise and undercover

Victor Victorian

Using the Identikit