What Lies Buried

"What Lies Buried"
Season	8
Episode	7
Airdate	November 24, 2014
Writer	Paul Aitken
Director	Deborah Chow
Recurring	Lachlan Murdoch as Henry Higgins Nigel Bennett as Chief Constable Giles
Previous	The Murdoch Appreciation Society
Next	High Voltage

"What Lies Buried" is the seventh episode of the eighth season of the Murdoch Mysteries and the one hundred-third episode of the series. It first aired November 24, 2014.

Summary

Detective Murdoch finds himself investigating his fellow policemen when a skeleton is found under concrete while Station 4 is undergoing renovation. Dr. Grace determines that the victim was an adult male with the cause of death most likely a blow to the temple. The concrete floor had been poured in 1881 and records indicate that Chief Constable Giles was the detective at Station House 4 at that time. Others who worked there include retired Chief Constable Stockton who was the station's inspector and Brackenreid, who was a uniformed officer. Murdoch and Crabtree soon determine that the victim was Constable Finch who last worked at the station house on the same day the concrete was poured. A broken glass photographic negative that was buried with the victim is the vital clue that leads them to the murderer.

Character Revelations

• Station House No. 4 has a mascot, "Nelly", an iron monkey who's seen it all sitting in the Inspector's office all these years.
• Constable Brackenreid was only on the force two weeks when he arrested Margaret. She had gotten into a tiff over the lunch special at Maisy’s,“…such a tart tongue, full of sass, even then.”
• Chief Constable Giles is a homosexual
• The relationship between Giles and Hodge is similar to Murdoch and Crabtree
• Retired Chief Constable Stockton, last seen in The Great Wall, is revealed to be suffering severe memory loss in his old age
• Then Chief Inspector Stockton of Station House No. 4 assigned his constables nicknames, Thomas Brackenreid's was "Tommy Two Cakes".

Continuity

• The cat and mouse game between Chief Constable Giles and Murdoch (over the escape of Constance Gardiner in Murdoch in Wonderland ) culminates in a daring wager: truth for a truth.

Historical References

• Alphonse Bertillon (1853 –1914) was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified by name or photograph. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting. He is also the inventor of the mug shot. Photographing of criminals began in the 1840s only a few years after the invention of photography, but it was not until 1888 that Bertillon standardized the process.

Trivia

• Guest Thomas Howes (Winston Churchill) in Winston's Lost Night loves dessert cakes so much and confessed to MM cast and crew that as a boy he was called "Tommy Two Cakes", which is Chief Constable Stockton's nickname for Brackenreid, revealed in this episode.
• This episode is a “bottle show”, an episode that is filmed quite cheaply, often in a single established setting, because of budget concerns– it happens at least once or twice a season, so this whole episode is contained within the station house.
• Yannick Bisson and Nigel Bennett filmed 15 pages of interrogation in one day and one of Bisson's favorite episodes.
• Nigel Bennett is nominated for the 2016 ACTRA Toronto award in the Male Outstanding Performance category for Murdoch Mysteries: What Lies Buried.

Errors

• We find that the floor of the station house was poured in 1881 and reference is made to earlier incidents at the station. Yet the exterior shots of Station House No. 4 show it as being built in 1889.
• The black-and-white photograph examined near the beginning of the episode shows inconsistencies in lighting. A few of the heads edited into the picture have their shadows on their right side while all of the bodies and the rest of the heads cast a shadow to their left.

Cast

Main Cast

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

Recurring Cast

Lachlan Murdoch as Henry Higgins
Nigel Bennett as Chief Constable Giles
Brian Kaulback as Constable John Hodge
Allan Royal as Chief Constable Stockton

Guest Cast

Stuart Clow as Constable Albert Perkins
Peter Wildman as Constable Ernest Applebee
Steven Chambers as Frank Porter

Uncredited Cast

Thomas Turner as Peter Reed

Gallery