Spoilers Houdini and Doyle

[Christopher]

I was pretty surprised by where they went with all of the stuff with Adelaide's husband. I was a bit confused though, was there no anarchist group at all, or did he just make it look like they were the ones doing everything? Was he part of a bigger conspiracy or was he working alone?

It's a historical fact that William McKinley was killed by a member of an anarchist group mere days after this episode's events. Presumably Benjamin was a member of the same group, with his attack being their first try and Leon Czolgosz finishing the job four days later (which they conveniently glossed over so as not to spoil our heroes' "victory").

The business with the book being the key for the anarchists' cipher was real. Benjamin couldn't have known that Houdini would take his copy of Tom Sawyer; probably the reason he contacted Adelaide was to try to get hold of the book (which he did) so that he could decipher the code in the newspaper and learn where and when to strike. Note that Doyle saw that he had the book in his pocket at the hotel. So, yes, the anarchist group was real, and Benjamin was the one they were trying to get instructions to. His deception was his attempt to convince Adelaide that he was working undercover to stop the anarchists, rather than working with them.

Although, really, the idea of an organized group of anarchists is kind of a contradiction in terms, isn't it? Wikipedia says that Czolgosz chose on his own initiative to emulate the actions of another anarchist who'd killed the king of Italy the year before. It sounds like he tried to get in with a group of anarchists, but they suspected him of being a spy and didn't let him into their club, so he decided to act on his own, or something.

 

[JD]

Wow, I had no idea that any of that stuff in H&D was even close to reality.
In the video of the guy doing the water escape Rebecca Liddiard mentioned Houdini's wife, I wonder if they'll bring her into the show eventually.

 

[Christopher]

Wow, I had no idea that any of that stuff in H&D was even close to reality.

The whole premise is very, very loosely based on their real friendship and their rivalry over spiritualism, though bumped back in time a couple of decades. So there are bits and pieces of real history. This particular one being so close to reality and yet so far at the same time is weird, though.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Well, this was a pretty grim episode, between the deaths of an entire town and the irony of saving President McKinley's life a couple of days before he was shot. If there's a second season, I wonder if they will show the gang's reaction to McKinley's death. At the end, on the ship, it seemed like some time had passed, so McKinley must have been already shot, if not dead, and surely the news would have reached them at sea (since the message from the doctor did). The episode seemed very compressed. I wonder if they originally had an order for twelve episodes and it was reduced to ten during production, so they had to combine stories.

The characters are left in some pretty odd places. While Conan Doyle seems to have been reinvigorated by his chat with with Holmes and there is some hope for his wife, Adelaide (or Penelope) is left to grieve over her husband's second death, this time at her own hands, and Houdini is either losing his marbles or has experienced the first genuine supernatural event on the show.

 

[Marc]

Given that this series was apparently filmed in Manchester and Liverpool, I was surprised to see a couple of familiar Canadian actors in this Canada-set episode -- The Expanse's Elias Toufexis as one of the suspects and Orphan Black's Peter Outerbridge as Thomas Edison. I see in the credits that it's a Canadian co-production, so I was a little confused about where it was made, until I checked Wikipedia. Apparently just about all the guest cast here was Canadian, which shows an interesting commitment to authenticity (although Edison was from Ohio).

Pretty sure the that "King Hotel" in Buffalo was actually the Royal York in Toronto. I've stayed there a couple of times and it looked familiar to me. Show the wife who's been there a lot more and she agrees.

 

[Christopher]

Oh, bother... Houdini & Doyle has been cancelled.

Oh, well. I liked the show and would've liked to see more (particularly of the stunning Rebecca Liddiard), but I suppose it managed to work fairly well as a 10-episode miniseries. It pretty much resolved all the major story and character arcs of the season. The only cliffhangery elements were that Doyle's wife still hadn't recovered (though Houdini had arranged for a specialist to see her, which is a hopeful note to end on) and that Houdini saw the "ghost" of his mother and was wondering about his sanity. But that last could be taken as the kind of "...or is it?" note of ambiguity that many supernatural-debunking stories end with. So we can see this as a single, finite story with a reasonably satisfying degree of closure at the end.