Early morning finds a pupil at a school for teenage girls drowned in a pool. Her body is covered in bloody wounds, and the post-mortem shows she is missing a substantial quantity of blood: could the twin puncture wounds to her neck have anything to do with it?
Murdoch soon discovers that some other girls at the school have similar puncture wounds, as well as hazy recollections of an encounter with an attractive man who bites their necks as they dreaming drift away.
Everyone is reading Dracula, the sensation story of the day, and suddenly, thanks to Inspector Brackenreid least favourite reporter, the town is gripped by vampire frenzy. Crabtree too is in thrall to the vampire tale, and solves the crime by tracing a series of similar incidents back through time and geography to conclude that the killer is a vampire know originally as Vladimir the Impaler from Southeast Europe several centuries earlier. When Inspector Brackenreid presses Crabtree, he admits that he hasn't yet worked all the details out.
Oddly enough, Crabtree is indeed on the right track for once, but it takes Murdoch's application of Occam's Razor to finally identify the real villain.
This is a hilarious episode in places, not only for the way the scriptwriters mess with our minds, but also for deft visual jokes such as the three men, including Murdoch, who have donated blood sitting together each holding a cup of tea and a biscuit, which is even now the traditional recompense for donating blood in the UK. And don't miss what Murdoch says to Crabtree about his book, and what happens straight afterwards at the end of the show.
Murdoch soon discovers that some other girls at the school have similar puncture wounds, as well as hazy recollections of an encounter with an attractive man who bites their necks as they dreaming drift away.
Everyone is reading Dracula, the sensation story of the day, and suddenly, thanks to Inspector Brackenreid least favourite reporter, the town is gripped by vampire frenzy. Crabtree too is in thrall to the vampire tale, and solves the crime by tracing a series of similar incidents back through time and geography to conclude that the killer is a vampire know originally as Vladimir the Impaler from Southeast Europe several centuries earlier. When Inspector Brackenreid presses Crabtree, he admits that he hasn't yet worked all the details out.
Oddly enough, Crabtree is indeed on the right track for once, but it takes Murdoch's application of Occam's Razor to finally identify the real villain.
This is a hilarious episode in places, not only for the way the scriptwriters mess with our minds, but also for deft visual jokes such as the three men, including Murdoch, who have donated blood sitting together each holding a cup of tea and a biscuit, which is even now the traditional recompense for donating blood in the UK. And don't miss what Murdoch says to Crabtree about his book, and what happens straight afterwards at the end of the show.
