Loveday Writing

This episode was all about toys.

The episode kicks off with Alexa meeting Harry to be briefed on the case of the week – Victor Townsend, 70 years old, who was killed by an 80kg concrete gargoyle falling on his head during a party at his mansion. The party was the launch of a new generation of the Tish Willoughby doll, which helped Townsend Toys make their first million dollars. The party also had staff and actors dress as the Tish Willoughby doll, with one of them being caught fleeing the scene on surveillance footage. Harry doesn’t see Victor’s death as an accident as a concrete gargoyle that heavy is unlikely to have fallen on its own.

Madison tells Alexa that the Tish Willoughby doll is based on Victor’s son, Byron’s, childhood imaginary friend. She’s old, retro and analogue, except that she speaks via a software system that needs tiny upgrades. The Tish Willoughby 2 comes with AI capabilities.

Madison and Alexa go to the Townsend mansion and speak with Byron in his escape room. Madison tells Alexa not to touch anything, a sentiment which Byron echoes, as the room is set to self-lock and touching the wrong item triggers the sequence, which resets to a new pattern each time. Alexa asks Byron where he was on the night of the murder, he tells her he was in the mansion but in the escape room as he has limited capacity for social interaction. He came into the escape room for a breather but accidentally locked himself in.

When Madison and Alexa search Victor’s wing in the mansion, they find photos of him with his granddaughter, Gizmo, and single-person meals in his fridge. They also notice that Byron and his wife, Diva, don’t feature in the pictures of Victor and Gizmo. Alexa later goes to the balcony where the gargoyle fell from and tries to lift another but can’t, as it’s too heavy. Alexa later runs into Gizmo, but Diva finds them and stops them from having a deep conversation. Alexa asks Diva what she thinks happened on the night Victor died. Diva tells her that she thinks the masonry was loose and the gargoyle falling was an accident. Alexa also overhears conversations indicating that there’s some sort of crisis going on.

Back at Alexa’s apartment, Madison and Alexa establish that Diva’s alibi was watching a movie with Gizmo in the mansion’s cinema, and Byron was in the escape room. The Townsend’s personal assistant, Jeri, handed over the party’s guest list to the police. Alexa also contemplates that the murderer may have been trying to disrupt the business. They decide to go back to the mansion to speak with Jeri, as she organised the party.

When Alexa and Madison go back to the mansion, they ask Byron for a Tish Willoughby 2 doll but he refuses. Alexa then goes back to Victor’s wing and asks Jeri about his and Byron’s relationship. Jeri tells them that Victor and Byron reconnected after Gizmo was born, but she wasn’t working for the Townsends at that time. Alexa asks Jeri where she was on the night of the murder, she tells Alexa that she was washing dishes.

On her way out, Alexa runs into Gizmo on the stairs. Gizmo tells her that her granddad died, but she will get a new one soon, and that when she lived in a wooden house in the valley, the iron caught the curtains on fire, and that this happened 100 years ago. When Diva walks in, Alexa asks her if Gizmo was at the party, she says she was until she got bored of the adult conversations.

Back at Alexa’s apartment, she and Madison rewatch the surveillance footage and notice that the person dressed as a Tish doll who ran away wore a similar microphone under their wig that Jeri wears. Madison also shows Alexa videos of “The Toy Boy”, a toy influencer who made a video of the Tish 2 doll, saying that the adaptive AI that comes with it can make her respond like a person and is worth $3,000 on the collector’s market.

They go to see “The Toy Boy” (real name Neville). When Madison tells him about the possible glitch in the Tish 2 doll, he says that a glitch makes them more valuable. After he and Alexa get into a fight, Madison eventually gets a lead from him on other sellers, and also agreed to go on a doll hunt with him to find a Tish 2 doll to buy.

Harry and Alexa go back to the mansion. Alexa goes to see Byron in his office, where she finds him working on another doll with Gizmo’s likeness. When Jeri is questioned about appearing on the surveillance footage, she denies it’s her. When Harry and Alexa meet up to compare notes, a concrete gargoyle nearly falls on them. As they find a crowbar next to the remaining gargoyles, this leads to the investigation moving from cold back to active. As the police arrive, per Harry’s request, Jeri finally admits to Alexa it was her on the footage running away, but she only did it to take a break.

Alexa goes back to Victor’s wing and finds passport photos he had done for himself and Gizmo. Meanwhile, Madison and Neville buy a Tish 2 doll. Whilst she is in Neville’s car waiting for him to come back with the doll, Madison discovers a Tish doll wig in his glove box. When Madison views the footage from the party again, she spots Neville in Tish doll costume, and that Neville wasn’t on the guest list that Jeri provided the police.

When Madison confronts Neville about being at the party, he tells her that Jeri invited him to have an influencer there but didn’t tell Byron and Diva, so he had to dress up as a Tish doll. He also took footage of the party, however it was of him, but the fall of the gargoyle can be heard in the background, with the video’s time stamp showing it happened at 1:30am. With Jeri being seen running away on the surveillance footage at 1am, this clears her as a suspect.

When Alexa asks Jeri about Neville’s appearance, she tells her that she gave the police the wrong guest list by mistake. Alexa then asks Jeri to show her Gizmo’s room, where she notices that her teddy bear is not a Townsend toy. When Alexa notices burn marks on Gizmo’s teddy bear, she does her research and finds a news article on a Wellington house fire, where an infant was rescued. When a Tish 2 doll starts saying “you’re not my real mum”, this makes Alexa realise that Gizmo is not Byron and Diva’s daughter.

Alexa goes back to the mansion and goes to see Byron in his escape room. When she ends up locked in the room with him, she tells him (and the audience) that Victor was a stranger that he approached to hire his granddaughter (real name Avery) to be his daughter. As Victor wasn’t going to sell his granddaughter, he gave Byron a counteroffer of him pretending to be his father. This meant that Victor held all the power as he could reveal their secret at any moment. Victor wanted out of their arrangement. Just as Byron is about to attack Alexa with a jug, she finds the bypass button that Byron is required to have in the escape room by law and lets Harry and the police in to arrest him.

The episode ends with the reveal that Jeri is adopting Avery, with Jeri thanking Alexa for her work.

Overall, I felt that this was an eccentric episode, in fact one of the most eccentric episodes I’ve ever seen in this series, to the point that I was kept guessing as to the motive of the murder. This wasn’t a bad thing, however the reveal of Gizmo (or rather Avery) not being Byron and Diva’s daughter was predictable. I also found it hard to believe that Jeri, a random woman who appears to be in her late twenties, would easily be able to adopt an orphaned little girl.

It was a good episode, but not the show’s best.

Stray Observations:

-There’s an inside joke in this episode. Byron asks Alexa if anyone has ever told her that she would make a wonderful action figure, clearly a nod to Lucy Lawless’ days as Xena: Warrior Princess.

-According to Madison, one of her cousins said to her that when he was an old woman (in an apparent past life) he drowned in the well.