Murders occur when Buffalo Bill Cody's Western Extravaganza comes to Toronto.
Tropes:
- Cowboy Episode: Buffalo Bill Cody comes to Toronto with his road show. A stunt goes wrong, and it's concluded it was a murder.
- Dark and Troubled Past: One of the cowboys witnessed a murder of his family member, and the killer was never held responsible. This led to him murdering the two killers.
- Decapitation Presentation: The victims head is cut off of his corpse in the morgue. it wasn't his killer who did this, but another member of the show who'd recognized him as a wanted man and had been content to leave him alone while he was alive, but hoped to claim the bounty on him once he was dead.
- Hangover Sensitivity: Brackenreid, after breaking his sobriety with Annie Oakley. Murdoch gets back at the inspector for indirectly framing him as a day drinker by talking loudly and slamming his office door.
- Historical Domain Character: Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill. Cody's wild west show also qualifies.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Once Murdoch determines where the shooter fired from, he estimates the range is 50 yards, and declares it would require a remarkable shooter to hit his target at that distance. However while a pistol of the era generally had an accurate range of no more than about 25 yards depending the gun, rifles could accurately hit targets at distances of 150 yards or more. By the time Murdoch identifies the shooter's position, he and Ogden had already concluded that a rifle and not a pistol was the murder weapon.
- Railroad Plot: In the backstory, with the victim and his friend who becomes the second victim having been gunmen who mrudered landowners for the railroad.
- Wild West: The way in which events had become inflated and mythologized is discussed and deconstructed at length throughout the episode. Murdoch in particular expresses his irritation with Cody over his show being the Theme Park Version, and remarks that the Wild West was dead and gone. Meanwhile, the victims were celebrated in the show as heroic lawmen taking down a violent criminal, while in reality they were hired thugs who shot an unarmed farmer in the back when he refused to sell his property to the railroad. The killer — the man's son, who witnessed the slaying — nearly murders Cody himself for glamorizing the incident until Murdoch talks him down.
