YMMV / Murdoch Mysteries S 6 E 6 Murdoch And The Cloud Of Doom

• Magnificent Bastard: Russell Bowes is a chemical company employee whose fiancee Mary is sentenced to hang for killing her sexually abusive father. He plots to break her out of prison before her execution in the middle of a city-wide evacuation, posing as a masked extortionist with access to poisoned gas by faking receipts from his factory and discards dozens of gas bottles at the delivery address and sending a film that appears to demonstrate the lethal gas to the police. He leaves enough clues in the film for the police to find where he shot it, with Russell killing all of the grass in the area with bleach and suffocating several rats to make it appear that the gas is lethal to everything and far-reaching. In truth Russell has no desire to hurt anyone as part of his plan and takes his failure hard yet gracefully and wins the sympathy of the police with his story, causing them to work to get Mary a new trial.