DVD Review: Da Vinci's Inquest - Season Three

Both cast and writers have clearly hit their stride in the third season of the Canadian forensic procedural, Da Vinci's Inquest, which has recently been issued by Acorn Media as a four-disc DVD boxed set. Our title hero, Coroner Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) remains, in the words of one character, a "bit of a prick," but you can hardly blame him. In season three, our man gets passed over for the Chief Coroner's position in favor of a numbers cruncher (Gerard Plunkett) and sees his proposal for a safe injection site get shot down. His relationship with his daughter Gabrielle (Jewel Staite, about to leave for more prominent roles) is so strained that we only get to see her for about ten seconds the entire season. In the season closer, our hero even finds himself attacked in court for being one of the few remaining coroners in Canada without a medical background. "I'm an anomaly and an anachronism, but I'm not alone," the former cop snaps at the attorney badgering him - and we wouldn't have it any other way.

The rest of the series cast - most particularly Donnelly Rhodes and Ian Tracey as partnering homicide detectives Leo Shannon and Mick Leary - have all settled into agreeable rhythms. Of all the supporting characters, Leo gets the most attention this season: dealing with an ailing wife whose periodic dementia gets her wandering the neighborhood, starting up dance lessons with an attractive lady instructor. In one of the season's funniest subplots, a distracted Leo's police car is stolen by a suspect. "They're never gonna let go of it," he grumbles in a later episode after one of his colleagues makes joking reference to the incident.

Leo's partner Leary gets less to do outside the job this season, though there are hints that his relationship with pathologist Sunny Ramen (Suleka Matthew) will be heading into creepy territory somewhere down the pike - perhaps at the hands of Mick's Borderliney ex-. He does have some memorable moments in "You See How It Happens," directed by Rhodes: struggling to tamp down his disgust as he questions a former Guatemalan policeman injected with a slow-acting poison by one of the émigré victims he once tortured. Midway into Mick's investigation, the focus shifts from uncovering the murderer's identity to getting the victim to reveal the whereabouts of the men and women he helped "disappear."

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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