The Key to the Castle (Season 1, Episode 1)
Premise: Toronto’s Major Crime Unit hunts for a crypto fund founder who disappears from his own boat party, along with about $300 million of his clients’ savings.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 1
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Peter Mooney as Nick Millwood, Amber Goldfarb as Sophie Siddiqui, Ali Kazmi as Daniel Siddiqui, Sharon Taylor as Arlene Cox, Karn Kalra as Ravi Singh
- Director
- Holly Dale
- Writers
- Tassie Cameron
Summary
The Case
“The Key to the Castle” opens at a party for clients of BigaPlex, a crypto fund, where founder Daniel Siddiqui thanks his wife, Sophie, partner Nick Millwood and assistant Ravi Singh and reassures nervous investors. Feeling sick, he takes pills from Sophie and lies down on his boat; by the time it docks, he is gone. Graff and Bateman find a near-empty office and a bank account holding none of the roughly $300 million invested. Graff reads the lake currents and an overnight storm, has the search moved east, and the body turns up on a beach.
Da Silva, the pathologist, finds pentobarbital, probably slipped into his champagne, though he was alive when he hit the water; two ribs had been broken a month earlier. Daniel had moved the money into a private crypto vault that opens only with a 64-character key, likely written down somewhere. Major client Arlene Cox turns out to invest for the Volkovs, a Russian family, and says one of their men joined a lunch with Daniel a month ago that, she heard, turned unpleasant. Client Johnny James admits grabbing Daniel the day he died and leaving with $50,000. Sophie, eight weeks pregnant, is badly hurt by a hit-and-run driver in a stolen car.
Daniel’s planner points to a cheap hotel room booked for a meeting with a woman named Maria. Nick turns out to be Mikolaj Milanowski, a con man with a fraud record who knew Daniel from a university fraternity, though Forrester finds the motive thin. Sophie admits she was involved with Nick before he steered her toward Daniel, that she told Daniel everything, and that Maria was Inspector Maria Bruno, head of Fraud, with whom Daniel planned a deal to repay his clients.
The Interrogation
The detectives offer to help Nick hunt for the key, and at Daniel’s house they lay out their theory: Nick took pentobarbital from an 89-year-old uncle with insomnia and planted Sophie on Daniel to keep all the money, never guessing the couple would fall in love or that Daniel would turn him in. Daniel’s note to Sophie about their baby, “our future starts with Dylan,” shows where the key begins, and once it is entered into the BigaPlex wallet, every dollar is there. The detectives then bluff that Daniel survived and is in a guarded hospital room. Nick snaps, lashes out and insists he saw Daniel go over the side.
The ending
Spoiler: With the key found, the clients will get back their money plus about $400,000, and Sophie and the baby are expected to recover. Daniel, a con man in life, ends up a kind of Robin Hood.
Suspect’s fate: Nick Millwood, arrested.
Why it stands out
- The series premiere of the Toronto-set adaptation of Criminal Intent; its opening narration reworks the franchise’s familiar introduction for Toronto’s war on crime.
- Early character notes: Bateman says she became pregnant on a second date and is raising the child, and Graff, who still carries a Filofax from 2010, reads Lake Ontario’s currents like a forecaster.
- Daniel Kash is credited as Detective Andy Manek, a role he is credited with again in episode 3.