Frankie Drake Mysteries Review: Life on the Line (Season 3 Episode 6)

Mary and Flo go undercover as phone operators on Frankie Drake Mysteries Season 3 Episode 6, “Life on the Line,” an installment with a rather unremarkable central mystery but some very fun side plots that more than pick up the slack.

While Frankie and Flo — truly a friendship pairing this show needs to explore more in future — are out on a girl’s night, they run into a man about to jump off a bridge. They talk him down and discover he’s a toymaker named Ernie Penny who’s been the subject of a harassment campaign at his shop. 

Obviously, it’s Drake Detective Agency to the rescue! 

To be fair, almost every aspect of the story about Ernie is…less than great. He’s not a very compelling character, and his messy connection to a former nun known as Margaret Robinson is overly complicated and hard to keep up with. 

Yet, “Life on the Line” still ends up being a very enjoyable episode, in spite of the flaws in its central mystery, and that’s because it gives two of its secondary characters a perfect opportunity to shine.

Frankie and friends are convinced that Ernie’s being targeted — he views it as being cursed, but the clues indicate that someone’s probably just paying ridiculously close attention to his phone calls and behaving accordingly.

Many people may not know this, but back in the day, not everyone had a private phone number. For folks that didn’t, when you called someone, you essentially used what was a party line, which allowed other people to break into your conversation or eavesdrop. 

And that includes the operators connecting your calls. 

Frankie Drake Mysteries sends Flo and Mary to become undercover operators, ostensibly to try and figure out who’s been targeting Ernie, but their story becomes something more than that. 

Both women get strangely very into their new identities as operators — though honestly, I have questions about how both of them manage to abandon their real day jobs long enough to take completely different day jobs elsewhere. Don’t their bosses notice?

But it’s hard to care when watching these two learn to be telephone operators is so much fun. 

Mary is immediately drawn into the drama on the line, listening to the sappy phone calls between a pair of unidentified young lovers like they’re an episode of General Hospital.  

She’s also takes her three day stint as an operator incredibly seriously, worrying about whether she’ll be reprimanded for listening on the line or not answering calls quickly enough. Mary is the world’s most adorable over achiever. 

Flo, for her part, is furious about how terrible people are, as she witnesses the awful things people say to and about one another when they assume no one is listening, from cruel husbands to mean friends. 

The two women also befriend a variety of other operators — all young, unmarried girls who are forced to “retire” should that status change — and the interoffice chatter is surprisingly enjoyable. More so than most everything going on with Ernie. 

It turns out that one of their coworkers is engaging in what is essentially insider trading, writing down stock tips gleaned from listening in on various conversations and using them to make money. Her argument is that she’s both paid and treated horribly so she should be allowed to make a little extra where she can.

Another one turns out to be the former nun in question, Edna, who was once Margaret, who’s been using her operator job to spy on and punish the terrible people whose calls she overhears. There’s something interesting here about a nun who spent years being taught “judge not; lest yet be judged” suddenly decided to become judge and proverbial executioner for the Toronto populace at large, but since Edna’s identity is only revealed in the episode’s final moments, it doesn’t go anywhere.

Basically, “Life on the Line” is kind of like the television equivalent of candy fluff. You can remember that you sort of enjoyed it, but might not be entirely clear why. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• This episode really did a great job giving all four of our main women something significant to do. 
• Trudy’s obsession with practical jokes and props is….well, it’s bizarre, because it seems so incongruous with everything else we know about her. Also, the sequence in which she and Frankie search an office with the aid of stinkbombs was…well, it’s probably best never mentioned again. 
• However, Trudy’s relationship with her boyfriend Bill is adorable, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of them together. (Plus, he’s a convenient source of info for the gals.) 

What did you think of this episode of Frankie Drake Mysteries? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Frankie Drake Mysteries airs Saturdays at 7/6c on Ovation.

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