When a circus tiger devours its trainer, Dr. Ogden discovers the animal has been deliberately starved.
Tropes:
- Armor-Piercing Question: Murdoch gets one (combined with an Armor-Piercing Response) when Murdoch asks if her revenge was worth giving up her beauty and identity, and the lives of four people, including Ivy herself, who is likely to be hanged.Ivy: I had to try. Wouldn't you give up everything for the love of your life, Detective?
- Circus Episode: It's even in the title.
- Fortune Teller: The circus's fortune teller Lady Minerva delivers a series of cryptic clues via tarot cards. Crabtree is a believer, but Murdoch is more skeptical.
- The Freakshow: The episode shows the gap between performers and freaks.
- Impoverished Patrician: Leoline is an actual Count, albeit one from a family so bankrupt that his own mother sold him to the circus.
- Karmic Death: One of the two individuals involved in the murders, the sword-swallower, is killed when another performer punches him in the stomach; this causes the switchblade knife that had been used to kill the second victim to go off inside of his stomach, resulting in him being fatally stabbed from the inside.
- Knife-Throwing Act: The killer is ultimately revealed to have been a knife thrower at a previous circus.
- Locked Room Mystery: One victim is stabbed to death while he is alone in a locked jail cell, with no knife to be found anywhere. It turns out that he was murdered by a knife thrower, whereupon a trained monkey had retrieved the knife and given it to the sword-swallower, her accomplice, who concealed it in his stomach.
- Love Makes You Evil: Ivy did everything for Count Leoline's love. She permanently disfigured herself to join him in the freakshow, killed his non-freak lover, and finally killed him when he spurned her and her alibi.
- Nobility Marries Money: Leoline and Kitty's relationship has shades of this, as she had an inheritance from an uncle that they were going to use to fund their own circus.
- Pet the Dog: Brackenreid dotes on the circuses monkey.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Leoline claims that he and Kitty both fought and loved with passion and intensity.
- Speak Ill of the Dead: Jake gets his fatal punch in the stomach after insulting Kitty in front of her friend the animal-feeder.
- This Bear Was Framed: The circus's lion tamer had her throat cut before her body was mauled by a starving tiger in an attempt to make it look like she was killed by the tiger.
