Death in Paradise, episode 1, review: reasonably good, if wholly implausible, Caribbean fun
Death in Paradise (BBC One) returned for an eighth series with a playful take on the most famous whodunit of them all, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Standing in for the luxurious train travelling from Istanbul to London was a brightly painted bus with broken air-conditioning, which picked up its passengers at the ferry port of the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie.
Ardal O’Hanlon’s DI Jack Mooney, the third lead in the series, after Ben Miller and Kris Marshall’s similarly fish-out-of-water detectives, took on the Hercule Poirot role (watch out, John Malkovich). Yachts dotted the harbour, a steel band played at the quayside. There were only four passengers, which meant that when one of them was stabbed to death (like the victim on the Orient Express), there seemed to be only three possible suspects, plus the driver (Christie had 13).
But as in the 1934 novel, each of the passengers had a connection to the dead man, and one by one, each would reveal a motive for killing him. Mooney even cracked a joke that recalled Christie’s denouement – there was “only one possible explanation... they’re all in it together.”
The victim, it transpired, had just been released from prison. His fellow passengers included Rebecca Front, as the mother of the young man he murdered 16 years earlier. The solution might have briefly taxed Poirot, but with a little sleight of hand, writer Paul Logue (a veteran of Taggart, DCI Banks and Midsomer Murders) managed to put a different perpetrator in the frame, quite literally. He had entered by the emergency door and stabbed his former partner in crime.
The murder, of course, happened off screen – this show is always more about paradise than death. It was all reasonably good fun but wholly implausible. Meanwhile, the series had to cope without another exiting favourite, Danny John-Jules’s Officer Dwayne Myers. A replacement was promised, who turned out to be the (as yet unseen) niece of Commissioner Patterson (a slightly hoary Don Warrington).
The incidental dramas were pretty thin fare, resting on whether people in the Caribbean knew the meaning of the phrase “budgie smugglers”, and a time-worn mistaken-identity gag. O’Hanlon remains likeable, but an unlikely cop. Death in Paradise, as ever, remains nothing to write home about.
