Father Brown: "The Requiem for the Dead" (BBC Studios, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I wanted to watch a couple of shows on KPBS, including a quite engaging Father Brown mystery, “The Requiem for the Dead,” in which a young man named Ned Hannigan (Michael Cooke) returns to the English village where years before he tried to run off with a teenage farm girl, Mary Banks, and killed her when she refused. Later Ned is himself found dead, and the principal suspects are the surviving members of Banks’ family, her father John (John Thomson), mother Nora (Penny Leyden) and brother Daniel (Tommy Garside). Father Brown (Mark Williams), an elderly parish priest who investigates murders in his spare time and thoroughly annoys the local cops by doing so, is of course convinced that there’s more to this case than meets the eye. He figures out that there are actually two Ned Harrigans – well, two Harrigans anyway, Ned and his identical twin brother Bryn Harrigan (John Cooke, who actually is Michael Cooke’s twin brother, though they look different enough I suspect the real Cookes are fraternal rather than identical), who despite having grown up in different homes – after their parents died Ned was taken in by a foster family while Bryn was left to fend for himself and had only sporadic guardians – have formed such a close bond as adults that they have stopped seeing themselves as two different people.

Father Brown learns this after he agrees to hear Ned’s confession – Ned pleaded guilty in court to murdering Mary Burke but has not settled his accounts with God – and he learns that the real Ned Harrigan is still alive and the man murdered in his place is actually Bryn. It was Bryn who really ran off with Mary Burke and killed her when she resisted him, and Ned falsely confessed to the crime and did a prison sentence for it to spare Bryn and protect him. Ned explains to Father Brown that he returned to the village where the original crime occurred to see if he could get Bryn to tell him what he had done with Mary’s body – understandably the surviving Burkes wanted to know her whereabouts so they could give her a proper funeral – and at the end Father Brown officiates at a joint memorial service for both Mary Burke and Bryn Harrigan, while the police accept Ned’s claim that he killed Bryn in self-defense after Bryn started choking him. I liked this show a lot better than the “Saints and Sinners” episode of Midsomer Murders Charles and I had watched previously, partly because it was only 45 minutes long and therefore didn’t had the time to create the confusing plethora of suspectrs and potential motives that weighted down the longer show.

While the gimmick of two people who are identical twins and therefore look almost exactly alike isn’t all that fresh or unique, writer Michelle Lipton uses it quite artfully here. She also creates an engaging character names Mrs. McCarthy (Sondra Cusack, who’d be good casting for a biopic of the current Queen), whose carefully curated flower bed is crushed under the wheels of a car being driven by the local police chief, Inspector Manony (Jack Deam) just as she’s about to enter it in the annual contest for best floral arrangement ini that particular part of England. Ultimately she gets a donation of flowers to replace the ones that were crushed, but she donates them to the church for the double funeral and says there’s always next year. The show was set, like tieFather Brown series in general, in the late 1940's, just after World War II, tough that's only visible in the late 1940's model cars the people drive and the brown woolen pants the proletarian male characters wear in this pre-jeans age.