The Mallorca Files: "Number One Fan" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, 2019 or 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The episode of The Mallorca Files was a fun show, though at 45 minutes it didn’t have much time either to waste or offer much depth to its story. The series leads are British-born Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and German-born Max Winter (Julian Looman), lead police detectives on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. They work under the immediate supervision of Inés Villegas (María Fernandéz Ache), who doesn’t particularly like or trust them, and it gets worse when during the course of this episode Inés has her 45th birthday party and Miranda, relying on Max’s deliberately false information, shows up with a balloon that proclaims Inés’s age as 50. The crime they’re investigating is the mysterious disappearance of German supermodel Valentina Caligari, who suddenly vanished off a train supposedly carrying her from Mallorca to Germany for an international models’ contest she’s already won five times. This means that Miranda and Max have to infiltrate the impossibly pretentious artists’ community headed by Valentina’s brother Otto (Matthias Zera) and featuring all sorts of red herrings, including Valentina’s former agent and boyfriend Abe Steiner (John Schwab), who was forced to sell his yacht after Valentina dumped him both professionally and personally; Hades Jaffar (Paul Bazely), a man with a well-waxed handlebar moustache with whom Steiner is playing a particularly nasty game of pool; and Richard Webb (Al Weaver), a nerdy waiter and cook at the Caligari compound who’s already been arrested for stalking famous models. Webb had had a crush on Valentina, but she already had a Lesbian partner, Azra Bolat (Hazar Ergüçlü).

Valentina and Azra had not only made up matching yin-and-yang heart-shaped pendants for each other, they had planned to have a child together, with Azra bearing the baby and Valentina’s brother Otto as the sperm donor so the kid would at least be biologically related to both “mommies.” Only Azra fell in love with Otto for real – the script by Rachael New takes a refreshingly non-essentialist view of sexual orientation – and as a result of a confrontation between Otto and Valentina over which one will end up with Azra, Otto killed Valentina accidentally and then decided to dump her body at sea. Then Otto and Azra hatched a plot to dress Otto in drag and pass him off as Valentina so “she’d” be seen getting on a train, from which Otto would later disembark so it would look like Valentina was still alive and just ditching her career. Only Richard Webb, stalking Valentina as usual, spotted the whole thing and pocketed Valentina’s half of the heart-shaped pendant, forcing Otto to wear Azra’s matching half and giving the cops the clue they needed to unravel the whole plot. The episode ends with some Nick and Nora Charles-esque banter between the two leads – though they’re not depicted as romantically or sexually involved with each other, and if anything this show (like the original Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) is a testament to the idea that a man and a woman can work together as professional partners without letting love or sex get in the way. The Mallorca Files is a sporadically interesting show, whose main assets are the Mallorca scenery and the vivid, bright colors with which director Charlie Palmer and cinematographer Kieran McGuigan film it. It’s also a colorfully insouciant show, and I especially loved the scene in which Miranda and Max, forced to chase Webb after he tries to escape them by car, leap into Miranda’s BMW convertible and tear off after him. “Now I know why they had to drive a convertible!” I joked.