Sister Boniface Mysteries: "The Shadow of Baron Battenberg" (BBC-TV, Britbox, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 13) I got home in time from the Bears San Diego party to watch an intriguing episode of the Sister Boniface Mysteries series called “The Shadow of Baron Battenberg.” Sister Boniface Mysteries is an offshoot of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories and the long-running TV series made from them, directed by John Maidens from a script by Dominique Moloney with Jude Tindall listed as the show’s creator. Sister Boniface herself (Lorna Watson) is an aggressively homely middle-aged nun – one doesn’t get the impression that terrestrial manhood lost much when she decided to marry Jesus Christ instead – who in previous episodes seemed to have known far more about forensics than the official police in the small English town where the series takes place. But the real intrigue is between official police detective Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) and journalist Ruth Penny (Miranda Raison), who pose as a couple to investigate a couples’ retreat called Pranayama run by Edwin Battenberg (Jason Thorpe), brother of the missing Baron Battenberg, and the Baron’s wife (widow, actually) Marion Gray (Emily Bruni). After having watched the recent Lifetime movie Couples Retreat Murder, it was fascinating to see a quite different depiction of a couples retreat, even though there were just as many sinister agendas going on at this one as there were in the Lifetime film.

Much of the fun in this one was the screwball comedy-style interactions between Sam (who’s using the name “Simon” here) and Ruth (who’s also calling herself something else), who have to pose as a couple and sleep together in a room with only one bed. Sam takes all the pillows (much to Ruth’s consternation) and grabs the comforter; when Ruth demands at least one pillow, Sam throws it at her. Another journalist working the Baron Battenberg disappearance, Victor Goodbody (Tim Frances), shows up at the retreat, gets thrown out by Marion Gray when she realizes he’s a reporter, and then turns up murdered. He’s crudely buried on the property and Sam and Ruth come upon his body, which leads to the inevitable pun about “Victor Goodbody’s body.” Also in the mix is the resort’s aggressive cook Connie Dumas (Sarah Moyle), who maintains a strict vegetarian regime (as did the cook in Couples Retreat Murder, too) and, when one of the other guests demands a steak, goes into a nasty animal-rights lecture about how she isn’t about to torture and kill poor animals just because someone wants to eat their flesh. Ultimately Connie confesses to murdering both Baron Battenberg and Victor Goodbody, and says her motive was that the Baron was a spousal abuser and she killed him to save his wife’s life from his latest attack. Later she killed Victor because he caught on to her and was about to expose her as the Baron’s murderer both to the police and the world. But Ruth deduces that Connie couldn’t have committed the murder alone because she’d need help disposing of the body, and ultimately she realizes that both Marion and Edwin helped in that regard – but she decides not to turn them in because, like Sherlock Holmes in some of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, she regards their actions as morally justifiable even if technically illegal.

There’s a charming ending in which Sam and Ruth find themselves romantically attracted to each other even though they were just posing as a couple, and they even have sex together on their last night (after a previous night in which they’d been kept awake by another couple next door pounding away at each other; said other couple also have a spat over her use of birth-control pills, which he assumes means she’s having extra-relational activities and she insists they’re just because, while their ultimate plans include having children, she’s not ready for one just yet). That poses a problem in that the morning after she hears that The Times of London is so impressed with her article on the Battenberg case they’re offering her the deceased Goodbody’s old job. There’s a brief dilemma over whether she should take the big-city offer or stay in the small town and pursue her new relationship with Sam, and she even suggests to him that they move to London together (which he declines because being a policeman in a big city would be too stressful – “too much like work,” he says), but in the end she takes the Times job and he’s left alone. This Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was a real charmer, and luckily it had almost none of the sniping between her and the official police that’s usually a trademark of this show. There’s also a scene in which Sister Boniface is fed LSD (an autopsy reveals that Victor Goodbody was dosed with LSD before he was killed so he couldn’t resist, and the resort uses LSD as part of its therapy regimen) and sees flying octopi and other aquatic creatures – a nicely done and really charming interlude.