The Mallorca Files: "Mallorca's Most Wanted" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, Britbox, France TV, ZDF, ORF, BBC, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Thursday, July 11) I watched an episode of the TV series The Mallorca Files – a truly international show in conception and execution (among the nations represented in its plethora of production companies are Britain, France, Germany, Austria and the U.S., and of course the show is set on an island off the coast of Spain) – called “Mallorca’s Most Wanted” that was actually the best episode I’ve seen so far. Written by Sarah-Louise Hawkins and directed by Rob Evans, “Mallorca’s Most Wanted” deals with the sudden and unexpected return to Mallorca of its most wanted (alleged) criminal, Charlie King (Ben Dilloway). King fled the island earlier when his girlfriend was murdered, and it turns out that one of the two leading characters on the show, German expatriate detective Max Winter (Julian Looman), has a direct connection to the case. He’s dating the victim’s roommate, Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo), and his police partner, cashiered London detective Miranda Blake (Ellen Rhys), finds Carmen’s name on a witness statement from the original investigation nine years earlier. It turns out that Charlie King returned to Mallorca for one last visit with his father, owner of a prestigious night spot on Mallorca, before he croaks from cancer. It also turns out that the case originally involved a liquor wholesaler which Charlie’s brother, Rob King (Charlie Anson), was using as a front to sell cheap knock-off booze in bottles emblazoned with high-end designer labels. In the present Rob King is running his dad’s old club and he threatens Miranda and Max when they bust a low-level drug dealer in his club during a busy night.

The true villain is Ramón Hernandez (Juan Pablo Shuk), a corrupt cop who was involved in the fake liquor scheme and was protecting it from law enforcement in return for half the proceeds. Miranda and Max both get push-back from their local boss on Mallorca, local police chief Inéz Villegas (María Fernández Ache), who doesn’t want to believe that detective Hernandez has gone corrupt and accuses Miranda of unfairly accusing an honest officer just because, when she still worked in London, she was pushed off the force there for accusing and ultimately arresting a crooked cop. (By chance I’m reading Michael Connelly’s 2022 novel Desert Star, which is about an evil cop who’s really a serial killer.) Ultimately it turns out that Rob King and Ramón Hernandez teamed up to kill Charlie’s girlfriend – who’d previously been having an affair with Hernandez even though he was married to someone else – and frame Charlie for it. The last major scene is of Charlie visiting his dad on dad’s deathbed, and I felt even sorrier than I would have otherwise because in his last days on earth he’s having to deal with the revelation that one of his sons, Rob, framed the other, Charlie, for a murder Rob himself committed. At the end of the show Miranda gets a call from London hinting they might be willing to summon her back from her Mallorcan exile and welcome her back onto the force since she’s so good at busting cops who’ve gone over to “the dark side.” Despite a rather phony, overwrought ending – Miranda and Max are both all too easily overpowered by the bad guys and tied up and left to die in a room with a stove burner on and gas from a deliberately severed pipe filling the room with flammable fumes, only Miranda is able to cut herself loose and turn off the stove and the gas with her trusty Swiss army knife – “Mallorca’s Most Wanted” is one of the best episodes of this show. All too many of the episodes were more interested in showing you Mallorca’s awesome scenery than telling an exciting, suspenseful story of police procedure, but this one went long on thrills and dark atmosphere instead, to its benefit.