Sister Boniface Mysteries: "House of Misfit Dolls" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

The Sister Boniface Mysteries KPBS ran right after “The Forensic Nun” was considerably weaker, though it had at least two things in common: a murderer we felt at least partial sympathy for and a victim who was a first-rate asshole. It was called “House of Misfit Dolls” in what I suspect writer Asher Pirie intended as a reference to the “Island of Misfit Toys” on the early-1960’s TV animated special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The action centers around a decades-old doll shop in Sister Boniface’s home village, “Great Slaughter” (itself a marvelous name for the setting of a murder mystery show) whose owner, Arthur Salem, has decided he needs to upgrade with the times. So he’s introduced a new doll that talks when you pull a string in the back, which his veteran employees all think is a betrayal of everything the shop has stood for all those years. His veteran employees are all … well, whatever the au courant euphemism is for the physically or mentally disabled, though some of them looked and sounded just fine to me. Among them are Merlin Crow (Alex Macqueen), Gideon Glove (Andre Flynn), Octavia Hemlock (Debbie Chazen) and Beth Moody (Alexandra O’Neill), who much to her own and Octavia’s discontent was chosen by Salem to be the “voice” of the new talking doll. Writer Pirie and director Kodjo Tsakpo concocted a classic locked-room mystery in which Arthur Salem is stabbed to death by a knife that came from one of the dolls and is replaced there after he’s killed. Eventually Salem’s killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Octavia Hemlock, whose motive turns out to be that Salem had promised her a job in perpetuity but had summarily fired her and demanded that she vacate the premises – it’s been a live-work situation for all the “misfit” staff – within 20 minutes. When she protests that she has nowhere to go, Salem couldn’t care less (the rotter!).

So she confronts him in his back office and uses the pull string on one of the talking dolls to pull the lock shut as she exits the murder room. (I liked the irony that it’s Salem’s own hateful invention that helps conceal his killer, even though the string-through-the-lock bit is a common favorite among writers doing locked-room mysteries.) Octavia’s motive was not only that Salem was about to render her homeless, but that he was about to do so after she had finally reunited with her daughter Beth, whom she had got a job at the store just so the two could be together even though Beth didn’t know she was Octavia’s daughter. Mixed in with all this was a rather dull subplot involving the junior member of Great Slaughter’s two-person official police force, the African-British Felix Livingstone (Jerry Iwu) and his Caribbean fiancée Victoria Braithwaite (Ayesha Griffiths), whose engagement has hit some rough patches stemming mainly from her culture shock at being stuck in a small British village like Great Slaughter. She’s encouraging him to put in for a transfer to Scotland Yard so the two can live together in a big city, London, but at the end it’s unclear whether or not he’s actually doing so. This Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was O.K.; I’ve seen better ones at reconciling the various plot strands of this show, including the fact that Sister Boniface, a middle-aged (and then some!) nun in the middle of central England, seems to know more about forensics than anyone else in the U.K., including all of professional law enforcement. There also have been scripts that were cleverer at playing the religious naïveté of Sister Boniface off against the worldliness of the villains, but at least I liked the idea that, as with “The Forensic Nun” episode of Father Brown that preceded it, the murder victim was someone who definitely deserved to be removed from humanity!