Death in Paradise: Episode 13.3 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

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

Last night (Friday, October 18) I watched a Death in Paradise episode, listed on imdb.com only as “Episode 13.3” (the third episode of the 13th season). It begins on the island of Saint-Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism bureau is one of the sponsors of the show) at the newly opened fifth resort of a chef-turned-entrepreneur named Stanley Drake (Gordon Kennedy), which has been refurbished and redeveloped from a previous one that went out of business and now bears the double-D Drake logo. Drake is hosting a cooking contest to determine which of six competitors will get the job of lead chef at the resort’s new restaurant. The contestants are Tristan Clayborn (Michael Fenton Stevens) and his wife Lucky (Kate Robbins); Dionne Bertrand (Shvorne Marks), a Black woman who was relegated to a nothing job running a little-known and out-of-the-way barbecue joint on the island; Celeste Duvall (Yasmin Mwanza), a seemingly innocent wide-eyed young Black woman apparently with a whole career ahead of her; and two others who kind of get lost in the shuffle in Katerina Watson’s script. Drake has a near-saintly reputation in the restaurant business for promoting new talent through his cooking competitions and identifying hot young chefs to major restaurants besides his own, but it turns out he has a dark side. He’s basically the Harvey Weinstein of the food business, always out to seduce the hot young female chefs who audition for him, which he does by telling them that if they don’t have sex with him he’ll ruin their careers and make sure they’ll never get anywhere in the business.

Thirty years before he had sex with Lucky Clayborn (though that appears to have been before she married Tristan, so it technically wasn’t an extra-relational activity), which apparently led to the bitter breakup with her best friend and former business partner, Andrina Harper Patterson (Genesis Lynea), who makes a formidable entrance early on in the episode (though still in the present day). It seems that Lucky and Andrina were supposed to buy a local bar together, only Lucky quickly left the island before the deal could be done and Andrina had to wait five more years before she raised enough money to buy the bar on her own. When he arrived on Saint-Marie to judge the latest contest and open his new resort, he sent word to Lucky to meet him privately so he could fuck her again. This time he had a secret camera in his bedroom so he could photograph them “in the act” and threaten to send the photos to her husband unless … it’s not all that clear what Drake wanted from her, but it was obviously something both embarrassing and nefarious. Unfortunately for Lucky, her husband already found out about her night with Drake, got jealously angry about it and threatened to divorce her – even though they’re co-authors of a cookbook and are selling themselves as a happily married couple who make beautiful meals together. Drake gets killed from a poison called furium, made from the locally abundant fury tree, and the drug takes effect and he collapses while he’s being interviewed by local reporter and police detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), who happens to be the daughter of police commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington).

The official police, detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little, the only white person playing a Saint-Marie law enforcement officer) and detective sergeant Thomas, realize Drake was killed by furium poisoning but are trying to figure out how in what becomes the gustatory version of a locked-room mystery. Since Drake made sure never to eat anything during a contest other than the contestants’ dishes (which were supposed to be made with locally sourced ingredients: the main course is red snapper, caught that morning by local fishermen, but all the other ingredients the chefs were expected to forage for on their own from the island’s flora), the mystery is how could Drake have been poisoned when he didn’t consume anything and the contestant chefs were eating their own dishes and not suffering any apparent ill effects at all. Then Celeste collapses with the symptoms of furium poisoning – though we’d previously been told there was no antidote or cure, she’s later taken to the hospital and we’re told she’s being successfully treated and should recover. Judging from this, Parker and Thomas deduce a solution to the mystery writer Watson obviously ripped off from Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: Parker calls Lucky Clayborn, Dionne Bertrand and Celeste Duvall together and announces that they all participated in Drake’s murder: they spiked each of their dishes with small amounts of furium so they’d be unaffected (though, since Celeste’s dish had two spiked courses instead of just one, she got sick anyway) while the deadly stuff would accumulate in Drake and ultimately knock him off. The reason the three women got together to kill Drake was they feared he’d be demanding both money and sex from them the rest of their lives, and the best way they’d have to end their power over him would be to murder him. The episode ends with Parker persuading all three murderesses to confess to the court officials, ask for mercy and he will do his best to persuade the court system to go easy on them. My husband Charles returned home from work relatively early, about midway through the show, and he watched most of the rest with me and seemed to enjoy it, though it’s not much of a mystery and, as Raymond Chandler once said about Christie’s original, “Only a half-wit could guess it.”