Death in Paradise: Episode 13.4 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 25) I watched a KPBS showing of an episode of the intriguing British mystery TV show Death in Paradise, which takes place in the fictional city of “Honoré” on the equally fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Marie, “played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. (The tourism board of Guadeloupe actually co-produces this program – though I have no idea whether they put money into it or just make sure the filmmakers have permission to film wherever they like on the island.) This one was simply tagged “Episode 13.4” – meaning the fourth show of season 13 – and it had an intriguing plot. A power surge causes an island-wide blackout, and the problem is traced to a substation at which a nice-looking young man named Ellis Baxter (Ben Wiggins) is found electrocuted. It’s not clear until later in the episode whether his body shorted the substation’s circuits and therefore led to the power surge or the surge came first and literally killed him. Before he died, Ellis had been dating Petra McQuillen (Leah Brotherhead), daughter of cantankerous Ivan McQuillen (Pearce Quigley). Ivan McQuillen runs a computer repair shop on the island, but his real business is buying and selling cryptocurrency – to wit, Tallium, a new brand of crypto that has a logo which strikingly resembles the Tesla car logo. Ellis, Petra and Ivan have been siphoning off electricity from the local utility in order to power the supercomputer that they have running the Tallium exchange. They’ve already accumulated $250,000 of Tallium, though given the high volatility of cryptocurrency exchange rates that value could literally disappear – or multiply 10 or more times – during this half-hour program.

There was a plot between Ivan, his daughter Petra, Ellis and Laurette Duschamps (Leah Walker) to set up this system and steal the electricity needed to run it, since we’re told by writers James Cary and Patrick Holmes that a computer running a crypto program will need a) a lot of money over a short period of time to keep up with all the various fluctuations in the coin’s value, and b) the only way the McQuillens and their partners in the scheme to get the power was by sneaking lines into the substation and extracting it illegally. Before he died, Ellis, a former Internet hotshot who had lost his fortune and was using Tallium to try to get back in the game, had proposed marriage to Petra – only the Black Laurette, whom he was also having sex with, got terribly jealous of the white Petra. Cary and Holmes cycle us through the usual set of red herrings and briefly try to get us to believe that Ellis committed suicide, but eventually it turns out that Laurette was the killer. It seems that she was hoping to grab the money, which is stored in a flash drive concealed in a metal pendant Ellis always wore around his neck, and run off with Ellis, leaving the McQuillens behind, only Ellis was determined to make his new relationship with Petra work and was even willing to give up his share of the money to do that. In order to get himself out of the deal, Ellis had engraved on the back of a Tallium business card the 256-digit binary code needed to unlock the account and offered Laurette the money, free and clear, if she’d just leave him alone and let him get married to Petra. Only that wasn’t good enough for Laurette, especially when the 256-digit binary code was simply the equivalent for “I love Petra” over and over again. So she had a jealous hissy-fit and shoved him into the current box, electrocuting him. It was an O.K. Death in Paradise show and Ralf Little as Detective Inspector Neville Parker (the only white person on the Saint Marie police force) is easy enough on the eyes, but alas for this ancient queen all the hot Black people in the show are women!