Father Brown: "Like Father, Like Son" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 19) I watched an unusually intriguing Father Brown episode on KPBS and then the Lifetime movie Husband, Father, Killer: The Alyssa Pladl Story. The Father Brown episode was called “Like Father, Like Son” and centered around Gabriel Hawksworth (Ian Gelder, who died in May 2024 just months after this episode was shot), a retired thief who now makes his living selling pocket-sized Bibles, including one he carries with him in which passages relating to the death penalty for murderers are underlined in red. One year earlier Gabriel and his son Hercule Flambeau (John Light, who bears a striking resemblance to the young and still hunky Orson Welles) stole a priceless relic, a jeweled replica of the crown of thorns made for Pope Alexander VI (the Borgia pope and father of Cesare and Lucrezia) in 1500. They stole it for the private collection of fellow gangster Drake Underwood (Adrian Schiller), who was one of those creeps who steal priceless works of art and keep them locked in a room so only they can see them. Unfortunately, Gabriel’s accomplice on the job was Drake’s psycho son Luther (Aaron Sidwell), who insisted on shooting and killing the 22-year-old museum security guard even though the man kept pleading for his life because he was married and had just had a baby son. Now Gabriel wants to pull one last job: to steal back the crown and sell it on the open market, so he can raise money for the security guard’s widow and their son. (There’s a hint that Gabriel is ill with terminal cancer and wants to get his affairs in order and pay his atonements before he croaks; ironically, Ian Gillen, who played him, also died of bile duct cancer.)

Inexplicably, he gets the help not only of his son, an art expert who’s also a clandestine crook, but of Father Brown (Mark Williams) and his friends Mrs. Devine (Claudie Blakely) and African-British Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood). They agree to serve as lookouts while Gabriel and Hercule pull the heist, which Hercule has agreed to help with if he can steal other items from Drake’s collection for his own benefit – only Drake catches them in the act (he spots Hercule on the rope he used to rappel down after entering the house through a skylight) and there’s a chase scene in which the singularly inept thieves drop the bag containing the rest of the loot but still make off with the crown. Ultimately Gabriel meets with the widow, offering her the crown so she can sell it herself, but she angrily turns down his blood money and shoots him. Hercule ends up with the crown, but returns it to Father Brown during a scene in the confessional, and Father Brown presumably sends it back to the Vatican from which it came (it had been on loan to a local museum when it was stolen in the first place). Directed by Ian Barber but with no writer credited on imdb.com, this Father Brown is an unusually quirky episode with far more moral ambiguity than usual for this series – which is not necessarily a good thing in this instance. Ordinarily I like mysteries with moral ambiguity, but I really couldn’t believe in Father Brown and his friends as legally culpable participants in a crime, no matter how justified morally.