Death in Paradise: Episode 13.6 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

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

Afterwards the Death in Paradise episode I watched was pretty lame. It was simply designated as “13.6” (the sixth show in season 13) and was about a middle-aged white couple, Joe and Cora Blyth (John Gordon Sinclair and Gabrielle Glaister) who are visiting Sainte-Marie with their daughter Holly (Elise Chappell) and son-in-law, Sam Portlake (Ali Ariale). Cora Blyth is found stabbed to death inside an elevator car at the fancy Arawak Hotel. She was seen very much alive going into the elevator (the “lift,” as the Brits call it) – a fellow tourist had just taken a Polaroid photo of the two of them moments before – but she’s found stabbed to death inside the elevator. It’s an intriguing variation on the locked-room mystery, but the local cops investigating the crime – detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little) and his Black partner (on the police, not in life!), detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) – figure out a way someone could have sneaked into the elevator from the safety skylight door on top of the car, killed Cora and got out again. The problem is they’d only have 15 seconds to do all this, and obviously it would take someone young, agile and lithe to pull it off. The someone turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Sam Portlake, Cora’s son-in-law, who’d been having an affair with one of his exes and who was scared that Cora, who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness and didn’t have much longer to live anyway, would disown him and/or force him to divorce Ellie if Cora found out about the affair. Meanwhile, Neville Parker is having an affair with one of his exes, which convinces them that whatever spark they had together is gone, but she tells him that he hasn’t found his soulmate yet and he should leave the island so he can travel other places and have a better shot at meeting the woman of his dreams. There’s also another annoying subplot in the return of one of the other cops, Officer Dwayne Myers (Danny John-Jules), to duty in Sainte-Marie after he’d been temporarily reassigned elsewhere, and the disgust Naomi feels towards him because he’s always hitting on her in the grossest imaginable ways. This Death in Paradise creeps to a close at the pace of a drunken snail – it was definitely not one of the better entries in the series – and it lost me when the subplots got more interesting than the main intrigue.