Death in Paradise: Episode 13.7 (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, November 15) I watched another episode of the TV series Death in Paradise, set on the fictional Caribbean island of Sainte-Marie (“played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe) – though in this case the police are split between Sainte-Marie and the equally fictitious Saint-Antoine, where a group of young women who all attended a prestigious boarding school in Britain are spending a summer. One of them, Cressida “Chris” Dempsey (Django Chan-Reeves), is an utterly obnoxious “influencer” who spends most of her time talking on her smart phone, filming everything she does and sees as she does and sees it for a vlog (a video Web log, for those of you who aren’t up to the latest digital-world terminology) and making herself utterly obnoxious to everyone in her group. Another young woman, Abigail Warner (Eve Ponsonby), is found dead in a hotel swimming pool. The death is at first ruled an accident, but detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) is suspicious because Abigail had just been swimming in the ocean before she was found dead in the pool, and why after having swum in the ocean would she want to swim again so soon? The Sainte-Marie police have to investigate this because Saint-Antoine is too small an island, with too limited a population, to have a police force of its own. Ultimately, to almost no one’s surprise, Chris turns out to be Abigail’s killer. Apparently there’s some deep, dark secret in Chris’s past – though I don’t think writer James Hall bothered to reveal what it was or why it would be so potentially destructive to Abigail or her direct, no-nonsense blog persona, but it was, and after a brief struggle in which Abigail confronted Chris in the pool (and writer James Hall gave her a scar on her forehead the cops never seemed to figure out what was up with that), it was Chris who knocked off Abigail instead so she didn’t reveal what she was going to reveal about her online. I was comparatively bored by this one and I did a fair amount of nodding off during it, but I got the gist of it even though for once the subplots on this show – including a former member of a witness protection program who’d testified against some criminal bigwigs on Sainte-Marie and had to spend years on a neighboring island until the charges in her case got resolved – were more interesting than the main intrigue.