Father Brown: "The Word of the Condemned" (BBC Studios, Britbox, American Public Television, PBS, 2024)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, November 2) I watched the next episodes in sequence of Father Brown and Sister Boniface Mysteries on KPBS. The Father Brown show, “The Word of the Condemned,” begins with Father Brown (Mark Williams) visiting condemned murderer William Harrow (Paul McEwan) on the eve of his execution for the so-called “Bride Murders.” In these killings, the victim (always a young but recently married woman) was dressed in a white wedding gown and laid out outdoors with a white rose clutched in her hands. Harrow admits he was justly convicted for the first three “Bride Murders” but insists he didn’t kill the fourth victim, Mrs. Sophie Blackthorn (unidentified on imdb.com though she’s seen in a flashback). The late Mrs. Blackthorn’s sister, Lady Felicia (Nancy Devine), also is convinced that Harrow didn’t kill her sister. Sophie’s widower, Ralph Blackthorn (David Burnett), works in the criminology lab of Professor Alexander Pritchard (Silas Carson), a narcissistic egomaniac who was instrumental in convicting Harrow of the murders in the first place. For a while I thought the writer, Dominique Moloney, was going to make Pritchard the murderer, with his motive being a secret sexual affair between him and Sophie Blackburn and jealousy over her refusal to leave Ralph for him. Indeed, Father Brown toys with just that suspicion before Pritchard convinces him he has an airtight alibi. It turns out the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Ralph Blackburn’s foster sister Ella (Kate Bracken). It seems that Ella was a blood Blackburn while Ralph was a lower-class kid from London whom the Blackburn parents adopted. Since they weren’t biologically related, Ella formed a crush on Ralph and thought he should reciprocate, but he saw her as his sister and was revolted by the whole idea of having a sexual relationship with her. So when Ralph married Sophie, Ella became insanely jealous and determined to eliminate the competition, faking it to look like one of Harrow’s killings. Ironically, one of her slip-ups was buying a white rose from a florist; Harrow’s roses had come from his mother’s garden and he’d cut them himself. This was one of the better Father Brown shows and avoided the silliness of some of them (particularly the recent one that engaged him in a conspiracy to commit burglary), though I missed the sequence in a recent Father Brown show of him officiating at a church funeral. The gimmick in that one was that the death had originally been ruled a suicide, which disqualified him from a church funeral since the Roman Catholic Church regards suicide as a mortal sin, but once Father Brown’s investigation proved that he had been killed by someone else, then he could have one.