The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Bride Not to Be" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 14) my husband Charles, who came home from work relatively early (shortly before 10 p.m.), and I watched an episode of the New Zealand-based detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries. This was called “Bride Not to Be” and was originally aired November 4, 2018 as the second episode from the show’s fifth season. The central characters are police inspector Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) and his reluctant female partner (professional, decidedly not personal!), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland). I remember a few KPBS showings of episodes from the first season of this series, in which Shepherd was explained as a huge fan of country music (both American and Antipodian – who knew Australia and New Zealand had major country-music scenes of their own?) and also a sexist pig who’s been married three or four times (even he can’t remember how many times, exactly). In the opening episode he made the obligatory pass at Kristin, who turned him down flat, and from then on they’ve had a guarded but still effective professional relationship. “Bride Not to Be” told the story of Ophelia (Anne-Marie Thomas), who on the eve of her wedding is found dead, floating in the Brokenwood River, by a local tourist boat captain whose real name is James Cook (not named on imdb.com, though inevitably there are plenty of jokes made about his name being the same as the legendary 18th century British captain who discovered Australia in the first place – just as there are the inevitable name-checks to Shakespeare’s Ophelia from Hamlet, since both Ophelias ended up floating dead in rivers, though Shakespeare’s committed suicide and this one, written by Tim Balme and Pip Hall, was murdered).

Ophelia was a major international tennis star who was in Brokenwood to recuperate from an on-court injury and to mourn the death of her father two months earlier (yet another parallel with Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whose father Polonius is killed by Hamlet by mistake). Ophelia’s fiancé was fellow tennis player Scotty (Dan Musgrave), who’d previously been having a non-serious “friends with benefits” affair with a friend of Ophelia’s, Chontelle (Cian Elyse White). Only on the eve of his wedding to Ophelia, Scotty learned from Chontelle that she was pregnant with his child – they had taken the usual “precautions” but that didn’t work – and Scotty had chosen to break his engagement to Ophelia so he could marry Chontelle and raise their child together. Writers Balme and Hall delivered a solidly constructed whodunit with plenty of suspects to choose from, and though they didn’t write in the quirks that made the earlier episodes unusually appealing (like having Shepherd blast country music in his car while he and Kristin are driving to interview various potential witnesses, or the ongoing sexual tension between them – he’s the sort of man willing to stick his dick into anything as long as it’s alive, human, and female, and she has utterly no interest in him “that way”), they did create a fascinating character named Darryn (Leon Wadham). Darryn is a deaf-mute, or at least a mute, since at one point he mentions having “listened” to a conversation (or was he close enough to the speakers to read their lips?), and in order to interview him the police need a sign-language interpreter.

They call on Zoe Fuller (Amanda Tito) even though Zoe has a potential conflict of interest in that she and Ophelia are friends, or at least acquaintances. Kristin Sims has some knowledge of the New Zealand version of sign language (my husband Charles told me that the government of New Zealand actually recognizes New Zealand Sign as one of the country’s official languages) and therefore can check up at least partly on the accuracy of Zoe’s translations. Ophelia and Zoe had kept up the pretense of being friends, but when Ophelia saw Zoe at her “hen party” (what we call a bridal shower), Ophelia took Zoe aside and whispered something insulting in her ear. Ophelia’s killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Zoe’s father, Alex Fuller (Stephen Lovatt), a quite unusual character. Though he’s pushing 54, he was hired as the stripper for Ophelia’s hen party – his act is posing as a police officer – and he’s also a physical therapist and personal trainer who was working on Ophelia to prepare her to return to competitive tennis. (Earlier in the investigation the police had found that Ophelia had a one-way plane ticket to San Francisco, and they had wondered whether Scotty had killed her when he learned that she was about to run out on him just two days after their wedding. Scotty explains that solo absences are just part of the life of a competitive tennis player, and he’d been O.K. with that.) Apparently Ophelia had regularly insulted Zoe during their days at school together, and when Alex heard about Ophelia’s latest insult, he decided she hadn’t changed and he would confront her on the local dock. He says he didn’t mean to kill her, but he did. “Bride Not to Be” was a well-crafted whodunit which was decently entertaining without breaking any new, or even unusual, ground – and somehow I’d expected more from The Brokenwood Mysteries based on the previous episodes I’d seen.