The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Dead Men Don't Shoot Ducks" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, aored November 24, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, December 26 – Boxing Day in Great Britain and through much of the British Commonwealth) my husband Charles and I watched the latest KPBS rerun of the New Zealand policier The Brokenwood Mysteries, dealing with a small, out-of-the-way New Zealand community called Brokenwood and the various police detectives who investigate crimes there: Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), given to listening to New Zealand country music and with a history of three or four failed marriages (even Shepherd can’t remember which); Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), his professional but not personal partner even though he began the series by making the obligatory pass at her; Sam Breen (Nic Sampson, red-headed and a hunk!); and their medical examiner, Russian immigrant Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Ionda), along with a Maori hanger-on named Jared Morehu (Pama Hema-Taylor) who’s a sort of unofficial hanger-on. This episode, aired November 24, 2019, was called “Dead Men Don’t Shoot Ducks,” and was directed by Murray Keane from a script by the series’ creator, Timothy Balme. It deals with a duck-hunting club on the Brokenwood lake whose activities on the first day of the season are disrupted by animal-rights activist Leslie Barrett (Alex Ellis), who takes a rowboat into the middle of the lake with a big sign reading “Birds’ Lives Matter.” She’s also brought along a boombox containing a recording of the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walküre in order to scare the ducks into flying off so the hunters can’t shoot them. (I’d like to believe that Timothy Balme knew that Wagner was an animal-rights activist in real life and picked his music for that reason.) Alas, one or more of the duck hunters shoot and kill Leslie. Needless to say, all the hunters are under suspicion, including Don Ducker (Edwin Wright), great-grandson of one of the original founders of the duck-hunting club; Simon Hughes (Colin Moy), who owns the lake on which the duck hunters hunt; Frankie “Frodo” Oates (Karl Willetts), who is returning to the duck hunt this year after he was traumatized by the accidental death by drowning of his hunting partner and best friend years before; Lance Gifford (Phil Brown), owner of the local gun store at which the duck hunters get their supplies, and who also runs a tour bus through the area which he calls “Eco Tours” even though there’s nothing particularly environmentally friendly about them; Ray Neilson (Jason Hoyte), and others.

It turns out that Leslie was shot from a disused blind that was abandoned when its owner, Frodo’s friend, died (each hunter has his own blind, or “mee-mee” as they’re called in the New Zealand version of English; in earlier episodes I’ve been amused by the accents and in particular their pronunciation of the short “e” as the long “ee,” so “sex” becomes “seex” and “dead” becomes “deed”). Also on the suspect list is Leslie’s widower, Ollie Barrett (Wesley Dowdell), who at first seems like a milquetoast middle-aged man whose wife clearly wears the pants in the family. Later it turns out that Ollie was having an affair with Don Ducker’s put-upon wife Marion (Narelle Ahrens) – there’s a brief flashback scene in which they’re shown screwing against the counter in her kitchen, one of those deals in which they were so horny for each other they couldn’t wait to make it to the bedroom. At one point Frodo confesses to the murder (and the appearance of a character nicknamed “Frodo” in the middle of a story set in New Zealand, where Peter Jackson filmed the movies of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels, is a neat in-joke even cleverer than the use of Wagner’s music by the animal-rights activist to disrupt the duck hunt) even though he didn’t really do it, and the smarmy attorney he’s hired (who’s also representing one of the other suspects – can you say “conflict of interest”?) talks him out of his bogus confession and the police officers out of believing it. There’s also a clever explanation of how “Don Ducker” got his name; he says that when his great-grandfather co-founded the duck club the family name was actually “Donald Duck,” only they had to change it after 1934 when Walt Disney Studios started making the Donald Duck cartoons.

“Dead Men Don’t Shoot Ducks” runs along rather complicated lines when the police deduce, based on a stray wire found in the disused duck blind from which Leslie was shot, that the killer used a gimmick first thought up by the British soldiers who were held back by the Turkish army at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915: a wire connecting the trigger of a gun to a water bottle that, when enough of the water dripped out of it, the gun would fire. It also turns out that the killer was [spoiler alert!] Leslie’s sister Kimberly Mason (Zara Cormack), who was in unrequited love with Ollie Barrett and was convinced that she could have him if she just got rid of the inconvenient sister to whom he was married. Kimberly used the old Gallipoli trick to shoot Leslie from the disused blind by remote control and then pose as a grief-stricken relative and apparently just happen on the scene. She also loaded her gun, a supposedly non-working souvenir she hung on her wall, with shells Don Ducker had previously handled and would therefore contain her fingerprints, to frame him for the crime. Her story unravels when she shoots Marion Ducker after her affair with Ollie has become common knowledge. Charles was rubbed the wrong way by the sheer elaborateness of the murder mechanism; it has way too much of the Agatha Christie style about it, including the sheer number of things that had to go right for the scheme to work. Overall, though, I liked the show, and one of the aspects of The Brokenwood Mysteries I like is the sheer number of suspects; this isn’t one of those stories that makes it easier for you to figure out whodunit simply by the paucity of potential killers!