Death in Paradise: Season 13, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 24) I watched an unusually engaging episode of the Caribbean-set mystery and policier Death in Paradise, the eighth and last episode of season 13 and the one in which they were basically attempting to write off Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little), the one white person on the police force of the fictitious Caribbean island of “Saint-Marie.” He’s on a chartered plane flight from Saint-Marie to Dominica, only he’s feeling a bit under the weather from the hard night of partying he did the night before and also a couple of antihistamines he took just before he got on the plane. While waiting at the airport Parker makes the acquaintance of Raphaël Coty (Jules Miesch), a tall, skinny Frenchman who works for a travel site. This means he gets to travel to various exotic locations throughout the world but does not get paid much, so his ability to enjoy himself in these wonderful spots is severely limited. Parker also meets a Black man named Kurt Henderson (Calvin Demba), only shortly after the plane takes off Parker falls asleep from the booze and drugs and doesn’t wake up until the plane has arrived at Dominica. There he wakes up and finds that Kurt Henderson is gone and the other passengers, Coty and the married couple Taylor (Richard Fleeshman) and Chelsea (Emma Naomi) Fielding, and also the plane’s crew, pilot Peter Holcroft (Richard Lintern) and co-pilot Catherine Bordey (Elizabeth Bourgine) insist he never got on the plane at all. Parker is summoned back to Saint-Marie after the body of Kurt Henderson is found on a local beach, shot to death.

The police eventually learn that Henderson was living as a house guest with Taylor and Chelsea Fielding, only Henderson started an extra-relational affair with Chelsea and Taylor, not surprisingly, was not happy about this. They also learn that pilot Holcroft was under investigation by United States authorities for flying smuggled drugs into the U.S., though the Americans couldn’t make the charges stick. Ultimately the police search Holcroft’s plane and find a compartment to hide drug money in, and eventually Chelsea Fielding gives Parker and the others on the Saint-Marie police force a confession claiming that she killed Henderson out of anger that Henderson wanted her to leave her husband for him. Only Parker is convinced that not only is Chelsea lying but he really did see Henderson on the plane, even though he wasn’t on it when the flight arrived in Dominica. Ultimately writer James Hall lets us in on the truth: a combination of Murder on the Orient Express and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Henderson got on the plane, all right, only he left it again when he realized his life was in danger. Chelsea Fielding thought she’d killed Henderson, but it was actually her husband Taylor who shot the man. Taylor had grabbed the same gun Chelsea fired at Henderson but missed, clapped a silencer on it, shot Henderson dead and left him behind. The Fieldings bribed the others with $50,000 apiece in drug money to keep quiet and lie about Henderson having ever been on the plane. Eventually everyone who was on the plane (aside from Parker) is arrested and Parker is sidetracked into returning, though it’s unclear whether he aborted his plan to leave Saint-Marie or just decided to travel to London with his Black Saint-Marian girlfriend Monette Gilbert (Rachel Adedeji) in tow instead of leaving her behind on the island. It seems that Ralf Little left the show after all for season 14 because his role leading the Saint-Marie police force has been taken over by a Black man, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), and the producers chose to add an annoying and often infuriating “comic relief” character, a young Black police trainee named Sebastian Rose (Shaquille All-Yebuah) whose incompetence quickly stopped being amusing and just got awful.