Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 5 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired March 19, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, May 29) I watched an engaging if somewhat frustrating episode of Death in Paradise, the charming mystery series set on the fictional Caribbean island of Sainte Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism board is one of the show’s producers because apparently they hope it will encourage people to vacation in Guadeloupe; I guess they’re thinking would-be tourists will fall for all the luscious scenery shot in vibrant color and ignore the fictional death toll). This episode, the fifth of season 14, showcases the cast as it stood at the time, with the white detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little) having been replaced by a Black one, Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). This episode takes place at a soccer game between Sainte Marie and its hated rivals from a neighboring island, Sainte Antoine, and the principal victim (the only murder victim, in fact), is Ines Mercedes (Nkechi Simms), star goalie for the Sainte Antoine team. She’s found shot to death with a bullet wound in her thigh at the halfway point of the game after she’s played deliberately badly and been red-carded (ejected from the game) just 10 minutes in. Ines had pleaded with the coach of her team, Curtly Lewis (Patrick Regis, a strikingly handsome middle-aged Black man who had my Lust-O-Meter registering off the charts), not to have to play at all, but Lewis insisted because a scout for an American soccer program was in the audience and his multi-million dollar contract with the American college soccer industry was riding on the success of his team in general and Ines’s performance in particular.

Directed by Carys Lewis and written by Joe Ainsworth, the episode turned into an intriguing variant of the locked-room mystery, in which the three principal suspects – Coach Lewis; his daughter Brigitte (Chantelle Alie), the team’s second-string goalkeeper who got sidelined by her dad in favor of Ines; and Grace Devon (Rita Bernard-Shaw), a player on the Sainte Marie team who turns out to have been Ines’s Lesbian lover. Grace had smuggled a gun to Ines because she’d been receiving death-threat texts from an anonymous source who turned out to be Brigitte, who also [spoiler alert!] was her killer, though Ines was shot accidentally when she and Brigitte had a fight and – say it with me now – They Both Reached for the Gun. Ines was wounded in the thigh before the game but tried to bandage herself up anyway so she could play, only when she was red-carded and returned to the locker room the open would bled out and she ultimately died from a wound that otherwise wouldn’t have been fatal. Ainsworth burdened his script with way too many soap-operaish complications, including Emmanuel Warner (Bobby Gordon), an ex-boyfriend of detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), who broke up with her after four years because they couldn’t decide which island to live on and it seems to both her and us like he’s coming on to her again, only he isn’t because he’s got engaged to someone else (whom we never see). There’s also the continuing anxiety from Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), whose job is being ended in a week despite the efforts of various Sainte Marieians to circulate a petition to the colonial authorites to save his job. And there’s Mervin Wilson’s ongoing private investigation of the mysterious death of his mother in a boating “accident” a year or two before. My husband Charles, who walked in about three-fifths of the way through, was a bit confused as to exactly how the police solved the crime, and frankly I’m not sure either. But it was a reasonably entertaining episode despite the running plot lines that only got in the way and the continuing aggravation of the comic-relief character they introduced this season, the disarmingly bungling junior officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), whom I find incredibly annoying.