Father Brown: "The Jackdaw's Revenge" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired January 2, 2018)

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

Later last night (Saturday, May 2) I watched a Father Brown episode from 2018 (I was a bit surprised they reached that far back in the archives) called “The Jackdaw’s Revenge.” It opens in a singularly stark set of a noose and a woman being led to it. She is Katherine Corvin (Kate O’Flynn), and she’s about to be hanged for the murder of her husband. (The show is set in the 1950’s, well before Britain abolished capital punishment.) At first she seems to have come to grips with her fate and meekly accepted it, but it turns out she has a trick up her sleeve. A terminally ill woman who used to work for her as a maid has made a deathbed confession to the murder, and so Katherine is released and officially exonerated. Then she moves back to Father Brown’s home town and shows up at the local Roman Catholic church, declaring her intent to take the vows and become a nun. It turns out that the whole thing is part of an elaborate revenge scheme Katherine has hatched to get back at Father Brown for having established her guilt for murdering her husband in the first place. She has an unlikely ally: Robin Gladwell (Paul Cauley), the publisher of the local newspaper, who was her lover way back when and the reason she wanted to knock off her husband. At first Father Brown suspects her accomplice is the young woman reporter for the paper who’s trying to reopen the case from a point of view sympathetic to Katherine, but in the end Katherine entraps Father Brown by kidnapping one of his parishioners and threatening to kill her. She presents Father Brown with a Hobson’s choice: either kill the assailant and thereby commit a mortal sin, or not act and therefore have the death of an innocent person on his conscience. Along the way she reveals how she got the old maid to confess on her behalf: she hired a thug to visit her and bribe her to do so, saying that if she issued the false confession her children and grandchildren would be well taken care of after her death, while if she refused the thug would kill the grandchildren. Ultimately one of Father Brown’s associates grabs the gun from his hand and kills the assailant himself, and the police show up and arrest Katherine. It was an O.K. episode – the titular jackdaw is a bird actually released in the church as Father Brown is preaching, and it’s an emblem of Katherine – though a bit on the twee side.