Midsomer Murders: “Harvest of Souls” (Bentley Productions, Independent Television Service, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was an episode of the British TV crime show Midsomer Murders – the name, with its offbeat spelling, represents the fictional (but based on real ones) county in central England where the stories take place – and the show has been running for 22 seasons, as long as Law and Order: SpeciaL Victims Unit. This particular episode (actually two parts, like most of the shows in this series, though PBS blessedly shows them consecutively so you can absorb them as a single story) was called “Harvest of Souls” and was unusually good even by the generally high standards of this show. It begins with a quite electrifying scene staged by director Nick Laughland to look like a nightmare in which a horse glows phosphorescently, which turns out to be a drug-induced hallucination the murder victim, Jasper Wyham (David Yelland), has just before he is killed. It’s only later that we learn just how he was killed – not by a rampaging horse, as we’re led to believe by that spectacular opening sequence, nor by a gunshot even though a bullet is found lodged into the wall of the barn where he died, but by an injection of the drug ketamine, used as a horse tranquilizer (and also as a “party drug” by clubgoers, especially Gay ones, who call it “Special K”).

The show’s dramatis personae include Wyham’s parents, Harry (Andrew Alexander) and Serena (Helen Schlesinger); the Nevins family – father Butch (Michael Higgs) and sons Dale (Rory Fleck Byrne) and Sean (Sean Delaney) – who run a traveling carnival featuring an attraction called “The Original Wall of Death,” which turns out to be a motorcycle track so steeply banked it’s almost cylindrical inside which the varioius male Nevinses ride on and have to maintain their speed to stay on the track; local pub owner Rod Barkham (Sean Gleeson) and his long-suffering wife Geri (Emma Rydell); the local veterinarian, Dr. Klara Karimore (Manjinder Vick) and her daughter Jessica Meyerscough (Amber Rose Revell), who was briefly married to Jasper Wyham but went through such a bitter divorce that the Wyhams not only got custody of their daughter Amy (Nikhita Essex) but have forbidden Jessica ever to see her; and also Jasper’s sister Beth Wyham (Daisy Whalley), who’s having an affair with Sean Nevins.

Inspector John Barnaby (series star Neil Dudgeon) and his younger, hunkier partner Charlie Nelson (Gwilym Lee) investigate Jasper’s killing and soon learn that the Wyhams had purchased the village green and were planning to build a state-of-the-art equestrian center – which would mean disposseing all their tenant farmers as well as barring the Nevins’ fair from ever playing there again and forcing Dr. Karimore to move her practice elsewhere. Midway through the story five of Wyham’s horses are stolen, though four of them are rather quickly recovered safe and sound, and the Wyhams’ trainer turns out to be implicated – but the bodies start piling up as Dr. Karimore is first hit over the head with a cattle prod, then shocked with it and finally placed in a chamber in her office and drowned with water. Then Dale Nevins is also found murdered, and the final solution turns out to be [spoiler alert!] that before she married Harry Wyham, Serena briefly had an affair with Butch Nevins and got pregnant by him, then told everyone that the baby had died while in fact he was alive and was secretly adopted. The payoff is that the pub owner Rod Barkham was the unwanted child of Butch Nevins and Serena, and he didn’t try to search for his birth parents until his daughter got kidney disease and needed a transplant.

He tracked down both his birth parents and tried to get them to acknowledge him and get tested as possible kidney donors for his daughter, but both the Wyhams and the Nevinses ignored his letters and his daughter died of kidney failure. So he hatched a revenge plot to kill both their first-born children so they, too, would know the anguish of losing a child prematurely. Though this show has some of the problems of previous Midsomer Murders episodes – notably plotting that doesn’t reveal the motive for the murders until about two-thirds of the way through the show – and there’s also something of D. H. Lawrence’s equation of aristocracy = impotence and proletarianism = potency (especially the way director Laughland keeps giving us mid-shots of the actors playing the Nevinses, with their big baskets clearly visible through their jeans), it’s an artfully constructed story (Caleb Ransom was the writer), well directed and movingly told – and without the torpor that often afflicts British mysteries. It’s also noteworthy is that there’s no trace of Christieism; instead of St. Agatha’s cardboard characters, the people in “Harvest of Souls” (a title which makes the story seem a bit more macabre than it is) have mixed motives and real emotional backgrounds, and the fact that the killer has a noble – though twisted – motive helps make the story live. And I liked the fact that the cute second cop has nearly the same name as my husband, Charles Nelson!