The Mallorca Files: "The Oligarch's Icon" (Cosmopolitan Prudictions,Clerkenwell Films, BBC. 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a PBS program, The Mallorca Files, one of those light-hearted British mysteries in which two foreigners, British-born Miranda Blake (Elan Rhys) and German-born Max Winter (Julian Looman), are officially assigned to the police department on the Spanish island of Mallorca (also called Majorca). Charles predictably was irritated by the fact that everyone on this island that’s supposedly part of Spain was speaking English. The only indication of which actors were playing native Mallorcans and which weren’t was the ones playing native Mallorcans spoke their English lines with ridiculously phony Spanish accents. The episode title was “The Oligarch’s Icon,” and in the script by Alex McBride and Don Sefton we were expected to believe that there was a fully functioning Russian Orthodox Church that had been on Mallorca for over 500 years, somehow surviving all the successive Spanish governments, from Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s to Franco’s, that had sought to suppress all non-Catholic churches in Spain. The MacGuffin is a priceless Russian icon painting on wood that was stolen from the church 500 years previously and has now been recovered by Kati Gorenka (Olivia Nita), widow of a Russian oligarch who was pushed out of a window six months earlier – the official verdict was suicide but the impression we’re clearly supposed to get is that Vladimir Putin and/or his cronies wanted to be rid of him and so they had him assassinated.

LJust before he died, however, he somehow ran down this icon and decided to return it to the Mallorcan Orthodox Church from whence it had come 500 years ago – only at the big ceremony announcing the impending return of the icon, it’s stolen again. A man dressed in black wearing a black hoodie and a black mask steals it in broad daylight and holds a gun on Kati Gorenka to keep the cops from catching him or shooting him down until he can get away on a speedboat. With the help of an informaint named Paco (Finbar Lynch), whom Max refers to as a “beachcomber” and Miranda insists on calling a “smuggler” (“Don’t be so judgmental,” Max told her, echoing a long-standing in-joke between Charles and I), the cops were able to trace the stolen boat where it was abandoned on the Mallorcan coast. They find a receipt that leads them to a less than above-board local gallery, but Max’s headstrong insistence on crashing the place and raiding it without waiting for backup or getting a court order to search it first allows the crooks to clear out the goods. The gallery owner is murdered, and later it turns out that before he died he painted a copy of the icon, which turns up and is accepted by Max’s and Miranda’s bosses as the real deal. Eventually it turns out that Kati Gorenka herself masterminded the whole scheme – though McBride and Sefton aren’t that clear about her motives – and she and her boyfriend/bodyguard Yuri (Christian Hillborg) were in on it together. She even killed her judo instructor, then used one of the moves he had taught her on one of the cops. It was an O.K. mystery, a bit too campy for my taste but reasonably entertaining if you can take all the phony accents and the overall light-heartedness of it all.