Midsomer Murders: "With Baited Breath" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 29) I watched a Midsomer Murders episode from 2019 called “With Baited Breath.” This was an unusually quirky episode of this generally quirky show based on Caroline Graham’s series of novels about the fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England and the police officers who investigate murders there, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), police trainee Jade-Marie Pierce (Eleanor Fanyinka) – an African-British woman whom Winter has the hots for – and their medical examiner and forensic technician, Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland). A lot of the Midsomer Murders shows are based around alleged competitions that supposedly take place every year in the environs, even though no one seems to have heard of them before. The script for “With Baited Breath,” written by Jeff Povey and directed by Jennie Darnell, features two such competitions, the so-called “Psycho Mud Run” that’s essentially a military-style obstacle course that attracts teams of competitors and a fishing competition at nearby Solomon Lake in which there’s a 20,000-pound prize for catching “Ahab,” the giant 20-pound fish (well, it’s central England so it’s not going to be anything truly monstrous, though Darnell and Povey use the fish in some quite amusing parodies of Jaws) that inhabits the lake.

Alas, the promoter of the “Psycho Mud Run,” Ned Skye (Nitin Ganatra), has re-routed the course so it runs by the lake, which will screw up the fishing competition by scaring the fish into hiding at the bottom. Ned is also having running arguments with his daughter Simone (Krupa Pattani), who works at the local inn owned by Izzy Silvermane (Nicola Stephenson) and is in love with fellow staff member Harper Kaplan (Lloyd Everitt), another Afro-Brit, but dad doesn’t want them to get together because he has no career plans. Kaplan was fired from the local fire department three years earlier by Lex Bedford (Andrew Brooke, who bore a striking resemblance to my hero Christopher Meloni from the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), who used to be a champion angler until he gave it up and is back in town but only to participate in the Psycho Mud Run. Izzy keeps getting postcards from her daughter Lola, who supposedly left town years before and is traveling around the world. The first crime occurs when someone strews fish hooks across the path of the Psycho Mud Run, leading to a number of contestants having their legs literally cut open and scarred. I was beginning to wonder when the actual murders would start, and soon enough the corpses started piling up: first, Lex Bedford’s; then, Nick Frye’s, and then that of Cornelius Tedbury (Miles Jupp), who’s killed with a slingshot (how David and Goliath!) as he’s bent over the water fishing with an underwater camera and a tablet computer so he can find the mystery fish Ahab.

Barnaby and Winter enlist the aid of retired police detective Artie Blythe (Vincent Franklin) to help investigate the case, but it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Blythe is the actual killer. Three years earlier Lola Silvermane was actually killed in a hit-and-run auto accident involving a Jeep being driven by Griffin Twigg (Morgan Watkins), who crashed into her because he was momentarily distracted by Lex Bedford, who was waving around the fishing trophy he had just won. Also in the car were Ned Skye and Blaise McQuinn (Bronagh Waugh), a fisherwoman who had been having an affair with Lex and was now doing a worldwide blog challenging the institutional sexism of the competitive fishing world. The four decided to conceal the crime by sinking the Jeep in the lake, where Cornelius’s hidden camera shot pictures of it, and sending Izzy fake postcards whose origins precisely tracked the cities from which Blaise did her blog posts. Artie’s motive was he was actually Lola Silvermane’s father, and he was angry with the foursome for having deprived him of the chance to watch her grow up and become a woman; he killed Cornelius by mistake because Griffin, the intended victim, had left his hat beside the lake and Cornelius had put it on. This was a quite charming Midsomer Murders episode, and the climax had real pathos, though I was disappointed that the hot young (straight) couple we saw in the opening scene were never heard from again; I wanted to see more of that sexy young man!