Midsomer Murders: "The Point of Balance" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV, American Public Television, 2019)

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

Last night (Wednesday, June 1) my husband Charles and I watched an unusually interesting 2019 rerun episode of the sporadically interesting British ITV series Midsomer Murders, “The Point of Balance.” Midsomer Murders is based on a series of novels by Caroline Graham about the police in the decidedly fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England, particularly Inspector John Barnaby (series star Neil Dudgeon) and a rotating slot for an assistant, in this case detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), though Charles preferred a previous sidekick, Gwilym Lee, if only because his character’s name was virtually the same as Charles’s own, “Charlie Nelson.” Charles (mine, not this show’s) recalled that when the series Murder, She Wrote was on he wondered how long it would take before Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) was the only person left alive in Cabot Cove, Maine since all the others would have murdered each other at some point, and he has the same problem with “Midsomer County” and its principal village. From the imdb.com synopsis of this episode – “Midsomer is buzzing at the 'Paramount Dance Extravaganza'. But behind the sequins and smiles are deep running feuds and passions, and the desire to win outweighs just about anything” – I feared the worst: a story about a trivial dance contest (which is supposed to take place every year even though none of the previous episodes mentioned it) in which one of the dancers get murdered and the suspects are the victim’s rivals.

In fact, it turned out to be a much deeper, richer and better story than that: the first victim is a 37-year-old free-lance journalist, Rosa Corrigan (Faye Toser), who had competed in the contest and won the last four years with a Russian-born partner named Brzezinski (apparently no one told writer Nicholas Hicks-Beach that the name “Brzezinski” is actually Polish), until an anonymous caller ratted him out to the British immigration authorities as undocumented and got him deported to Moscow. (Though we never meet the man, we feel sorry for him because no doubt once he’s sent back to Russia, he’ll be pressed into service in Vladimir Putin’s insane and totally worthless war on Ukraine.) The second victim is Rosa’s brother, Duncan Corrigan (Cassidy Little), a British servicemember who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan until, just five days before his third tour was supposed to end, he and the transport truck he was on were blown up by an improvised explosive device (IED). Most of the men on it were killed and Duncan survived but lost a leg in the blast. He moved to Midsomer County after his discharge and settled in the area because a super-rich retail tycoon named Andrew Wilder (Nigel Havers) retired there and developed a degenerative brain disease. So he decided to use his accumulated fortune to start a biorobotics company because, even though anything the new company discovered would come too late for him, he hoped to spare others his fate. Andrew Wilder lives on a country estate with his trophy second wife Lilly (Jaye Griffiths), an African-British woman, and also in the picture are his children by his previous wife: daughter Heather (Carolina Main) and son Ray (Tom Chambers), along with Heather’s fiancé Jake Hannity (Jack Hawkins).

Andrew has made it clear that he intends to leave his company to Heather and Jake, and disinherit Ray because Ray is more interested in dancing – he and his dancing partner Rachel Stevenson (Natalie Gumede, another African-Brit) are the favorites in the contest now that Rosa is dead and her partner on his way back to Russia – than in business. Ray has just concluded a deal for Wilder’s chain to sell a line of lipsticks made in China, but Andrew dismisses it and says he won’t take Ray seriously as a businessperson until he’s made 20 deals. (This does sound as if Hicks-Beach grafted a murder mystery onto the plot of the recently concluded HBO TV series Succession.) It turns out Duncan denounced Brzezinski to the immigration authorities but the real villains are [spoiler alert!] Ray Wilder and Jake Hannity. Jake had wormed his way into the Wilder family’s confidences by claiming he too had served in Afghanistan and narrowly escaped annihilation by an IED, only he regarded the Corrigans as potential threats because Rosa was researching a book about the Wilder family and Duncan, as a genuine Afghanistan veteran, could easily have seen through his pose. So he blackmailed Ray into killing both Rosa and Duncan, whom Ray dispatched by luring him to the biorobotics factory and getting Duncan to lock himself in a room with a robot Ray had programmed to deliver a lethal blow (sort of like Daniel in the lion’s den, but with a considerably less happy result for Duncan than for Daniel).

A number of people on imdb.com’s reviews page criticized the ending, but I found it quite strong, powerful and believable – certainly better than some Midsomer Murders episodes which have set up so many crimes it seems like half the population of this supposedly sleepy, peaceful English visit were involved in some sort of crime! There's also a subplot in which Lilly Wilder and Duncan Corrigan are having a sexual affair – with Andrew's knowledge and approval since he can no longer complete the sex act – and a framing story about Inspector Barnaby's fraught relationship with his own father Ned (Christopher Timothy) which hit me particularly hard because I failed to reconcile with my own father before he died.