Midsomer Murders: "The Witches of Angel's Rise" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, copyrighted 2021, premiered 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 9) I watched a Midsomer Murders episode that’s listed on the show’s imdb.com page as the most recent one: “The Witches of Angel’s Rise,” about an annual “Psychic Fayre” [sic] held on a central English estate owned by Peter Saint-Stephens (Clive Mantle) and his African-British wife Jeanie (Caroline Lee-Johnson). The Saint-Stephenses had two children, a teenage daughter named Bea who dies under mysterious circumstances in a black-and-white prologue and a scapegrace teenage son named Isaac (Jordan Ford Silver, a nice hunk of man-meat who looks credible as the offspring of a mixed-race couple), who never gets out of bed before noon and doesn’t seem to have any plans for what to do with the rest of his life. The prologue showed Bea waiting in the ruins of an abandoned castle for a visitor to show up – it’s not clear whether the visitor she was expecting was alive or dead, since she’s drawn as a major believer in spiritualism – and we see a shadowy figure calling out to her just before she takes a header out of a window opening that long before lost its window and falls to her death. In the present her parents are still grieving for her even though they have radically different attitudes towards the New Age stuff being peddled on their property: she’s convinced that there’s something to it while he’s sure it’s all bunk, but is willing to accept the rental income from the Psychic Fayre to help maintain the estate.

The Psychic Fayre attracts all manner of exhibitors, including accountant by day and Tarot reader by night Simeon Dagley (Richard David-Caine); empaths Sally Ann Barker (Tracy-Ann Oberman) and Rachel Finn (Sarah Paul); star psychic Hattie Bainbridge (Janine Duvitski), who suddenly retired from public appearances a few years earlier and is attempting a comeback with this one; and Gerard King (Colin Salmon), a local landowner and another Afro-Brit who’s having an affair with Jeanie Saint-Stephens and has seduced her by telling her she was Cleopatra in a previous lifetime. Simeon has caught her taking money from the Saint-Stephens family account to lavish on Gerard as part of his scheme to rip her off, though she remains in thrall to him until another victim confronts her and tells her Gerard had said she was Cieopatra, too. The first victim besides Bea is Tilly Mulroney (Erin Mullin), who’s fired from the staff of the Psychic Fayre just a week before it’s supposed to begin and is later found dead in a field with a number of ritualistic symbols surrounding her body, as if she were a sacrifice to witchcraft. Later Simeon Henry is also found dead, with his body hung from trees and arranged to look like the Hanged Man in a Tarot deck. Also in the dramatis personae are Felix Marshall (Tristan Sturrock), a formerly respected scientist whose work on string theory was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in physics; and his assistant, Jonas Wilson (Cian Barry). Felix has been collecting books on the occult with the intent of studying it scientifically and discovering whether there’s any truth in it. Jonas, who was Bea’s boyfriend until her mysterious death and was supposed to meet her on the night she died – only he was delayed and still suffers from guilt that if he’d made their date on time, she’d have lived – is a hard-line disbeliever in all forms of spirituality, both conventional religion and the New Age occult.

Eventually it turns out that Jonas killed both Tilly and Simeon, and his motive was his militant, hard-core atheism; he literally became homicidally angry at all the people around him who were telling him that Bea was alive and well in another plane of existence and therefore he shouldn’t feel too terribly about her death. This Midsomer Murders episode ends with quite a few people getting arrested; Gerard King ends up in custody on fraud charges, Felix Marshall is revealed as a fake whose supposed “discovery” in string theory was really the work of a Romanian scientist he ripped it off from and later paid a “retainer” (a more polite term than “blackmail”) to keep quiet, and of course Jonas is arrested for the murders of Tilly and Simeon. While one of the things that annoys me about Midsomer Murders is the sheer number of crimes the police, led by Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), uncover in each episode. At times it seems like the fictional Midsomer County, England is living up to Bob Dylan’s comment that “the whole world is one big prison yard/Some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards.” But there’s still a real charm to this show – and did I mention that there’s also a subplot dealing with a river that runs through the Midsomer County estate and the battle between a local landowner and the townspeople over whether the water can be diverted and that’s going to have an adverse impact to a species of newt that now lives in the water? That’s just one of many subplots in this show that gets developed for a while and then dropped as the ultimate explanation for the murders turns out to be something, as the Monty Pythoners would have said, completely different.