The Mallorca Files: "The Blue Feather". (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, PBS, 2021)

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

Last night (Friday, December 15) at 9:45 – an odd start time for KPBS so they can cram the show in between a dull medical program, Doc Martin, and an even duller alleged “comedy,” Mr. Bean, I watched an episode of the TV series The Mallorca Files called “The Blue Feather.” The Mallorca Files is set on the island of Mallorca (sometimes called “Majorca”) off the coast of Spain, though the lead detectives are British woman Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and German man Max Winter (Julian Looman) and they’re not lovers – Max has a local girlfriend, saloon owner and barmaid Carmen Lorenza (Tábita Cerezo), and their immediate supervisor on the police force is also a local, Inéz Villegas (Maria Fernández Ache). “The Blue Feather” is from an ultra-rare local exotic bird, and Max and Miranda find it and realize it’s an important clue to the crime they’re investigating, the mysterious disappearance of British ornithologist Tony Ball (Wayne Foskett). In the opening scene we see Tony Ball literally being netted by an unseen, shadowy assailant and held in a cage-like enclosure. Tony is also a diabetic who didn’t bring along any extra doses of insulin – the last insulin pen he had fell out of his pocket as he was being dragged through the Mallorca countryside in a net – and there’s a legitimate if rather obvious suspense issue: will the cops be able to find him in time to give him the life-saving dose of insulin, or will he die before they get to him? The cops begin to suspect he was the victim of a love triangle involving his wife Linda (Kacey Ainsworth) and her masseur (whom we hear her describe but we never see) – either that or he was out having extra-relational activities of his own – but in the end they decide that the two, though still ostensibly married and living together, have simply drifted apart physically and emotionally without either having alternate partners.

The cops also start to suspect Emilia Alvarez (Alba Ribas), who works for Felipe Santos (José Luis Ferrer – no relation, at least as far as I can tell) at the local bird sanctuary, because she has a criminal record, though not much of one – one charge of assaulting a police officer who was trying to arrest her during an environmental demonstration. Eventually Miranda and Max realize that [spoiler alert!] Felipe is the real kidnapper and his motive was actually noble. It seems that Tony Ball, far from being a bird lover, was in fact a bird smuggler, part of an international gang dealing in rare and exotic birds. Tony would steal the birds from the sanctuary and then pass them along to the other members of the gang. Only Felipe figured out what he was doing and kidnapped him as if he were a target bird, then held him on the sanctuary’s premises. Max and Miranda apprehend Felipe and threaten to prosecute him for murder if Tony goes into insulin shock and dies, and Felipe relents and tells them where he’s holding Tony just in time to save his life. Ultimately the cops arrest both Felipe and Tony. The best element of “The Blue Feather” is the sheer amount of incredibly beautiful Mallorcan scenery we got and the breathtaking footage the cinematographer (oddly unnamed on the show’s imdb.com page, even though the editor, production designer and casting director are!) shot of the local bird flocks that are the subject of the skullduggery. It’s one of the better Mallorca Files episodes I’ve seen, thanks to the moral ambiguity (at the end we – or at least I – clearly like the kidnapper much better than the victim!) and also the blessed absence of the annoying Carmen as an on-screen character this time.