Death in Paradise: "The Painkiller Thriller" (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 26) at 10 I watched a show on PBS that’s been on the outskirts of my consciousness for a while but I hadn’t actually seen before: Death in Paradise. It’s set on Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, whose Web site, https://www.guadeloupe-islands.com, makes it clear the islands (there are several) are marketing themselves as a tourist attraction. The regular characters are a white British-born police detective, Neville Parker (Ralf Little); his Black immediate supervisor, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington); and various other police in the station referred to both as Saint-Marie and Honoré. (“Saint-Marie” is the name on their police uniforms and “Honoré” is the name above the entrance to the police building.) This episode, number five in season 11, was called “The Painkiller Thriller” and was about a troubled 22-year-old pop star named Ayana Jelani (Olivia D’Lima) who was sent to a rehab center on Guadeloupe after she crashed and burned on alcohol and drugs following a bitter breakup with an older man. She’s also deathly allergic to aspirin, and she duly dies from aspirin poisoning one night after taking – or seemingly taking – her prescribed meds for the night. (I couldn’t help but musing on the irony of a rehab center for drug addicts prescribing the residents drugs. Remember Woody Allen’s great line in Annie Hall: “I used to be a heroin addict. Now I’m a methadone addict.”) The nurse who gave her the prescribed pill, Darlene Curtis (a nice pathos-filled performance by Ginny Holder), is worried that Ayana’s death will be blamed on her and at best she’ll lose her job; at worst, she’ll be prosecuted.

Writers Asher Pirie and James Hall give us the usual round of red-herring suspects, including two other residents at the rehab center: Ariel Fanshaw (Leo Hatton – a woman, by the way) and Evann Parry (Jack Parry-Jones). There’s also Ayana’s mother, Sandra White (Camille Coduri), who runs Ayana’s career with all the sensitivity of a concentration-camp commandant (were writers Pirie and Hall thinking of Britney Spears and her dad here?) and a mystery stalker who turns out to be paparazzo Gerry Wigsworth (Nicholas Asbury), a photographer who’s been out of work since the closure of his former employer, the notorious tabloid News of the World, a few years before and has scrambled to make a living as a free-lancer. Ayana’s killing turns out to revolve around a mysterious two-page letter Ayana was handwriting in a notebook until Ariel came upon her and reminded her that she was due back in the facility for a group-therapy session. The police get an inkling of the contents of the letter – or at least its first page – when they find a surveillance video that somehow recorded it well enough the cops could see that it was written to her mom firing her as her manager. Later, however, the cops find the letter, including its second page, which announces that she and Evann have fallen in love and plan to continue as a couple as soon as they both finish rehab. They trace the principals back to Britain and learn that the killer is [spoiler alert!] the facility’s medical director, Dr. Mark Fuller (Keir Charles), who was previously in a similar job in London, only he was fired when he and Ayana ended up in a sexual relationship.

Dr. Fuller was able to pull strings with Ayana’s mother Sandra to get her assigned to his new facility in Guadeloupe when she relapsed, and there he hoped to restart their relationship – only Ayana wasn’t interested because in the meantime she’d fallen in love with Evann. So Dr. Fuller killed her and staged it elaborately, pickpocketing her EpiPen so she couldn’t use it to save her life when she noticed she was going into anaphylactic shock, and later restoring it to her bag when he broke into her room, ostensibly to try to save her life but really to cover his tracks. There also were a couple of subplots, a genuinely moving one about Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), a uniformed police officer who wants to be promoted to detective and become Parker’s police partner, and an annoying one featuring Parker’s long-lost sister Izzy (Kate O’Flynn), who shows up on Guadeloupe after having not had any contact with him for two years. She proceeds to wreck his apartment, where she’s staying – she’s there less than a day and already his kitchen is full of dirty dishes that in the hot tropical climate attract all manner of pests – and she embarrasses him creating a scene at an outdoor dance club. Naomi Thomas, meanwhile, gets her promotion, but only after Parker literally runs out of the office to block Commissioner Patterson from going to a larger city (we’re not told which one) and fetching a new detective from outside. Death in Paradise is a nice little show, and among its official producers are Région Guadeloupe and the Film Commission of Guadeloupe – obviously those authorities are hoping the show will promote tourism to the islands – along with a production company called Red Planet Pictures and the BBC. And we certainly get lots of glimpses of the Guadeloupean scenery, the better to make viewers want to go there!