Death in Paradise: "Phone-In Murder" (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, February 2) at 10 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies expecting to see a 1975 Blaxploitation film from American International called Cornbread, Earl and Me, but I’d made a mistake reading their schedule – that’s actually going to be aired tonight instead. So I switched back to KPBS for the latest episode in sequence of Death in Paradise – I watched this series for the first time the Friday before last and quite liked that episode, “The Painkiller Thrller.” Unfortunately, this one, “Phone-In Murder,” was nowhere nearly as good. It begins with a woman named Eve Wilding (Aislín McGuckin) calling from a lavish home on the island of Guadeloupe, where the series takes place, telling the police she wants to report a murder. When the police, headed by detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little, the series lead) and detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), who was supposed to have got her promotion from uniformed officer to plainclothes detective at the end of “Painkiller Thriller,” as well as a third officer named Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder), arrive at the scene, they find Eve Wilding face down in a decorative pool on the house’s first-floor porch. She’s still alive – the cops are able to call in an ambulance and get her to a hospital in time to save her life – but she’s shown signs of having been strangled and left face down in the pool to die. The police deduce that there’s no way an outside assailant could have got into the house and therefore whoever attacked Eve is still in there. They’re also faced with trying to figure out whether Eve suspected she was about to be murdered herself or she was reporting a previous victim who was already dead.

We get a lot of shots of Naomi and Darlene, both young Black women with a lot of feminine curves the show’s costume designers (uncredited on imdb.com) go out of their way to show off, encasing both actresses in skin-tight pants of very bright colors. We also get to meet the other people inside the house, including Orla Mills (Eileen Walsh) and her daughter Astrid (Isabelle Connolly), as well as Eve’s husband Callum (Owen McDonald). Orla’s husband has recently died – he’s been cremated and they’re planning a ceremony during which they will sprinkle his ashes on the local beach – but we learn that two weeks or so before his death he ordered DNA tests on himself and Astrid and learned from them that he was not Astrid’s biological father. They had had a number of miscarriages and failures with IV fertilization before Orla got pregnant, but the real father was Callum Wilding, a co-worker with whom she drifted into an affair because “I was in a dark place.” Apparently Callum murdered Orla’s husband and tried to kill Eve out of jealousy – writer Emma Goodwin wasn’t all that clear about whodunit and even less so about whydunit. I was left with a reasonably entertaining show whose subplots, including the one about Nathan’s sister Izzy (Kate O’Flynn), who after not having contacted him for two years came out to Guadeloupe and imposed herself on him as a house guest from hell while she tried to make up her mind whether to accept her latest boyfriend de jour’s marriage proposal, were more fun than the main intrigue.