The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Hunting the Stag" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2014)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 15) I watched a quite good episode of the New Zealand-based TV series The Brokenwood Mysteries, aired in 2014 (when the series started production; this was the fourth episode of season 1) called “Hunting the Stag.” It’s about a young couple named Hayden (Francis Mountjoy) and Kelly (Jessica Joy Wood) who are about to get married, only the day before Hayden goes out on a hunting trip with his two (male) best friends and co-workers, Stent Baker (Ben Wright) and Frankie Oades (Karl Willetts), for some reason nicknamed “Frodo” after Frodo Baggins, the lead Hobbit in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Frodo is not the best-looking man in the cast but he is the most striking, with his oddly craggy face that signifies “avuncular” (i.e., “uncle-like”) even though he’s the same age as Stent and Hayden. The three men have an agreement whereby they’ll each load their hunting rifles with one bullet each from the same box of ammunition and they’ll all fire at the same time. Only when they do that, Hayden gets shot with a bullet from his own gun. The police – lead detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), his assistant Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland) and a third plainclothes cop, Sam Breen (Nic Sampson) – immediately suspect suicide until both male detectives try to manhandle the gun and realize they can’t possibly hold it in such a position that they could fire it themselves and kill themselves with it. They then briefly suspect Kelly of murdering her husband-to-be when they learn she used to be a crack shot with just that sort of gun – the gun Hayden used on his ill-fated trip was a present from her, and she’d intended to buy another for herself as a sort of his-and-hers hunting-rifle pair, but she didn’t because the owner of the local gun store, Rory Parkes (Jared Turner), reported it stolen from his gun safe.

Though the cops suspect the other two guys as well as Kelly, the crime’s roots turn out to stretch back to an auto accident from five years earlier in which Hayden, Kelly and a young woman named Marcie (Rachel King) were involved. At the time Hayden and Marcie were dating and Kelly was along for the ride, only when the car caught fire and exploded, Marcie was trapped inside while Hayden and Kelly escaped relatively unharmed – though Kelly got concussions that led her to periodic losses of memory and muscle control. (Marcie is dead when our story begins, but she’s shown in enough flashbacks to the scene of the accident that they needed an actress to play her.) The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Marcie’s brother, Rory Parkes (Jared Turner), owner of the gun store and tire shop (or “tyre,” this being New Zealand, a British Commonwealth country that spells the word in the British fashion) where Hayden, Stent and Frodo all worked. Rory’s motive is that in the accident he lost both his sister and his girlfriend, since Kelly re-met Hayden in a grief counseling group and the two started dating, with Kelly dumping Rory to be with Hayden and ultimately deciding to get engaged. Rory loses it totally about 20 minutes before the episode ends and he kidnaps both Kristin Sims and his own office assistant, Tanya Stokes (Mirama McDowell). He holds them both at gunpoint with two separate rifles and demands that Mike Shepherd pick one to set free, whereupon he will keep the other under his control until the cops let him escape.

After some effective suspense direction by Mike Smith (working from a script by Timothy Balme, with Philip Dalkin supplying “additional material”) Mike picks Tanya to be set free and Kristin remains in captivity. Rory strings her up by a chain and keeps her dangling, but Kristin kicks him in the balls and gets him to drop his gun. Rory retrieves it but Mike comes up from behind and wrestles him to the ground, ultimately getting him to let go of the gun again and arresting him. Mike then sets Kristin free and she, understandably miffed that he chose to let Tanya go free while Kristin remained in the madman’s power, asks Mike why he chose the way he did. “Because she has kids,” he says – and the final shot of Tanya shows her on the couch watching TV with the two children she’s been raising as a single mother. “Hunting the Stag” is an above-average episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, with an exciting action climax far more intense than the rather wry ending of most British Commonwealth mystery shows, a truly interesting psychopathic villain, and a plot that gives us multidimensional characters and a resolution that actually makes sense. This one made less of the odd character of Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor), a hunky Maori who deals in rare wines and whom Shepherd and the other cops use as an informant because he apparently has some ill-defined association with Brokenwood’s underworld, than usual, and there was also less of Mike Shepherd’s obsession with country music (or at least the Down Under version thereof). But it was well written and, more than most shows in this series, made use of the odd characteristic that in a town as small as Brokenwood, everybody seems to know everybody else’s business.