The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Catch of the Day" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2015)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 7) I watched another episode of the New Zealand-set and -filmed crime show The Brokenwood Mysteries: “Catch of the Day,” in which the police officers on the job in Brokenwood, New Zealand – Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), Sam Breen (red-headed cutie Nic Sampson) and Jared Morehu (Pana-Huma Taylor), the last an Indigenous civilian who lingers around the cops and attempts to help them – are alerted to a murder when they find a disembodied human hand in a crayfish trap labeled “66.” Later they find the rest of the victim’s body drowned underwater in a wet suit – though he was actually killed with a harpoon gun – and he turns out to be a man named Fahey who was an inspector for New Zealand’s Fish and Game Agency (or whatever it’s called). It turns out he and his wife, Jools Fahey (Ingrid Park), were in a “thruple” with their lawyer, Dennis Buchanan (Shane Cortese). Mr. Fahey had also discovered an underwater treasure left behind by a German ship that had sunk off the Brokenwood coast during World War II. The other suspects include the formidable Keely family: matriarch Ma Keely (Judy Rankin), her sons Tommy (Cohen Holloway) and Liam (Kevin Keys), and her daughter Liza (Kate McGill), along with another Keely named Des (Ken Reinsfield) who hovers on the periphery of the action.

The Keelys have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the crayfish catch in the area and also on the clam harvest, though Tommy has leased his share to a major corporation owned by Wes Pullman (Jason “Shane” Hood). Five years earlier Ma Keely’s husband was killed in a boating accident when his craft blew up, and Liza was there and was badly burned (the scars are visible on her face except in the pre-incident flashbacks). She’s convinced that her husband was murdered even though the authorities officially declared it an accident, and she’s convinced that the recent killing of Mr. Fahey was part of the same plot. She’s right on the first part but wrong on the second: eventually Mike Shepherd and Kristin Sims realize that Tommy Keely deliberately sabotaged his dad’s boat and then called him to report poachers in the area, knowing that dad would take out the boat and chase them with his harpoon gun. Instead the boat blew up and Tommy’s dad died just as planned. But the most recent crime, Fahey’s murder, turns out to be the work of Tommy’s brother Liam because Fahey had independently discovered the sunken German treasure and Liam wanted to keep its location a secret known only to him. This wasn’t one of the better episodes of The Brokenwood Mysteries: it was too convoluted and the plot was too far-fetched as well as too loosely integrated. Though one of the Keely brothers compared the two of them to Cain and Abel, in the Bible Cain slew Abel, not Adam!