The Brokenwood Mysteries: "The Black Widower" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media International, Acorn, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, March 7) I watched a 2016 episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, a quirky mystery show set in New Zealand featuring a thrice-married, thrice-divorced lead detective named Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), who’s actually been to the altar and back so many times even he’s not sure if he had a fourth marriage and divorce somewhere along the way. He’s in an uneasy partnership with woman detective Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), who’s understandably worried that he’s going to screw up their working relationship by hitting on her; and there’s a third cop in the mix, young, hunky red-headed detective constable Sam Breen (Nic Sampson), who gets assigned by the other two to run around and do the muscle work required. This episode was called “The Black Widower” at centers around a so-called “Lord of the Ringz” tour – note the spelling, precisely to avoid copyright litigation from Warner Bros. and the estate of J. R. R. Tolkien – run by a local pub owner named Ray Nielson (Jason Hoyte). Ray’s “Lord of the Ringz” tour features a re-creation of one of the biggest scare sequences in Peter Jackson’s movie: the tour guests stumble first on a giant spider’s web and then meet the giant spider (a pretty obvious papier-machê mockup thereof) and its alleged victim, Ray’s wife Denise (not listed on imdb.com, though we get quite a few flashbacks showing her even though she’s dead at the start of the main story). One of Denise’s stops on the main part of the tour was to put on a costume that would make it look like she’d been attacked by the giant spider, only she would turn out to be A-O.K. Only this time Denise dies for real while trussed up inside the costume that’s supposed to make her look like a spider has mummified her as prologue to killing her. At first the cops think it was a workplace accident – the diabetic Denise went into shock and couldn’t reach her insulin pen in time to save her life – but when Denise’s body is autopsied it revealed that the real cause of her death was the venom of a Katipō spider, related to a black widow and native to the New Zealand coasts.

A local woman named Chandra Singh (Kalyani Nagarajan) raises Katipō spiders in the area to extract their venom so a New Zealand pharmaceutical company can develop an antidote, while her live-in boyfriend Billy Franks (Dan Veints) is intimidated by spiders but has his own oddball career working with dangerous animals. Billy studies sharks who live on the Brokenwood coast, and he’s got so attached to them he’s named them and attributed personality traits to them, just as Chandra has with her spiders. (At one point the police show Chandra a photograph of a spider they’ve found on Denise’s body and ask her which one it is, and Chandra twice says, “I can’t tell from a photo. I’d have to look at her in person.”) After a lot of red-herring suspects, including Ray Nielson – whom the cops suspect at first partly because of the matter-of-fact way he responds to his wife’s death and partly because in the case of a married murder victim, the cops automatically make the surviving spouse the prime suspect – and a highly dissatisfied German tourist named Hans Zigler (Julian Wilson), who took the “Lord of the Ringz” tour and picked apart its inaccuracies, its deviations from Tolkien and the implication that Peter Jackson filmed The Lord of the Rings movies in Brokenwood, which he didn’t, the police finally solve the crime. The killer is [spoiler alert!] Billy Franks, who killed Denise Nielson because she’s been harvesting his sharks for shark-fin soup, which she used to make the gourmet meal the tourists taking her husband’s trip were promised as part of their ticket price. Billy stole the venom Chandra had painstakingly extracted from the spiders – the gimmick is that one spider doesn’t carry more than a fraction of the venom needed to kill a human, so in order to use it as a murder weapon he needed a large amount of it – and also stole a living spider so he could plant it on the body and make it look like the spider killed her.

Aside from it briefly looking like The Brokenwood Mysteries’ casting director, Annabel Lomas, was adopting the Lifetime practice of making the hunkiest guy in the movie the villain, it’s an O.K. ending to a highly unsatisfying program that almost totally lacks the wit and humor of previous episodes in the series. The closest we come to it is when Mike Shepherd asks his immediate supervisor on the police force, Hughes (Colin Moy), about Hughes’s wife Linda, who’s a diabetic like Debbie Nielson was. Hughes immediately worries that Mike is going to try to seduce Linda away from him and make him Mike’s wife number four (or is it five?), and when Mike seemingly innocently says to Hughes, “Give my love to Linda,” Hughes replies, “Not on your life!”