The Brokenwood Mysteries: "The Power of Steam" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media International, Acorn, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, December 12) my husband Charles came home from work in time to join me in watching an episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, that quirky crime show based (and shot) in New Zealand. The lead characters are Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), a heavy-set police detective in the Brokenwood area of New Zealand, and his police partner Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland, who gets to dress quite hotly in black denim and leather pants that cling quite tightly to her body). It was already established in previous episodes (this one first aired November 10, 2019, and led off the show’s sixth season) that Shepherd had been married either three or four times previously – even he can’t remember just how many ex-wives he has – and also that he’s a huge fan of country music, much of it created locally (who knew New Zealand had a thriving local country-music scene?). Not surprisingly Mike has been hitting on Kristin, and equally unsurprisingly Kristin has the good sense to avoid any involvement with him “that way.” This episode was called “The Power of Steam” and made both Charles and I unusually interested in it because it centers around a steampunk convention. Needless to say, there’s a lot of back-and-forth arguing between the police characters, including hunky young detective Sam Breen (Nic Simpson, who also co-wrote the script with series creator Tim Balme), over just what steampunk is. Steampunk is just a pretext to set the mystery at a convention that supposedly happens every year but had never been heard of before by the police – the old Midsomer Murders strategy. The convention is co-chaired by the appropriately named Lionel (John Leigh) – the name is appropriate because he makes his living running a model-train store in town – and Alden Coombes (Andrew Grainger), who makes his living running a hot-air balloon flying service. Lionel ends up dead when, in the middle of a giant fireworks display using illegally obtained fireworks (we hear a lot about how dangerous they are but most of them turn out to be duds), a port-a-potty (or “port-a-loo,” as they’re called in the British English-speaking world) explodes spectacularly with him inside it.

It turns out that someone stole a tank of propane gas from Alden’s storage shed, sealed up the ventilation holes in the port-a-loo, ran a pipe from the tank into the loo, and locked it from the outside so no one inside it could get out. The suspects include Lionel’s daughter Poppy (Beth Alexander); Cleo (Zoë Robins), the young Black (or is she Native?) woman whom Poppy is in a Lesbian relationship with; Elsa (Geraldine Brophy), a middle-aged woman hanger-on in the steampunk scenes even though she loudly proclaims her disdain for the whole phenomenon; her learning-disabled son Bart (Dan Weekes), who works as an assistant at Lionel’s train store and had a history of childhood diseases which force him to take medications that, among other things, make him pee a lot; and the owner of the port-a-loo concession, who drank absinthe at the festival and therefore had some bizarre hallucinations that complicate matters for the police. The police learn that Lionel and Alden were having arguments just before Lionel was killed, mostly over Lionel’s attempts to blackmail Alden over the mysterious death of his wife iin a ballooning “accident” a decade earlier, and Lionel had threatened to kill Alden. Alden was severely injured in the blast and ended up in the local hospital, where he lost (or pretended to lose, we’re not sure which) all memory of the night Lionel was killed. But he makes a spectacular escape on a bicycle, which he rides through town, before the police finally corner him on his balloon, where they threaten to shoot out the hot-air bag and therefore cause the balloon to plummet to earth. Alden gets the message and insists that the cops arrest him because he’s fearful of the loan sharks from whom he borrowed money to keep his balloon business afloat (or should I say “aloft”?), though it turns out the loan-sharking gang he borrowed from were already taken into custody elsewhere and therefore were no threat to him. The police briefly suspect that Alden, not Lionel, was the intended victim – though the night of the murder Lionel had actually used the women’s port-a-loo because Alden was hiding out in the men’s.

They also learn that Bart, Lionel’s assistant at the model train store, joined an online group for “incels,” short for “involuntary celibate”: young straight guys who lament that they can’t find women willing to have sex with them and frequently ratchet that up to a hostile distaste for women in general. “Incels” reached the public awareness when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California on May 23, 2014, killing six and injuring 14 others before taking his own life. Before he went on his rampage, Rodger posted a video to YouTube in which he “said he wanted to punish women for rejecting him, and sexually active men because he envied them.” From this the police deduce that [spoiler alert!] Bart was the killer, and he did so in an elaborate mistaken-identity scheme. His real target was Cleo, Poppy’s Lesbian girlfriend, and his motive was he’d had a crush on Poppy but she’d not only rejected him, she’d done so in favor of a woman, and a woman of color at that. (Lionel himself had a history of making both racist and homophobic comments, and the script makes it powerfully ambiguous about whether Lionel was more bothered about Poppy dating a woman or Poppy dating a person of color.) My heart sank when I realized they were going to make the “incel” the killer, especially since I once told a friend of mine that the photos of incels I’d seen made me regret that people can’t choose their sexual orientation; maybe women aren’t interested in them, but at least some of them look attractive enough they’d do well in a Gay bar. Bart rigged the trap first by grinding up some of his diuretic pills, then giving Cleo a beer spiked with them, and in a bizarre bit of mistaken identity he ended up targeting Lionel instead of Cleo because not only was Lionel in the women’s restroom, he was wearing the hat he’d made for Poppy and Poppy had in turn given to Cleo, only Lionel had reclaimed it and was wearing it himself because he was so upset that his love gift to his daughter had ended up on the head of his daughter’s girlfriend. The show was actually rather well done, and there was a nice comic-relief subplot in that throughout the show Mike Shepherd is shown dog-sitting a Corgi, famously Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite breed (a fact that of course doesn’t go unmentioned in the dialogue!), for (it eventually turns out) one of his ex-wives.