Mysteries Ahoy!

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My Thoughts

As much as I enjoyed The Wrestler’s Tomb, I think this second episode is an improvement on it in pretty much every respect. From the background of the case to the characters involved and the central impossibility, I think this is a really engaging and entertaining hour of television.

Jack Holiday, played by John Bluthal from The Vicar of Dibley, is an aging comic actor whose life has been touched with personal tragedy. Around a decade earlier his first wife was found murdered in a back street while Jack was filming abroad. Alan Rokesmith was arrested and convicted of the murder but is freed thanks to a media campaign led by Maddy who argued that the evidence was circumstantial.

Shortly after Rokesmith is freed he disappears and Holiday is found dead in a sealed bunker from an apparently self-inflicted gun wound. His second wife disagrees, pointing the finger at Rokesmith and blaming Maddy for his release. Maddy decides to recruit Jonathan to take a look at the scene in the hope of convincing her that it was suicide. When evidence is produced though that shows he could not have killed himself, Jonathan has to find out how Holiday could have been killed inside a bunker that was firmly locked from the inside.

One of the disappointments about the first episode for me was that it wasn’t really an impossible crime story. Well, this does give us a much stronger and clearer impossibility to resolve and I think it is a good one. A large part of the reason I really rate it well is that the show does an excellent job of showing the physical space, demonstrating that the lock was solid and in tact and exploring a variety of possible explanations, only to dismiss each of them as flawed.

After establishing that the door really was locked, the next most important point is that the possibility of suicide is clearly and decisively dismissed. I found the sequence in which that happens to be really quite good, in part because it ties into material we had already seen that might otherwise have felt a little irrelevant and demonstrates it in a pretty humorous way.

With these basic facts of the case established, Jonathan and Maddy are able to start exploring more creative explanations. Here I think Renwick does an excellent job of balancing the need to consider a variety of options with not dwelling on any of them too long.

Now at this point I ought to confess to having been unable to solve the crime – a particularly pitiful effort on my part given I have actually seen this story before. The important point though is that Renwick plays fair and gives the viewer enough to work out the explanation for themselves. The result is a strong explanation that manages to be simultaneously clever mechanically yet simple enough to explain and follow.

The other aspect of this episode that particularly stands out to me is its portrayal of its victim, the aging comic whose physical comedy style has fallen decidedly out of fashion. Jonathan for instance makes his distaste for Jack’s work pretty clear when he is alone with Maddy and we get a little taste of his work in the form of the commercial that opens the episode.

While his comedy style may be broad and dated, the character himself is well drawn and recognizable – particularly for those of us who grew up on the saucy British comedies of the sixties and seventies. I think the depiction of his frustrations at having fallen out of vogue and of the way he was used in the commercial are quite relatable and take the character in a surprisingly interesting and poignant direction.

Similarly, I found the character of Jack’s second wife – played by Maureen O’Brien – to also have a pleasing complexity. We soon learn that Kirsten had been Jack’s secretary for years prior to marrying him and her pride in how her husband had brought amusement to so many people is plain to see. It is easy to understand why she decides to write to Maddy and why she blames her for the death.

Jonathan and Maddy’s investigation has several interesting twists and turns. Once again both play an active and pretty equal role in investigating the case (though Jonathan will ultimately solve it as usual) and there are some entertaining relationship-building and simple comedic scenes shared between the two.

Overall then I have very little negative to say about this episode. I think it does an awful lot right to build an interesting scenario and provide us with a compelling solution. While I tried to think of some negatives to throw out there about this story, the most I can come up with is that I think some of the Rokesmith material plays out a little too directly. Still, some directness in the storytelling is understandable given that this case has to be set up and resolved in less than an hour which I think is done very well.

This just leaves me with one last (pretty irrelevant) question – does anyone happen to know for sure where this was filmed? I feel that I have seen Jack’s cottage which leads me to think it may have been shot in Cornwall or Devon.