Midsomer Murders – “Death of the Small Coppers” review

A beautiful countryside full of butterflies, an IQ society full of prospective new members, an international cold case and a gruesome death – it can only be a new episode of Midsomer Murders. The show returns with “Death of the Small Coppers”, which is typically enjoyable and boasts a fine cast, but is again let down by a script full of tangents and dull subplots.

The return of Poulsen is a big selling point of this episode – she last appeared in the 100th episode, ‘The Killings of Copenhagen’, and her interplay with Barnaby and his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) is a fun one

Manesh Sidana is a butterfly collector whose body is discovered, pinned to a wall with an industrial drill bit, in the manner of one of his butterflies. Barnaby and Winter learn that he was one of the founding members of Circulus, an elite global IQ society. Their investigation brings them up against some of the society’s other members, including its newly-assumed head Grady Palmerston (Peter Egan), a man with a lot of secrets of his own. A new crop of people is trying to gain entry into Circulus, and one of them is Barnaby’s former ally Birgitte Poulsen (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen) – what is she doing there, and how does it link to the murder?

The return of Poulsen is a big selling point of this episode – she last appeared in the 100th episode, “The Killings of Copenhagen”, and her interplay with Barnaby and his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) is a fun one. She brings a case of her own, which is unfortunately somewhat neglected by the episode and solved in a very offhand way, but she’s a very likeable presence and I liked the call back to another part of Midsomer history. (On that note, there are apparently 20 references to past Midsomer episodes hidden in this instalment – if you’re a fan and you fancy a challenge, see if you can find them all!)

For those of you worried that Midsomer may be getting a bit tame in its twentieth series, this episode will ease your concerns

Jørgensen is the standout of a fine supporting cast, and I also particularly rate Egan, playing it really rather smug as the head of Circulus. Mark Benton crops up as a man desperate to gain entry, relying somewhat on his bumbling fool routine, and he (along with many other cast members) is really under-used – John Light, as a Circulus founder, and Ella Kenion, as Palmerston’s wife, are victims of this. The other main player is Penny Kingdom (Niamh McGrady), a lepidopterist and campaigner to whom Winter to immediately attracted.

One thing that Midsomer Murders has always boasted is its unusual trove of murders, and “Death of the Small Coppers” doesn’t let us down here. The opening death, framed in a macabre way, is a particularly striking image, but it’s the second murder that I really want to highlight. It’s a wonderfully karmic death, playing on the worst character traits of the victim, and it’s really quite brutal and unpleasant – the victim is essentially forced to electrocute themselves to death. For those of you worried that Midsomer may be getting a bit tame in its twentieth series, this episode will ease your concerns.

It’s an enjoyable instalment but, as with last week, it suffers most from a plot that doesn’t really hold up under reflection

Something I really want to bring up (and it was exactly the same issue with the previous episode, “The Ghosts of Causton Abbey”) is the rather flimsy storyline. Much of what we see, from the trappings of the IQ school and the not-particularly interesting focus on butterflies, is completely unrelated to the main case – it’s window dressing, and it’s not really enjoyable enough to warrant the focus. The motive for the killing was also somewhat tenuous, and it didn’t help that the reason for the first killing doesn’t even crop up until we’re already confronting the killer – how is the audience possibly expected to work that out? There were a lot of questions left over when the episode ended, and that’s not a good play to be for a crime drama.

For some unknown reason, ITV is holding onto the remaining episodes of Midsomer Murders until some random time in the future, so “Death of the Small Coppers” is the last we’ll see of it for a while. It’s an enjoyable instalment but, as with last week, it suffers most from a plot that doesn’t really hold up under reflection. Even so, I enjoyed it, and the return of Ann Eleonora Jørgensen certainly upped the pleasure – there are worse things to watch than “Death of the Small Coppers”. That said, when Midsomer Murders returns, I hope the scripts are given a bit more polish first!