Midsomer Murders – The Lions of Causton review

The joy of the erratic ITV scheduling means we’ll never know when we’ll get a new episode of Midsomer Murders, but this recent bank holiday provided another instalment of series 20. ‘The Lions of Causton’ is a solid episode with some fantastic guest stars, although the many of its mysteries are a bit too obvious for its own good.

DCI Barnaby gets to relive some of his former sporting glory when he’s called to investigate a death at the local rugby club. The club’s owner, wealthy ex-rugby player Mark Adler (Nicholas Goh), is found frozen to death in one of the club’s cryotherapy rooms, and Barnaby soon learns that the club ascent to the professional league has upset a number of locals. Adler also appeared to be having difficulties with his wife Samantha (Tamzin Outhwaite), linked to neurological problems that have greatly concerned his friends and employees Bill Viner (Don Gilet) and Neville Gallagher (Michael Maloney). As Barnaby investigates, he comes up with no shortage of motives for Adler’s murder – but can he also find the killer?

Midsomer Murders always boasts fantastic guest casts, and ‘The Lions of Causton’ is no different. Mahoney’s performance as a gay masseur was really compelling, and the episode devotes a lot of time to his relationship with Bill Viner – the two get a fair number of scenes together, and they’re played really well. Outhwaite is also suitably guilty-seeming, but is her secretiveness because she’s a killer or something else entirely? She gets a lot to do, and she is a compelling presence.

It’s one of the stronger recent episodes

It’s so easy to praise individual members of the cast in this episode because everyone else has so little to do. Douggie McMeekin plays a shifty chocolate shop worker- so shifty, in fact, that you know he’s not going to be the murderer the moment he appears. Shereen Martin plays Neville Gallagher’s daughter, and Aaron Cobham plays Jake Galpin (a character name I had to look up, such was his impact on the plot), but neither of them really do anything.

The lack of development is really annoying, to the extent that you wonder what some of these characters are doing here in the first place. There’s kind of a subplot involving a waitress who is groped by one of the rugby players, but nothing comes of it, and this happens to more than one character here. This is a big problem when you’re working out who the killer is – there are only really three suspects that you’ll remember.

‘The Lions of Causton’ also suffers from a major issue in the crime genre – a lot of things that should be clues are really obvious far too early. The moment the episode makes a mystery of who injured Bill Viner’s leg in his rugby days, the solution is fairly apparent. Similarly, Barnaby and Winter spend a lot of the episode’s latter half looking for a missing memory stick, with only a cryptic clue as to where it could be – I say ‘cryptic clue’, but the only mystery is how it takes the police so long to come up with the location (even though there is a fantastic musical joke as Winter thinks he’s made a breakthrough).

Come to this one for the performances rather than the mystery

It’s a shame to dunk on the episode, because there is a lot to like here. There are a couple of really novel murder methods, which is always one of the big draws of Midsomer, and a subplot involving a blackmailer that feels genuinely threatening (cliché though the shots of a mysterious camera are). The chemistry between the main cast is as strong and humorous as ever (Annette Badland again proving an excellent choice for pathologist), and there’s even a more poignant ending than we’re used to. It’s kudos to the performances that it actually lands.

I enjoyed ‘The Lions of Causton’, and it’s one of the stronger recent episodes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not without its faults. Come to this one for the performances rather than the mystery, and you won’t be disappointed.