Jonathan Creek

After seeing a bunch of recommendations, I gave the show a try when it was on BeebAmerica this week. Don’t think I’ll be back.

Unabashed spoilers follow, if you haven’t seen the show. It’s a couple of years old.

The show began with a historical flashback that was so full of alarming impossibilities that my disbelief crashed and burned immediately. It also introduced the central gimmick, the Satan’s Chimney of the title. Then it’s back to now while the author puts all the characters together, first for the murder, then for the revenge, and last for the detection. In The Great Tradition, the detective solves all the crimes, but always just too late to prevent them. At the end, he makes things worse.

Boiling it down: we have an aging movie star, Vivian Brodie (nice to see Romanadvoratrelundar again) is shooting a movie and is scared to death about something. With reason. Her character is supposed to commit suicide in an empty room, and when the rest of the cast chop down the door, they find her really dying. A prominent American escape artist and former lover/boyfriend/husband of Vivian turns to Jonathan Creek (illusion deviser and amateur sleuth) to solve the crime. Everyone decamps to Doomsdorf Castle (O, really. That is so not Scots), site of Satan’s Chimney, now conveniently owned by the director of the movie and Vivian’s oldest friend in The Business, to bury her on the grounds. Challenged to escape from the escape proof Satan’s Chimney, the American escape artist seemingly gets turned into a charred corpse, but later that night calls Jonathan’s cell phone. At 3:30 AM Jonathan wakes up apparently in order to see the dead escape artist drive away from the castle. Later, though, Jonathan and Carla (I suppose she’s his side kick. Not quite girlfriend, not lover, not helper, not much of anything) discover him when Carla mistakes him for a stepping stone as she crosses a burn. Carla is not especially a noticing sort of girl. The very, very weird American actress in the film, Jodee, shows them Vivian’s laptop on which she kept a diary. There’s some silly folderol about the password, Jonathan copies the diary to a floppy, pulls on some chains involved in the castle’s drawbridge, and solves the case. You see, it’s all because Vivian aborted the American escape artist’s child a few years ago. He got hold of the medical records, and, having become in the meantime some sort of brutish right wing right-to-lifer, decides that she must die for her sins. He persuades one of the minor actors in the movie, who was fixated on Vivian anyway, to play the part of executioner by building a single-shot rifle into the ax with which he chops down the door. It just so happens that the bit part actor, Tom, is also Vivian’s son, given up for adoption long ago (and given away in very early in the show when Jonathan points out that Vivian’s very full c.v. had two years in the 1970s without much to show for them). The cast and director of the movie, all of whom loved Vivian, determine to revenge themselves on Escape dude.

Satan’s Chimney, you see, is really the chamber in which the counterweight to the castle drawbridge moves. The castle builder had decided to make the counterweight a massive cylindrical section that moved within sealed cylinder. Those bad counter reformation Catholics had converted it to a mysterious execution chamber by knocking a hole in the side of the chamber. People were not supposed to notice the sound of several tons of stone descending on chains, or that the floor of the chamber was now several feet higher than it had been. Also, despite the massive weight that settled on our Evil American Escaping Fundamentalist, he was merely crushed to death without any blood being shed, nor even visible deformity. Gulp.

Those are the dominant and egregious failings of the script. There are any number of assistant failings. For example, there’s supposed to be a 16th century manuscript eyewitness account of the use of the Chimney, but written in a hand no one of the time would have used. Not credible in the least. And then there are the Americans. Three allegedly Americans appear, and each one is mad as a hatter. The Escape Artist is the principal villain, and is characterized by his murderous wrath over Vivian’s abortion (let’s not look to closely at Vivian’s rationale for having the abortion. She’d given a child up for adoption, you see, and thereby given up her right to ever be a mother. I don’t see the link, but I’m not a Beeb writer). We have the leading man, also American, a hypochondriacal, germophobic twit, and the strangely eyebrowless and rampantly bisexual Jodee. Earlier in the show, Carla had picked up and taken home a random but hunky stranger, but her somewhat casual exploit are an example of her endearing spontaneity. Jodee is creepy and meant to be so. And then there is Vivian’s really subtle way of entering secret passages in her computer diary by changing the text color to white. Duh.

And then there is the most mysterious thing of all. Jonathan and Carla stop by to tell Tom, Vivian’s murderer, not only that they know he killed her and how, but, hey, Tom, by the way, she was yer mum. He breaks down in hysterics, and they walk away, leaving him with only his little dog for comfort. That is weirdly cruel. They don’t turn him in (the man’s a murderer, after all, and we know that the Brit police have their hands full. Give the Bobbies a hand), but don’t help him either. They just make his misery worse. The castle full of revengers, who after all have taken it upon themselves to execute a man without trial or defense, they also leave alone.

No. I don’t care who says this is good. Won’t be back.