Death in Paradise

The Secret of the Flame Tree - S6-E2

Stupidity: Sylvie Baptiste is a successful writer, and she published novels after her masterpiece. The idea that she'd lose all her fame and fortune if someone published an academic paper making a completely unsubstantiated claim (if Sylvie does not have an original manuscript of the novel, neither does Lizzie) about her novel being the work of her crazy sister, is simply absurd. A good copyright lawyer or even any decent PR agency would put the appropriate spin to the accusations easily, and since her sister is certainly not gonna sue her and Sylvie is her only possible tutor, all those people supposedly very well connected with the academia and industry and shrewd in marketing their work, overreact for nothing. Even better; Humphrey has not even exposed the killer (or that it is a murder at all), and the university announces already that they plan to give a posthumous PhD to the deceased, for the paper she hasn't finished, based on an accusation with no evidence.

Sammo

Episode #3.7 - S3-E7

Stupidity: Humphrey picks the gun from its case using a pen to avoid leaving prints (since for some reason he's not wearing gloves), but then starts messing with the box with his bare hands without having it dusted for any print. Since the box was owned by only one person and hidden under his bed, any other print would have been important evidence. (00:11:40)

Sammo

Episode #3.6 - S3-E6

Stupidity: The villain concocts a demented plan that puts him at absurd risk (if anything goes wrong, he is caught red-handed) and accomplishes nothing, since it does not make him and his accomplice unlikely suspects any more than anyone in the group. It does not make it look like it was an outsider doing it (no attempt is made to fake a robbery), nor a result of an accident. It makes obvious it was a murder (a knife plunged in the back!) but does not pin the guilt on anyone else in the team, which would have been really easy to do (plant the knife or any of the victim's belongings in anyone's tent) and with the two being in on the scheme without anyone suspecting they were connected to each other, it would have been easy to create an alibi for each other, but they don't have any. It should also be noted that there's no reason why the victim wouldn't have exposed the culprit's crime earlier to his fellow birders, since he knew he was going to harm the animals.

Sammo

Episode #3.2 - S3-E2

Stupidity: Throughout the whole episode, no effort at all is made to find out where were the chocolates purchased, and the bottle of champagne that accompanied the box(es) is completely ignored, not even addressed in a throwaway line (such as that it's too common to trace, or whatnot). It's not directly part of the murder trick so it not even considered. The explanation of why the other incriminating box is still there is also quite ridiculous, since the murderer is left alone for enough time to do strike again with a very timely effort involving her leaving the only room of her bungalow (which involves her, the most known and conspicuous person on set, stalk her in plain view for an undisclosed amount of time), but could not find a few seconds to take a walk a few feet away and bury the box in the sand or bushes, flush the poisoned chocolates down a toilet, throw them at sea, just about anything. It's a bit of chocolate and cardboard, not exactly hard to dispose of that in a big set in the wild.

Sammo

A Personal Murder - S5-E4

Stupidity: The entire episode hinges on the fact that a police officer would receive from a close friend, the mentor who changed their life even, their most precious keepsake necklace they always keep with themselves, with ominous words, and kinda ignores the fact for a week. Anybody would be hugely upset and worried by such a turn of events and investigate. Dwayne remembers all this only after he receives the mysterious text message - not even after his friend DIES.

Sammo

Murder in the Polls - S6-E8

Stupidity: The bad candidate is debriefed about the journalist that is gonna interview him less than 10 feet away from her, and there's no way she would have not heard them. Catherine and Peter hear him and they are maybe 10 times further away. (00:02:05)

Sammo

Stumped in Murder - S6-E4

Stupidity: Humphrey has just 4 suspects who did not have a chance to flee the scene. He needs to find out who shot the victim, but does not ask for a gunpowder residue test for them. The fact that he does ask for that very same test for the resolution of the following case in the next 2-parter episode makes this omission more glaring - it also would have not interfered with this particular case.

Sammo

Stumped in Murder - S6-E4

Stupidity: The attempted sabotage was a fake, but even with that taken into consideration, it makes no sense that the culprit would do it in the middle of the day, with the car in plain view in front of the police station AND an open market.

Sammo

The Secret of the Flame Tree - S6-E2

Stupidity: The whole plot hinges on the fact that Goodman trusts 100% without any doubt ever the time of death (even if it would have been easy for the killer to change the time on the watch, one of the most common tricks used in murder mysteries), and that out of over 100 people nobody mentioned that one of the suspects was nowhere to be seen at the time in question, especially with the police asking specifically for that sort of hole in alibis. Also, the stage is tiny and the show happened literally in the middle of the day; during a slideshow projection it's practically impossible that everyone's eyes would be focused on the screen to the point of not noticing the movement from the tent.

Sammo

Erupting in Murder - S6-E1

Stupidity: There is just one CCTV camera in the building, and it is pointed in the control room. You basically look at yourself all day. That's kind of a terrible security arrangement - but very convenient for the plot.

Sammo

Episode #4.7 - S4-E7

Stupidity: It is stated that the police got the fingerprints of the culprit thanks to a certain object. In other words, they investigated the murder without taking any fingerprints from any suspect - even the one who has been jailed for shooting the corpse - and they even had his file already from the previous inquiries.

Sammo

Episode #4.6 - S4-E6

Stupidity: This is another episode when with a very limited number of suspects, not checking the phone records makes the case more complicated than it would be, but more importantly, the bad guy keeps the phone used for the shady affairs constantly switched on for no reason. No attempt is made by the police to trace the area it comes from, either - in fact it's very naive of the Commissioner to even try to call the number - but it works.

Sammo

Episode #4.6 - S4-E6

Stupidity: The police finds a message the victim recorded on the phone. Conveniently, there is no timestamp on the message; it's a vital clue and with a modicum of effort surely a date of the recorded file could have been determined - but of course it would have made the mystery easier.

Sammo

Episode #4.2 - S4-E2

Stupidity: The way the investigation proceeds makes no sense - it is especially obvious for us viewers having actually seen the scene; Karl arrives and meets the wife of the victim, who is busy in the kitchen. He walks just a few feet outside, placing his doctor bag on the bench that is right there, and again, right there with no wait, he pulls a deck of cards out of his pants and puts that on the table. A gunshot is instantly heard. Karl and Katie Peters should be perfectly able to validate each other's alibi, because there's no way that either of them could have shot the victim.in the shack in the less than 10 seconds they lost sight of each other. Instead, the whole episode goes on as if it could be possible for everyone to just go on and shoot someone while being mere meters away from each other.

Sammo

Episode #3.7 - S3-E7

Stupidity: The detectives suddenly bring everything to a dramatic halt to have a word with Joseph, because Fidel has been able to check the prints and his were the only ones on the gun and therefore he became really suspicious. It's his own gun, and people can wear gloves - in fact they do all the time! The fact that they automatically turn on him and he is unable to defend himself is simply 'because the plot this time says so', since in every other episode Joseph's prints would have been exclusion prints - they are supposed to be there and there's nothing suspicious about it.

Sammo

Episode #3.6 - S3-E6

Stupidity: At Catherine's, Humphrey is browsing the photos; neither he or his agents noticed before amongst all the bird and wilderness pics the very obvious series of shots of a woman in a hotel poolside and in close-ups. And yet he has to have printed the (obviously enormous, since he already went through them in the afternoon and investigated the cane seen in them) amount of photos entirely, but finds the photos dining outside from a very small pile on his little dinner table. Those pictures stand out at first glance.

Sammo

Episode #3.2 - S3-E2

Stupidity: Spoiler - In the flashback, apparently the killer 'framed' Susie by going as herself and on the phone going "Helloo, Susie speaking" next to the one guy that is a police informant - not the guy who sold her the fish poison. It would have made sense if she did that while she was buying the tetrodotoxin, but there's no way she could have known that that particular guy was going to talk to the police and they wouldn't be able to instead get a description from the original poison seller (that the police seems to ignore anyway and just let him deal unscrupulously - nobody has a good reason to own a bag of venom - in deadly substances).

Sammo

Episode #3.2 - S3-E2

Stupidity: The whole case could and should have been solved in 5 minutes if only the cops did what any normal cop would have done; once it became clear (very early in the case) which rare poison was used; trace where it came from. Which in this episode is depicted as being ridiculously easy (all it takes is send Dwayne to the docks to give 20 bucks to his buddy), and is instead resolved very late because it is relegated to a little side-quest Fidel has to deal ineffectively with while the main characters psychoanalyse people and air their dirty laundry.

Sammo

Episode #2.7 - S2-E7

Stupidity: For his experiment, Richard times Dwayne's departure with exact precision including a 3 count, getting angry because he 'cheats' taking off before it's over...but does that while the others, and himself, have yet to even get to their parallel parked cars. That makes no sense at all. (00:13:55)

Sammo

Episode #2.5 - S2-E5

Stupidity: For the plot to go the way it is shown, the police, that were specifically looking for poison from an unknown source, had to completely neglectful checking the trash bin (or they'd find a bottle with - literally - the name of the victim in big glitter letters, which is sure to draw attention!) and somehow miss the fact that the victim's food and drink were into a mess of shattered glass that made at best dubious which one her real glass was. Both are pretty huge oversights nobody seems to care about and that would have raised at least some suspicion from even the most casual investigator, especially when no poison was found in the glass.

Sammo

More mistakes in Death in Paradise
More quotes from Death in Paradise

Erupting in Murder - S6-E1

Trivia: A bit of the episode has been cut for the streaming releases; at the end of the scene with Humphrey taking Martha's luggage, he would make a date with her for the next day, to cook dinner for her at 8. This has been eliminated probably because it created timing issues with 8 PM being too well lit (in contrast with the supposed timing of the murder) and the ending takes place at Catherine's for a cute drinking scene anyway. (00:22:50)

Sammo

More trivia for Death in Paradise

Show generally

Question: When Richard reminisces about England, he talks about going to the pub and having a pint. Yet the whole time he's in Saint Marie, he is never seen to drink alcohol with the rest of the team; only cups of tea. Why?

Answer: Most likely they had only tropical exotic drinks, he wanted an old fashioned English beer.

More questions & answers from Death in Paradise

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.