Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Midsomer Murders, Set 22 Blu-ray Movie Review

Settling In

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 23, 2013

The back half of Midsomer Murders' fourteenth season (or "series", as the British call it) completed actor Neil Dudgeon's transition into the show's lead and the fitting of his character, DCI John Barnaby, into the big shoes left by the retirement of his cousin Tom Barnaby, the former DCI for Causton's Criminal Investigation Divsion (or C.I.D.) in the fictional rural county of Midsomer, where evil lurks behind every manicured hedge. Aiding the Chief Inspector's assimilation is the arrival of a fresh-faced coroner, Dr. Kate Wilding (Tamzin Malleson), who replaces the recently retired Dr. Bullard. Now Barnaby has a chance to cultivate a working relationship with someone who is even newer than he is.

Dr. Wilding immediately lets Barnaby know that she is his kind of professional. When pressed to offer a guess about something at a crime scene, she refuses. "Amateurs guess", she crisply retorts. "And then they apologize afterwards."

Midsomer County continues to be a hotbed of greed, deceit and homicidal mania. Barnaby and his impatient sergeant, DS Ben Jones (Jason Hughes), never lack for work. For an overview of Midsomer Murders and its history, see the review of Set 19, the first set released on Blu-ray.

The Sleeper Under the Hill (disc 1) Sept. 21, 2011

The town of Midsomer Mow contains an ancient stone circle similar to Stonehenge that is considered sacred to the local cult of New Dawn Druids. Unfortunately for the Druids, the circle sits on land owned by Alex Preston (Justin Shevlin), who intends to fence off the circle and plow the land. The result has been a dispute of great local notoriety, but the conflict ends abruptly when Preston is found early one morning disemboweled and laid out in the middle of the stone circle. The person who finds the body is a local vagrant and poacher named Evan Jago (Richard Leaf).

The town constable, Sergeant Gibson (Lee Ross), happens to be an old friend of Jones, and he acts as guide to the investigators from Causton C.I.D. The Druids are obvious suspects, especially their leaders, Leticia Clifford (Susan Brown) and Ezra Canning (Alan Williams), both of whom have publicly expressed their disagreement with Preston. But other possibilities present themselves when Mrs. Preston (Claudia Harrison) cannot be found for several days after her husband's death and, upon reappearing, gives shifty explanations of her whereabouts.

Meanwhile, Barnaby is trying to understand the intensity of local interest in the ancient history of Midsomer Mow, and he seeks assistance from a resident, Caradoc Singer (Robert Pugh), who is an amateur history buff. The Druids seem to be looking for new evidence regarding the sites and burial grounds of ancient battles, but Singer dismisses their efforts as fantasy.

The mysteries in Midsomer Murders thrive on buried secrets, but usually they relate in some obvious fashion to the events we have been following for the preceding hour or so. "The Sleeper Under the Hill" is notable for having its solution come from an entirely unexpected direction—except that it's not unexpected, because the writer of the episode, David Lawrence (who penned the superb "Blood in the Saddle" for Series 13), has planted an early clue that is so out of character with the rest of the proceedings that it sticks out begging to be noticed. "The Sleeper Under the Hill" is worth watching for its characters and the arrival of the new coroner, but as a mystery it's disappointing.


The Night of the Stag (disc 1) Oct. 12, 2011

The second episode in the set marks a welcome return to form with a classic Midsomer Murders tale of English countryside gothic. It begins when a man from the Inland Revenue (the British equivalent of the IRS) named Peter Slim (Richard Bradshaw) disappears. Slim was known to be seeking the whereabouts of an illegal distillery somewhere in the woods outside the town of Midsomer Abbas, and Barnaby and Jones make routine inquiries among the townspeople on May 1, which happens to be the town's annual joint festival with the neighboring town of Midsomer Herne celebrating their many centuries of cooperation in apple farming. Cider flows liberally, and Barnaby gets so caught up in the spirit that he buys a jar of locally produced honey from an elderly beekeeper, Byron Street (Bernard Lloyd).

As Barnaby observes the festival rituals, which include an elaborate dance by participants wearing stag antlers, he comments to the local vicar, Rev. Walker (Andrew Havil), that the celebration seems more pagan than Christian. Rev. Walker agrees but explains that historically the Christian church found it practical simply to assimilate the ancient Celtic rites rather than try to suppress them. Indeed, when the ceremonial antlers aren't in use, they hang in the local chapel as decorations.

Unfortunately for the participants, however, this year's festival suffers two major disruptions. The first is an invasion by a militant temperance league lead by a religious zealot, the Rev. Norman Grigor. The other is the sudden discovery of the body of the missing Revenue man in circumstances that are both bizarre and stomach-turning. Barnaby orders the area secured as a crime scene, and reinforcements from headquarters in Causton begin processing the evidence. Dr. Wilding concludes that the victim was shaken until his neck was broken in several places, by a large and powerful individual, much like a giant.

Investigation of Peter Slim's death is hampered by a tight-lipped attitude in Midsomer Abbas toward outsiders. Even the otherwise talkative Byron Street refuses to help. "Ask the trees", he tells Barnaby. By following up on the deceased Slim's leads, Jones easily tracks down the illegal still and arrests its operator, a bear of a man named Silas Trout (Stephen Marcus). But Trout won't talk and, other than his size, nothing connects him to Peter Slim's murder.

The wealthy owner of the local cider mill, Anthony Devereaux (Patrick Ryecart), to whom all the local farmers sell their crop, behaves oddly, such that suspicions are aroused even in his long-time secretary and bookkeeper, Alice Quested (Eleanor Yates), daughter of the local pub owner and leading town citizen, Samuel Quested (Warren Clarke, who, as a young man, played Dim in A Clockwork Orange). Devereaux has never been popular in Midsomer Abbas; though his family has lived there for hundreds of years, he's still considered an outsider, having descended from Norman invaders, as the name suggests. The farmers refer to him as "the French".

Barnaby keeps trying to talk to both Alice and her friend from Midsomer Herne, Esme Baker (Natalie Klamar), daughter of a bawdy kennel owner named Chloe (Denise Black), who has her eye on the widower Samuel Quested. With his usual policeman's attention to people's behavior, Barnaby can't help but notice that Esme seems unusually distraught by Peter Slim's death, while most of her fellow citizens are unconcerned, if not downright pleased, that a Revenue man has met an untimely demise. But the locals keep coming between the detectives and their inquiries, and one senses that it's only a matter of time before Barnaby and Jones find themselves surrounded by an angry mob threatening violence. By that point, though, Barnaby has taken Byron Street's advice and talked to the trees, and Jones has done other research. Between them, they've uncovered motives more basic than ancient country rituals.




A Sacred Trust (disc 2) Oct. 26, 2011

Midsomer Priory is a huge estate that once housed a thriving order of Catholic nuns. Now, however, the residents have dwindled to four, three of them elderly. The fourth, Sister Catherine (Fiona Glascott), gave up a promising teaching career when she answered God's call.

With little support from the church and no way of raising more than pocket change, the residents of the Priory barely scrape by. Several of them have proposed selling certain prized silver antiques, but the prioress, Mother Julian (Joanna David), will not permit it, not even after a gang of local teenage boys smash up the chapel's stained glass windows, necessitating costly repairs. The vandalism was organized by Duncan Hendred (Jamie Buckley) as a form of revenge after one of the nuns interrupted his sexual encounter with a high school classmate, Tamsin (Martha Mackintosh), on the Priory grounds. (Duncan and Katy ran off half-dressed, but when they returned, Duncan's pants were missing. No one knows what happened to them.)

The nuns so zealously guard their privacy that they refuse to let the police investigate the attack on the chapel, but they have no choice when they find one of their own, Mother Thomas (Susan Sheridan), strangled on the grounds. Causton C.I.D. begin their investigation, but Barnaby may have met his match in Mother Julian, who insists that no aspect of police activities disrupt the daily routine of life at the Priory.

Eventually Barnaby and Jones track down Duncan Hendred, whose father, Matthew Hendred (George Irving), is greatly chagrined to learn of his son's involvement in vandalizing the Priory. But Duncan isn't so easily connected to the murder, and there's also the matter of the antique silver, which is discovered missing from the Priory safe shortly after Mother Thomas is killed. Father Behan (Michael Colgan), who comes regularly to hear confessions at the Priory, hints that he may know something, but he is bound by pastoral privilege. And as Barnaby and Jones look further into the history of Midsomer Priory, they find a special connection between it and Sister Catherine that she neglected to mention. (Land. It's always about land.)

"A Sacred Trust" has interesting characters and an intriguing setting. But like the first episode in this set, "The Sleeper Under the Hill", the solution to the mystery relies on information imported into the story in the final act and distinct from the various proceedings in which we've become invested during the previous hour. It's easy (and lazy on the writer's part) to keep an audience in the dark when a murderer is motivated by events of which viewers cannot possibly be aware, because the only reference to them is so tangential that not even Hercule Poirot himself would have noticed.


A Rare Bird (disc 2) Jan. 11, 2012

Ballet and birdwatching are avocations where passions run high, especially in the town of Midsomer-in-the-Marsh, where the head of the intensely competitive local ornithological society, Patrick Morgan (Alexander Hanson), has a much younger trophy wife, Nina (Genevieve O'Reilly), who used to be a prima ballerina in Moscow. When Nina informs her husband that, after many years of unsuccessfully trying to start a family, they are expecting a baby, he is furious. He's certain the child isn't his. Their argument is surreptitiously recorded by an unknown eavesdropper, who may be a rival birdwatcher, since all of them are equipped with telephoto lenses and long-range microphones.

It may be a fluke that this marital dispute was picked up by the unidentified spy, whose interest in Morgan may have nothing to do with domestic affairs. The rivalry among the ornithological society's members has reached a new level of intensity. Patrick Morgan usually wins the annual competition, but a taxidermist named Ralph Ford (James Dreyfus) is claiming victory this year, due to the sighting of a rare African bird, the blue-crested hoopoe, which is almost never found in England. Unfortunately for Ford, he has no proof, and Morgan, as president, leads a vote that rules his submission invalid. Ford is outraged, and the meeting of the society ends in shouting.

Morgan is generally unpopular in the town. A farmer, George Napier (Tony Haygarth), whose land borders Morgan's, wants to drain wetlands to expand his operation, but Morgan is attempting to have them declared a nature preserve. The two are now bitter enemies, and it doesn't help that Napier employs a young lothario named Dave Foxley (Paul Nicholls), who is rumored to be romancing Nina Morgan.

When Morgan turns up dead, Barnaby and Jones have no shortage of suspects, including the widow herself, who, as Jones notes, seems less than grief-stricken. The capable new coroner soon determines why the deceased was so certain that his wife's future child wasn't his, and Barnaby receives anonymous photos pointing him to motives more adulterous than avian. In the end, as they always do, Barnaby and Jones sort through the layers of camouflage and identify the culprit. They even solve the mystery of the blue-crested hoopoe.

Midsomer Murders, Set 22 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As with Set 21, which contained the first half of what the British consider "Series 14" of Midsomer Murders, Acorn Media has provided the episodes with 1080p encoding, thereby continuing the superior video quality from Set 21 into Set 22. With two AVC-encoded 90-minute (approximately) episodes per BD-25 disc, Acorn has achieved a remarkable and consistent image despite the high degree of compression. Detail is excellent, colors are natural and bright, and there is no sign of video noise or aliasing, such as occasionally appeared on earlier sets formatted at 1080i. Even the end credits, which were of poor quality on Set 21, are vastly improved. These most recent two sets of Midsomer Murders represent TV on Blu-ray as it should be done.

Midsomer Murders, Set 22 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Provided in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, the sound design for Midsomer Murders continues to be basic and functional, with emphasis on dialogue and sparing use of music. The Blu-ray's track conveys the dialogue clearly, and Jim Parker's signature theme continues to provide the appropriately macabre note of fascination, especially in the signature theremin version that opens and closes most episodes.

Midsomer Murders, Set 22 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Midsomer Murders in Conversation (disc 1) (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 35:53): In separate interviews, Neil Dudgeon and Jason Hughes talk about Series 14 of Midsomer Murders and the challenges of replacing the series' lead character. Dudgeon also talks about his background, with many self-deprecating stories of failure in other performing arts before he found his way into acting.



• Startup Trailers: At startup, disc 1 plays trailers for Acorn Media and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Midsomer Murders, Set 22 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As of this writing, Acorn Media is preparing to re-release the first five series of Midsomer Murders on DVD in their original broadcast order, but with no Blu-ray release on the horizon. Presumably the expense of returning to the 16mm film sources of these early episodes for rescanning and remastering has been deemed too high, which is unfortunate. The world of Midsomer Murders was defined by these early cases, and the effort to reformulate that world with new characters can only be fully appreciated within that context. Misfires such as "The Sleeper Under the Hill" and "A Sacred Trust" are to be expected when a long-running series undergoes fundamental change, but they would be easier to accept if Acorn would accelerate the pace of bringing one of its most popular series to high definition. The show in general remains highly recommended, as does the technical quality of Set 22. The episodes themselves are a mixed lot.