‘Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance’ delivers on only one promise: It has a lot of dancing
‘Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance’ begins with the titular amateur (now-professional) sleuth played by Ashley Jensen grinding her teeth at a newspaper feature about her and her detective agency. What she calls a “hatchet job” may as well have been a meta take on how one may have perceived the Acorn TV miniseries in general.
There is something about ‘Agatha Raisin’ (not just the character, but the whole show based on the novels by MC Beaton) that is annoying. She (as well as the show) is too flippant and generally preposterous to be taken seriously. And while irreverence through filmmaking can often be uncharacteristically delightful, in the case of ‘Agatha Raisin’, the effect only comes off as gauche.
Carrying forward the aforementioned flippancy, Agatha meets with a new client and behaves like a child at a candy store when she mentions a death threat. Tiggy Laggat-Brown’s (Anna Wilson-Jones) daughter Cassandra (Abigail Carter-Simpson) is being threatened -- if she went through with her engagement, she would be murdered. One could suspect that the death threat, comically worded with magazine and newspaper cutouts, is a pastiche on sleuth stories of the past, but that would be a bit too much to expect from this show.
And while she and the crew solve the mystery of the death threat, they also try and solve the mystery of a missing dog -- a dog that can be seen frolicking around in many scenes.
The mystery goes from a murder attempt to a suspiscious suicide of the fiance’s once-incarcerated-and-not-invited-to-the-party father, to the possibility that it wasn’t the daughter but the mother who was the target. That last bit was discovered through one phone-captured video from the party that had surprisingly good shots from various angles -- mind-blowing, how much technology has evolved, hasn’t it? It also, somehow, had a clear look at the point from where the shot was fired, even when it only meant to capture Agatha and others falling into a swimming pool.
If ‘Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House’ had a ‘Scooby-Doo’ vibe, then the second episode most definitely had the churlish structure and execution of an Enid Blyton mystery worthy of ‘The Secret Seven’. Neither comparison is a compliment, sadly.
The episode, however, delivers on one promise. It does have an awful lot of dancing, more specifically Tango. But overall, just like the previous episode, this too is just one of those things one watches without really watching, unwilling to bother if one has missed on any of the telltale clues one would look for in a mystery show hoping to solve it before it’s done on screen.
The next episode of ‘Agatha Raisin’ will air on Acorn TV on February 17.