by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I put on KPBS for the rerun
of the Doctor Blake Mysteries episode “King of the Lake,” the first one shown in 2015 (the original
air date was February 13, 2015) and yet another story by show creators George
Adams and Tony Wright, and this show’s actual writer Michael Harvey, in which a
local hero in Ballarat, Australia, where the show takes place, gets himself
killed and the investigation proves he had the proverbial feet of clay. In this
case the young man whose murder exposes his secrets is Dennis Goodman (Jordan
Prainito), a star on a two-man rowing team who’s just won a race on Ballarat
Lake when, according to tradition, he and his teammate are dunked in the lake
at the end of the race — only his teammate comes up alive and he comes up dead,
apparently drowned but after only 25 seconds in the water. Dr. Blake
immediately suspects foul play but he can’t figure out either whodunit or
howdunit — he considers a blow with a blunt object because of a crescent-shaped
scar on the boy’s neck, but realizes that was just made by the toe of his
teammate’s shoe as he was trying to rescue him. Blake also suspects Dennis’s
girlfriend, who suspected that he was seeing someone else but didn’t know who —
and in the script’s kinkiest scene, it turns out Dennis’s alternate lover was
his girlfriend’s mother (reminding one that the film Room at the Top was released the year this episode was supposed to
take place, 1959) — but neither woman killed Dennis.
Then suspicion lights on
Dennis’s father, Herbert Goodman (Jeremy Stanford), who apparently had a shot
on the Australian rowing team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics but had to bow out at
the last minute because of some health hazard — so he’s turned his ambitions
towards not only Dennis but his younger son Lucas (Max Whitelaw), even though
Lucas is a bookish young man who wants no part of athletics. It also turns out
that Herbert’s wife, and therefore Dennis’s and Lucas’s mother, is Monika
(Alyson Whyte), an old girlfriend of Dr. Blake’s whom he nearly proposed to years
before, only he went off to London to train for the medical corps in the
European theatre of World War II instead and she met Herbert during the war
while Blake was away. Herbert is ferociously jealous of Blake for that reason
and tries to keep him away from the investigation; he also gives the cops a
deadline for giving him Dennis’s body, which Blake wants to keep because he’s
still autopsying it in hopes of determining both a cause of death and a killer.
Eventually Dennis’s real dark
secret is that his dad had arranged for him to take testosterone and/or
anabolic steroids, and that’s how he was winning all those races — only because the Goodmans had a
predisposition towards heart disease, both Herbert and Dennis were also on
heart medications made from foxglove, and in the end it turns out one of the
rival rowers Dennis had beaten killed him by substituting aspirin for his heart
meds, meaning that when he leaped into the water following the exertion of the
race, his lungs opened wide and he drowned unusually fast. The reveal wasn’t quite as dynamic as the writers were expecting it to be
because all those young, pretty actors playing rowers started to look alike
after a while and I wasn’t quite sure whom Dr. Blake had fingered as the killer, but it was still an entertaining
show and one of the better ones they’ve been showing on KPBS lately.
