Death in Paradise season 14 episode 2 recap: who killed Jonny Feldon?

Death in Paradise season 14 episode 2 sees the team get drawn into the murky world of reality TV — sadly not with Mervin, Naomi, Darlene, Selwyn, Catherine et al going head-to-head on a season of The Traitors, but with the tragic death of a frontrunner in a Bear Grylls-esque survival competition. We're also introduced to a new member of the team — who's full of enthusiasm but very much in need of mentoring. Here's what went down in episode two Death in Paradise continues...

We open with Chaz Simons (Bhavna Limbachia) running through a jungle trail, in workout gear with a rucksack on her back. She's constantly looking over her shoulder as Jonny Feldon (Simon Lennon) gains ground on her. They approach a stone arch with "Island Warrior" branding on it, which leads to a tunnel filled with makeshift cobwebs and creepy-crawlies. A camera crew films Chaz as she emerges and continues down the path, while Jonny emerges covered in cockroaches and spluttering. We see the show's production team watching the raw footage, as producer Rick Mayhew (Hotel Portofino's Adam James) chuckles in delight. He radios to camera operator Dale Buckingham (Domina's David Avery) to advise him to get the drone camera ready to capture the contestants on the zipline — it's clear even from this brief exchange that they're not exactly the best of friends.

As Chaz and Jonny approach the next stage, Jonny is limping, but Chaz trips and falls — he offers to stop and help her, but she tells him she's fine. Jonny runs up ahead and picks up a key to the treasure chest, stopping to briefly taunt Chaz before running off. Rick radios to runner Lisa Bulmer (Extraordinary's Sofia Oxenham) asking her to "pick up Supermum — she's done, she's cooked. I really thought she'd have this in the bag." He asks her to make sure Chaz is back in time for the winner's ceremony, as he wants to get footage of her crying when Jonny wins. What a delightful man! Lisa asks Rick if he wants a lift to the finish line, but he tells her he'll make his own way there, and tells the rest of the production team to let him know if he misses any big surprises while he's travelling.

Jubilant Jonny makes his way to the zipline and descends, cheering with joy as he goes — he disappears into the trees but as he emerges at the finish line, it's clear something is horribly wrong because Jonny's body is dangling lifelessly from the harness. The production team call for a medic, but it's already too late...

Over at Honoré Police Station, the electrician has just finished fixing things after Mervin broke the fan (and the ceiling) last week, and Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) and DS Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) are quietly celebrating the fact that Mervin should be back in London by now. Darlene says she hopes the new Inspector will be more patient and polite, and Naomi agrees. Unfortunately for them, at that precise moment, DI Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet) is signing a three-month contract with Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) over in the beach shack. Mervin assures the Commissioner he has no intention of staying beyond the end of the contract, he just wants a bit more time to investigate the circumstances of his mother's accident. Selwyn doesn't seem entirely convinced that Mervin will want to go home afterward. The Commissioner receives a call from Darlene, and he informs Mervin that he has his first case.

Darlene and Naomi are already on the Island Warrior set, where they've established that the cause of Jonny's death was a knife wound to the abdomen. Lisa hurries over and tells Naomi that she's got a DI Mervin Wilson on the radio who needs to speak to them. Naomi and Darlene are stunned into silence, and Naomi eventually asks why he's not in London. Mervin says he has good news: he's signed a three month contract to be their new DI. Darlene whispers that it's not what she would call good news, not realising that Naomi still has her finger on the radio's "call" button and Mervin can hear her. Darlene tries to cover that it's not good news for Mervin, since he seems to hate it here. Mervin clarifies that he doesn't hate it — he just doesn't love it — and says he's going to be heading down from the production base to the apparent scene of the crime, asking them to meet him there with a crime scene kit.

At the production base, Dale replays footage of Jonny's descent for Mervin, saying he was out of sight for about 40 seconds before appearing at the landing platform, already dead. Mervin asks Rick if he could think of any reason why someone would want to kill Jonny in such an elaborate manner — Rick says no, Jonny was a terrific contestant who planned to donate the prize money to a cancer charity in honour of his sick mum. Chaz, who's nearby resting her ankle, agrees that Jonny was "the sweetest guy". Rick's phone rings — it's the network, holding crisis talks about the show's future — so Mervin leaves him to it.

Mervin joins Naomi and Darlene at the crime scene, where they greet him without enthusiasm. Mervin assesses the set-up — the killer would have had to climb a very tall tree, wait for Johnny to pass by on the zipline, stab him as he passed, and then climb back down again. Naomi has found signs of flattened bushes and scuff marks at the base of the tree, as well as a knife which matches the wound — presumably having fallen out of the killer's pocket as they climbed down. Darlene says she will dust it for prints back at the station. Mervin stumbles over something next to the tree and calls out for a glove — Darlene glares at him until he says "please". Near to where the knife was found, Mervin discovers a pearl that appears to have snapped off an earring, and bags that as evidence too. He tells Darlene to interview everyone involved in filming — crew and contestants — and find out where everyone was when Jonny was stabbed at 8:40, as well as interviewing everyone who was staying in the same place as Jonny, and asks her to see if anyone is missing a pearl earring. Darlene points out that this is an impossible workload for one person, and Naomi says they need to speak to the Commissioner to see if he has found a new recruit yet.

As it happens, he has — Officer Sebastian Rose (The First Team's Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who completed the pan-Caribbean training scheme shortly before the late Officer Brice, but has yet to find a placement. Selwyn takes Mervin to meet Sebastian — who is currently handing out leaflets while dressed as a pineapple. Selwyn admits that Sebastian wasn't his first choice for the role, but he has potential — it just needs teasing out. Selwyn introduces Mervin to Sebastian, who is excited to meet a real detective for the first time. Mervin is immediately turned off by Sebastian's brimming enthusiasm, but agrees to an initial three-month probationary period. Sebastian is excited, and promises not to let them down. As they walk away, Sebastian celebrates, while Mervin is already feeling like the wrong decision has been made.

At the station, Naomi has assembled an incident board of the four people who can't be alibied for the time that Jonny was stabbed: Rick, Chaz, Dale and Lisa. Naomi says that Jonny started his descent at 8:39, was stabbed halfway down at 8:40 and arrived dead at the landing platform at 8:41. It took him a total of two minutes from top to bottom — and Naomi points out that while the suspects can't be alibied at the time of the murder, they were all recorded by one of the show's cameras arriving at the landing platform — first Dale, then Chaz and Lisa, then Rick. But here's the tricky part: it took Naomi and Darlene half an hour to walk the distance from the crime scene to the landing platform, and Naomi says that even if they'd run, they'd only shave about 10 minutes off that time. So how on earth could the killer have covered that distance in two minutes, including getting down from a tree? Mervin notes that it's a particularly difficult and public way to kill someone — the whole thing just doesn't make sense.

Outside in his car, Selwyn takes a call from the Chief Commissioner in Jamaica, who wants to meet with him tomorrow. Selwyn asks if he's able to get some indication of what it's about, but the Chief Commissioner says they'll go over that tomorrow. Of course, Selwyn already knows full well what it's about, thanks to JP. Mervin comes out and tells Selwyn he wants to get working on his mum's accident, and Selwyn reiterates that he wants them to meet and discuss it properly first — he says that his secretary will contact Mervin in due course to set something up. Back at the shack, Mervin takes out Dorna's file again and makes a phone call to his mum's friend, Brianna Clemetson (Joy Richardson), who we met in the Christmas special. He goes to meet her, and she's confused as to why he's there, since she thought Dorna's death was an accident. She asks if he is now saying it's murder, and Mervin asks to come in and explain properly.

Naomi arrives at the shack the following morning, where Mervin is ironing his clothes, having had some of his belongings shipped over by a friend back in London. Naomi is impressed with his ironing skills, and asks if he'd be up for doing some of hers. Unsurprisingly, he would not. Naomi hands over the post-mortem report, which confirms that Jonny was killed by a single stab wound that pierced his kidney, and the blood on the knife matches Jonny's, but there are no fingerprints on it.

At the station, Mervin tells Naomi that the fact they found the knife at the crime scene is starting to feel fishy: the killer was both careless enough to drop it, but also canny enough to wipe their prints off it? Naomi asks if he thinks the killer planted it for them to find. Mervin wonders why they found the pearl earring in the same spot as the knife too. The Commissioner arrives in his car looking thoroughly displeased: he has had a call from Brianna Clemetson asking if they are investigating Dorna's murder. Mervin quickly clarifies that he never said "murder" to her, but Selwyn shuts him down: he says that from now on, Mervin is to do nothing without his say-so, and he wants Naomi across the investigation as well. Naomi — who has been out of the loop so far — asks what exactly it is she's meant to be across before reading the room (well, the car park) and quickly backtracking, assuring them she can get caught up later (a lovely bit of comic acting from Shantol Jackson there, by the way). Selwyn leaves to catch his plane, and Naomi tells Mervin she has a lot of questions.

Inside the station, Seb has arrived for his first day and greets Mervin sunnily. Darlene says she's given Seb the case file to read, so he's fully up to speed — Seb admits he's a slow reader so he isn't quite finished yet. Mervin gets Darlene to review where they're up to, and she says that she and Seb are about to go over to the crew's hotel to search the victim's bedroom. Naomi adds that the toxicology report shows that the victim had a significant amount of painkillers in his system — according to the production's medic, Jonny was taking them for a knee injury he sustained earlier in the competition. Mervin wants to know more about Chaz, so Darlene explains that she's a PE teacher from Reading, recently divorced, with an eight-year-old daughter, and she was frontrunner in the show. Mervin raises something that's been bugging him: for the killer's plan to work, Jonny needed to be the one to get to the zipline first — so could Chaz have been in on it? Or, Naomi suggests, someone made sure she wasn't in a position to win. Darlene has something to add on that: she recovered some CCTV from outside the production office showing Chaz emerging from a vehicle. Despite injuring her ankle during the competition, Chaz is clearly stepping out of the car and putting her full weight on it without any apparent pain, so it seems she's faking the injury.

At the cast and crew hotel, Mervin and Naomi quiz Chaz about her faked injury, and she reluctantly admits that Rick made her throw the final, since the bosses had told him they wanted Jonny to win because he had the better backstory. So Rick offered her £25,000 — the same as the prize amount on offer — to let Jonny win, but she had no idea he was going to die. Mervin asks Chaz why she didn't ignore Jonny and just win the show if she just wanted the money, and she says that Rick threatened to give her a terrible edit that made her look petty and jealous — she felt intimidated by him and didn't want her little girl to be disappointed in her, so she felt compelled to go along with what Rick wanted. However, she does have more information for them: she overheard Jonny on the phone to his lawyers, talking about the injury he'd sustained in the competition and sounding angry.

Darlene and Seb are busy logging evidence in Jonny's room, and Darlene is taking the time to get to know Seb, who seems to be enthusiastic about absolutely everything. Seb admits he's more of a practical, physical person who's less skilled at paperwork, but he's got good at muddling his way through that side of things — and if they ever need someone to chase down a criminal, he's their man. Darlene finds something in one of Jonny's socks - a USB stick that somebody clearly didn't want to be found. Darlene gets Seb to bag it and log it so they can examine it back at the station.

Mervin and Naomi go to see Rick at the production base, where he's fighting fires because somebody has leaked the information about Jonny's death to the press. Mervin asks him about paying Chaz to rig the final, and Rick says he had to do what was best for the show — Jonny's story about his sick mother was the better narrative. He says he did what had to be done: "I'm pretty sure that isn't a crime, is it?" Mervin informs him curtly that bribery is absolutely a crime, and says that he doesn't buy the backstory argument anyway: Naomi spoke to Jonny's lawyer, who revealed that Jonny was going to take the show to court for negligence. Jonny's leg injury happened on set after the production team cut corners on the health and safety front. Rick asks sarcastically if they think Jonny's death has solved all of his problems, and points out that his investors are pulling out, the tabloids are sniffing around, and the show he's been developing and working on for years will not be aired. Mervin asks him if the show is insured, and whether Rick stands to get a substantial payout resulting from Jonny's death.

At the police station, Darlene is just getting off the phone with the insurance company, who confirmed that the show's insurance policy covered murder. (Given that it was being filmed in Saint Marie, you'd think that would have pushed the premiums up by quite some whack.) They also said it wasn't the first accident reported on set, and that the show has a reputation as a cursed production. Although this gives Rick a clear motive, Mervin reminds the others that it doesn't solve the problem of it being seemingly impossible for Rick to be up in the tree in the right position to stab Jonny on the zipline and still arrive at the landing pad two minutes later. He asks Seb for the memory stick to see if it sheds any light on things, and Seb goes through the gathered evidence — but can't find it. Darlene says she and Seb will go back to the hotel and look for it. Seb tries to apologise to Mervin and reiterates that he's sure he bagged it, but Darlene drags him away.

Naomi gently invites Mervin to go for a drink and talk about his mother, and just as he's finishing telling her his story, the Commissioner turns up looking like someone who has had a very rough day. Selwyn asks Naomi what she makes of the whole thing, and Naomi says she still isn't sure why Mervin thinks Dorna's death was suspicious — which Selwyn agrees with. Mervin says that according to the file, Dorna went out to see to scatter her father's ashes, but according to his research, Dorna's father was a fisherman — which means Dorna grew up around boats, and would know to check the weather before heading out to sea. Naomi says that still feels like a tenuous argument, and that it's likely Dorna wasn't thinking clearly because she was grieving. Selwyn says that even if there was more to it, Dorna was alone at sea on the boat in the middle of a storm — so how could anyone have killed her? Mervin admits he doesn't know what went on, but he can't ignore it if there's even the smallest possibility that something untoward happened.

The next morning, Naomi and Mervin arrive at the police station, where Darlene is staring at a curious sight: Seb has cordoned off the motorcycle and sidecar with crime scene tape. Inside, Seb explains that he was feeling bad about the missing evidence and wanted to put things right. He thought back to when he last had the USB stick, and he vividly remembered putting it in the sidecar with the rest of the evidence, which means someone must have taken it. He's dusted the sidecar for prints, and he got a match.

Dale returns to his room at the hotel to discover Mervin and Naomi inside — they've found the memory stick there, and they've looked at it. It contains footage from Dale's drone, of Jonny and Lisa in bed together, unaware that they are being filmed. Dale blusters that he's never done anything like that before, and Naomi asks him why he did it. Dale says that people are always hooking up on film shoots but it never happens for him. Mervin: "Hang on: you didn't manage to pull, so you did this instead?" Dale says that he liked Lisa and they'd been getting close. He thought it was going somewhere, but then she started getting close to Jonny and he got jealous. Mervin tells him he will absolutely be arrested and charged for this, and Naomi hypothesises that Jonny found out what Dale had done, confronted him, and took the memory stick. Dale says Jonny told him on the morning of the finale that he was going to tell Rick as soon as they'd wrapped — which gives Dale motive, since his career was in ruins. Dale protests that he didn't do kill Jonny because he was ready to accept the consequences of his actions — and then Jonny died.

On the way out, Naomi wonders why Lisa never told them that she and Jonny were an item, and Mervin says it's a good point. He also points out that the dynamic between the two of them at the end of the video didn't look like pillow talk between lovers; it looked like a row. He asks Naomi to organise a lip reader to look at the footage and find out what they were saying — but, he clarifies, only the bit at the end where they were talking. Not the rest of it.

At the station, Darlene — doing her best to mentor Seb but slightly frustrated with his lack of care and attention — wonders how he ended up leaving the evidence unattended. Darlene suspects he was on his phone, and Seb grudgingly fesses up: he was distracted by a group chat organising a beach party for the weekend. He tells Darlene that he has a "fidgety brain" and he's not good at focusing on what's right in front of him, which is probably why he's not so good at the paperwork. Darlene, softening, tells him that now they know what they're dealing with, they can keep an eye on it — together. She also tells him that she's impressed that he had the idea to dust the sidecar for prints without being told to. (There's a really lovely dynamic between these two already, I'm excited to see more of them working together.)

Mervin and Naomi arrive, and Darlene tells them what the lip-reader revealed: Lisa got a job working on Island Warrior because she has a score to settle with Rick. Lisa is brought into the station for questioning, and claims she hadn't met Rick before coming to work on the show, but Naomi says they know she told Jonny that she believes Rick stole her original idea for the show without crediting her, and she got the runner job to sabotage the show from the inside. Lisa cracks and admits she met Rick at a networking event two years ago, pitching her idea to him, but he told her it wasn't what the broadcasters are looking for. The next thing she knew, the show had been greenlit and gone into pre-production, but she couldn't prove that he'd stolen her idea. Mervin says that they know she's responsible for several accidents on set, including Jonny's leg injury, because they have a recording of her talking to him (Lisa is unaware of the recording, and Naomi gently says she'll talk to her about that in a moment). Lisa admits that when she told Jonny what she'd done, he was really angry with her for potentially ruining his chances of winning the money for his mum. Naomi asks if she was worried what Jonny would do with that information, and Mervin points out that Jonny's death achieved everything Lisa wanted: Rick's TV show is ruined. But Lisa is adamant: whatever else she may have done, she's not a murderer.

After the interview, Mervin tells Naomi that even if Lisa is lying about not killing Jonny, they have the same problem with her as a suspect that they have with everyone else: she couldn't have got from the treetop to the landing platform in two minutes. Naomi asks what they do now. Mervin says he wants to see it in action, and tells Seb that they have a job for him.

On the set of Island Warrior, Seb is limbering up while Mervin is attached to the zipline. Mervin grumbles about never having to do things like this in London, and whether it's even been risk-assessed, but Darlene gleefully reminds him that it was his idea in the first place. Naomi cues them both in, and Mervin rides the zipline somewhat nervously. As he goes under tree cover, he yells "go, go, go!" to Seb, who sets off running.

Back at the police station, Darlene reveals that Seb clocked in a time of 8 minutes 42 seconds — an impressive time, but still nowhere near fast enough. Naomi adds that Seb's time also doesn't account for the killer getting down from the tree after stabbing Jonny. Mervin is frustrated: the whole thing is impossible, so there must be more to it. And they still haven't accounted for the pearl earring either. Naomi suggests the pearl earring could be entirely unrelated to the crime, and Darlene wonders if it's not even an earring — it might be something else. This causes everything to slot into place in Mervin's head. Darlene offers to go and gather the suspects — a concept that Mervin still isn't keen on — but first he asks Naomi to speak to the show's production office and see if the costume or props department recognise the pearl.

With all the suspects gathered (and Lisa being sure to keep well away from Dale now she knows about the recording), Seb's excited for his very first big dénouement. Mervin says that as far as murders go, this one is pretty extreme: a man stabbed on a zipline, alive at the top but dead by the time he gets to the bottom. He says that the thing that bothered them throughout was the unnecessary complexity of the crime: why go to such lengths when there are easier ways to murder someone? But that was the point all along: the killer was setting the police up on a wild goose chase, and Jonny Feldon wasn't stabbed on the zipwire; he was actually already dying before he started his descent.

Mervin reveals Dale as the killer, and this is how he did it: the pearl that they found at the base of the tree was part of the murder weapon. It was part of a pearl headed pin used by the costume department — they are over four inches long, made of sharp steel, and capable of penetrating human flesh. Dale stole a pin from the costume rail when nobody was about, and then offered to help Lisa, whose job it was to get the contestants' rucksacks onto their backs. While helping Jonny with his backpack, Dale pieced the belt of the backpack — and Jonny's abdomen — with the pin. Jonny felt the stabbing sensation as it went in, but Dale claimed he'd just caught Jonny's skin in the buckle. As he tightened the belt on Jonny's backpack, the pin was driven further in and pierced his kidney — and because Jonny was already on strong painkillers for his leg injury, he didn't notice. When Johnny got to the zipwire, he took his backpack off, removing the pin and opening the wound. Given that his clothes were already stained with mud, it's unlikely anyone would have noticed a tiny blood stain on his shirt. While on the zipline, the momentum accelerated Jonny's blood flow, so he bled out — and was dead by the time he got to the landing platform.

Dale timed his arrival at the landing platform carefully and — knowing which angle he'd placed the static camera at — carefully positioned Jonny's body so the camera couldn't see him clearly. When Rick arrived and called for the set to be cleared for the paramedics, Dale waited for everyone else to leave before stabbing Jonny in the exact same place with a much bigger knife — meaning the post-mortem would only register the larger knife wound. In the aftermath, Dale had to remove the pin from the backpack and clean any blood marks off it, and then go into the forest to plant the bloodstained knife under the zipwire, carefully trampling the bushes and scuffing the tree trunk to make it look like someone had been climbing it. But the weight of Jonny's backpack had loosened the pearl on the head of the pin, and it broke off in Dale's pocket, so when he knelt down to take out the decoy weapon, it fell onto the ground — ironically contaminating the fake crime scene he'd staged so carefully and creating the only piece of real evidence.

Chaz, a little confused, asks why he did all of this. Mervin tells her that Dale did it out of love: he had very strong feelings for Lisa, and in addition to the knowledge that Jonny was about to ruin Dale's own career, he believed that Jonny was also going to ruin Lisa by outing her sabotage of the show. In a bid to protect Lisa and himself, he killed Jonny — and did it in such a public way that it would destroy the show itself in the process, giving Lisa what she wanted and hopefully making her eternally grateful to him. Of course, Lisa now knows that Dale is a creep who made a sex tape of her without her consent, so she doesn't even want to be in the same postcode as him.

Dale is arrested, and Mervin gets a congratulatory call from the Commissioner, who's at Catherine's Bar. Catherine (Élizabeth Bourgine) comes over, having just had a call from JP with the news about Selwyn's job being phased out. She says she knew something wasn't right, but they can't do this. Selwyn tells her they can, and they have: the Chief Commissioner officially informed him yesterday, because they need to save money. Catherine tells Selwyn that the island needs him, and asks him what he's going to do. Selwyn doesn't know, but Catherine already seems to be plotting a campaign of some sort.

Mervin goes to see Brianna again and apologizes for upsetting her on his last visit. He says that he's been asked by the Commissioner to inform her that this nis ot an official murder investigation, but they are looking into the possibility that Dorna Bray's death might not have been an accident. He asks if anything else has come back to her about the day Dorna died, and Brianna says it's something very small and silly: she remembered that morning she was watering her garden and she heard Dorna singing, as she often did around the house. She was singing "Dusty Roads" by John Holt — it must have been a favorite of hers because she was always singing it. Mervin goes back to the beach shack by himself and puts the song on, slowly taking in the music and the lyrics as he stands on the veranda and looks out to sea.