Second Sight

John Ransom collapses and dies outside a pub, minutes after a shouting match with his brother-in-law about the baptism of his niece. On the face of it, a man with a weak heart and a temper. Then the pathologist finds electrical scars across the top of his head, and the case stops being that simple. Scars like that do not come from arguing about christenings.

Barnaby and Scott start pulling at the thread. But the Ransom family is a crowded one, with the Kirbys and the Kubatskis all tangled up in the same small patch of Midsomer. Little Mal Kirby and his namesake Young Mal hover around the edges, Preaching Pete Kubatski adds a flavour of sermon and suspicion, and Dr Gregory Ransom provides the professional and family link to the victim. Everyone has an opinion about John Ransom. Nobody wants to give the same one twice, which Barnaby finds more interesting than any of the opinions themselves.

Tony Etchells and Caroline Graham wrote the script, Richard Holthouse directed. The cast is one of the oddest and best assembled this season: Owen Teale playing both Mal Kirbys, Will Keen as Preaching Pete, Geoffrey Whitehead as Dr Gregory Ransom, Joe Anderson as Max Ransom and Tom Frederic as Ben Kirby, with Barry Jackson as Bullard, Jane Wymark as Joyce and Laura Howard as Cully alongside John Nettles and John Hopkins.

Those electrical scars are the detail the episode hangs its hat on, the one thing that cannot be explained away by family rows and baptisms. Midsomer likes its mysteries to hide in plain sight, and a man dropping dead in front of a pub crowd is about as public as it gets. The trick is what he was carrying on his head the whole time, and the episode keeps that answer to itself until it is good and ready.