The Devil's Dust is the seventh episode of the first season of Father Brown.
Father Brown joins the search when a girl who is believed to be radioactive goes missing overnight. He struggles to understand who is responsible for her disappearance.
Tropes:
- Always Murder Averted; what looks like the kidnapping and murder of local teenager Ruth Bennett turns out to be an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Ruth herself, in an attempt to escape her overbearing parents and elope with her handsome therapist, Dr. Michael Evans. When Father Brown tells her in no small terms that Michael does not return her feelings, she drops the act.
- Chekhov's Gun: Averted; the red plates that Sid finds that turn out to be radioactive seem to be nothing but a rednote herring.
- Wild Mass Guessing: Sid presumably stashed the plates in the foxhole that Susie finds setting off the Geiger counter, and then retrieved them before she returned with Father Brown, all by coincidence. Otherwise, the reason the counter goes off there the first time is never explained.
- Chocolate Baby: Discussed in this episode. The child of a white woman and a black man is born lily white. The father views this as a God-given miracle, considering that by the time of the child's birth, the mother was married to a white man.
- Disappointed in You / What the Hell, Hero?: At an atomic energy meeting, Mrs. McCarthy raises a mini-mob outcry against scientist Geoffrey Bennett when his daughter, Ruth, is believed to have come down with radiation sickness, believing her to be at risk of contaminating the village. Afterwards, when she tries to justify her actions by citing a Bible verse about casting out lepers, Father Brown very coldly informs her of just how little he was impressed by this. Mrs. McCarthy is left looking like someone just hit her with a goods train.Father Brown: Ruth Bennett is not a leper and that was unchristian. It was insensitive, intolerant, and it was judgmental. And I am VERY disappointed.
- Disney Death: Ruth turns out to be alive, despite blood-stained clothes making it look like she had been murdered at at least one point in the investigation.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Ruth's father is revealed to be not Geoffrey Bennett, the man her mother is married to, but Douglas Taylor, a family friend who her mother slept with before she got married.
- Shown Their Work: The red plates that Sid finds that turn out to be radioactive are likely inspired by orange-red Fiestaware, which in the 1930s and 1940s were made with uranium oxide glaze
to get their bright color. However, they weren't nearly as radioactive as the show suggests. - Smitten Teenage Girl: Ruth is this, for Dr. Evans.
