The Hammer of God is the first episode of the first season of Father Brown.
The brother of an Anglican vicar is killed with a blacksmith's hammer. The blacksmith's wife, who was being blackmailed by the victim, confesses; Father Brown must find a killer who believes it was God's work from the victim's many enemies before an innocent woman is sent to the gallows.
Tropes:
- Asshole Victim / Depraved Bisexual: Norman Bohun is an obnoxious boor who practices Sexual Extortion on a married woman and is callous towards his male lover. Said lover insists that he has redeeming qualities, but they go unseen.
- "Awkward Silence" Entrance: When the obnoxious drunken Jerkass Colonel Bohun drives into an interfaith picnic uninvited, the guests fall silent and watch him with varying degrees of distaste, including the woman he's sexually extorting. However, the string band plays merrily on in the background.Bohun: Seems my invitation got lost in the post.
- Cain and Abel: Norman and Wilfred Bohun. Wilfred is the modest man of the cloth, whereas Norman is a boorish alcoholic who loves to gamble and is not above forcing a woman to sleep with him in order to pay her husbands debts. Though the episode does play with this trope, revealing that Wilfred was the one to smash his own brother's skull in, after discovering that Norman enjoyed men as well as women.
- Little "No": Father Brown says this when he notices a key discrepancy between the church clock and his pocket watch right before the climax.
- Politically Correct History: Generally averted, though Father Brown's own political and spiritual attitudes can be a bit closer to the twenty-first century than you might otherwise expect from a 1950s Catholic priest. When Philip Walker is frightened that Brown will expose his then-illegal relationship with Norman, explicitly mentioning chemical castration, Father Brown assures him that such business is his own, and promises that he won't try to convert Philip when next they meet.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: After hearing the confession of Wilfred Bohun and the reasons why he committed the crime and doesn't feel guilty about either the crime or the possibility that Elizabeth could hang for it, because the events were divinely guided, Father Brown yells, "God! Is not! Your scapegoat!!" The fact that this is pretty much the only occasion over the course of the whole series in which the sleuthing priest raises his voice in anger/outrage, it isn't just the punctuation that emphasises the line. Brown himself in fact looks more stunned afterwards than Bohun.
