Recap / Father Brown S 5 E 6

The Eagle and the Daw is the sixth episode of the fifth season of Father Brown.

A convicted murderer invites Father Brown for confession, but instead she tells him she's plotting the death of her lover. After Father Brown visits the lover to check on them, they give him their gun, and the key to their place. When the lover is later found shot in the head, Father Brown becomes the top suspect. From jail, Father Brown struggles to prove his own innocence, but has the help of his friends to push things along to find out what really happened.

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Tropes:

• A Day in the Limelight: With Father Brown indisposed, Bunty and Mrs. M. have to do some of the legwork in this episode on their own, including wheedling their way into visiting Katherine at prison, and making observations to Mallory.
• Ambiguous Innocence: Katherine insists she's innocent... but she says it with a smirk.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Katherine is holding something over on Frances, the prison guard assigned to her unit, and is able to thus get her to do things for her, such as custom meals, but also squirreling out letters to Raymond and Father Brown.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: The letters that Father Brown (and others) are receiving from "R," which provide Mallory with motive for Father Brown to kill Worrall. We later see they have been constructed with cut bits from a Bible.
• The Dead Guy Did It: Raymond Worrall plays an important part in the framing of Father Brown, specifically finding a reason to hand over to him what would become incriminating evidence in his death. All of course orchestrated by Katherine.
• Death Row: Katherine Corven. She points it out repeatedly as the reason why she doesn't really care what happens at this point; she's going to die in a few days anyway.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Katherine Corven tells Father Brown she has orchestrated the death of her lover. She doesn't explain how, but the assumption is, she's going to have him murdered. In fact, she has plotted with him to have him kill himself.
• Great Escape: Father Brown breaks out of Kembleford jail by swapping clothes with Blind 'Arry and having Goodfellow put Arry, in Brown's clothes, in Brown's cell, while walking Brown out dressed as 'Arry. Later, Goodfellow executes the reverse swap by bringing in Father Brown, still in Arry's clothes, mimicking 'Arry's drunk singing, being put back in 'Arry's cell, in front of Mallory, none the wiser.
  • Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Goodfellow, referring to his helping Brown break out of (and back into) jail.
• Lawful Neutral: Father Brown steadfastly refuses to break the seal of the confessional and tell what Frances told him, despite the fact that it would likely get him out of jail and out of suspicion.
• Lawman Gone Bad: Invoked by Mallory, who suggests that Father Brown's skill at catching criminals has rubbed off too much and turned him into a criminal. Or even that it was a ploy all along to distract from his own criminal nature.
  • Pretender Diss: Mrs. McCarthy to Mallory:
    If finely-honed detective skills are a sign that somebody might be a violent maniac, I'm sure none of us has anything to fear from you.
• Period Piece: They didn't have the kind of ballistic forensics we have in subsequent decades, so simply a gun with the right caliber is enough evidence, since that's the best they can do anyway. This doesn't mean it was the same gun, but it's close enough. On the other hand, being able to present another gun with the same caliber is enough to refute such evidence.
• Prison Episode: More than others in the series, because the main character is the one in jail.
• Rage Against the Legal System: Katherine's plot is to have revenge on Father Brown for getting her convicted.
• Tally Marks on the Prison Wall: Of the String Theory variety. Father Brown gets a piece of chalk from Goodfellow, and proceeds to draw out an investigation board on the cell wall. Mallory is apoplectic when he finds it.
• Title Drop: At the end of the episode, when Father Brown recites the titular parable to Bunty, using it as an explanation for why he will not be going back to see Frances and gloat.
• Together in Death: Katherine's ploy to get Raymond to kill himself for her.