Death in Paradise plots keep turning up in Return to Paradise – and we can prove it

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Season two of Return to Paradise is progressing, with DI Mackenzie Clarke again demonstrating her detective abilities in the latest episode. However, viewers have noticed the new season seems to be revisiting plotlines from the original Death in Paradise series.

Okay, so here’s the deal – it’s a real head-scratcher of a case. Last week, a guy was found dead on a boat, way out at sea. The weird thing is, how could anyone have done it? All the suspects had alibis – they couldn’t have physically been near the boat when it happened. But knowing how these stories usually go, I figured there had to be some clever way the killer pulled it off, some trick we hadn’t seen yet.

The fifth season of Death in Paradise began with the murder of a marine biologist named Dan. He was shot on a boat, but the puzzling part was that everyone else was scuba diving when it happened.

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It turned out there was a reason for everything: Dan’s wife, Laura, had used a silencer on the gun before going into the ocean to create an alibi, and her plan was to steal his money.

As a longtime viewer, I still remember a really great storyline where Kris Marshall’s Humphrey Goodman had to solve a murder – it was a guy found all alone on his boat at sea! It was a classic ‘Death in Paradise’ mystery.

Okay, so in the big season six finale, things got really intense with Humphrey leaving – or so we thought, since he came back in Beyond Paradise! The mystery revolved around Tom, and it turned out the killer was actually his own son, Steve. It was a revenge thing – apparently, Tom left Steve to drown when he was a kid, and he’d been holding onto that anger all these years. It was a pretty shocking reveal, honestly!

If you’re curious about what actually happened, or just want to revisit a really wild time in the game, you’ll find everything in episodes five and six. That’s where all the main stuff went down!

This isn’t the only time a similar plot has appeared in the show’s history. Before Ardal O’Hanlon’s character, Jack Mooney – who eventually became Mackenzie’s boss – left the series, the fourth episode of season 9 featured a storyline centered around a man’s body discovered on a boat near the Caribbean.

It’s understandable that coastal detective shows have limited unique settings for murders. However, the recent trend of copying old storylines is making things predictable. The latest episode of Return suffered from this, and surprisingly, it even reused multiple familiar tropes from Death in Paradise.

Singer Luke was discovered dead, and, like with other recent cases, his bandmates had alibis. It was revealed that one of them, secretly Luke’s wife Steph, was the one who killed him. The motive stemmed from Luke having forced Steph to give up their child many years ago.

In the fifth episode of season four of Death in Paradise, a rock star named Stevie died after being electrocuted in a swimming pool. As usual, everyone in his inner circle had an alibi – except for Pete, who actually committed the murder because Stevie had ruined a valuable business deal.

By season twelve, with Ralf Little as Neville Parker leading the investigation, the focus also turned to the lives of musicians. This time, famous singer Babette wasn’t the direct victim of a crime, but she had been deeply hurt. Similar to Steph in Return to Paradise, her husband, Elijah, had forced her to give up their child for adoption, and Babette’s friend Clifford took matters into his own hands, poisoning Elijah to help her escape his control.

The parallels to current events continue. Just as a cherished song of Babette’s was discovered to have been originally written and given to her by her partner, Kenton, the villain Steph from Return had a meaningful song of her own stolen and credited to Luke.

It’s natural for some story points to be revisited, particularly when they connect to relatable life experiences. However, we’re noticing a growing trend of murder mystery shows appearing on television.

Considering the Paraverse universe, it’s worth questioning whether creative resources are being stretched thin, given how heavily Return to Paradise appears to be borrowing ideas from its related series.

Will Mackenzie stumble into a new case that feels a bit too close to home? We’re definitely watching to see what happens.

Return to Paradise is on BBC One on Fridays at 8pm and is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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2025-11-08 00:20