Harry Wild - Season 4

Jane Seymour takes centre stage once again in Season 4 of this Dublin-set cosy crime drama, with seven new cases to crack, aided by her streetwise sidekick Fergus Reid. We all know that Seymour’s HARRY WILD is a retired literature professor with a penchant for red wine and amateur sleuthing. Therefore, it’s all the more amusing that in Season 4, her son, who is Chief Superintendent with the local Garda Siochána, increasingly relies on ‘mum’ when it comes to solving some particularly tricky cases…

Familiar faces return for this fourth season, while domestic situations evolve and change with every episode, of which there are eight in total (episodes 7 and 8 offer a double-whammy so to speak). Even some of the culprits from the first few episodes are in one way or another connected to the final episodes, which makes for a great viewing pleasure!

Episode 1 (‘Heads, I Win, Tails, You Lose’) kicks off in suitably gruesome fashion when a serial killer appears to select his victims as random and leaves a coin in the mouth of each victim. Trust Harry to get to the top of a case which seems to lack any logical thinking, thanks to her profound knowledge of literature which somehow always seems to provide a clue. On the private front, Harry’s paramour Harry Benedict (the ‘other’ Harry, played by Lochlann O’Mearáin) has enough of his own detective job and plans to travel the world, asking a reluctant Harry Wild to accompany him. Should she stay or should she go? Despite the age difference of the two actors (O’Mearáin is 51, Seymour is 75 but looks anything but!), their online chemistry is simply great. Fergus also has plans, namely to attend college with Charlie Wild’s (Kevin Ryan) daughter Lola (Rose O’Neill).

‘For Whom the Bells Tolls’ turns out to be a tough nut to crack indeed when an old friend of Harry, Sister Ignatius (Kate O’Toole), who has become a nun, contacts her and asks for help… A fellow nun has committed suicide by hanging herself from a beam in the main church hall, but the Sister is convinced foul play is at work. When Harry and Fergus travel to the convent to investigate, they are met with a wall of silence… literally!
In ‘Hold Your Horses, We’ve a Killer to Catch’, Harry Benedict accuses his own father, Duncan, of being involved when during a horse race the female jockey is thrown the saddle and Harry discovers the saddle had been tampered with, aggravating the animal. Will the two Harry’s get to the bottom of things?

Fergus is heartbroken when Charlie Wild throws a hint that daughter Lola has been accepted for a place in Georgetown University in Washington, urging Fergus to set Lola ‘free’ for the benefit of her future. When Lola finds out that daddy had a talk with Fergus, she is livid. As for Fergus, he doesn’t have too much time to ponder over whether he should let Lola go or not because she, together with mum Orla (Amy Huberman), asks him and Harry for help when two dancers mysteriously vanish from a dance school. What’s behind it all? ‘Murder on the Dance Floor’ is the name of the fourth episode and my word, it offers a truly fiery conclusion!

‘The Death of Harry Wild’ (Episode 5) might sound alarming but it’s not Harry Wild who dies, but her unfortunate doppelgänger during a crime convention, which Fergus has taken Harry to. While still not entirely sure whether it actually was murder or simply an unfortunate accident, Harry orders the building to be locked down and calls her son for help, who soon after arrives with fellow coppers in tow. Things take a more sinister turn when an author is murdered while the building is in lockdown, meaning the killer must be in the building. Yes, he is, and he turns out to be connected to the coin murderer from Episode 1… and takes Harry and two other guests hostage. It’s now a race against time for Charlie and Fergus to save them. In a side plot, Charlie’s Italian father Marcello (Eduardo Costa) has died when, during his funeral held in Dublin, he suddenly turns up very much alive…
Episode 6, ‘The Final Chapter’, provides the opening for Episodes 7 and 8. In Episode 6, a Dublin tour guide is heckled by one of the tourists when he tells tales of vampires and how certain events may have inspired Irish writer Bram Stoker to pen his horror classic Dracula. A short time later, the heckler is found dead with a nasty stab wound in the graveyard chapel… In a parallel plot line taking place in the US, two FBI agents - Danielle Draper (Emily Dunlop) and Mikey Ford (Blake Berris) are unable to foil a killing by an assassin named Diyu, who shortly after flies to Dublin to carry out another hit during DS Vicky Boyle’s (Danielle Ryan) planned wedding to her betrothed Cormac…

Episodes 7 and 8 (‘You Are Cordially Invited to an Assassination’) takes on almost Shakespearean complexities when, during Vicky’s wedding in a grand country mansion, the guests - Harry, Fergus and the rest of the Wild family among them - find themselves poisoned during the dinner. When they wake up, some of the guests, including Charlie and Lola, are missing. In a frantic search for them and in order to establish what may have happened and why, Harry finds herself at loggerheads with FBI agent Danielle. This is truly nail-biting stuff and a worthy finale to Season 4, with the usual cliffhangers at the end.

HARRY WILD - Season 4 has just been released as a 2-Disc DVD set and on digital. Bonus material includes ‘When Harry met Fergus’ / ‘Behind the Scenes’ and ‘Wild About Harry’.