Return to Paradise’s grand cliffhanger isn’t the best thing about the finale
It's about so much more.
Return to Paradise season-one finale spoilers follow.
After a season’s worth of pining, Glenn (Tai Hara) finally reveals in the finale how he feels about Mackenzie (Anna Samson). It’s odd timing given that he’s just got engaged to his long-term girlfriend Daisy (Andrea Demetriades), but while the pair have always been suitable it’s been clear from the start that he and Mackenzie are endgame. We’re talking Martha and Humphrey endgame.
It’s pretty momentous – but more on that later! Because there’s another, more important, reason to crack open a bottle of chocolate milk in celebration, and that’s down to Mackenzie herself.
When the DI begrudgingly returned to Dolphin Cove six years after running out on her engagement to Glenn she was in a permanent bad mood just being on the island. “I just don’t fit” was a motto endorsed by a few on the island who also wanted her gone – Trevor (Ron Smyck) included.
However the Dolphin Cove police force’s latest case highlights just how untrue that is.
When tour guide and land owner Vince Ogden (Peter Phelps) turns up dead following a suspected suicide Mackenzie and the team are tasked with finding out the truth behind his death but it reveals so much more than the fact he was murdered.
While working the case it comes to light that Mackenzie has been cleared of all wrong-doing back in London and is free to return ‘home’. While colleague and mentor Jack Mooney (Arlan O’Hanlon) is delighted, he seems to be the only one as the news results in a usually poker-faced Mackenzie breaking down in tears in front of Glenn’s mum and her boss Philomena Strong (Catherine McClements).
She later breaks the news to Glenn, who also seems nothing but pleased for his ex-fiancée. “That’s what you always wanted,” he tells her, knowing how deeply she’s been pining for London. Once again she’s the only one who seems less than thrilled about this news. In fact she looks confused and somewhat disappointed by his reaction, as though she’d been trying to gauge his feelings for her from his response.
Glenn gives nothing away with his words but his later actions speak volumes. While flirting over the reconstruction of a doorknob from the case, Glenn offers Mackenzie a drink. When he hands her favourite brand of chocolate milk she is surprised to find he has a fridge stocked full of them.
“Why?” she asks him.
“Because you’re here a lot, for work.”
That explanation doesn’t work for Mackenzie, who points out that so are a lot of other people who don’t have their brand of drink chilling in the fridge.
She reads between the lines and so do we. “I’m still invested,” Glenn’s saying. The question is, was he also testing the waters to see how she’d respond? We’ll never know, at least not based on that, because their minds swiftly turn to the case when something sparks a thought in Mackenzie’s mind about the case that she needs to confirm with Daisy.
The pair head to Glenn’s current fiancée, and after asking just a few quick questions crack the case.
Daisy’s observation of their chemistry as they solve the case in sync is heartbreaking for her but completely unavoidable. They just seem to fit without effort.
When breaking down the case in front of the suspect, Mackenzie has a breakthrough. The murder was the result of toxic love when the recently widowed Priya (Sarah Roberts) and her stepson fell in love with each other and conspired to kill her husband so they could both receive the money from the sale of the family land and be together.
The money would have always been Priya’s and her husband’s if he’d lived but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her lover behind, so they killed him.
As Mackenzie puts it to Priya in front of them all:
“You know that if you don’t have love, you don’t have anything.”
At that moment, the truth of those words meant for Priya hit her too and she gets emotional, just shy of spilling tears during an investigation (which is more criminal than the actual murder in Mackenzie’s books).
While this is undoubtedly about her feelings for Glenn, it’s also a metaphor for her relationship with Dolphin Cove and her place on the island.
At the beginning she felt like an outsider in her own homeland with no sense of belonging, but each case has been a new building brick, allowing her to form strong, foundational friendships with people who have come to love her and who she’s come to love too.
Her and Colin’s (Lloyd Griffith) “Oh my giddy aunt” response to learning the exact same fact in the case on separate occasions is proof of their growing connection.
The bond between her and the wider team has also become so strong that the station’s parting gift to her is a boomerang, in hopes that she’ll return.
Despite breaking her son’s heart, Philomena also holds a special place for Mackenzie in her heart and while she sends Mackenzie on her way back to London it’s clear that she doesn’t want her to go.
In spite of all this it isn’t until Glenn verbalises it during their goodbye that she begins to understand that she doesn’t fit, she might never fit but that that doesn’t mean she doesn’t belong.
“I don’t really fit here,” she tells him for the millionth time, but this time it’s as though she’s waiting for confirmation otherwise. “Not like you and Daisy,” she adds. “Pure Dolphin Cove, you two.”
Glenn agrees with her, before clarifying: “It was always the best thing about you, though.”
Over the course of the season Mackenzie has been slowly learning that her differences are what make her, and even though Glenn was the one to spell it out for her, it is a lesson she’s learnt from all the people that she’s learnt to let into her life. All have shaped her for the better, possibly allowing her to see herself as someone who is ready for the kind of love she and Glenn still share.
We say still because if the chocolate milk chilling in the fridge wasn’t enough of an indicator Glenn, comes right out with it to Frankie.
“I know, Frankie,” he tells their dog, who is clearly missing Mackenzie. “I think I still love her too,” and unknown to him Mackenzie overhears.
As romantic cliffhangers go it was pretty special. We have a feeling it’s going to put a giant wrench in her returning-to-London plans at the very least in the interim. Will Glenn take a chance on Mackenzie in season two or play it safe with Daisy? Who knows, but whatever happens between the pair at least Mackenzie has a stronger sense of self, which is far better in our books.
Return to Paradise airs Fridays 8pm on BBC One and all episodes are available to watch now on BBC iPlayer. Beyond Paradise and Death in Paradise both air on BBC One and stream on BBC iPlayer.
