We are deep into the stylish and gorgeously filmed locked-room murder mystery series “Death and Other Details” when two key characters team up for a cruise-ship karaoke version of “Come Sail Away,” the classic Styx power ballad written by the South Side’s own Dennis DeYoung nearly a half-century ago. As the song continues, at times giving way to an orchestral version, we catch up with a few other developments on the ship, including an absolutely insane encounter between two consenting adults that involves alcohol and a lighter. It’s a perfectly edited, memorably bizarre sequence, and while it’s not the best use ever of “Come Sail Away” (that honor goes to “Freaks and Geeks,” although some would say “South Park”), it’s near the top.
That’s the thing with this 10-part series (I was given access to the first eight episodes). There are a LOT of stylistic flourishes and attention-getting gimmicks, e.g., an extended flashback sequence in which a character follows a younger version of herself, and while it’s all impressively rendered, it can be a chore to keep up with all the time-hopping twists and turns.
Still, this is a nice combo platter of “The White Lotus” paired with a “Knives Out” mystery with a “Succession” chaser, and you cannot go wrong with the great Mandy Patinkin leaning into his role as the hard-drinking, egotistic, semi-legendary Rufus Cotesworth, who was once the “world’s greatest detective” but has fallen on hard times. Now, Rufus has been given one last chance to reclaim his reputation thanks to a gruesome murder that takes place on that aforementioned luxury liner. What a fortuitous development!
Ah, but dear reader (as Rufus might say in his voice-over narration), let’s go back to the beginning, before the murder of the obnoxious Indiana multimillionaire Keith Trubitsky (Michael Gladis), who, like many a major character in this series, might not be exactly who he appears to be. In 2005, the adolescent child Imogen Scott (Sophia Reid-Gantzert), who is wise and perceptive beyond her years, witnesses the violent death of her mother, who worked for the obscenely wealthy Colliers family, owners of a textile empire. Enter Patinkin’s Rufus, who promises Imogen he will find the killer — but then abruptly exits sometime later without having cracked the case, breaking Imogen’s heart in the process.
Cut to 18 years later. Imogen (now played by Violett Beane in a show-stopping performance), sporting a blonde version of Uma Thurman’s hairstyle from “Pulp Fiction,” works for the Colliers (who raised her after her mother’s death) and has accompanied them on a VIP cruise on the Mediterranean on which the Colliers hope to secure the funding that will set them up for a wildly profitable merger with the wealthy Chun family.
Patriarch Lawrence Collier (David Marshall Grant) is set to retire and announce that his successor will be his ambitious and cunning daughter Anna (Lauren Patten), an easy choice over coke-sniffing, irresponsible son Tripp (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who has invited the boorish Trubitsky along on the cruise in the hopes Trubitsky will invest millions with him. Ah, but then someone murders Trubitsky with a harpoon in the dead of night, and Rufus, on board working for the Chuns, springs into Detective Poirot mode and starts questioning suspects while putting together pieces of an intricate puzzle.
As for Imogen, she hasn’t seen Rufus in all these years and she greets him by winging him with a glass tumbler — but she was in Trubitsky’s room (smashing his watch as revenge for some loutish behavior) shortly before he was killed and she’s the prime suspect, so she reluctantly agrees to team up with Rufus to solve the case, which could also unlock the mystery of her mother’s death.
Patinkin and Beane have terrific chemistry together, with the dynamic between Rufus and Imogen constantly shifting according to circumstances and points of view. (In one flashback sequence, Imogen literally becomes Rufus, walking in his shoes as he describes certain events, hoping to get Imogen to unearth some deeply suppressed memories.)
As you’d expect, there’s also a myriad of colorful, flawed, in some cases you-love-to-hate-them types on board the ship. Among the standouts: Tamberla Perry as the governor of Washington, who isn’t above accepting the Colliers’ generosity in exchange for … well, whatever they want; Rahul Kohli as the ship’s mysterious owner, Sunil; Jere Burns as the Colliers’ hilariously blunt and weird attorney; Lisa Lu as Celia Chun, the matriarch of the Chun family; and Pardis Saremi as Anna’s wife, Leila, a former clickbait journalist with a serious case of paranoia. As the story weaves this way and that, often stretching the limits of credulity, let’s just say Trubitsky might not be the only one who won’t survive this cruise.
Isn’t that almost always the way with these locked-room mysteries? We start with a murder, and then maybe one more, and perhaps another, before the world’s greatest detective(s) get to the bottom of things. That’s the fun of it, and “Death and Other Details” is all about the fun, even when someone goes down for the count.
