Sauce for the Goose is the seventh episode of the eighth series of Midsomer Murders and was originally aired on April 3, 2005.
A tour of Plummer's relish factory proves too hot to handle when a man gets crushed by a tower of bottles, then thrown into a sterilizing oven. Upon learning that the deceased worked for a competitor in the industry, Barnaby and Scott discover that the Plummers harbor far more secrets than just the family recipe.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Broken Pedestal: Barnaby is extremely fond of Plummer's relish at the start of the episode, having had it since he was a boy. By the end, however, he's gone quite off it.
- Cassandra Truth: Both Scott and Joyce tell Barnaby that Helen Plummer could well be the murderer several times. She is.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Joyce Barnaby asks John Barnaby to notice her new glasses and he gets the "aha" moment that the first victim's glasses were not found leading him to the murderer.
- Forklift Fu: Dexter Lockwood is crushed by a forklift before being dumped in a sterilizer.
- Gambit Pileup: Multiple different parties all conspire to gain majority control over Plummer's by having Amelia Plummer's shares under their control via power of attorney, with Dexter Lockwood, Ralph Plummer, and Ralph's siblings all attempting this very trick (although in Ralph's case it was to stop anyone else doing it).
- Gaslighting: One of the mysteries of the episode. The Plummer matriarch keeps seeing a stuffed figure hanged from a tree near her house as someone tries to trigger her mental breakdown.
- Only Sane Man: Subverted, The family are mostly lazy, grasping, selfish small thinkers. The killer is efficient and the only one who can see the best ways to save the business. But, they apply their skills to committing and hiding the murder.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Double subverted. Initially Amelia Plummer seems to be losing her mind due to seeing a man hanging from a tree branch outside her window which disappears as soon as she looks again, none of her family taking her seriously about this under the assumption it's this trope. Barnaby and Scott quickly figure out that this is someone deliberately trying to drive her insane due to finding footprints under the tree and bark scraped away from the branch in question. At the end of the episode, however, she both forgets who her own children are and talks about her long dead husband as though he's alive.
- Skewed Priorities: Ralph's company is in serious financial trouble but he would rather spend his days in the woods birdwatching.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The murdered man is chased and crushed by a pallet of relish being moved by a forklift, then dragged along the factory, stripped and left overnight in a bottle sterilizing machine where he was sprayed with steam that was heated to 200˚ centigrade.
