Girl

June 1965, and a secretarial student named Margaret Bell dies at home. The medical verdict is heart attack, and most people are ready to leave it at that. Endeavour Morse is not most people. He is convinced there is more to it, and the weeks that follow bear him out: a doctor is shot, a vicar is shot, and the cases that look unconnected keep snagging on his theories.

Not everyone is grateful. Chief Superintendent Bright, the new commanding officer of Oxford City Police, thinks Morse's zeal is a liability, and he tells DI Thursday plainly that the bagman's job is a Detective Sergeant's, and the young constable is too inexperienced for it. When Morse dismisses a beautiful but mentally unstable young woman as a suspect, and the vicar is shot shortly afterwards, he is reduced to general duties and warned that his superiors may yet see cause for dismissal.

He carries on investigating alone anyway. That refusal to drop a case would become the defining habit of his career; here it nearly ends it.

The episode is also a study in what being right costs when you are junior. Every time Morse's instinct pays off, his standing drops a little further, and Bright's displeasure hangs over the whole investigation like weather. The eventual vindication feels earned rather than triumphant, which is the right note for a show about a man who is always a step ahead of the people who sign his pay.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Edward Bazalgette directed. Shaun Evans is Morse, with Jonathan Hyde as Sir Edmund Sloan, Alan Morrissey as Denis Bradley, Fiona Ryan as Margaret Bell, Will Richards as Brian Powell, Dominic Taylor as Dr Frank Cartwright, Luke Allen-Gale as Derek Clark, Albert Welling as Wallace Clark, Sophie Stuckey as Pamela Walters, and Jonathan Guy Lewis as Rev Monkford.

It is a strong opening statement: a procedural that keeps its nerve, and a hero at odds with his own shop.