Game

July 1967, and the white heat of technology has reached Lovelace College. A team of research scientists is at work on a 'thinking' machine, built to equal and even outstrip the human mind, and the Cold War is being fought out on a chequered field as a Russian academic prepares to take on the Joint Computing Nexus, or Jason for short, in a game of chess. Into this very modern picture floats a very old-fashioned problem: the body of a scientist, missing for over a month, found drowned near Magdalen Bridge.

Drowning looks accidental, but Morse is not convinced. When a second victim is found dead at the East Cowley Baths, and then a third at the same place, the pattern is hard to ignore. Morse manages to talk a skeptical Thursday into using the computer itself to narrow down the suspects connected to the second victim, which must count as one of the more forward-thinking moments in 1960s policing. The discovery of another body at a farmhouse owned by one of the suspects puts Morse squarely in the killer's path.

Meanwhile his own career is quietly unravelling. His sergeant's exam papers go astray, and when he confronts Bright he learns his paper was the only one to have mysteriously disappeared.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Ashley Pearce directed. Shaun Evans is Morse, Sara Vickers is Joan Thursday, Roger Allam is DI Fred Thursday. Daniel Attwell plays Mick Mitcham, Katherine Kingsley is Mona Davies, Natalie Grady is Ruth Hargreaves, James Laurenson is Professor George Amory, Tristan Sturrock is Dr Bernard Gould, Gillian Saker is Dr Pat Amory, and Abram Rooney is Dr Clifford Gibbs.

The chess match between a Russian academic and the machine is the episode's set piece, and it wears its Cold War colours lightly. Morse's vanished exam paper, meanwhile, is a lovely piece of office paranoia that threatens his future in a way no corpse can.

A clever meeting of Cold War computing and old-fashioned murder, and the machine is the best detective in it until Morse proves otherwise.