Quartet

September 1968, and an international It's a Knockout event is the last place anyone expects an assassination. Morse and Thursday arrive to find a dead competitor, supposedly from West Germany, shot by an assassin supposedly from Switzerland. A small boy in the crowd catches a stray bullet. Before anyone can get comfortable with the official story, DeBryn drops a detail that undoes it: the German's dentures appear to have come from East Germany, and the real Swiss competitor is found murdered in his hotel room.

Special Branch sweeps in and takes the case off their hands, but Morse keeps digging into a tangle of espionage, big business and dark secrecy that makes the sporting version of events look silly. Meanwhile Thursday is dealing with something far more local and far harder: trying to protect the wife of a local newsagent from a husband who hurts her. The two tracks could not be more different, and the episode is better for keeping both.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Geoffrey Sax directed. Shaun Evans is DS Endeavour Morse, Roger Allam is DCI Fred Thursday, Lewis Peek is DC George Fancy, and Ian Bartholomew is Albert Mullion. Hector Bateman-Harden plays Steven McLean, Jennifer Tollady is Zoe McLean, Richard Durden is Prof Alexander Richmond, David Reed is Julian Calendar, Mary Roscoe is Elsie Dozier, and Andrew Paul is Joe Dozier.

The espionage material is a nice change of pace, and the show clearly enjoys dressing the game up: foreign identities, dentures from East Germany, a real Swiss competitor dead in his hotel room. Special Branch sweeping in to take over is a reliable source of irritation for Morse, and the episode gets good mileage from his resentment. The Thursday storyline, by contrast, is all quiet dignity, a man trying to hold a family together while the world plays at spies.

A brisk espionage puzzle with a domestic ache underneath it, and Thursday's protective streak gets the better scenes.