Icarus

November 1968, and Morse is back undercover, this time inside a public school where a teacher has vanished. The case lands at Cowley Station only because the local police investigating it were killed in an auto accident, which tells you the kind of luck that follows this job. Morse goes in with WPC Trewlove, and the school's dark and secret world does not stay hidden for long: one of the students turns out to be the son of the gangster Eddie Nero, and the discovery of a former student's body makes Morse start questioning who, if anyone, can be trusted.

Thursday is carrying his own load. Cowley Station faces imminent closure, and he is planning his retirement while trying to prove the role of Cromwell Ames, a West Indian criminal moving on Nero's territory, in a series of unsolved murders. The two threads converge violently. DC Fancy, assigned to follow Ames, is killed in the crossfire of a shootout that also takes Nero, Ames, and members of both gangs. The season ends with Trewlove transferring to the Metropolitan Police and Thursday getting bad news from his brother Charlie.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Gordon Anderson directed. Shaun Evans is DS Endeavour Morse, Roger Allam is DCI Fred Thursday, Dakota Blue Richards is WPC Shirley Trewlove, Anton Lesser is Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright, Lewis Peek is DC George Fancy, and Sean Rigby is DS Jim Strange. Caroline Martin plays Kate Ivory, Aldo Maland is Stanlow, Sam Clemmett is Rackway, and Jojo Macari is Queach.

The school setting is another closed world done properly, all blazers and locked doors and boys who know more than they say. Fancy's death lands harder than most, because the show has spent years making him endearing, and the shootout that takes him is over in seconds, the way these things always are.

A richly plotted finale that balances the criminal investigation against the private anxieties of its senior officers, and it does not let anyone off easy.