Pylon

Early July 1969, and Morse is out of CID, sporting a moustache and policing a lonely country patch in Banbury, the sort of posting that feels like a long goodbye to detective work. Then he follows an escaped horse into a field and finds the body of a missing schoolgirl lying by a power line pylon, and the quiet backwater suddenly matters.

Castle Gate CID takes over, staffed now by Thursday, demoted in the aftermath of George Fancy's death, and an old adversary of Morse's to boot. With Thursday's hands tied by the circumstances, Morse sets himself a course he knows well: prove the innocence of the accused teenager and find the real truth behind the girl's death. The investigation also folds in the separate disappearances of two other girls, with very different outcomes, and the episode keeps all three threads straight while making its larger point about premature certainty.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Johnny Kenton directed. Shaun Evans is Sergeant Endeavour Morse, Sean Rigby is DS Jim Strange, Anton Lesser is Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright, and Simon Harrison is DCI Ronnie Box. Aston McAuley plays Stanley Clemence, Mike Grady is Ernest Croglin, Ava Masters is Ann Kirby, Ed Coleman is Wizard, Fiona Skinner is Karen Kirby, and Khali Best is Mick Haynes.

It is a return to the show's roots in some ways: one small place, a few suspects, a truth nobody wants to face. The moustache, which Morse is clearly not comfortable with, gives the episode its comic relief, and the banished detective routine suits him. The two other missing girls, resolved with very different outcomes, remind you that the show does not promise happy endings, only endings. It is a quieter, more human opener than the series has attempted in a while.

It is an episode about refusing to accept the easy suspect, and about what happens to a force that settles for one.