Terminus

November 1971, and the Thursday family has two worries at once. An Oxford don is killed in a violent attack moments after getting off a bus, and word arrives that Sam Thursday has gone AWOL from the army in Northern Ireland. Morse takes the murder on, and the case comes with a nasty personal sting: he was on that bus with the victim, and he was too drunk to remember a single useful detail.

Thursday has had enough. He tells Morse, in the way only Thursday can, to take time off and get help. Morse, being Morse, catches the same bus home instead. It gets trapped in a snowdrift, and the passengers take refuge in a hotel that carries its own dark history: a mass murder, several years earlier, within these very walls. Then the passengers start dying.

Trapped in the closed hotel, going through the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, Morse has to solve the case to survive it, and the episode turns his private struggle into the plot. When the snow thaws and the sun finally breaks through, he agrees to take the time off everyone has been telling him to take.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Kate Saxon directed. Shaun Evans is DS Endeavour Morse, Roger Allam is DCI Fred Thursday, Sean Rigby is DS Jim Strange, Anton Lesser is Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright, and James Bradshaw is Dr Max DeBryn. Adam Ewan plays Les Grant, William Sebag-Montefiore is Professor Patrick Stanton, Anna Burnett is Linda Travers, Adam Mirsky is Richard Blake, and Ray Emmet Brown is John Peckett.

The hotel is a classic locked-room set-up, and the show leans into the tradition, complete with a snowdrift and a body count. Morse's withdrawal symptoms blur the line between detective and patient, and the episode is brave enough to let him be genuinely unwell on screen. The thaw at the end feels like mercy.

A snowbound bottle episode in the best sense, and one of the series' most honest looks at Morse's drinking.