Uniform

Morse starts this one with two missing persons cases tugging at him at once. A woman has vanished, and he suspects a connection to her past employer, a property developer tied up in the old Blenheim Vale scandal. At the same time an artist has disappeared, one whose work adorns the covers of a series of detective novels. Both cases need him, and he is one man.

Then the day gets properly messy. Reports flood in of smashed and stolen cars, wanton criminal damage, and the fatal beating of a homeless man, all of it the work of a debauched group of university undergraduates on a rampage. The apparent murder of a uniformed officer brings Bright out with all hands on deck. And to cap it off, the cast of the television detective series Jolly For Short are in town filming their final episodes, which is exactly as welcome to Morse and Thursday as you would expect from a pair of working detectives watching actors play at their job.

The shadows of Blenheim Vale keep deepening underneath everything, and an old colleague makes an unexpected return before the episode is out. Nothing here gets an easy rhythm.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Nirpal Bhogal directed. Kevin McNally plays both Kenny and Superintendent Jolliphant, Leo Staar is Richard and DI Chance, and Richard Hope is Ted and Sergeant Wilkins. Todd Bell is Henry Brockhurst, Bill Skinner is Archibald Ormsby-Gore, Jake Kenny-Byrne is Frederick Mulcaster, Roger Allam is DCI Fred Thursday, Caroline O'Neill is Win Thursday, and Shaheen Khan is the Librarian, Miss Hatch.

The Jolly For Short business is the episode's sharpest joke, a detective show filming in a city that has a real detective show going on around it, and the parallel is not lost on Morse. The undergraduates' rampage gives the case its energy, while the Blenheim Vale shadows give it its dread.

When missing persons, vandalism and a television crew converge on the same city, the weight of the investigation becomes a character in its own right.