Season 04 Episode 01

It is 1956. Geordie Keating complains that Elvis Presley has spoiled the country's manners, and Sidney Chambers complains of nothing, but the tedium of the Parochial Council, the village fete and the same parishioners is the first thing established about him. They break off to arrest a man named Jim Parsons, who runs, and Sidney chases him down and is told off for taking the risk.

Professor Henry Barkley is hosting a fundraising visit by the American civil rights minister the Reverend Nathaniel Todd, his children Charles and Violet, and Todd's assistant Robert Deveaux. At Barkley's reception Sidney is introduced to Will Davenport, chaplain at Corpus Christi, whom the college dean regards as a liability. Racist demonstrators meet the party outside the church. Inside, a student of Barkley's, Gregory Jones, stands and quotes scripture against intermarriage; fireworks are set off, the congregation panics and runs at a door that is locked, and when the crowd is out Charles Todd is found bleeding from a stab wound to the chest and dies. Threatening letters signed by a society named for Phineas, the biblical figure who killed an intermarrying couple, had preceded the visit. Geordie arrests Jones, who admits he invented the society and wrote the letters to impress women and out of plain racism, but denies the one letter that threatens Violet Todd by name. That night a cross is cut into Violet's bedroom wall and a knife left on her bed. Sidney moves the Todds to the vicarage, and he and Violet sleep together.

Will Davenport walks into the police station with the murder weapon and refuses to name the person who gave it to him, because it was given under the seal of the confessional. Geordie locks him in a cell and sends Sidney to argue the point. Will names Robert Deveaux, who says the knife was slipped into his pocket. Deveaux is then caught out, because the threatening letter spelled colored the American way and the household was the only place the Phineas Society's name was known. He admits the letter and the cross, saying he was trying to frighten the Todds home, and he did not kill Charles.

Sidney remembers Violet telling him that Charles had danced with Barkley's wife, Madhia, at the Barkleys' house on the night the Todds arrived. He taunts Barkley about his jealousy of a young black man dancing with his wife. Barkley attacks him and is beating him when Madhia intervenes and Geordie arrives to arrest him. Barkley stabbed Charles himself in the panic at the church. At the fete Leonard reads an earnest and heavily erotic poem to the parish, and Sidney, called up to give the blessing, sends Violet to the microphone instead so she can speak for herself. The Todds leave the next morning and Geordie finds Sidney drunk in a church pew.

The episode is the point at which the series changes hands, because the new vicar is introduced before he has the job and the old one's last act in the case is a piece of spite in a drawing room. The reception scene is the most contemporary the series has been, with racist demonstrators outside the church and a locked door inside it, and the investigation's false trails run in the order the episode wants them to, from a student's letters to a colleague's knife to the man whose wife danced with the victim.