Season 07 Episode 06

Will is working through an apology tour. He tells Bonnie that Maya was a mistake from the start, and Bonnie says she is thinking of leaving Grantchester now that Geordie has moved back in with Cathy, and Will agrees there is little reason for her to stay. He confesses his recent liaisons to Jim Baker, the student who wants to be ordained, and says he intends to abstain from love. He prays over Mrs Chapman as she goes through her cancer treatment, to her visible distaste.

At the Cherry Orchard, Daniel Marlowe is struggling to keep up with the work. Leonard talks to Rosie, a girl of seventeen who needs her birth certificate from her parents' house before a factory will take her on, and offers to go with her, and Daniel reminds him he cannot help everyone. Geordie's domestic happiness is interrupted by the discovery of another dead vagrant, killed in the same way as the previous three and left clean-shaven. The press never knew about the washing and shaving, so the killing is unlikely to be a copyist's work, and Geordie has to consider he arrested the wrong man. DCI Elliot Wallace assures him he did the right thing. Geordie's guilt deepens when he visits Robin Fellows in the asylum and finds that Robin has hanged himself. Robin had been improving under psychiatric treatment, but an orderly had told him about the new killing that day, believing it would prove his innocence, and Robin's last visitor that morning had been Professor Edith Larson.

Geordie and Will visit the professor, who says Robin had asked her to come and had rambled at her. She has an alibi, having been with the master of the college all night, and she suggests for the sake of argument that Robin and the vagrants might all have been better off dead, given their suffering and their inability to adapt to the world, pointing out the Latin motto on her office wall, that what harms often teaches. That motto is written on the slip of paper found on the dead man. When Geordie returns to her office she is on the ground, bleeding, and says he attacked me as she comes round.

Will is at the vicarage, smoking, drinking and playing music while he thinks about Bonnie, and Geordie has told him to tell her how he feels. Jim Baker arrives, having heard Robin is dead, and says he wants to talk. He admits Robin confessed to the murders without being asked, and that he confessed to something he had not done, because Jim committed them. He believed the vagrants could not be helped in this life, so he freed them from it. Robin helped him wash and shave the men but could not go through with the killings, which is why he broke down, and he confessed because he hoped to stop Jim, and Jim could not stop himself. He has his next suffering soul in mind, and it is Will. He stabs him.

Will is missing as Mrs Chapman goes into her final treatment, which frightens her further, but she tells Leonard she is proud of what he has done with the cafe, even as Leonard is ready to leave the business behind, having found a calling in helping homeless people. She wakes from the treatment healthy. Daniel tells Jack that Leonard wants to do other things, a shelter and a soup kitchen, and Jack, who had prayed he would give up his wealth if Mrs Chapman came through, says he will fund it. She returns to prayer and to the belief that it works, having prayed at Will's bedside and thanked God when he woke, since he was helped by a blood donation from Leonard.

Geordie had worked out the truth from the professor, who told him Robin had said he was innocent and that Jim was the murderer, and who had then confronted Jim herself and been attacked for it. Knowing Jim was religious, Geordie went to the vicarage, which Bonnie was just leaving, and Jim had told Will he would kill Bonnie if Will called out to her. Geordie came in as Jim was praying over Will, Will saw him and pushed Jim away, and Geordie took him. As Will was fading while they waited for the ambulance, Geordie told him he could not die, that Bonnie and Ernie needed him, and so did Geordie.

Will wakes in hospital. Bonnie sat with him until he was stable, but she is leaving town that day, against Ernie's wish to stay. Will, barely recovered, goes with Geordie to the station to intercept her, and Geordie takes Ernie for an ice cream while Will tells Bonnie he wants her to stay and to try a relationship, and that he loves her. They kiss. The series ends at their wedding, conducted by the bishop, with Will's mother Amelia and his stepfather St John Gurney-Clifford present, and his half-sister Tamara, who wishes Bonnie luck and then goes off to flirt with the bishop. St John is told by Will's mother that she has never seen her son happier, and Mrs Chapman catches the bouquet and hands it to Daniel. Will and Geordie both make speeches, and afterwards the two of them talk: Geordie says he will be an uncle to Will and Bonnie's children if they have any, and Will tells Geordie he loves him. Geordie, reluctantly, accepts the hug and says the same, calling him son.

The final episode pays off the series-long thread about the man who thought his friend's death would be a mercy, which the audience was invited to agree with a series earlier, by presenting the same argument as a working murderer's justification and having him say it to Will's face. The shaved and washed body is the detail that reopens everything, because the police alone had kept it back, and the professor's motto on the slip of paper is the clue that identifies the man she had just accused. The wedding is the series' last word on what it has been about: a vicar, a detective and a parish that between them lose and find the same people.