The Way Through the Woods

Nothing about the first Morse special looked, on paper, like a gamble. The formula was the formula: two hours of Oxford stone and canal water, a crossword clue, an opera on the stereo, and John Thaw's rumpled chief inspector letting a pint go flat while the truth arranged itself in his head. But The Way Through the Woods arrived in November 1995 after a gap of nearly three years, under a new production regime — Carlton, in association with WGBH Boston — and with Thaw himself now credited among the executive producers. The seventh series had ended in January 1993 with Thaw privately convinced he was done with the role; the specials were the compromise that kept Morse alive without committing him to another full season. It proved a durable one: this film set the annual pattern that would carry the character to his farewell in 2000.

The script, from Russell Lewis, then a young writer whose name would later become inseparable from Morse's world as the deviser of Endeavour, adapts the tenth novel, Colin Dexter's Gold Dagger winner. It opens on a death that is almost an inconvenience: Steven Parnell, a drifter who confessed to a string of murders, is killed in prison before his trial, insisting to the last that he never killed the final victim, Karen Anderson, whose body was never recovered. The original inquiry belonged to DCI Martin Johnson, who had investigated while Morse was on leave, and Johnson wants the file closed. Morse, picking at the gaps, will not let it go. The clue that hooks him is a postcard found among Anderson's effects, showing a stretch of woodland he is certain lies in Wytham Woods, and when bones are at last recovered there, the case he has been pushing onto his superiors turns suddenly, violently real. The remains belong not to Anderson but to James Myton, a lecturer who had been photographing her — and George Daley, the Blenheim estate worker who found her abandoned overnight bag, is soon shot dead in the palace gardens.

John Madden directs with the ease of a man who had learned Morse's rhythms over several films; he would soon leave television behind for cinema, where Shakespeare in Love awaited him. The guest list is one of the specials' strongest. Nicholas Le Prevost is silkily donnish as the bursar Alan Hardinge; Neil Dudgeon, a decade and a half from Midsomer's Barnaby, is the bluff forester Dave Michaels; Malcolm Storry's DCI Johnson carries the wounded pride of a man whose shortcuts are being counted. Best of all, Michelle Fairley — years before Game of Thrones — gives Cathy Michaels a still, watchful menace, and Clare Holman arrives as pathologist Dr Laura Hobson, cool and amused, a presence who would anchor the remaining specials.

The solution is one of the series' boldest. Karen Anderson was never dead. Sheltered under a new identity as Cathy Michaels after killing Myton in self-defence when he tried to rape her, she has spent years inside the life her saviour built for her — and it is she who shot Daley when his attentions curdled into something predatory. Cornered in the woods at the climax, she dies when the shotgun Morse knocks from her hands goes off. The novel ended more gently, its missing woman a Swedish tourist and its violence mostly offstage; the adaptation's harder ending gave Thaw a confrontation as bleak as any in the series, between a killer who is also a victim and a detective who understands her better than she expects.