The Remorseful Day

There was never any chance that the final Morse would be anything but a funeral, and the film knows it from the first frames. The Remorseful Day, adapted by Stephen Churchett from Dexter's last novel, finds the chief inspector a year older and visibly ill. The case that summons him is itself a cold one: Yvonne Harrison, murdered in her bed in a quiet village, was found by her husband Frank, and the investigation stalled until Morse was taken off it. A year on, an anonymous letter suggests that Harry Repp, about to be released from prison, may be the man. Morse, back from sick leave against his doctor's advice, insists on working the case even as the inquiry passes, in effect, to Lewis — who is at last heading a murder investigation, and who cannot quite bring himself to enjoy the promotion.

Jack Gold, an old hand who had directed The Naked Civil Servant, steers the two hours with the gravity of a man filming an ending, and Churchett's script keeps its mysteries decently tangled. Repp is found dead in the boot of a stolen car; Paddy Flynn, the taxi driver who once gave Frank Harrison his alibi, is found dead at the rubbish dump; John Barron, the local handyman with a gift for the ladies, falls from a ladder. The pattern resolves into blackmail: all three men knew who killed Yvonne Harrison, and all three were bleeding the killer dry. The killer, it emerges, is Sandra Harrison — the daughter, a doctor who had been treating Morse himself, and who beat her mother to death in a jealous rage over Barron, using the crutch that was supposed to be her alibi.

The cast is the series' final roll-call. Paul Freeman's Frank Harrison is a study in respectable grief with something held back; Anna Wilson-Jones makes Sandra's composure curdle by degrees; Jesse Birdsall's Barron has the raffish charm of a man who made a profession of it; and T. P. McKenna's Sir Lionel Phelps supplies the last red herring, an old lecher with a name to protect. James Grout's Strange and Clare Holman's Hobson do their final duty, and the series regulars close ranks around a dying man who refuses to stop working.

The ending is the point, and it is handled with more restraint than anyone had a right to expect from a franchise farewell. Morse, on the point of naming the killer, collapses at Exeter College with a heart attack; in hospital, with Strange beside him, he asks that Lewis be thanked, and dies. Lewis, at Heathrow to arrest Sandra as she flees to Canada, takes the call, and when she says Morse will understand, he shouts into the phone that Inspector Morse is dead. The film closes with Wagner's Parsifal over the mortuary, where Lewis says his private goodbye, and a last, foggy pan across Oxford. More than thirteen million viewers watched it, the biggest audience the series ever drew, and the switchboards lit up with people who had spent thirteen years in the company of a man who drank too much, listened to opera, solved the crossword, and died, in the end, doing the only thing he was ever any good at. The title, taken from a Housman poem, had promised the mood: how hopeless under ground falls the remorseful day. The remorse was all on the viewers' side.