The Settling of the Sun

Morse's third case in the season takes him out of the familiar Oxford of spires and pubs and into the stranger territory of an international summer school, where a death turns out to be less a murder than a ritual of revenge stretching back to the Second World War. Charles Wood wrote this elegant, unsettling hour, and Peter Hammond, a veteran director with a feel for the uncanny, stages it with deliberate strangeness that the series had not quite attempted before.

The detective arrives hoping for a romance rather than a crime. He has resumed contact with Dr Jane Robson, played by Anna Calder-Marshall, and the college setting seems to promise a quiet rekindling away from corpses and crosswords. Instead, in a student's room, he finds a young Japanese man, Yukio Li, arranged in a pose that looks like some ancient rite: bound, gagged, and stabbed, with almost no blood, a detail that tells the pathologist the victim died elsewhere and was positioned afterward. The discovery is shocking enough; what unsettles Morse more is the realisation that the elaborate staging has handed every other person at the summer school a perfect, shared alibi for the time of death, a coincidence too convenient to be accident.

A heroin-traced videocassette addressed to the dead student surfaces, and a second staff member, Graham Daniel, dies as well, but the heart of the puzzle is the web of identities. Morse grows suspicious of a man calling himself Kurt Friedman, a German introduced into the company under convenient circumstances, and of Sir Wilfred Mulryne, played by Robert Stephens with magnificent insouciance. When his superior, Superintendent Dewar, pulls him off the case, Morse does what he always does and keeps digging in defiance of orders and good sense alike.

The truth, when it comes, is quietly chilling. Robson confesses that Friedman is in fact her brother Michael, and Morse deduces that the man found in the room was not Yukio at all but an impostor recruited to play him, while the real student was kidnapped, bound and murdered days earlier. The mutilation of the body was Michael's revenge: his and Jane's father had been tortured in a wartime camp by Yukio's father, a fact Mulryne discloses with careless aristocratic candour. Derek Fowlds gives a fine double performance as the amiable German and the damaged brother, and Amanda Burton's Mirella Lunghi rounds out a cast asked to live inside a story about inherited guilt. Hammond's direction lingers on the empty college rooms, letting the silence carry the weight of what was done there, and Wood's dialogue trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort rather than resolve it neatly. The episode closes on a second body, Michael's, and leaves the viewer with the cold sense that some debts are settled only in blood, across the generations that thought themselves finished with the war.