The Last Enemy

Peter Buckman's script for The Last Enemy is the series at its most conspiratorial, a story in which a severed body in Oxford's canal turns out to be the loose thread on a garment woven in Whitehall. Morse arrives at the water's edge with a toothache and a bad temper, and the case immediately refuses to behave. The clothing on the headless corpse points to Dr David Kerridge, a senior academic supposedly vanished, yet Kerridge is alive and in London, drawn there by the promise of a television appearance that proves to be a cruel falsehood. The dead man, Lewis insists, is someone else entirely, Nicholas Balarat, a Whitehall civil servant and honorary fellow who has been missing for the better part of a week.

The university politics supply the motive. Sir Alexander Reece, the Master of Beaumont College and an old acquaintance of Morse's from their student days, is locked in a bitter contest with Kerridge and the ailing Dr Arthur Drysdale, who faces a terminal illness with a bitterness all his own. Barry Foster gives Reece a magnificent smugness, the self-satisfaction of a man who has always expected the world to deliver; Michael Aldridge makes Drysdale a figure of thwarted fury; and James Grout's Chief Superintendent Strange provides the usual exasperated counterweight from headquarters. The wrangling over the college's highest office is rendered with a sharp eye for academic vanity, and the suspicion that the murdered man may have been a pawn rather than a target lends the early stages a genuine unease.

James Scott directs with a cold, almost procedural clarity, and the story rewards close attention. Morse suspects that the apparent link to Kerridge is a deliberate smokescreen, and his theory points at Reece: having secured Balarat's election to a fellowship, the Master expected the civil servant's backing for a royal commission chair, was denied it, and took a terrible revenge before tipping the body into the water to implicate his rival. When the missing head is recovered and identified, the ballistics suggest two shooters rather than one, and the plot splits open a second time. Reece is himself shot dead in his rooms; Lewis, digging into the tangle of allegiances, learns that Drysdale's wife had run off with Balarat. Morse finally corners Drysdale, who had never gone to Rome at all, and the dying man confesses to both killings — a revenge exacted not for professional slight alone, but for the ruin of his marriage and the betrayal by the man he blamed for it. The episode is a neat demonstration of how Morse's intuitions, wrong as often as right, still carry him further than the neat procedures of his juniors, and the final unmasking lands with the quiet despair the series so often favours.