Driven to Distraction

Driven to Distraction brings Anthony Minghella back to the series and gives it one of its most unsettling premises: a killer who treats murder as a kind of craft. Jackie Thorn is discovered bound and stabbed in her flat, the precise copy of a killing twenty-seven days earlier, and the assumption is immediate that a single psychotic hand is at work. Morse and Lewis are joined by Sergeant Siobhan Maitland, a specialist in crimes against women, whose presence sharpens the procedural and quietly corrects the chief inspector's blunter instincts.

The link between the victims is mortifyingly mundane: both young women bought their cars from the same garage, and Morse fastens with disproportionate zeal on the owner, Jeremy Boynton. Patrick Malahide makes Boynton a study in smug evasion, loathsome enough to be suspect and plausible enough to be innocent, and the antagonism between him and Morse supplies the episode's sour comedy. Christopher Fulford's Tim Ablett, Jackie's aggrieved boyfriend, is so convinced of Boynton's guilt that he turns on the man himself, while Mary Jo Randle's Maitland grounds the investigation in a professionalism Morse, for all his brilliance, sometimes lacks. Tessa Wojtczak's Angie Howe, Jackie's neighbour who was herself threatened by Boynton and named him regardless, gives the human cost a face.

Sandy Johnson directs with a taut, modern chill, and the case deepens when a third victim is found who survived an almost identical assault some five years before. Yet Morse's certainty about Boynton proves wrong: the garage connection runs deeper, for it was her instructor, Whittaker, who had in fact purchased the vehicle from Boynton's on Lau's behalf, and it is Whittaker who is the killer. Boynton is attacked and hospitalised, and a further murder while he lies incapacitated dismantles Morse's theory entirely. The episode closes not with the chief inspector's vindication but with Whittaker impaled on his own knife in a speeding car — a grim, accidental justice, and a rare Morse story in which the hero's favoured suspect is innocent. Johnson's camerawork lingers on the showrooms and the test drives, transforming ordinary consumer moments into something predatory, and Maitland's professionalism keeps Morse honest when his obsession threatens to become a witch-hunt. The episode's melancholy is that the truth, once assembled, arrives in spite of the chief inspector rather than because of him, and Wood's Jimmy and the surviving witness force the wider world to reckon with how many men noticed nothing and remembered less. It is a story about the violence beneath ordinary transactions, and about how a clever man can be wrong and still certain. The garage, in the end, is less a hunting ground than a coincidence that Morse invested with too much meaning, and the real killer hides in plain sight among the instructors who teach the very women he targets. Fulford's Ablett, grieving and furious, mistakes his own suspicion for proof and takes the law into his hands, a reminder that Morse is not the only man in the story prone to certainty. Randle's Maitland, by contrast, models the patience the case actually requires, and her presence quietly reshapes what the series thinks a good detective looks like. The knife-in-the-car climax is gruesome and almost comic in its abruptness, a justice administered by the killer's own weapon and his own momentum.