Masonic Mysteries

Masonic Mysteries is the series at its most playful and most personal, written by Julian Mitchell and directed by a young Danny Boyle. For once Morse is not the hunter but the quarry. His friend Beryl Newsome dies from knife wounds suffered during a rehearsal of The Magic Flute, and Morse, in a characteristic lapse of judgement, handles the murder weapon — placing himself at the very top of his own suspect list. Suspended from duty, he watches DCI Alex Bottomley take command of the inquiry with Lewis seconded to assist the investigation closing in on him.

The framing is elaborate and theatrical. Masonic symbols are scratched into Morse's car, and a cache of his personal belongings turns up in Beryl's flat, pieces in a plot clearly designed to implicate him. The cruelest blow lands when Desmond McNutt — Morse's former chief inspector and mentor — is murdered, his body discovered in Morse's own airing cupboard, seemingly sealing the case against the suspended detective. Ian McDiarmid's Hugo De Vries and Diane Fletcher's Marion Brooke move through the amateur dramatics and the charity where Brooke works; it is Brooke who is De Vries's accomplice and the true killer of Beryl, the lodge politics a smokescreen rather than the cause.

Boyle, years from Trainspotting, directs with real energy, staging the rehearsal-hall chaos and Morse's isolation with a restless camera that keeps the chief inspector off balance. James Grout's Strange supplies the exasperated institutional weight, and Richard Kane's Bottomley works the inquiry by the book. The pleasure is in watching Morse, stripped of authority, work the case from the outside, reviewing old enemies in search of a grudge worth killing for, until the frame collapses and the real killers stand exposed. It is a rare comedy of suspicion, and the resolution restores him with the series' characteristic mixture of relief and residue. Whately's Lewis, seconded to the rival inquiry, walks a careful line between loyalty and duty that the script handles with unusual subtlety, and the sight of Morse handcuffed in his own station is the series' boldest image to that point. Boyle's restless style makes the familiar Oxford locations feel suddenly unsafe, and when the frame finally collapses it does so through the small loyalties of colleagues rather than Morse's genius. Grout's Strange, exasperated as ever, proves unexpectedly useful once the set-up is exposed, and the episode remains a favourite precisely because it turns the whole apparatus of the series against its own hero before letting him win his way back. The amateur dramatics, with their flapping sheets and missed cues, make an unlikely stage for a frame so carefully built, and McDiarmid's De Vries is all plummy menace beneath the amateurs' good cheer. Cuthbertson's McNutt, murdered for what he knew or represented, lends the personal stakes a real weight, and Fletcher's Brooke is chilling precisely because she seems so ordinary, a colleague of Beryl's at the charity rather than a figure of power. Boyle keeps the camera moving even in the quieter rooms, so that safety never quite arrives, and the episode's pleasures are double: the puzzle of who really killed Beryl, and the spectacle of Morse stripped of his badge and forced to solve the one case in which he is the suspect.