Promised Land

Promised Land, written by Julian Mitchell and directed by John Madden, is the rare Morse story that leaves Oxford entirely. A criminal named Peter Matthews has died of AIDS in prison, prompting an inquiry into the case that convicted him, and Morse comes to suspect that Kenny Stone, the informant who helped seal the verdict, withheld part of the story. Stone has been relocated to Australia under a new name, and Morse and Lewis fly out to firm up the evidence and head off the possible release of other members of Matthews's Oxford gang.

What they find down under is resistance. Stone, now calling himself Mike Harding, has vanished; his mother-in-law's care-home room has been turned over and she is in hospital; and his wife Anne wants nothing to do with the two English policemen. Noah Taylor's Dave Harding and Rhondda Findleton's Anne Harding give the relocated family a wary, sunbleached wariness, and the outback setting — so foreign to a series built on Oxford stone — throws the partnership into relief. Con O'Neill's Paul Matthews, Peter's younger brother and a later, violent presence in the case, haunts the inquiry from afar.

Madden, later of Shakespeare in Love, directs with an open, unfamiliar light, and the Australian locations let the episode breathe in a way the cramped Cotswold interiors rarely do. Lewis, the Geordie sergeant, is curiously more at home abroad than Morse expects, while Morse himself seems unmoored without his usual referents — a nice inversion of the usual English-abroad comedy. Max Phipps's DI Glenn McAllister represents the local law, sceptical of the visitors. The case becomes a meditation on witness protection and the long half-life of a lie told to put a villain away, and on whether the promised land of a new identity is ever truly safe. It is a bold, expansive close to the series, and proof that Morse could survive, briefly, without Oxford. The inquiry into Matthews's conviction forces Morse to weigh the cleanliness of a result against the honesty of how it was obtained, and the Australian police — Phipps's McAllister chief among them — have little patience for Englishmen reopening what they consider closed. The outback and the care homes, the relocations and the ransacked rooms, all testify to how fragile a new life built on a lie can be. Madden frames the distance beautifully, the vast skies making Morse's Oxford certainties look parochial, and Lewis's ease abroad quietly rebukes his boss's unease. The case resolves without the tidy English satisfaction Morse prefers, leaving the question of whether justice was served or merely administered — a fittingly open note on which to send the series abroad, and a reminder that some promised lands are only ever temporary. Morse, stranded far from his beloved Oxford, concedes more than once that the case might have been cleaner at home, yet the honesty of the dead man's silence stays with him.