Dead on Time

Dead on Time, written by Daniel Boyle and directed by John Madden, opens the sixth series by dragging Morse back into a relationship he thought he had put behind him for good. Henry Fallon, a Fellow of an Oxford college, is found shot dead in his own home, and the inquest duly records a suicide — the man was, after all, slowly dying of a degenerative neurological disease and had ample reason to end things on his own terms. It is Susan Fallon, the dead man's widow, who unsettles Morse: she is a former fiancée of his, and the reopening of that old wound gives the case a private ache the chief inspector is at pains to conceal.

What begins as a courtesy to a former love acquires a harder edge as the evidence refuses to fit the suicide verdict. Morse comes to suspect that Fallon was helped to his death, and the circle of those with cause widens to include John Marriat, the dead man's own doctor, who cut short a holiday to insist Fallon could never have held the gun, and Peter Rhodes, Fallon's son-in-law, whose inheritance hinges on the verdict — alongside Murray Stone, a younger man whose claim on Susan's attention may not have been entirely innocent. Joanna David plays Susan with a cool, regretful poise that keeps Morse off balance, while James Walker's Fallon is present only in the accounts of those who resented or pitied him. Madden films the college quads and the quiet house with a restrained melancholy, letting the personal and the procedural move in counterpoint.

The pleasure of the piece is in watching Morse pretend to detachment while plainly not feeling it — a detective who can read a Latin epitaph at a glance is helpless before the woman who once knew him better than he knows himself. The solution, when it arrives, turns on a motive quieter than jealousy and sadder than greed, and the episode closes on one of the series' most humane notes: Morse acknowledging, briefly and without self-pity, that some cases are really about the detective. It is a sombre, beautifully acted beginning to the season, and a reminder of how much of Morse's competence is armour for his own disappointments. The college's instinct is to let the suicide stand, and Morse's superiors are no keener to disturb a prominent Fellow's memory than the institution is; it is Susan's quiet insistence, and Morse's own inability to leave her alone, that keeps the file open. Dominic Keating's Murray Stone, young and sure of himself, makes a plausible rival for Susan's attention and a useful suspect, while Samantha Bond's Helen Marriat supplies a colder, marital motive that the inquiry cannot quite disprove. The episode's real subject is time — the years Morse and Susan have spent apart, and the smaller betrayal of a man dying alone while the living rearrange their alibis. Madden resists any tidy catharsis, closing instead on a handshake that acknowledges everything and changes nothing.