The Day of the Devil

The Day of the Devil, scripted by Daniel Boyle and directed by Stephen Whittaker, throws Morse into a manhunt for John Peter Barrie, jailed for rape and given to devil-worship, who escapes from a prison infirmary using a succession of elaborate disguises. The chase is equal parts police procedural and pagan horror, as Barrie taunts the authorities and the calendar moves toward Lammas, the festival of ritual fire on which he has demanded a meeting with his former prison therapist, Dr Esther Martin.

The investigation leans on two contrasting experts: Harriet Walter's Dr Martin, who knew Barrie from the other side of a consulting room, and Richard Griffiths's Canon Humphrey Appleton, an occult scholar whose accounts of the prisoner's state of mind are as theatrical as they are useful. Keith Allen makes Barrie a genuinely unsettling presence — never quite where expected, always performing — and the discovery that his disguises require professional theatrical make-up points to a helper inside the net. Gavin Richards's Steven Trevors, who does odd jobs around an Oxford college, and Gilly Coman's Holly Trevors, whom Barrie abducts and releases, draw the menace toward ordinary domestic lives.

Lewis's visit to an occult bookshop — where a regular customer turns out to be a colleague of Trevors — and the surfacing of Trevors's prints from an older, unsolved crime linked to Barrie, tighten the noose around the wrong man. The climax, on Lammas night, surrounds a circle of worshippers with a ring of fire and burns Trevors alive, at which point Barrie's earlier, intimate connection to his therapist rewrites everything the audience thought it knew. Whittaker gives the hour a nervous, flickering energy, all smoke and ritual, and the episode stands as one of the series' most daring excursions into the outright uncanny. The disguises themselves become a kind of autobiography, each persona Barrie assumes revealing the man he wishes he were, and Morse's frustration at a quarry who keeps changing face gives the manhunt a deliberately unsettling texture. Appleton's occult lectures and Martin's clinical memories pull the investigation in opposite directions — the mystical and the psychiatric — and the truth, when it comes, honours neither and exposes both as theatre. The Lammas fire, encircling the worshippers, is the series' most overtly ritual image, and Whittaker stages it with a creeping, pagan dread that never tips into camp. Trevors, the willing helper, is the tragedy's true victim, burned for a devotion he did not understand, and Barrie's link to his therapist reframes the entire hunt as something far more intimate than a prison break. It is a bold, atmospheric entry, and evidence of how far the series would stretch its form when it chose to. Barrie himself, glimpsed behind each new face, is the series' most theatrical villain, and Allen's performance makes the disguises feel like a confession rather than a disguise.