Twilight of the Gods

Twilight of the Gods, written by Julian Mitchell and directed by Herbert Wise, closes the seventh series on a note of public spectacle and old wounds. The freelance journalist Neville Grimshaw is gunned down beside the Isis while in Oxford to write about Andrew Baydon, the prospective benefactor of a new college, and the same hand soon strikes again during an academic procession: Gwladys Probert, an imperious Welsh opera diva, is cut down by a sniper in full view of Morse and Lewis.

The two shootings prove linked, and the trail runs through Baydon's glittering, ruthless world. Robert Hardy plays the businessman with a grandee's charm that the investigation steadily strips away, for Baydon is a camp survivor from the Nazi era revealed to have served there as a collaborator and guard — a past Grimshaw had been closing in on. Sheila Gish's Probert is all majestic self-regard until the bullet finds her, and Rachel Weisz's Arabella Baydon gives the family a younger, more anxious face. John Bluthal's Victor Ignotas, another camp survivor, becomes the hinge on which the whole mystery turns.

Morse comes to suspect that Baydon ordered Grimshaw's murder, and then realises the second shot was never meant for Probert at all: Ignotas, seeking his own revenge on the collaborator, fired at Baydon and struck the diva by accident. John Gielgud's Lord Hinksey and Alan David's Sir Watkin Davies lend the Oxford establishment its usual, polished opacity. Wise directs with a stately gravity suited to the procession and the college, and the episode resolves into a meditation on vengeance deferred and innocence destroyed by other men's wars. As a season finale it is elegiac and assured, the series at its most deliberately operatic. The procession, with its robes and Latin and ancient rituals, is the perfect Morse backdrop — a world he knows and the killer exploits — and the sniper's bullet cutting through it becomes an attack on the chief inspector's entire idea of order. Baydon's camp past, and the web of survivors and collaborators he imported to England, gives the case a historical weight the usual domestic murder lacks, and Morse's pursuit of the truth about the benefactor becomes a quiet act of justice for the dead of another continent. Weisz's Arabella and Bluthal's Ignotas, the survivor who fired the fatal shot at the wrong target, embody the long reach of that history. Wise frames the college and the river with a melancholy grandeur, and the episode's title — borrowed from Wagner — tells the truth: this is a story of gods already in decline. As a finale it is both a summation and a farewell, the series at its most confident and its most mournful. Gielgud's Lord Hinksey, doddering and amused by the whole affair, is a perfect emblem of an establishment that survives every scandal by refusing to notice it.