Life Born of Fire

The case starts with a suicide: a young member of a religious sect called The Garden takes her own life. That would be tragedy enough for one episode, but the questions it raises about the group will not stay quiet, and when further murders follow, all connected to the sect, Lewis has a proper investigation on his hands.

The deeper current here is personal. The dead girl was an old friend of Hathaway's, and the case forces him to sit with difficult feelings about his own past, including his sexual history, while Lewis watches from the other side of the desk. The professional relationship strains under the weight of it. The show is usually good at this, letting the mystery share the screen with the cost of the work, and here Hathaway carries most of that cost himself.

But what lingers is the way Hathaway stands at the edge of his own history, trying to decide which parts of it he is willing to look at. The sect itself is drawn without cartoon villainy, ordinary people who found certainty and then found it expensive, and Lewis treats them fairly, which is his habit. The murders give his partner no time to decide, and the case file closes over a friendship that will take far longer to mend.

Colin Dexter and Tom MacRae wrote the episode, and Richard Spence directed. Philip Battley plays Will McEwan, Matthew Marsh is Henry McEwan, Ian McNeice plays Rev King, Rachael Stirling takes Zoë Kenneth, Chiké Okonkwo plays Jonjo Read, Kate Miles is Nova Rose and Bruce Mackinnon appears as Conan Jones. Laurence Fox and Kevin Whately anchor it as Hathaway and Lewis, with Clare Holman's Dr Hobson in support.

The murders get solved, but the episode is honest that some questions do not close with the case file.