Wild Justice

An ecumenical conference at St Gerard's College, formerly Catholic and proud of it, is interrupted by the poisoning of a female black American bishop. It is a shocking start, and the killings that follow are stranger still: two more deaths, each mirroring a macabre murder out of Jacobean revenge tragedy. Somebody is staging murders with the taste of a literary scholar, and the obvious target is the election for vice-regent.

The investigation keeps pointing at the candidates, and Lewis and Hathaway do their patient work among them. Then Innocent learns that one of the suspects is hiding a secret dark enough to reframe the whole affair, and the motive turns out to be much more twisted than a simple political struggle. The theatrical murders, it becomes clear, were never really about the election at all.

But the Jacobean references decorate rather than drown the plot. What matters is the poisoning of trust at the heart of the college, an election meant to be about renewal turning into a reckoning with the past. The bishop's death, it turns out, was the first act of a play nobody realised was running.

Colin Dexter and Stephen Churchett wrote it, and Hettie Macdonald directed. Ronald Pickup plays Fr Moreno Mancini, Siân Phillips is Adele Goffe, Pamela Nomvete plays Helen Parsons, Christopher Timothy takes Barry Winter, Daniel Ryan plays Felix Sansome, Amelia Bullmore is Caroline Hope, Sorcha Cusack plays Prof Joanna Pinnock and Amanda Ryan takes Gina Goffe. Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox anchor the investigation, with Rebecca Front's Innocent in the wings.

The Jacobean theme gives the episode a bloody, theatrical edge that suits the college setting. Poisoned wine, staged deaths, old church politics: the show enjoys itself with the material, and the result is one of the more flamboyant mysteries of the run. The reveal, when it comes, is properly dark, and it earns the theatre that surrounds it.