The Fisher King

Every so often Midsomer digs up the past, and in "The Fisher King" it digs up a whole graveyard's worth. The case begins with a death thirty years old, discovered at a Celtic burial site, and the stolen ancient artefacts that go with it. Family secrets buried almost as long as the body start surfacing, and each one brings another present-day murder with it. History with a body count, and the title's old legend hangs over the whole investigation like weather.

Barnaby and DS Scott work through the wreckage of a few very old families. The Heartley-Reades sit at the centre of it, David and Miriam, carrying a name that sounds like it comes with a family crest and a family curse. Per Hansen, Anne Heldman, Jane Willows and Vanessa Stone circle the edges, each with their own version of what happened three decades ago. Jim Carter, better known to most viewers as Downton's Mr Carson, plays Nathan Green with a weary authority that suits the part to the ground, and Lynda Bellingham brings her familiar warmth to Jane Willows. It is a gift of an episode for character actors, and they take it.

Isabelle Grey and Caroline Graham wrote the script, Richard Holthouse directed, and the story unfolds less like a sudden outbreak of violence than the final settling of a very old account. Nothing in the present makes sense until the past is explained, and the past takes its time. The script trusts the viewer to hold on through the archaeology, and it is rewarded.

It is one of the darker entries of the series, archaeological in every sense. But the secrets were always going to come out; the only question was what they would cost, and Midsomer's answer, as usual, is that someone pays with their life. Malcolm Tierney's Per Hansen and Diana Kent's Anne Heldman add to the sense of a village carrying a debt it never meant to take on.