Must be fascinating work, pitting your wits against some diabolical villain. The red herrings, the unexpected twists and the final act before the killer is revealed.
The chess episode.
July 1967. Whilst Professor Amory unveils his chess-playing computer JCN and crime novelist Kent Finn signs copies of his latest book, the body of Dr. Nielsen, a member of the computer team, is dragged from the river and some time later a series of drownings is discovered at the local baths.
The pattern of the murders suggests a serial killer with a knowledge of chess moves, and Morse finds a link between one of the victims and another member of Amory's team with a further possible connection to Finn. However, Morse deduces, with some help from JCN, that the culprit is not a random killer but one seeking vengeance on those he believed wronged him in the past.
At the same time, Morse — cheated out of a promotion — feels unable to comfort Thursday and his wife in the light of their daughter Joan leaving home.
This episode contains examples of:
- Added Alliterative Appeal: Max describes a month-old corpse that's been fished out of the river as "as ripe and runny as a rancid Roquefort."
- Always Murder: Body-count, four. Murder victims, four. Dr. Castle, alias Alexander Leyton-Asprey, is going after everyone who ever wronged him — Dr. Neilson had threatened to take him off the JCN project, Miss Porfrey was the family servant who gave evidence against him, Edison Smalls had quarrelled with him and Tessa Knight had insulted him in print. His next intended victim is Dorothea Frazil, but Morse and Thursday catch him before he can kill her. The fact that it really is always murder on this show is lampshaded when Morse and Strange are discussing Miss Porfrey's death, which initially looks like it might be accidental. Which, of course, it is not.Strange: Straightforward accidental, then. Make a nice change for the coroner.
- Ambiguous Situation: Just how, err, friendly are Dorothea Frazil and Kent Finn?Morse: You're friends, then?Kent Finn: Well, a gentleman never tells.Morse: A gentleman would just say "yes", and leave it at that.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Tessa Knight leaves the Oxford Mail for greater things, telling Dorothea Frazil that she's going to be on the front page. She does just that ... when her murder is reported.
- Brand X: The latest in the long list of fictional Oxford colleges that exist in the Morseverse is Lovelace
College; somewhat appropriate, given the computer theme of this episode. - Call-Back: This episode takes place a couple of weeks after the events of "Coda"; Morse experiences a couple of flashbacks to Joan Thursday leaving at the end of that episode, while Fred and Win Thursday are still reeling from that event.Win: You don't have to wrap me in cotton wool, Fred. I won't break.Fred: You're all I've got.
- Call-Forward: When he tells Professor Amory about the discovery of Neilson's body, Morse says that the clothes on the body match the description of what he was "last seen wearing" — thus quoting the title of one of the Morse novels.
- Chekhov's Gun: Chekhov's Computer, in this case. JCN's original purpose was to run a postal address database. Later in the episode Morse and Thursday need to locate an address, and find that the computer can look it up in mere hours, as opposed to the days a manual search would take.
- Chekhov's Skill: Trewlove's knowledge of chess, in evidence early on, proves crucial in determining a link between the deaths of Dr. Nielson, Miss Porfrey and Edison Smalls.
- Creator Cameo: Colin Dexter did not appear in person in this series due to ill health; instead, pictures of him were used to ensure that this Morseverse tradition continued. In this episode, a picture of him can be seen on the wall of Dorothea Frazil's office.
- Cunning Linguist: Morse, it turns out, can speak Russian.
- Foreshadowing: Quite a few allusions to water at the opening of the episode serve as a clear indicator that one or more people will end up dead as a result of drowning. On a series-wide note, the Tarot cards at the end are this for what will happen in the final episode.
- Hard Work Hardly Works: Morse studied hard for his sergeant's exam ... only to be failed because his paper went missing ... and it was the only one that went missing.
- Immoral Journalist: Tessa Knight has shades of this, having stolen Morse's notebook.Morse: There are things which could only have come from my notebook!Dorothea Frazil: Are you accusing Miss Knight of stealing it? Because if you are, I'd like the Mail's lawyers present.Thursday: If I find this chit of yours does have Morse's notebook, I'll have her up before the beak so fast, her feet won't touch the ground!
- Left the Background Music On: Played straight rather than for comedy; the opening music — Satie's Gnossiene, played on a cristal baschet — is being played at a concert that Morse is attending.
- The Lost Lenore: A fairly
squicky example, given that the murderer's lost love was his sister, who likely killed herself to escape his advances. - O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Running Gag about what's in Fred Thursday's sandwiches goes on hiatus as Win hasn't made him a luncheon meat sandwich on a Tuesday ... a sign of how seriously Joan's disappearance has affected her.
- Powers That Be: It's heavily implied that the loss of Morse's sergeant's exam paper was no accident. Bright knows more than he's letting on when he 'suggests' that the still-DC Morse could do better elsewhere...Bright: These past three years, you've made some very powerful enemies. They won't forgive and they won't forget. They mean to dog your steps until the very last hour of your service. And now this. If you want my advice, your best hope of salvaging any kind of career would be to transfer to another constabulary.Morse: Leave Oxford?Bright: Why not? Fresh start. You've no family local. As I understand it, there's nothing to keep you here.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: A few examples of Real Life events crop up in this episode.
- Professor Amory states that JCN was originally designed for "Mr. Benn's six-figure postal-coding system". Anthony Wedgewood Benn was the Postmaster General from 1964 to 1966 in the Wilson government, during which time the Post Office's area codes (which are still appended to correspondence addresses to this day) were introduced.
- Strange is shown watching the tennis (the Wimbledon Ladies' Final, in which Billie-Jean King beat Ann Jones, to be precise) in colour. The first colour broadcasts on British television happened in the summer of 1967, although at the time colour was restricted to The BBC.
- Also, the story Morse is told by Kent Finn about a portrait of a cast of a drowned woman is an actual one. Known as L'inconnue de la Seine, she was a woman found in said river in the late 1880s and presumed to be a suicide since there were no marks of violence. She was never identified, but was seen as the epitome of female beauty; copies of her death-mask did indeed become must-have household objects.
- Red Herring: Kent Finn, and Dr. Gibbs.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Turns out, this is the motive for the murders.
- Shout-Out: A few...
- The "thinking machine" is called the Joint Computing Network, or JCN for short - a nod to IBM, each of the initials being one letter along in the alphabet (if you move the initials the other way, you get HAL). It's programmed in "Forbin-66", which is both a nod to Colossus: The Forbin Project and a play on the real-life computer language Fortran-66.
- The fact that one of the scientists has a small white mouse on his shoulder is a nod to Deep Thought, the computer in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which was created by pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent beings (who look like white mice to humans) in the hope of finding the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. IBM named their Real Life chess-playing computer after it.
- Trewlove's chess knowledge is such that she is able to identify the Russian's opening move as "the Kronsteen Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined". Kronsteen is the chess grand master in From Russia with Love who devises the plan to kill James Bond. In the novel, Kronsteen won his chess match with "a brilliant twist into the Meran Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined, to be debated all over Russia for weeks to come".
- Kent Finn's new novel, Just for Jolly, gets its name from a phrase in one of the letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper.
- The moment when Morse turns on the steam in the cubicle and is thus able to observe the previously-invisible word "Denial" on the mirror (obviously inscribed by a finger) is highly reminiscent of the way in which Miss Froy's surname is found written on the glass of a train window in The Lady Vanishes.
- After a second death at the swimming baths, the receptionist says that nothing like this has happened in the time she's worked there: "In 1959, no one died. In 1960, no one died..." Fortunately Thursday cuts her off before she can reproduce the entire Overly Long Gag from Steve Coogan's "Pool Supervisor" sketch.
- Thursday's "turn it off and on again" line is an allusion to The IT Crowd.
- Shout-Out to Shakespeare: When he says: "What piece of work is man", Kent Finn is quoting from Hamlet.
- Story Arc: Fred and Win dealing with Joan's departure is a running theme of this series.
- Theme Naming: Kent Finn's novels — with titles like Just for Jolly, Jolly Hard Luck and Jolly Deep Water.
- Wicked Cultured: In its own way, the chess motif, and the murderer leaving clues about who his next victim will be.
