Title: Expiation
Directed by: Dan Reed
Written by: Guy Andrews
Air Date: March 4, 2007
Previous: Old School Ties
Next: And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea
Guest Starring: James Wilby, Vincent Regan, Lucy Robinson, John Wood, Emma Croft, Pip Torrens
"Expiation" is the fourth and last episode of the first season of Lewis, aka Inspector Lewis in the United States.
Rachel and Hugh Mallory pack off their two daughters to the car pool for school. The kids are being driven by David and Louise Hayward, close friends of the Mallorys; David and Hugh are partners in an optometry business. Not long after Hugh leaves for work an odd woman, later to be identified as Jane Templeton, confronts Rachel Mallory at Rachel's home. Jane says "You've been expecting me since you were nine years old."
Jane shows up at the Mallory-Hayward optometry shop, where, as it happens, DS James Hathaway is getting fitted for contacts. Jane confronts Hugh and says "You know," but when Hugh says he has no idea what she's talking about, she stalks out. Eventually Hugh comes home from work and engages in some chit chat with his neighbor, Stephanie. Together they enter the Mallory home and find Rachel—dead! Hanging from the second floor banister!
When the temporary pathologist filling in for Dr. Hobson writes Rachel's death off as suicide, Chief Innocent orders Lewis to close the case. But Lewis doesn't agree, and sure enough, Dr. Hobson upon her return reveals that the temp was wrong and it's a case of murder. Lewis and Hathaway investigate and find some extremely odd things about the Mallorys and the Haywards. Like how Hugh used to be married to Louise, and David to Rachel, before the couples swapped partners. There's also an Oxford don, Dr. Edward Le Plassiter, who tells the detectives an even more shocking secret about Rachel Mallory's past.
Tropes:
- Anguished Declaration of Love: Eventually the detectives discover that Bella, the secretary at the clinic, simply lied about Hugh staying in the office all day. When Lewis confronts her, Bella sobs that she loves Hugh, she couldn't stand Rachel, she's glad she could help Hugh, and she doesn't care that her silence led to a second murder.
- Answer Cut: Lewis and Hathaway are at the optometry clinic when Lewis's cell phone beeps. He complains "Who's trying to contact me now?" Cut to Lewis and Hathaway on the campus of Oxford as Lewis talks about Edward Le Plassiter, the Oxford don who's summoned them.
- Artistic License – Law: Rachel aka Alison Bright is said to have killed her little brother when she was nine. In Britain the age of "criminal responsibility" is ten and consequently Alison should not have had to face any legal consequence, not even a government worker shadowing her for years.
- Blunt "Yes": Lewis is quizzing Caroline Croft, the shrink, about David Hayward. When she says "Are you seriously asking me if David was capable of murder?", Lewis simply says "Yes."
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Lampshaded. Dr. Hobson, back from vacation, is agitated by the temp having evaluated Rachel's death as a suicide when it was actually murder. She waves around a cigarette, and says she doesn't even smoke.Dr. Hobson: It's merely an indicator of stress. If I light the cigarette, you'll know I'm about to scream.
- Creator Cameo: Another instance of Colin Dexter, the author of the Inspector Morse novels that inspired Lewis, getting a cameo as an Oxford don.
- Da Chief: Another example of CS Innocent filling this role. She initially leans hard on Lewis to close the Mallory case as a suicide, then tries to forbid him from employing Hathaway on the case. Even at the end, after Lewis and Hathaway have caught Hugh, Innocent is berating them for intimidating Stephanie's son and nearly botching the arrest, and threatening to bust Hathaway down to beat cop.
- Double Don't Know: Lewis gets confrontational, demanding from Louise why Rachel might have killed herself. Louise says "I don't know," sobs, and then repeats "I don't know!"
- Eye Open: Hathaway is introduced trying and failing to put some unsatisfactory contacts into his eye. He winds up going to Hugh Mallory for an eye exam.
- Foreshadowing: When Dr. Hobson confirms Lewis's hunch that the Rachel Mallory "suicide" was actually a murder, a delighted Lewis says "Doctor, you bring me all this because you secretly love me." This is an early hint of the Lewis-Hobson romance that will be developed much later on in the series.
- Grammar Nazi: A snooty Oxford professor reads the newspaper headline about how Rachel Mallory was "found hung." His reaction: "Hung. One despairs."
- Mistaken for Gay: The detectives go to the school where the Mallory and Hayward families send their kids. The headmaster, Malcolm Croft, mistakes them for a gay couple looking to enroll their child.
- Never Suicide:
- The pathologist concludes that Rachel hanged herself, but Lewis doesn't buy it, observing among other things that Rachel didn't leave a note and didn't take off her ring, two things usually typical of female suicides. Of course he's right, as Dr. Hobson confirms.
- Jane Templeton's death is made to look like she gassed herself with exhaust fumes from her car, but Dr. Hobson proves that she was smothered by a pillow before she was put into the garage by her killer.
- Porn Stash: Malcolm, the headmaster at the school, is oddly jittery at the prospect of Lewis and Hathaway going through his files, and later Lewis catches him taking a suspicious trash bag out to his car. Is he the killer? Nope, he's just trying to get rid of a large stash of pornographic magazines that he had hidden in his office.
- The Shrink: Caroline Croft, Malcolm Croft's wife and the therapist at the school.
- Shrunken Head: A dying Le Plassiter makes a cryptic reference to "head shrink" and the detectives initially think it's a reference to The Shrink, Caroline Croft the psychiatrist. Nope, it's a reference to literal shrunken heads at the science museum. Rachel Mallory liked to go there and look at them, and that's where Hugh takes his daughters at the climax.
- Stepford Smiler: Rachel is a loving mother, happily married, and is constantly helping charities and taking on charity cases. She surrounds herself with goodness because she needs to constantly remind herself that people are not dolls that can be taken apart and sewn back together, like she tried to do to her little brother.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: In the backstory, and about as troubling as it gets. Eventually it's revealed that Rachel, at the age of nine, cut her infant brother's hands off with scissors because the baby kept scratching his face. That's the secret that Jane Templeton knew, and why she kept lurking around: she was a government worker specifically tasked with keeping a watch on Rachel.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Edward Le Plassiter, the Oxford professor who knows a secret about Rachel, is dying of cancer. He demands that Lewis and Hathaway go off on a side mission to find a young student named Stoker that Le Plassiter once wronged. Hathaway and Lewis have to do it, because they have no other leverage to get a dying Le Plassiter to tell what he knows.
