The freak accident episode.
Another woman is found murdered on the towpath suffering from bite marks, and Thursday arrests Carl Sturgis despite the lack of evidence. When yet another woman, Petra Cornwell (a student at the all-female Lady Matilda's College) is found dead on the towpath, Morse and Thursday have a public falling-out in front of pathologist Max De Bryn and Strange, making his working as Thursday's bagman untenable.
Morse returns to Jenny Tate, the gifted ESP student, who is haunted by her childhood past and blamed for a fire that killed her family. Meanwhile, Ludo seeks Morse's advice concerning his belief that his wife is seeing another man, and arranges a meeting of all three at a restaurant.
A fatal accident at Lady Matilda's is added by Morse to a number of fatal accidents brought to his attention by Dorothea Frazil. This includes Bright's wife, who is fatally electrocuted in a freak accident at their home. Morse's suggestion that an insurance fraud of buying up life policies (viaticals) and then killing off the insured is behind the accidents is angrily dismissed by Thursday and Bright. Strange, though, takes Morse's claim seriously, leading both sergeants to end up at the house occupied by Carl Sturgis, where they discover that Jenny Tate is being held prisoner.
The episode ends with Morse going back to Venice to confront Ludo, who is found to have been behind the insurance fraud.
This episodes contains examples of:
- Bookends: The episode ends with the shot of Morse in a blood-stained shirt sitting in what appears to be an Italian police interview room that we saw at the start of "Oracle".
- Call-Forward: Lady Matilda's College also appears in the Lewis episode "Old, Unhappy, Far Off Things" in which it is the last Oxford college to go co-educational.
- Continuity Nod: There have been several references to students of Lady Matilda's College as "Matilda-beasts" throughout the show.
- Does Not Like Men: Magdalena Byrne, who is firmly against Lady Matilda's going co-educational due to this.
- Fictional Counterpart: Lady Matilda's College is this to the real-life Oxford college of St Hilda's, which was a women's college (with students nicknamed "Hildabeasts") from its founding in 1893 until it started admitting male students in 2008.
- Headscratchers: A few.
- Why would Ludo arrange those accidents in towns that spell out his name, given the hints that it's an alias?
- How exactly does Morse intend to arrest Ludo in Italy, given that he has not even cleared this course of action with his superiors, let alone the Italian police?
- How does Fred Thursday manage to get a gun across international borders?
- Jurisdiction Friction: Not specifically mentioned, but two British cops going to Italy to arrest two (presumably) Italian citizens for crimes committed in Britain must surely invoke this. Especially given that one of them's armed.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Ludo's entire modus operandi is based on this. For each of the people whose life insurance policies he has bought, he sets up a situation which would probably lead to a fatality that would to all intents and purposes appear to be an accident.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Strange is the only person to take Morse’s theory about the accidents being part of an insurance fraud seriously.
- Shout-Out: A few.
- Jenny tells Morse that as a child playing hide-and-seek, she hid in her aunt's wardrobe which was "full of fur coats" - a nod to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Her sadistic "cousin Kevin", meanwhile, is a nod to Tommy.
- Carl Sturgis's lawyer is a Mr Vholes - who has previously been referred to in the show, in addition to being a namesake of one of the lawyers in Bleak House.
- Morse's description of Fred Thursday as "the best and wisest of men" echoes Dr Watson's comment about Sherlock Holmes after the latter's assumed death at the Reichenbach Falls in "The Adventure of the Final Problem".
- Ludo mentions that Violetta grew up in poverty on "the back streets of Naples", a nod to the Peter Sarstedt song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?".
- Shout-Out to Shakespeare: When Ludo greets Morse at the cemetery, he slightly misquotes a line from the "All the world's a stage" speech from As You Like It.Ludo: We all have our entrances and exits.
- Too Dumb to Live: One of the accident victims, the young woman at Lady Matilda's, dies as a result of climbing a ladder to get a book from a high shelf and then leaning too far from the ladder to reach for the book, falling to the floor (and dying) as a result. She would not have had the accident if she had she climbed down and moved the ladder.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Both Strange and Max are appalled by Thursday and Morse publicly arguing.Strange: That's the face we want to show the world now, is it? Washing out our dirty smalls in front of respected friends and colleagues? God Almighty! What's the matter with you? Well, I hope you're both pleased with yourselves.
