Title: The Great and the Good
Directed by: Stuart Orme
Written by: Paul Rutman
Air Date: March 16, 2008
Previous: Life Born of Fire
Next: Allegory of Love
Guest Starring: Laura Rees, Jason Watkins, Tim Dutton
"The Great and the Good" is the fourth and last episode of the second season of Lewis, aka Inspector Lewis in the United States.
A teenaged girl, Beatrice Donnelly, is drugged and raped in a field outside of Oxford. When a dazed Beatrice wanders back home on foot, her parents rush her to the emergency room—the same ER that DI Robbie Lewis and DS James Hathaway are at after Lewis wrenched his back while the two of them were playing squash. Lewis and Hathaway, homicide detectives, take on the rape case on their own initiative and quickly find their way to Oswald Cooper, the AV/IT guy at Beatrice's high school. Cooper knew Beatrice and had a prescription for the sedative used to drug her. However, he has alibis from not one, not two, but three big-wigs:
- Lord Danny Adebayou, a construction magnate who is looking to build an entirely new "green city."
- Gavin Matthews, a right-wing radio talk show host.
- Simon Ashton, a former British diplomat who has come home to Oxford to look after his wife, who has Parkinson's.
All three confirm that they were having dinner with Cooper at his place at the time of the attack. Lewis and Hathaway are surprised to find that a lowly computer tech has such high-society friends, but it turns out they all knew each other when they were students at Oxford. Since the Donnelly case is a rape case, and not murder, Lewis and Hathaway are told they must give it up. Before they do, they get DNA results indicating that Cooper was in fact the rapist. Then they get the case back when Cooper is murdered. Beatrice Donnelly's father Kieran confesses, and is arrested, but when the Lewis Never One Murder rule kicks in, the detectives realize that Kieran Donnelly isn't their man.
Tropes:
- Awful Wedded Life: Mr. and Mrs. Matthews can't stand each other. Eventually Gavin Matthews confirms that his wife is a Gold Digger who cares little for him and doesn't even really care that he repeatedly cheats on her.
- Call-Back: When Hathaway calls Lord Adebayou "sir", Adebayou's bitchy secretary says that Hathaway should call him "your lordship." Near the end of the episode, when the detectives are arresting Adebayou for financial fraud, Hathaway makes a point of calling him "your lordship."
- Creator Cameo: One of several cameos by Colin Dexter, who wrote the inspector Morse novels that inspired Lewis. Here he's seen chatting with CS Innocent at the art exhibit cocktail party.
- Curse Cut Short: Matthews the obnoxious right-wing radio host is having an increasingly angry conversation with a caller. Finally the caller says "Why don't you just f—", and it's at that point that the radio show producer cuts the call.
- Da Chief: CS Innocent has a habit of getting upset when Lewis and Hathaway antagonize VIPs. After the detectives drag Adebayou, Matthews, and Ashton out of the cocktail party for a hostile interrogation, Innocent comes storming in and demands that Lewis let them all go. She says that Oxford is no place for such "chippy copper antics", which enrages Lewis, who later wonders why important Oxford people have to be treated with kid gloves.
- Danger Takes a Backseat: Frank Sporetti, the shifty character who knew Cooper and knows his secrets, parks in the fields out of town near where Beatrice was raped—and an unseen person in the backseat leaps up and strangles him to death.
- Dies Wide Open: A closeup of Frank Sporetti's face, with wide, staring eyes, after Sporetti was garroted to death in his car.
- Gilligan Cut: Lewis has to get a new orthopedic mattress after he strains his back. That leaves the problem of what to do with the old mattress. Hathaway suggests dumping it in a local dumpster, which happens to be illegal. Lewis says they couldn't possibly do that: "We're police officers man!" Cut to Lewis and Hathaway, hurriedly driving up to the dumpster in the middle of the night and dumping the mattress.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: It turns out that Kieran Donnelly isn't Brenda's father after all. Her real father is Simon Ashton, who had a fling with Brenda's mother Magda when they were both students.
- Never One Murder: An iron rule of Lewis. Frank Sporetti is garroted to death for knowing many of the same secrets that Cooper did.
- Papa Wolf: Both of Beatrice's fathers. Her biological father Simon Ashton kills her rapist and a blackmailer to avenge and protect her. The father who raised her, Kieran Donnelly, nearly takes the blame out of guilt for failing to protect her that once and later attacks the other man when he thinks he's a threat.
- Sequel Hook: Another reference to the ongoing, unsolved death of Valerie Lewis, killed in a hit-and-run. Shortly before he died Cooper sent Lewis a newspaper clipping about Valerie's death, implying that he knows something. At the end of the episode Lewis is frantically scouring the papers and photos in Cooper's lair, looking for evidence. Hathaway finds him, and after telling him there can't be anything there as the cops have already gone over the room, he joins Lewis in digging.
- Shout-Out: Ashton's alibi for Cooper's murder is that he was home watching You've Got Mail with his wife.
- Slipping a Mickey: How Cooper drugged and raped Beatrice, by luring her to a rendezvous in the meadow by pretending to be her father, then leaving an open bottle of champagne, drugged, with a note for her to drink.
- This Is What the Building Will Look Like: Adebayou has an entire table devoted to a small-scale model of what his "green city" will look like. It turns out that he's been committing fraud, pretending to have fictional investors in order to attract other investors to his project.
