Inspector Lewis - What Lies Tangled - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode.

The final episode of Inspector Lewis begins with long, loving shots of Oxford landmarks (perhaps a bit longer and more loving than usual?), as a woman reads a philosophical passage of The Brothers Karamazov. Drops of quicksilver plink one by one into a petri dish. Businessman Adam Capstone looks out a window and sips his coffee just before...the...bomb...goes...off. It's a shocking and elegant moment as the shrapnel floats away in slow-motion. The slow-mo does two things: it draws our attention to the passage of time, and grants the murder just a bit more weight than usual.

Inspector Lewis - Magnum Opus - Review

My review of the previous episode: One For Sorrow

It's not often I'm erudite enough to recognize the names or references that flit through your average Lewis episode, but the instant a character in the opening to Magnum Opus referred to Charles Williams, I jumped out of my seat. In fact, Williams’s name had already sprung to mind when the soon-to-be-dead college don Phil Beskin referred to the Bible's injunction to "bear ye one another's burdens."

Phil Beskin, murdered and laid out in a sinister ritual, loved Williams, fashioning an ideology around the late theologian’s ideas. Williams was a treasure trove when it came to occult belief, and the murder itself seems to have something to do with alchemy (the episode alleges there was no connection between the two, but commenter Grevel Lindop assures me otherwise). Lured into the woods by a text message from a student, Gina Doran, Beskin is killed and covered in leaves and maggots in a wooden hut. As Lewis and Hathaway further investigate the case, it appears that Beskin is the first of four killings, each planned to fulfill the steps of an alchemical process known as the magnum opus.

Inspector Lewis - One for Sorrow - Episode Review

 My review of the last season.

[SPOILER ALERT]

The first episode of Inspector Lewis's ninth series, appropriately, begins at an archaeological dig. They're looking for a body in a well, and a body they find, rather newer than expected. This shouldn't really be surprising. After all, this is Oxford! There's a body under every bush.

Lewis, Maddox, and Hobson are quick to the scene, where they banter and wonder where Hathaway's gone on his holidays. Another pilgrimage-not-really-a-pilgrimage? Sort of, but with a goal not religious but familial. He's visiting his father, Philip Hathaway (Nicholas Jones), who lives in a home, struggling with dementia. James, never great with his feelings at the best of times, is completely lost here.