Attention, lovers of Brit mysteries. There's a little slice of heaven in store for you tonight when Chief Inspector "I-never-use-my-given-name" Morse returns at 9 on MPT (Channels 22 and 67).
Morse is in his own peculiar heaven tonight, as the chief inspector has to travel from his native Oxford to Italy -- the birthplace of Morse's beloved opera -- to solve a particularly nasty murder. An Englishwoman at a new-age treatment center in Vicenza was found with a spike driven through her skull. Oh, dear.
Two weeks in sunny Italy at the government's expense is, of course, Detective Sergeant Lewis' own vision of a spike in the head. Morse's working-class assistant only wants to get the job over with so that he can return home to his family and his son's sports day at school.
Morse, to Lewis' constant irritation, wants to visit beer emporiums, gaze on ancient manuscripts in museums and, most of all, witness the comeback of a glamorous opera star in Verona.
Not an irritant has been left unturned in tonight's episode, titled "Death of the Self," as Morse meets up again with a con man he once put away for fraud. Played somewhere between sly and wicked by Michael Kitchen (last seen as Prince Charles in "To Play the King"), the new-age guru pushes all of Morse's buttons. You can feel Morse count to 10 whenever he's in the man's company.
Of course, it wouldn't be Morse without the inspector losing his heart at first sight to an entirely inappropriate woman. Tonight, it's the opera singer who is being treated for her nerves at the new-age center. The emotionally maimed, melancholy Morse get positively all Keats-Wordsworth-Shelley-and-Byroned-out over the operatic damsel who's been distressed.
This is a wonderful two hours of television. The mystery seems particularly intricate, and all the suspects have two or three layers to them.
Lewis does computer runs and file searches with the help of the Italian police. Morse takes in arias and the Italian countryside just as there's a second corpse to deal with.
In all of this death, danger and sleuthing, viewers will see only one spot of blood, and that belongs to Morse himself, as somebody conks him over the head with what one suspects is probably a fine piece of Italian glass -- or, maybe, an ale bottle. There are no guns, rifles, car chases or knives. We don't even see the spike that did the nasty piece of business in the opening frames. The sharpest instruments here are the writers' and actors' wits.
With John Thaw as Morse, Kevin Whately as Lewis and the very same writers and producers who started the series eight seasons ago in Britain, the "Inspector Morse" series has been one of the few constant sources of quality on television.
Now the bad news. There will be two more episodes of Morse airing across the next four Thursday night installments on
"Mystery." After that, there are no more. Thaw says he might make one final Morse, which would air sometime around next Christmas on PBS. But, at this point, it's only a maybe, according to Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of "Mystery!"
My advice: Seize the VCR, set it on record and savor these final episodes of Morse.