Morse is taken seriously ill at a museum reception and is hospitalized. In the hospital, Supt. Strange, visits Morse to push him to take early retirement, while Dr. Millicent 'Millie' Van Buren gives him her book on a 140 year-old court case known as the Oxford Canal Murders. The case involved the murder and rape of a young woman, Mrs Joanna Franks, traveling by canal boat from Coventry to London. The case resulted in three boatmen being sentenced to death and two of them hanged. Morse starts to read Millie's book and dreams about it. He soon has a number of problems with the case忍不住给五星,太好看了!原著那么优秀,底子太好,只要大方向不改不会差到哪里去!赵薇演的太好了,小菲傻的可爱。里面好多人物都非常有趣,看完再来写长评!我不常看这类型的电视剧,沉溺于古偶,没发现有这么好看的剧种! Why weren't the three men also charged with theft? Why did Mrs Franks take a boat instead of a train that was much faster and comfortable and only slightly more expensive? Why didn't she abandon the boat after she complained about lewd behavior of the crew at the shipping office in Banbury? Why did she then drink and 'socialise' with the crew? What happened to her 'carpet bag' with which she arrived on the boat but which was not mentioned in the court case, nor was it stored in the archives with her, almost empty, trunk? The trunk was marked with initials of her first husband who had died. How did it happen that her shoes were found on the boat but nobody saw her return to the boat from the forest? PC Adrian Kershaw does some brilliant leg work for Morse. He studied history and has invaluable background knowledge. For instance, he mentions that the boatmen had bad reputation because they worked on Sundays and did not attend church. Later a chapel was built for them in Oxford. The dead woman's clothes and the shoes found on the boat are submitted to modern forensic investigation. The result is that the shoes did not belong to the dead woman found in the water because she was much taller.The shoes were never used in the forest. Only Mrs Franks' husband, Charles Franks, was called to identify the body of the dead woman. He claimed that, while her face was darkened and disfigured, he found a birth mark behind her ear. The prosecutor welcomed that information "that only a husband or a lover would know". The accused were not shown the body. The defense attorney merely claimed that the guilt of the three men was not proved. All three accused claimed to the end that they were innocent. One of them was not executed because he embraced Christianity in prison. Morse instructs Kershaw to investigate if Charles Franks benefited from his wife's death and, indeed, he pocketed 300 pounds insurance money. Case closed: Charles Franks murdered a tall women and dropped her in the canal after meeting Joanna in the forest. If Joanna Franks jumped off the boat at the same time as the dead body hit the water, she swam to the bank and joined her husband. The couple changed their names, in the case of 'Charles Franks' a second time after he 'died' as Joanna's first husband. The fourth boatman, a youngster who was not charged, was probably paid by Joanna to give false testimony. Morse travels to Ireland and has a grave of Joanna's first husband exhumed. The coffin contains bags of sand and some stones.
抽丝剥茧的历史探案主线本身很有看头,角色很鲜活:不显山露水的tea boy、morse的俏皮话,和strange的互动笑死,没有尸体但女法医表现依然精彩,唯独女专家塑造得太不真实:面对一大堆loose ends却缺乏逻辑和好奇,就这搞学术?存了一百多年的报纸、婚姻登记、证物,另外印证了PD詹姆斯的一句话:“谋杀是时代的镜子。”结尾略微233但那三条人命。。。对这类题材感兴趣推荐一本关于1811年真实案件的non-fiction《The Maul and the Pear Tree》。字幕小错不断大错一堆。