Thursday, October 16, 2014

Inspector Lewis - The Lions of Nemea - Episode Review




Murder in Oxford! Panic in the streets!

Well, British panic—which means we’re suitably upset about the whole thing but couldn’t we hush it up quietly?

This Lewis episode brings us back to the heart of England’s deadliest city when Rose Anderson, a graduate in classics, is found stabbed to death alongside a canal.

Lewis and Hathaway are quick to the scene, and have now regained their familiar banter (“Pictures are hung. People are always hanged.” Morse would be proud.) Dr. Hobson is still irritable about the whole situation, but she’s coming around. Chief Superintendent Innocent is hoping Lizzie Maddox will shake up the boys’ routine (I hope so too, but it hasn’t happened so far.) At the moment, she's becoming pals with Innocent, but once again is hindered by the established closeness between Whately and Fox.

Investigation progresses through a series of rather predictable plot twists, and with a solution that only barely hangs together. One revelation, in particular, precisely mirrors one from the pilot episode, way back in 2006. That said, the improbability (something I pardon more in Endeavour than Lewis—though I’m not sure why) is rather lost in the wake of several solid performances during the final unveiling.

The suspects? From the crusty old professor who loves no one but Euripides to parents with a terminally ill child to the damsel in distress and her sleazy astrophysicist husband—we’ve seen all of them before. Notable is Andrea Lowe, playing said damsel in distress. She makes a connection with Hathaway who, gallant but professional, provides a sympathetic ear.

It’s a basic if somewhat unremarkable middle installment. The conclusion is sober, but the impact of some rather good dialogue is muddied by the light-hearted setting of the denouement


Longish

8 comments:

  1. I don't think I followed this one as closely as the first, as I was busy at the time, but from what I did grasp it did seem to follow somewhat predictable (although I had no previous episode/material to base it on, in my head) but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Probably because I had the satisfaction of being right in who did it. ;)

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    1. I thought the climax was really good, if somewhat melodramatic.

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  2. Why did Paul kill Rose. She loaned him $10,000 for his daughter's health problems. I thought the elderly professor was the only one who had a motive to kill Rose.

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  3. Because Rose wanted to kill Felix! She'd already tried once with the car, after all ... and if Felix was dead, then there would be no matching sperm-donor for the IVF.
    So Paul killed Rose, in order to prevent her killing Felix before the IVF "took."

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  4. What did Lewis mean by "it doesn't work like that man" when Hathaway misquotes "mothing has more strength tahn dire necessity"?

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    1. I just saw the episode and was wondering about that too. Maybe Hathaway was referring to the husband murdering two women from what he believed was "necessity." Not sure why Lewis said "it doesn't work like that." Maybe he meant that kind of necessity was no excuse for murder?

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