What could have been a disaster or an insult—bringing Kevin Whately’s Robbie Lewis back to Oxford after the death of John Thaw’s Inspector Morse—turns out instead to be one of the most satisfying two-hour Mystery!s in years. Lewis, whose wife died in a senseless auto accident, is said to have spent two years in the British Virgin Islands. He returns wearing one of those fruit-drink shirts sure to blackball him from High Table for the rest of the century. And Whately has grown a face as sad and lonely as Thaw’s, a sort of sand castle of ruined intelligence appropriate to a case involving Sleep Labs and insomnia, Hamlet and mathematics, trumpets and theology, incest and a Heisenberg-uncertainty joke.
Channel 13, July 30, 9 P.M.