List of Lewis episodes

First ever episode. DI Lewis returns to Oxford after two years' secondment to the British Virgin Islands to recover from his wife's death, and is reluctantly assigned by his new boss, DCS Innocent, to the murder of an Oxford mathematics student who is shot while participating in a sleep study. The key-code used to access the sleep lab is assigned to a fellow maths student, Daniel Griffon, but Daniel's maths tutor has provided him with an alibi. Daniel is a maladjusted young man who will soon inherit his father's automotive empire. He is disruptive and has no respect for his uncle who now heads the company. The future of the company rests however on an impending deal with Japanese investors who insist that family unity is all important at this time. When two other murders occur, Lewis must decipher a cryptic clue left in an old case file by his former boss, Chief Inspector Morse: "Polo wasn't the king".

Other references to Morse are that: on his arrival at London Heathrow Airport, Lewis is nearly run over by a red Jaguar Mark 2 (which at the same time reminds him of his wife Val’s death in a hit-and-run); he knows the word 'bruxism' (tooth-grinding) as he spent "15 years working for a crossword fanatic"; Trudi Griffon knew Morse and says: "He was a man you could talk to". Her daughter Jessica Pollock is being examined for the ‘Endeavour Award’ which had been endowed by an anonymous donor for music that spoke to the soul.

DI Lewis and DS Hathaway investigate the murder of Dean Greely. As the investigation continues, they discover that Greely and three other men had formed a club during their Oxford student days, the Sons of the Twice Born. Today, the men have little contact with one another and initially deny that their club existed. When a second member of the foursome is murdered, it becomes apparent that they have a secret, from 30 years ago, and that someone is out for revenge.

Four disparate characters are linked by their membership of an old student club called the ‘Sons of the Twice Born’, which refers to Dionysus, a hero of Nietzsche:

• Harry Bundrick, who runs a bike shop with his mum
• Sefton Linn, college master and prospective vice-chancellor
• Theodor Platt, last remnant of a wealthy family, failed author and cocaine user. He uses a wheel chair since being involved in a hit-and-run (thus eliciting Lewis’s ire)
• Dean Greely, a failed painter staying in a houseboat.

The group keep their ex-membership of this disreputable club secret, although they each have a gold ring bearing the image of Dionysus.

Greely and Linn are murdered. It transpires that the murders have been masterminded by two women. Tina Daniels used to be a prostitute who recommended her colleague Patsy Worth to Harry Bundrick. Patsy got drunk or drugged with the ‘Sons of the Twice Born’ and they decided to murder her in order to take out her adrenal gland and extract the adrenochrome, which was reputed (by Hunter S. Thompson) to give a very good high. It was Platt who actually carried out the murder. Patsy had a daughter, Anne, whom Tina brought up. Anne trained as a nurse, and got a job nursing Platt. When Platt chokes, Anne saves his life (in Lewis’s presence) when, as Platt tells her, she could have let him die. The couple seem to be reconciled, but in reality Tina and Anne are manipulating the ‘Sons of the Twice Born’ to murder each other:

• First Tina tells Linn that Greely is near death and is planning to come clean, so he must kill him if the secret is to be kept;
• She then poses as a journalist named ‘Fury’ (an allusion to the avenging Furies of classical literature) to goad Platt into shooting Linn;
• However Harry Bundrick is to be spared as he has shown remorse.

This leaves Platt outstanding – and he is the only one who knows where Patsy is buried. Anne therefore telephones him, pretending to be being held hostage and that her abductor will release her only if he tells her where her mother's grave is. He tells her she is buried by the statue of Dionysus in their park. She then reveals the plot and sets their two Belgian Shepherd dogs on him, which tear him to shreds. Patsy’s skeleton is disinterred. She had sent Lewis a cryptic note reading 'His best friends killed him because of a boast', which can be interpreted as meaning that, like Actaeon, he boasted of being a better shot than Diana, and his dogs killed him. Hathaway says: "If Anne sent the riddle, she is guilty of premeditated murder. Doesn't it make her just like Platt? Lewis replies: "Not in my book." Tina and Anne thus stand to face a low penalty, if any, and to become very rich women by inheriting the Platt estate.

A further erudite classical detail is that Dean signs his paintings in Greek. Lewis and Hathaway consult Professor Margaret Gold, who immediately deciphers them as telephone numbers written in Greek numerals.

DI Lewis is less than pleased when he and DS Hathaway are assigned to protect Nicky Turnbull, a former criminal turned successful author. Turnbull had actually cheated two Oxford colleges in his computer scam and had received death threats. Turnbull is everything Lewis dislikes but he grits his teeth and does the job. Turnbull is in Oxford to make a speech at the request of the Oxford Union but things take a serious turn when Jo Gilchrist, a student and a member of Turnbull's reception committee, is found strangled. Gilchrist wrote for a student newspaper and intended to expose a professor's exam scam. When Turnbull is shot in the courtyard of his hotel, Lewis is reunited with his first girlfriend, who became Turnbull's wife, and uncovers that a divorce was forthcoming.

‘Rock and roll hacker’ Nicky Turnbull is invited to speak at the Oxford Union. Lewis and Hathaway are tasked with babysitting him. He is met by a welcoming committee composed of Caroline Morton, president of the Union, Jo Gilchrist, unscrupulous student journalist with ambitions to be a tabloid editor, Stephen Gilchrist, her brother who is a serious scholar, and David Harvey, a rugby player who has had to retire because of an injury.

Turnbull gives his lecture and afterwards treats his audience to champagne in his hotel, which is housed in the converted prison in Oxford Castle. On the way there he is nearly run over by a jeep. Next morning he is shot dead by a sniper while talking to Lewis in the hotel courtyard. Later that day, Jo Gilchrist is found strangled in the hotel room next to Turnbull’s, which had been booked in Lewis’s name. Caroline Morton emerges, having spent the night with Turnbull. She admits that after the speech, she and Jo planned a ‘honey trap’ which would give Jo a juicy story for the press.

Turnbull’s wife Diane, also his agent, comes to identify his body. By an amazing coincidence, she was at school with Lewis and he was indeed her first boyfriend. By another coincidence, David Harvey was at the same public school as Hathaway, and remembers him as the head boy. He tells him is nickname was ‘WC’, short for ‘Wolfgang Christ’, as they couldn’t work out whether he wanted to be Mozart or Jesus. It transpires that during his hacking exploits Turnbull stole large amounts of money from two Oxford colleges, and that as a result David Harvey’s father lost his job and committed suicide. David gave Jo a pistol for her 21st birthday, and on the night of Turnbull’s speech brought bullets for it, hoping she might shoot him. But she refused as she found him “kind of cute”. He therefore, out of revenge, shot him with a rifle.

Chief Superintendent Jack Cornish, an ex-colleague of Robbie's – goes missing and a recently embalmed body is discovered near an isolated farm track. Lewis takes the awkward, young but bright DC Gray under his wing to investigate the case. It transpires that Cornish has gone to ground in a cottage in  [hr], Croatia, where he manufactures crystal meth, which is smuggled into Britain inside bodies being repatriated by Miller’s undertakers. It is convenient that Hathaway is on holiday in nearby Kosovo that week, renovating an orphanage. Lewis relishes asking him to pop over to Split to dig him out, leading to the dialogue: "What’s the time difference?" – "About a century. You know Split is in a different country?" – "Only recently." Peter Faulkner, with whom Lewis had previously had a run-in, had murdered the other members of the gang Johnny Jay (because he objected to his son Liam being involved) and Matt Whitby, and tried to murder Liam’s girlfriend Ruth Wilson in case Liam had told her anything. Cornish walks free as there is no proof. On the way out of the police station he asks Lewis: "A drink for old time’s sake?" – "There isn’t a spoon long enough."

The episode is interspersed with incidents in the culmination of Lewis and Hobson’s love affair: a longing look, her hands on his shoulders, holding hands and finally a passionate kiss in front of Innocent and Hathaway. Lewis has finally got over his wife’s death: at midpoint she asks how he is and he says “Val is slipping away. I’m turning over the page.” She replies “Right!”

Hathaway returns from making the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, and starts work on his first murder case as an inspector with the help of a new partner, DS Lizzie Maddox. As the pair delve into the worlds of neurosurgery, blood sports and animal rights, Hathaway struggles to solve the case; unwilling to delegate responsibility to an increasingly frustrated Maddox, he is overwhelmed by the work involved, and requests help from Innocent, who persuades the now-retired Lewis to come back on a one-year contract (to the annoyance of Laura Hobson, who had hoped for a quieter life with her retired partner). A well-respected neurosurgeon has been shot, and the case becomes still more complicated when his friend and business partner, the co-owner of the hunting estate where the shooting occurred, is also murdered -- apparently with the same weapon, though it was locked away in the police evidence room after the first murder. This second murder victim had been the prime suspect for the first killing, but there's no shortage of other suspects, as the neurosurgeon turns out to have made several enemies through his work, including a complaint of malpractice for a botched operation.

Lewis, Hathaway and Maddox's abilities as a team are severely tested when they investigate the brutal stabbing of an American classics scholar. The bizarre case that follows takes in the cocaine trade, astrophysics and ancient drama.

Classics postgraduate student Rose Anderson is killed while jogging. She had been having an affair with Felix Garwood (whose wife Philippa was her academic supervisor), an astronomy professor, but Felix had recently dumped her; she retaliates by knocking him off his bike in her blue Mini (assembled at BMW’s local Plant Oxford in Cowley). Felix later meets a violent end in his office filled with antique astronomical instruments, including a telescope which had previously belonged to Isaac Newton (filming location was the Tower of the Winds, part of the Radcliffe Observatory).

Meanwhile, questions arise regarding the Classics professor Simon Flaxmore, who had made his name by apparently rediscovering the lost Euripides play Alcmaeon in Corinth (Ἀλκμαίων ὁ διὰ Κορίνθου, 405 BC), which hints at hidden paternity. He seems very concerned to insist that he hardly knew Rose at all and had never spoken to her, but how likely is that, given that she was studying the subject on which he is the college's expert? Hathaway works out that the ‘rediscovered’ play is a fraud as it refers to the ‘two lions of Nemea’, while the constellation of Leo Minor was only so named by Johannes Hevelius in 1687. Research shows that Flaxmore’s fingerprints match those of Linus Cage, who was imprisoned for fraud, released in 1985 and appointed as classics professor on a fabricated CV in 1992. Rose had discovered this and was planning to expose him.

Felix's wife Philippa’s sister, Jennie Brightway, has a daughter Tabitha with Fanconi anaemia, whom Rose tutored. Jennie and her husband Paul, desperate to engender a saviour sibling via In vitro fertilisation, have been struggling to find the money for this expensive procedure, but Rose has donated a large sum to help them. Could they be connected somehow to the murders of their tutor and brother-in-law? Chemical analysis shows that the telescope used to kill Felix had been wiped clean with lens wipes, which points to Jennie’s husband Paul Brightway, who is an optometrist. It was only when they undertook IVF that Paul discovered that Jenny and Felix had had an affair and that Tabitha is Felix’s daughter. Paul killed Felix because he threatened to take Jennie and the children away from him. Felix had also made Rose pregnant.

Lewis and Hathaway are called to investigate a body in some woodland. But realising three more murders are to follow, the team must hurry to catch the killer, before they happen. Hathaway is struggling to cope with his father’s illness, as he begins his search to find out his past before the dementia presented.

Three people are murdered, all members of a spiritual cult, the ‘Companions of Coinherence’. This group revived the ideas of Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings literary discussion group. He taught that it is not only God that can forgive; we can also take another’s guilt on ourselves through the ritual of ‘substitution’. The members of the cult bear a tattoo in the form of a triskelion as used in gothic tracery.

The murders follow the four stages of the alchemical process of the magnum opus:

1. Negredo – black – raven – decomposition: College dean and Tolkien specialist Phil Beskin is lured into the woods on Boars Hill, knocked out, semi-buried and covered with maggots.
2. Albedo – white – moon, purification: After undergoing the substitution ritual Annapurna Kinneson is strangled then tied to a post in the river, so that the water can purify her
3. Citrinitas – yellow – sun, male, enlightenment: After his assistant Gina Doran is lured out of his tattoo parlour, Jay Fennell is killed and covered in a yellow substance
4. Rubedo – red – blood

Carina confesses that eight years ago the four – Phil Beskin, Jay Annapurna and Carina – were larking about, driving home late at night without headlights, and killed Francis Fisher, a practising alchemist. Carina was driving while drunk, but the group escaped punishment. Their doctrine of substitution was their way of coping with their guilt.

Lewis and Hathaway deduce that Sam Langton is in reality Francis Fisher’s younger son John, who is wreaking vengeance. They track him down to a farmhouse near Burford, led there by traces of the local chalk on his shoes. They interrupt him in the process of concocting a red liquid and overpower him before he can drink it. Under Hathaway’s persuasion he tells Carina Beskin, (Phil’s sister, with whom he is in a relationship, and is dressed in red) that he forgives her. She asks what for, and he says “for murdering my father.” Suddenly she realises who he really is and berates him for killing her brother and her friends.

Three ongoing plot lines also develop: (1) Laura is persuading Lewis that he is looking forward to their trip to New Zealand; (2) Moody overcomes his doubts agrees that Hathaway will get on fine while Lewis is away; (3) Hathaway visits his old monastery school after 17 years’ absence, and learns from Father Placid that his father has been talking to him about how to repair the damage caused by his being so distant. Though he had previously angered his sister Nell by leaving all the filial duties to her, Hathaway rings his dad up and asks if he can visit him.

Part of Series 8 in the U.S. Shown in one piece on 14 August 2016.