ITV’s detective team of Lewis and Hathaway return this autumn for six new episodes of crime drama Lewis.
A year and a half after the conclusion of the previous season – which left Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) focused on his retirement plans and James Hathaway (Laurence Fox) abandoning the Oxfordshire Police for an uncertain future – we find Oxford not quite as we left it.
Hathaway, after a year spent ‘taking a walk’, decided that a policeman’s life was something worth committing to. He’s been fast-tracked through the promotion boards and two months ago, on Innocent’s advice, he took his inspector’s exams in London. He passed with flying colours.
We pick up four weeks into his new career as DI Hathaway of the Oxfordshire Police, and he’s already onto his second sergeant, DS Lizzie Maddox (Angela Griffin), having acrimoniously parted with his first.
It’s still not working. Diligent as ever, always the brilliant detective, Hathaway is too introverted and solipsistic to work as a boss. Maddox, desperate to learn – to help – is getting nowhere. Add to this a severe manpower crisis – plenty of troops, not many veterans – and Innocent (Rebecca Front) has a crisis unfolding. Her solution: Lewis.
> Buy the complete Season 1-7 boxset on Amazon.
Episode 1: ‘Entry Wounds (Part One)’
Friday 10 October 2014, 9pm
Episode 2: ‘Entry Wounds (Part Two)’
Friday 17 October 2014, 9pm
There’s something missing in Lewis’s life. It’s not Hobson’s fault, but retirement plainly doesn’t suit him. So when the call comes from Innocent to take up his badge and rejoin the force, he jumps at the chance.
Meanwhile Hathaway (Laurence Fox) is wading into his first murder mystery – a tricky case that bridges the worlds of neurosurgery, blood sports and animal rights. It started with an arson attack on a hunting lodge, but soon enough Hathaway and DS Maddox (Angela Griffin) have a dead neurosurgeon on their hands. Alastair Stoke (Jonny Phillips) was shot in the head on the farmland he co-owned with his troubled business partner Tom Marston (Aden Gillett), but as Hathaway delves into the network of fear and loathing that surrounds the surgeon, the case begins to careen out of control.
What is Alastair’s glamorous widow Erica (Kara Tointon) hiding, and what is the nature of her relationship with Alastair’s younger rival in the operating theatre, Simon Eastwood (Leo Staar)? Does the original owner of the farmland, Gillian Fernsby (Anna Carteret), harbour homicidal urges? What of her daughter Lorraine (Elizabeth Rider), Alastair’s loyal scrub nurse, and chippy grandson Chris (Michael Peavoy), a porter at the hospital? What plans does student activist Jessica Tallison (Francesca Zoutewelle) have for Alastair and Tom’s failing business empire?
It soon becomes clear that the case has everything to do with Alastair’s failure to save a badly injured teenager, Nabeel Sira, in the operating theatre; but the hospital staff seem to be closing ranks and the boy’s parents Ayesha (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Rizwan (Ace Bhatti) are considering their options – some of them not entirely legal…
What follows is a second murder, an unfolding tragedy, and the unraveling of a long-running hate campaign… But can Innocent’s experiment – throwing Hathaway and Lewis together again – be sufficient to solve the mystery and stop the killings?
Episode 3: ‘The Lions Of Nemea (Part One)’
Friday 24 October 2014, 9pm
Episode 4: ‘The Lions Of Nemea (Part Two)’
Friday 31 October 2014, 9pm
After a difficult start, the Lewis/Hathaway partnership seems to have achieved some semblance of normal. DS Maddox (Angela Griffin) has become integral to the team, and even Hobson (Claire Holman), initially sceptical, seems to be at peace with sharing her supposedly retired partner with Hathaway and the Oxfordshire Police. But the team’s abilities will be sorely tested when the team begin to investigate the brutal murder of an American classics student, Rose Anderson (Alisha Bailey), whose body is hauled from the canal with stab wounds to the neck and abdomen.
Suspicion immediately falls on young astrophysics professor Felix Garwood (John Light), who had recently broken off an affair with Rose and was knocked off his bicycle by his jilted lover in the hours preceding the murder. And Felix happens to be married to Rose’s DPhil supervisor Philippa Garwood (Andrea Lowe) – could the jealous wife have committed murder?
But the more the detectives delve, the more secrets and murky motives they uncover. Rose’s flatmate, Chloe Ilson (Jessica Henwick), is mixed up with the criminal activities of her bouncer boyfriend Harrison Sax (Michael Ryan) – did they kill Rose to keep her quiet?
And then there is Rose’s other life, playing private tutor to Philippa’s anemic ten-year-old niece Tabitha Brightway (Kitty Rich). When it turns out that Tabitha’s parents, Jennie (Sian Brooke) and Paul (Jason Done), have used Rose’s money to pay for their latest attempt to create a ‘saviour sibling’ to remedy Tabitha’s rare genetic disorder, Lewis, Hathaway and Maddox start to question their motivation.
The case soon takes a classical turn when it transpires out that respected don Simon Flaxmore (Clive Merrison) – Philippa’s mentor and he reason Rose came to study at the college in the first place – might be hiding dark secrets of his own. Deep in Rose’s work is a revelation that threatens Simon’s career. When a second murder takes place, the detectives realise they might very well be the chorus in an unfolding Greek tragedy… Desperate for answers, Hathaway finds himself turning to one of his chief suspects for guidance.
Episode 5: ‘Beyond Good and Evil (Part One’)
Friday 7 November 2014, 9pm
Episode 6: ‘Beyond Good and Evil (Part Two’)
Friday 14 November 2014, 9pm
In 2001, in one of his first great successes as a newly fledged Detective Inspector, Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) arrested slater Graham Lawrie (Alec Newman) for the brutal murder of three police officers. The murders ceased; Lawrie was given a whole life sentence and, diagnosed with psychopathy during the trial, was incarcerated in a secure psychiatric hospital. It felt like the nightmare was over.
But thirteen years later the prosecution’s case is falling apart. The forensics laboratory that processed the DNA used to convict Lawrie has had its practice called into question and an appeal has been launched. Lewis fears the worst – but nothing can prepare him for the resumption of the original murders. While Lawrie remains locked up, awaiting his big day in court, PC Mark Travis (Gruffudd Glyn) is lured to an isolated location by a hoax call and takes a slater’s hammer to the back of his skull. Forensics reveal the murder weapon is the same hammer as was used thirteen years ago.
A rogues’ gallery of suspects make themselves known: Dr Sally Rook (Susan Wooldridge), the woman who diagnosed Lawrie all those years ago and has never let go; Dr Brendan Ward (Tom Davy), a philosophy don feeding Lawrie’s unhealthy interest in Nietzsche; Douglas Wilkins (Richie Campbell), a psychotic nurse at Thamesmarsh Hospital; spinster Pamela Carson (Robin Weaver), Lawrie’s greatest defender; Katherine Warwick (Priyanga Burford), the self-serving solicitor; and Hugo Blayne (Paul Lacoux), tabloid hack and Lawrie’s ghost writer. Any one of them could be Lawrie’s accomplice.
But as Hathaway and Maddox investigate the murder of Travis, they discover that the trail leads back to Lewis’s original case – could his mentor have put away an innocent man? The two younger detectives race to prevent another murder, and Lewis finds himself isolated and alone, his reputation in jeopardy.
> Buy the complete Season 1-7 boxset on Amazon.
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