Did anyone watch Lewis last night?

[leggymambo]

Can someone explain why the farmer killed himself? (or was he murdered too?) it kept me awake for quite a chunk of last night wracking my brains wondering. Am probably being very dense........

oooh - I wondered this when I woke up this morning! Glad I'm not the only one to miss this point - no help then, but a bump for someone less dense?

Thanks sophia, am begininng to wonder if maybe the farmer was just feeling depressed and it was just a coincidence he committed suicide?! But I don't think they should be allowed to use that kind of red herring in the midst of a murder mystery.

Bump

It was fab (and have huge crush on Laurence Fox) but I did rather get lost with the speedy wrap up at the end. Hoping someone on here will explain. Do ITV have an i-player thing? I think I need to watch the last half-hour again. I thought the farmer must have been murdered but who? how? and why?
Why did Scarlett write the letters? & when? & how did they get them into the dead man's house?
Mind you I did guess the murderer v early on (the butler did it )

Didn't the butler kill the farmer as well? They were all covering up for the old aristo for some reason, inc the engaged daughter who was writing teh love letters to make it look like the farmers wife had run off, not been murdered.
Althugh actually now I am not clear why she was murdered either.

Will go and ask DH - he may have been paying more attention. I was getting confused by having Inspector Lynley in there as well pretending to be a cad. Perhaps he was on a covert mission.

Wasn't the lord abusing the farmer's daughter and had also the boy who became the butler, and suggested the possibly of the young Hathaway too. Out of some misguided loyalty the butler killed the girl's mother to cover it up when she had found out (the love letters and photos were planted to suggest she had run off with the historian - key under flower pot, not on body). Presumably the farmer had been told somewhere along the line, maybe when Black had visited previously, and on findng the Pills realised it was true and killed himself. The end was a bit of a blur though !

DH isn't sure about the farmer either. That was definitely blurry.

Hmm, I know I'm stepping out of line with most views but I was rather disappointed - detective drama meets Brideshead right down to the bumping into Diana Quick lookalike. Most of the story line confused and frankly not credible (the arranged marriage because the furriners had bailed them out, yeah right). A butler so servile that he was a cartoon character. All in all plotting of a sub-Midsomer standard..

And yes, Linley only added to the confusion.

Thanks for trying everyone, I understood the bit about the lord of the manor abusing the farmers daughter, butler etc and everyone becoming embroiled in the cover up to save face and protect the old man. Maybe the butler was worried that the farmer had now realised his wife had been murdered all those years ago and would tell the police? so killed him to keep him quiet? Or maybe we should just accept that the butler was clearly unhinged by the abuse and so logic goes out of the window. After all, he was going to kill Lewis, and what good would that have done?

Butler was in love with the aristorat?

did anyone die in the melee in the dark at the end ? Agree it had smacks of Brideshead and surely it wasn't so far out of Oxford that Hathaway would n't have kept even casual tabs on the shenanigans of his love interest.

More than smacks of Brideshead - it was surely deliberate, what with the name of the aristocratic family so nearly being Marchmain and some of the camera shots were def "homages"...

STill bothered about the farmer - the last we saw of him he had discovered pills, but would that be enough to make him shoot himself? Surely he would have assumed the daughter was sleeping with the young chap?

Agree that it was probably deliberate - but they could have done a better class of 'homage'.

Did anyone else not really get what the storyline about the academics was for? There was the art historian man with his painting, and some woman who'd had part of her doctorate stolen by the dead guy - were they all red herrings? Or was it just so they could film some of it in Oxford and remind us that's where we are?

Not the greatest ep imo, and usually I love it. I saw quite a lot of the filming and hoped it would be better than this.

Did the farmer murder the art historian because he thought he had run off with his wife. Led into that idea by the butler who didn't want the art historian unearthing the body of the missing wife? (or maybe not, I'm very about the whole thing). I do love Lewis though

The butler murdered the historian because the historian would have wanted to dig under the monument looking for missing kings ransom and that's where the body of the estate managers wife was hidden (she was murdered by the butler 9 years previously).
But did anyone work out if the estate manager killed himself or was murdered by the butler too? Am still