Previously on Lewis: The Gift of Promise.
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The Impossible Quest
The premiere episode of Series 6 has so many red herrings dangling around it’s basically set in a pond, and at first watching it felt a bit as if, perhaps, one or two might have been better left out, but on second thoughts, no, it’s fine the way it is. It all comes together nicely in the end, which is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable. Hathaway was right—there was no motive, no reason for Alex Falconer to kill Michelle Marber’s son. He did have a hand in all the other murders, but Stevie’s mother will have to live with the realisation that her son wasn’t who she’d convinced herself he was.
While the first victim, Murray Hawes, was obsessed with Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, the resident Miss Marple and Falconer himself are on impossible quests of their own. Michelle is desperate to piece together the last moments of her son’s life, trying to find another explanation than the obvious one. Unable to bear that her son might have been a drug addict and died entirely by accident, wasting all that genius and potential, wasting himself away, she seeks someone to blame, a reason that she can accept, though not understand. Alex Falconer is searching for a cure for his wife’s cancer, using the Doctrine of Signatures—an impossible quest if there ever was one, and lives are destroyed by it, and relationships torn apart.
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