'Dalgliesh' Season 1 Continues with "The Black Tower" Parts 1 and 2

As a mystery, The Black Tower is full of plot holes, a disappointment after the first book dramatized in Acorn TV’s Dalgliesh series, Shroud for a Nightingale, which was tightly and deftly plotted. The Black Tower, however, is troubling. The big reveal is a surprise — the genre demands it, after all — but it seems outlandish and hurried. However, The Black Tower compensates with star turns by Stephen Mackintosh and Mirren Mack (who was so outstanding in Acorn TV's The Nest), a fearless dive deep into Adam Dalgliesh’s soul, and an examination of how people with disabilities, advanced age, or illness can be marginalized and underestimated.

My body is my prison and I would be so obedient to the Lord as not to break prison. I will not hasten my death starving or macerating this body.

A panoramic shot that swoops over a rural landscape speckled with gorse, above an imposing Georgian house and an ancient stone structure (The Black Tower of the title) and to the cliffs and sea beyond. The idyllic landscape is broken by a man in a wheelchair being pushed by a figure in a monk’s habit, and they are quarreling violently. At the cliff’s edge, Victor (Darren Swift), alone in his wheelchair, gazes at the sky, the birds, and the sea, before the wheels rapidly turn, and he falls to his death.