'Dalgliesh's Season 1 Finale Serves "A Taste for Death" Parts 1 and 2

Following the bizarre and illogical "The Black Tower," the final installment of Acorn-TV’s Dalgliesh, A Taste for Death, mostly delivers, pulling together Dalgliesh’s great loss, his poetry, and his skills as a detective. "A Taste for Death" is set in the infamous Winter of Discontent of 1978 – 1979, when labor disputes hastened the rise of Margaret Thatcher. London is littered with uncollected trash bags; poverty and hardship are all too obvious. In the opening sequence, a man gazes at Regent’s Canal for a little too long, rather as Dalgliesh hesitated on the cliff’s edge before he turns away to unlock the door of a huge, empty church and go inside.

We flirt with death, don’t we. Fool ourselves into believing it’s a choice dressed in black, call it an event, an experience, a release. It’s not oblivion, an absence, it’s not even that. It defies words because all our words need life itself to give them meaning.

The next day, the elderly Miss Wharton (Tilly Vosburgh) and her self-appointed shadow Darren (Sami Amber), a boy who should definitely be at school, unlock the door and enter the church, and Miss Wharton calls out for Fr. Barnes (Jim Morton). After giving Darren a coin for the collection box, she opens a door and screams. Dalgliesh still has his sergeant Charles Masterson, who cuts corners, lies, and is now threatened by the new hire, none other than Sgt. Kate Miskin, from Dorset. She’s his worst nightmare — calm, disciplined, a woman, and Black. She gently interviews the two witnesses, who are in shock from finding the corpses of two men lying in pools of blood. There are ashes in the grate; the murder weapon is a straight razor that was kept in an adjoining bathroom.