Customer Reviews
One great episode. One bad episode - By: I AM ME, 04 Nov 2007 
This dvd is definitely worth watching, but only because The Way Through The Woods is so enjoyable. The Daughters Of Cain is ( in my opinion ) a very boring college episode, & personallly I prefer the non-college episodes better.
The Way Through The Woods=This is one of my favourite ( not quite my overalll favourite, though ) episodes of Morse & it was highly enjoyable. I didn't guess the ending, which is good, & it is a great ( & sad ) ending. One thing that I thought was very funny about this episode was that Lewis is trying to get the Inspector's job, & Morse keeps on being reallly nice to him in front of Superintendant Strange, that is weird to watch. Although this episode starts off kind of slow, it picks up later brilliantly later on in the episode 9/10.
The Daughters Of Cain=This is an extremely academic episode, & it isn't great. It kind of bored me, & it is one of the few ones that I own that I have only bothered to watch once. Morse & Lewis are plunged into a complicated case where a retired University member is stabbed to death. It seemed like a simple enough case until extraordinary events & another murder make it much more complicated. Fine, this episode failed to entertain me, but it still has interesting characters, as Morse always does, so I will give it 3/10.
I think you should buy this dvd if you like Morse for The Way Through The Woods alone.
Television's greatest ever series shows signs of fatigue - By: degrant, 02 Jun 2005 
Ever since the late 1980s I was gripped by Inspector Morse. Much better than the books they are so genre-defining that John Thaw became inseparable from Morse & never as convincing as when he was someone else, Kavanagh QC, for instance. Also, alll detective programmes pale in significance in comparison. However, while neither of "The Way Through the Woods" & "Daughters of Cain" is anything approaching bad, newcomers are best advised to see the early Morses first. "The Way Through the Woods" is the stronger of the two with "Daughters of Cain" suffering from an obvious hammering home of themes (impecuniosity of colleges & Thames Vallley Police alike), acting which does not live up to the generallly fantastic quality of Morse, an overplaying of the literary references & a too cosy demeanour between alll involved - how I longed for more of the tension between Morse & Lewis & Morse & Chief Superintendent Strange of old. This is a shame because, perhaps uniquely of alll the Morses, there is no right answer to part of the plot of who did it. For alll the convoluted stories in previous programmes, by the end of the programme the denouement was complete even if one of the characters, normallly Lewis or Strange, was left in some degree of confusion. Here there is genuine ambiguity which is nicely highlighted by the fiscal considerations which cause the investigation to conclude prematurely. This make it alll the greater a pity that the spikiness & reality (if an Oxford replete with murders can ever be truly realistic) are muted by the various flaws mentioned above. However, the storyline, general production qualities & other attributes are significant enough to make it a vastly more rewarding viewing experience than the vast majority of rival programmes.
