Did you crack the killer clue to solve the Morse code mystery?

The clue was in the name. like the cryptic solution to one of Morse’s fiendish crosswords, the key to unlocking the best series yet of Endeavour (iTV) has been dangling right in front of our faces.

While an embittered Fred Thursday seemed intent on ploughing his career and his marriage into the ground, and dogged Jim Strange was obsessed with finding the gang that murdered young copper George Fancy, Detective Sergeant Morse has been busy becoming the character we first knew from the John Thaw era in the eighties.

The short temper, the inability to hold his tongue, the contempt for authority — all the flaws that held him back, yet made him the detective he was, have emerged this year.

it appeared to be his boss, bent Dci Ronnie Box, who was shaping Morse’s mistrust of his superiors. But in a climactic shoot-out, with the good guys facing the villains like cowboys in a frontier town, DS Jago (Richard Riddell) emerged as the real villain.

That’s Jago, as in iago the traitor of Othello — which is not only a Shakespeare play, but an opera by Verdi, one that has featured in the endeavour soundtrack. What a hidden clue ... you might almost call it Morse code.

This episode, the last in a batch that has never been less than brilliant, opened with a grimly spectacular sequence. it was all the more shocking for the way it left the worst to our imaginations.

Morse was called to a disturbance at a newly built tower block, where residents were panicked by strange rumblings. as he arrived, part of the building collapsed in a deafening thunder of rubble.

Rather than showing a sensational collage of screaming and horror, the screen blacked out and left us with our ears singing until the sound of sirens faded in.

Superintendent Bright (anton lesser), a man who has suffered a catalogue of humiliations and tragedies this year, was seen in an unfamiliar heroic light as he directed the rescuers.

inspector Thursday ( Roger allam) touched bottom before redeeming himself — and earning promotion. For one terrible moment it looked like he had decided to end it all, after getting maudlin drunk and leaving a note for his wife. Then he rode to the rescue in his battered black Ford Zephyr. he’ll surely be back for the next series.

The clues are ever ingenious, the interwoven mysteries gripping, but it’s gruff old Fred who is the show’s beating heart.

a beating heart was the one thing archaeologists couldn’t uncover in Ice Age: Return Of The Mammoth (c4) as they went in search of prehistoric animals preserved in the Siberian permafrost.

Though the Russian ivory hunters leading the hunt were excavating the ancient landscape with high-pressure hoses, which is like looking for easter eggs with a mallet, they revealed some incredibly undamaged remains. The legs of a bull mammoth, which apparently got stuck in freezing mud 30,000 years ago and was mauled to death by wolves, might yield enough DNa to enable scientists to recreate the species.

That’s mind-boggling enough, but the find that really made me gape was the cave-lion cub. This Siberian big cat, extinct for 8,000 years, was a bigger cousin of today’s african lion, but the baby was no bigger than a modern moggie. its teeth, its claws, even its whiskers and tongue were still perfectly intact — protected by millennia in the frozen ground.

Never mind sampling its DNa, this thing looked like a competent vet might be able to revive it.