Viewers seemed to agree. Morse's return to the small screen drew an audience of 16.5 million, a whopping 65% of the available British audience at the time. The two actors, reunited, were clearly delighted to be back in harness once again. They were helped by a spellbinding story and some sparkling dialogue: In once scene, with Sergeant Lewis still pushing for his long-delayed promotion, the young man loses his temper for once with Morse and calls him "a miserable, self-centered, arrogant bastard." Morse was certainly back with a bang.

Four more Morse mysteries followed in the next four years. These resulted in yet two more acheivements for John; for in May 2001 he was awarded the Radio Times reader-voted Lew Grade Award for the Inspector Morse series, and a Lifetime Acheivement Fellowship Award from the Royal Academy of Drama and Acting. Both well-deserved awards were presented to John by his old friend, Sir Tom Courtney. John was at the peak of his career and this night was an emotional one for him. It was an honor John clearly cherished.

In the last two episodes viewers noticed a new direction the series was taking as Chief Inspector Morse began facing his own mortality. In one episode, after suffering chest pains and being hospitalized, it was discovered that Morse had become a diabetic; a lifteime of smoking, liberal drinking, and constant overwork were catching up with him. He was encouraged by Lewis and Strange that it his body's way of telling him he should retire. Lamenting his own lack of advancement, Lewis states, "I'll be made Inspector yet if there's any justice in this world." To this Morse replies, facing his own forced retirement, "I'm not sure there is, Lewis, or else there'd be one last case for Morse." Morse eventually decides against retirement as he had no other life outside of the force and no family ties for him to enjoy; he recoiled at the prospect of being "fobbed off by a gold watch only to grow old, waiting to die in bed." It was not the way he wanted to go out.

The truth was that it was a decison mutually arrived at by both Thaw and author Colin Dexter. When it came to film the ending, the cast and crew said although they were in tears, they felt it was time for the end. "Producer Chris Burt phoned to tell me that in Colin's next book Morse would die," said Thaw. "I was pleased in a way because it took away the responsibility of deciding if I, as an actor, should do Morse again and again. I didn't want the television Morse to end like Frank Sinatra, doing an endless series of farewell concerts." After 13 full-length novels, more than a dozen short stories, and 32 television screenplays in the span of 15 years, Dexter felt he had taken the character as far as it could go and that Morse was not the kind of person to go off into the sunset enjoying his golden years. So it was announced that in the 33rd and final Morse, the aptly-titled "Remorseful Day", the unthinkable would happen: the great detective would die. In a prophetic statement made at the time to an interviewer, John said that his onscreen demise was chilling: "Seeing yourself on a mortuary slab pulls you up. I've done a past Morse when he was in the hospital, and you think that this could be you tommorrow or in 6 month's time; I could be here as John Thaw."

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