'Jonathan Creek' returned to our screens over the Christmas period with the one-off hour-and-a-half special 'Daemons' Roost'. After 2014's rather tame three-episode season five, this episode takes the show back to its dark roots with murder, magic tricks and revenge.

Alan Davies and Sarah AlexanderAlan Davies and Sarah Alexander return in 'Jonathan Creek'

The episode aired on Wednesday (December 28th 2016) with Alan Davies reprising his role as the titular sleuth and Sarah Alexander as his wife Polly. It also featured Warwick Davis in a guest role as Reverend Wendell Wilkie.

Keen 'Jonathan Creek' fans will note that we revisited a few of the old episodes in 'Daemons' Roost'. While Wendell Wilkie was quite open with his appreciation for cases the likes of 'Satan's Chimney', 'The Three Gamblers' and 'Danse Macabre', it was the result of the 1997 season one episode 'The House of Monkeys' that had the biggest reference. The faceless murderer of Elliot Strange returns from prison to get revenge on Jonathan, ultimately by hiding in a magician's cabinet that was being removed from the curly-haired amateur detective's old windmill, in the style of 'The Reconstituted Corpse'.

However, that is merely a nasty sidenote in an episode that follows an old horror film director named Nathan Clore with a severe neurodegenerative disease that has rendered him almost totally paralysed. His stepdaughter returns to his house to uncover the truth behind a horrific mystery that shrouds the death of her mother and sisters when she was just a girl, but Clore can do little to help her with his condition. 

More: The last 'Jonathan Creek' special was in 2013

Meanwhile, Jonathan is being reined in to help, and also discovers some more bloodthirsty business about the previous owners of the house and a hidden dungeon - the legend for which Clore originally adapted into his film 'Brides of the Damned'. It seems that supernatural forces have this house in their grip, but it will take more than a few so-called ghost sightings and dark magic tricks to fool this former magician's assistant. 

Indeed, there is another murderer in their midst notwithstanding Creek's 'House of Monkeys' stalker, and we learn that despite all his intelligence Jonathan Creek is not completely infallible. Plus, there's an avenger among them and as usual it turns out to be the person they least suspected.