Tag: Endeavour

An Endeavour Threnody

March 14th, 2023

So I’m avoiding all the mind how you go jokes and the so farewell then headlines. I wonder how many people are even aware of E J Thribb? I suppose if you work in the medja.

I’ve been thinking about Endeavour. It was so very good. I said ages ago that it was better than Morse, and I think it would be a harsh critic who wouldn’t acknowledge it so. As I wrote recently, Morse itself seems a bit weird now, more of a sketch than a fully realised artwork.

But that last episode? In fact the whole of the last series? It was good, and welcome, but… well. Don’t read on if you have not seen the final three episodes.

Before I start a word on length. Look away now if you don’t like thinking how everything is a little worse now than it used to be. Old man alert!

Episodes of Endeavour are 10 minutes shorter than episodes of Morse, but they fit in the same time slot. Yes, there are now 10 minutes more adverts than there were in the 80s and 90s. And as anyone who has watched recent ITV or Channel 4 will know, there are fewer adverts, shown more often, so you don’t even get variety. All the adverts are for river cruises and funerals, as far as I can make out.

Luckily, I’ve been subscribing to ITVX so I can avoid the ad breaks while watching Paris-Nice highlights and episodes of Endeavour. I did watch the first of the season live, but will not make that mistake again.

So the show is better but the experience is worse, is what I’m saying. And then there were the last three episodes.

First of all, let’s talk retcon. I think Endeavour has fallen victim to retroactive continuity. This didn’t feel like Thursday’s past coming back to haunt him so much as, how can we create a situation whereby Morse never speaks of him again? So levers were pulled, and furniture was moved, and it all felt a little creaky. So his brother didn’t lose all his money but pretended to so that the gangsters could hold something over Thursday should they ever need to? What? It doesn’t make sense. It would make more sense if his brother had given him a return-on-investment that turned out in the fullness of time to be dirty money. But no, because they couldn’t go back that far.

So then there’s the COINCIDENCE KLAXON of the dead biker being the missing boy from the children’s home, only with a different name, yadda yadda. The 19th rule of Pixar storytelling has some thoughts about coincidence, and so do I. Although this coincidence didn’t get Thursday or Morse out of trouble, it certainly solved a problem for the writers. There was this kid, and he went away and changed his name and he came back to Oxford of all places because…?

Things fall apart.

But I did like the plotlines of the penultimate two episodes, the murder-of-the-week stories. Because the second episode took aim at the £20 note burners of the Bullingdon Club, and the third created a killer who was basically a Brexit Bigot from 50 years ago, murdering people simply for having opinions he didn’t like. So it was like The Nasty Party writ large.

They may not be Nazis*, but they are nasty.

Which brings us to the finale and the falling out. I would have bought guilt as a reason for Morse’s silence. If Morse’s actions had got, say, Thursday and Joan both killed, it would explain his silence (guilt) and Chief Superintendent Strange’s antipathy towards Morse in Morse.

But the showrunners didn’t quite have the gumption to kill off Thursday, and they married Joan off to Strange, which might explain why Morse hates Strange, but not the other way around. They teased a death for Thursday (in the same spot that Morse died, which is cheesy), but they didn’t go through with it.

Instead, they had Thursday be the murderer of the biker, and Morse knew it and confronted him about it and… nothing. Actually, the falling out wasn’t even a proper falling out. They parted as friends. Sure, Thursday was going to make himself scarce, but there was no sense in which Morse was so thoroughly disillusioned with him that he could no longer bear to speak his name.

Nope. Not buying it.

As for the gun. As for the discharge of a fire arm in a church yard, off camera, well, what? It was all a dream? A suicide deferred? I don’t get it, and I don’t think anybody else does either. And don’t bother reading any of those “ending explained” articles. I suspect they’re written by AIs and they explain nothing. Ever.

In the end, I loved it, except for the bits that were put in as fan service and the retconning in an attempt to explain Morse’s silence. Why not have him actually turn Thursday in for murder? That would be a classic detective move. To paraphrase Dashiell Hammett:

When someone’s son is killed you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was somebody’s son and you’re supposed to do something about it. It’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around-bad for the organisation, bad for every detective everywhere.
The Maltese Falcon

So it seems to me that would have been the way to go. It doesn’t matter what the fans think. The character has to be true to himself. And if Morse had arrested Thursday, it would have been a shocker, but in character. And it would have explained his ongoing silence on the subject. And Strange’s attitude to him.

I’ll finish on a positive. Because I did love the show. The whole cast was brilliant, but I must say a special word for Anton Lesser. I fucking love Anton Lesser. And in that last episode, when he said his farewell to the squad, talking about what a privilege it had been etc., I absolutely welled up. Fifteen words, by my count. Fifteen words is all he needed, and I was wrecked.

Keep an eye, won’t you?

*They totally are.
In Praise of Endeavour

December 5th, 2021

It’s so many years now since Inspector Morse was new to ITV, it really belongs to another era. And yet, when it was new, it was very new. The two-hour films, the score, the pacing, the roster of guest stars, we’d never seen a police procedural of this quality before.

That first series was 34 years ago, in 1987, also the year the world first met The Simpsons; it was the year British Airways was privatised, the year Thatcher won her third election; the year of the Iran-Contra scandal; the year of the Great Storm, of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster (the ironically named Herald of Free Enterprise), the King’s Cross fire.

A different world.

There were 33 episodes, the last five of which eked Morse out at the rate of one per year, until his on-screen death in November 2000.

The first spin-off, Lewis never quite had the gravitas of Morse, and of course has been forever tainted by the antics of one of its co-stars. In a way, it was always a bit of a stretch. The workmanlike Lewis was never the brains of the operation, and was too settled, too normal, and too happily married to be a lead detective. For his spin-off, they killed off his wife, and they still managed 33 episodes, but you can’t watch Lewis now, can you?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Endeavour was more of the same, the cruel flogging of a dead horse, and I wouldn’t blame you if you’d avoided it, if you viewed it as a relic of the past, of the kind of television rendered obsolete by Mad Men, Game of Thrones, even Luther. But I’m here to argue that it is not only worth watching, but is probably, by now, better than Morse. It has outgrown its source, and the only problem it has is that the in-universe future of Endeavour is Morse, which means the producers and writers are somewhat hamstrung by canon.

Shaun Evans as the younger Morse has produced a nuanced performance, which is engaging and sometimes moving. Yes, you do see him making a series of decisions that will leave him as a lonely problem drinker in the 1980s, but you also see the brilliant mind who becomes indispensable to his superiors, notwithstanding his issues.

One of the things that makes Endeavour better than Morse and Lewis is the period setting. It’s another different world, though not as distant from the original series as the original series is from us. The producers do not go over the top with period detail, but they do bring in plot elements that resonate down the years. A body found at a deserted train station on a branch line that closed in 1964, for example. Or a photographer girlfriend who disappears off to Vietnam. The formation of the Thames Valley police force. It’s not a 60s world of Carnaby Street hipsters and psychedelic 60s pop, however. It’s a 60s Oxford of seedy travelling salesmen, racist hairdressers, secretly communist Oxford dons, Commer vans and Ford Zodiacs.

Detective Constable Morse is introduced in 1965, and the most recent series finished in 1971. There have been 33 episodes, but I do hope they don’t stop now, just because 33 happens to be the magic Morse number.

The character starts as bag man to mentor Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), an old school copper and war veteran, whose old fashioned phlegmatic decency sometimes clashes with Morse’s intellectual idealism. Starting the job at the same time as Morse is Police Constable Strange, a proper plod and woodentop who joins the Masons, doesn’t frighten the horses, and thus eventually becomes Chief Superintendent Strange in Morse. Strange is there to have the life Morse could have had if he’d been less of the maverick. The Chief Superintendent of Endeavour, meanwhile, is DS Bright (played by the chameleon-like Anton Lesser). Bright’s role is to be constantly appalled at the way of the modern world, but to be smart enough to recognise Morse’s talents.

Endeavour is a window into a vanished world, a world of quieter streets, outside toilets, and local newspapers, and most of the time it works beautifully. There have been a couple of upsetting errors. One of these was the inclusion of the 1971 Rolling Stones track, “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” in an episode set in 1968. When you first hear it, it seems as if it’s a piece of non-diegetic almost-period music, but then Morse goes into a party where it is playing on a record player. This is so wrong it feels almost deliberate, as if placed to make the viewer feel the wrongness of Morse at the party: he just doesn’t fit with people his own age.

But it was probably just a mistake.

You can get Endeavour on the ITV Hub, with adverts, or on Britbox, without.

Tag: Endeavour

An Endeavour Threnody

In Praise of Endeavour