Drama Note:
Philistines
18 March 2019

¶ Kathleen and I are about to pass from Season 4 to Season 5 of Endeavour, neither of which we’ve seen before. We are struck by the distance into emotional complication that the corpus of all things Morse has traveled since the bright puzzles of Last Bus to Woodstock and The Wolvercote Tongue. The murder mysteries in each episode of Endeavour have become challenged for equal interest by the ongoing stories of the recurring characters — the coppers and the people attached to them. While the Inspector Morse series abounded in “personal” glimpses of the peculiar detective’s misfit character, Endeavour has made of Morse a satellite in the Thursday story.

Surely there was never anything in Morse or Lewis so poignant, if you know what’s behind it, as the scene between Joan Thursday and her father, Morse’s boss, Fred, when she finds him loitering outside her flat in Oxford. She says, not unreasonably, that we must all make our own mistakes, but it cannot be denied that Fred has had a much closer look at Joan’s mistakes than the ordinary father. (He has severely beaten Joan’s sugar daddy in Leaminigton, in a kind of intervention rarely seen above rather low socioeconomic levels.) For a moment, it is almost as embarrassing as if father and daughter were naked — and tragic to a degree far beyond the romantic disappointments that the maladroit Morse played by John Thaw so regularly experienced.

But while the emotional richness of the Thursday saga is deeply engrossing, it occasionally threatens to overtake the show, leaving Kathleen and me a bit disgruntled, feeling that we haven’t gotten what we paid for. 

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