Our “feature” last night was the final episode of the 2017 series of Endeavour, the interesting British TV production created by Russell Lewis, who seems to have been the one to conceive of doing a prequel to Inspector Morse, Colin Dexter’s creation, an old, dyspeptic, recovering-alcoholic opera-buff police inspector in the university town of Oxford, England. In Lewis’s recounting of Morse’s origins, the time is the 1960’s — this episode, “Harvest,” begins with a prologue showing a car being run off the road in September, 1962 (after we hear on its radio an all-too-timely today warning about impending nuclear war: the time is just before the Cuban Missile Crisis and we hear a BBC reporter announcing that Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev has announced that any attack on a Soviet vessel shipping supplies, including missile parts, to Cuba will be considered an act of war against the Soviet Union); the prologue is in black-and-white and then we flash-forward five years later to the series’ present, September 1967. We learn that the man whose car was run off the road was a botanist named Dr. Matthew Laxman (Alex Mann) and his murder was never solved. We get the impression why his murder was never solved was that the county police, not the Oxford city police, were given jurisdiction, and the city police have so low an opinion of their county counterparts that Morse’s immediate superior, detective chief inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), tells him, “County couldn’t find its arse with both hands and a map!”
A body turns up in the wild Branford Meer
country outside Oxford, and the police at first hope it’s Laxman’s, but the
remains turn out to be 2,000 years old — though there’s a grimly funny scene in
which the police securing the crime scene find a pair of eyeglasses that are,
of course, considerably less than 2,000 years old and which turn out to be
Laxman’s. The script by Russell Lewis (who seems not only to have come up with
the concept of an Inspector Morse
prequel but to have written all the episodes himself instead of just being a
show runner and turning the actual scripting over to other writers) is one of
his usually convoluted jumbles, in which modern-day attempts to re-create a
pagan harvest festival (which reminded both Charles and some of the imdb.com
contributors of the film The Wicker Man) exist cheek-by-jowl with a nuclear power reactor already operating at
Branford and another, the “Branford Goldenrod,” about to open. The “Goldenrod”
is one of the nuclear industry’s sickest inspirations, the so-called “breeder
reactor,” which was supposed to produce more fuel than it used because it was
designed so that the uranium that was not consumed in actual fission reactions
to produce the power would be bombarded with neutrons and turned into
plutonium, which could be used to power future reactors even though it’s also one
of the most preposterously toxic substances known to man: just inhaling one
grain of it can give you cancer. As you might guess, not all is well in
Nukeland: though the British government has a tight rein on secrecy at the
plant (so much so that Morse is turned away and not allowed on the plant
grounds even though his police badge has always got him into secure places
before), the plant is leaking radioactive coolant all over the countryside and
Dr. Laxman (ya remember Dr. Laxman?)
was a volunteer with a local anti-nuclear group who went to the grounds around
the site with a Geiger counter to document the sheer amount of radioactive
material the plant was dumping and the extent to which it had spread.
As if that isn’t enough plot for you, there’s also a long-haired
man with a peace-sign button (Charles reminded me that the original meaning of
this symbol wasn’t peace in general, but specifically nuclear disarmament —
indeed the peace symbol was actually formed for the semaphore signals for “N”
and “D”) — who stands around on streetcorners reciting the Book of Revelation
(he begins with the famous quote, “And when he had opened the seventh seal,
there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour,” which not only
supplied the title of Ingmar Bergman’s 1956 film The Seventh Seal but also its overall theme. There’s also a romantic
intrigue involving Fred Thursday’s daughter Win (Caroline O’Neill), who’s in a
relationship with a married man who’s putting her up in a nice but unassuming
house, paying her bills and promising to leave his wife for her (“Yeah, right,” we groan, at least if we’ve seen more than about
three or four movies in our lifetime before) — only Fred discovers that she’s
living this way and reacts by cornering her paramour in a parking lot and
beating the shit out of him. When he threatens to go to the police and file a
claim for assault, Fred says, “I am
the police,” and leaves him in the Kafka-esque situation of having to take
being assaulted and beaten with impunity because his assailant is the chief of
the local cops. And as if that weren’t enough for you, there are also a group
of shepherds working the local land, one of whom has adorned his scarecrow
(which, alas, does not come to
life and take us down the Yellow Brick Road) with the coat Matthew Laxman was
wearing when he disappeared, complete with a radiation dosimeter he had got at
the nuclear power plant. There are also an “American” couple named Tristan and
Selina Berger (Sam Hoare and Joanna Horton, both of whom are unable to do a convincing
American accent to save their lives — though I’m sure American actors trying to
do “British” accents sound as risible to genuine Brits as these two do to us)
who were brought in to help run the plant — at least he was, and apparently her immigration status cleared
before his did because she was there alone, waiting for him, and not contenting
herself to wait alone. She attracted the amorous attentions of one of the local
shepherds, but it was Dr. Laxman she had an affair with — which of course leads
the police to suspect her husband Tristan of Laxman’s murder with jealousy as
his motive — only they also discover an ongoing cover-up of the problems with
the nuclear power plant and they suspect Laxman might have been murdered so he
wouldn’t figure out what was going on there and report it.
The final twist in
the melodramatic knife of this show concerns a former nuclear physicist, Donald
Bagley (Michael Pennington), who abruptly renounced nuclear power and joined
the anti-nuclear movement after his wife died of cancer she had contracted from
exposure to radiation at the various places they had lived and worked. He joins
with the street preacher — who was a hitchhiker who was the last person to see
Laxman alive before his disappearance — to hold the workers at the nuclear
plant hostage, China Syndrome-style,
until Morse manages to talk Bagley out of using the gun. Bagley was convinced
people from the plant killed Laxman, and it turns out he was indeed run off the
road by a trucker working with the plant — but his actual killer was the
crofter who had the hots for Selina Berger, who came across Laxman in his car
after the trucker ran him off the road, still alive. The two men had an
argument, the crofter hit Laxman, thought he had killed him, then started to
bury him, only when Laxman started stirring — indicating he was still alive —
the crofter finished him off once and for all. Morse deduces all this from
noticing that the man’s croft (the hooked stick with which traditional
shepherds controlled their herds) has the same teeth marks (from his dog) as
were found on Laxman’s glasses, and in the end they unearth Laxman, his widow
gets closure, Laxman’s killer is shot by an old woman who reads Tarot cards and
was angry with the plant owners for wanting to seize her property (she reminded
me of Margaret Hamilton’s character in the 1951 Abbott and Costello vehicle Comin’
’Round the Mountain), and both Thursday and
Morse get decorations personally authorized by the Queen, though a condition of
receiving the decorations is that the grounds for them remain totally secret
and the recipients are permanently forbidden from talking about what they did
to deserve them — which implies that the cover-up around the nuclear plant and
its issues will continue indefinitely. “Harvest” seems too diffuse, with too
many different characters and agendas, to be on the level of some of the other Endeavour shows they’ve aired lately (particularly “Game” and
“Canticle”), but it’s still an unusually literate show for a policier, albeit a British policier with their usually more decorous and genteel
attitude towards crime.
