Endeavour: :Terminus" (Independent Television Service, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday I returned home from the neighbors’ barbecue at 9 p.m. for an intriguing episode of the British Independent Television series Endeavour, a prequel to their long-running (1987-2000) Inspector Morse series. Inspector Morse depicted its central character as a veteran police inspector in the town of Oxford, England, famous as the locale of England’s premier university. He was also a recovering alcoholic and a huge fan of classical music in general and Wagner in particular. In the Inspector Morse series he was played by John Thaw and his partner, detective sergeant Robert Lewis, was played by Kevin Whatley, who later got a spinoff series of his own. \

Endeavour – Morse’s first name – was a depiction of Morse’s early years on the Oxford police force, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and in those days he was an active alcoholic whose principal commanding officer, detective chief inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam). The young Morse was played by the genuinely hot Shaun Evans, and one running theme of his relationship with Thursday was that Thursday kept trying to get Morse into rehab,and Morse did the usual alcoholic’s or drug addict’s thing of saying, “I don’t have a problem … “. This particular episode was called “Terminus” after the Chipping Compton terminus where the #33 bus disgorges its last remaining passengers and then continues in the other direction. (An imdb.com “Trivia” poster noted that this was the 33rd episode of Endeavour and that’s why they used the #33 bus, while a “Goofs” poster said that the bus seen on the show was a double-decker that is regualrdly used in London but not in Oxford.)

“Terminus” deals with the murder of a college professor while on a previous run of the #33 bus, to which Morse was a witness but he was too drunk to notice anything. On a subsequent run of the #33 two nights later, the bus breaks down and is forced to stop at an old hotel that has been closed for eight years, ever since a recently escaped mental patient went there during a ballroom dance and massacred at least eight people, then was rearrested, sent back to the institution, and committed suicide in his cell. What’s fascinating about this episode of Endeavour was its twist into Gothic horror – it is about an old dark house with a sinister past, after all – and director Kate Saxon and writer Russell Lewis give us some nice frissons of fright. But the resolution of the mystery is a bit on the disappointing side: it turns out that the professor and the killers were all part of a betting pool on British football (i.e., soccer) games who were relying on a teenage math wizard to predict the teams they should bet on. D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” in which a child would sit on a rocking horse, rocking back and forth, and somehow gain from that information that he “knew” the outcome of a particular horse race,so his family would bet accordingly, not only was a clear inspiration but is actually name-checked in Lewis’s script.

Alas, like the boy in Lawrence’s story (who dies while still a child), life didn’t end happily for the math protégé whose predictions were key to the soccer bets: he went crazy, was institutionalized and escaped to commit the mass murder at the hotel. In order to safeguard their winnings, the members of the soccer pool decided to put the money in a safe at the hotel and split the combination between them so none of them could get at the money without the others – only the members of the pool murder the professor, who figuired out the scheme in the first place, stabbing him all at once like the killers of Julius Caesar (though the parallel that occurred most commonly to the imdb.com reviewers was to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express). Detective Sergeant Morse figures out the scheme when he remembers his drunken stumble out of the bus just as the professor was also getting off, and he remembers the number 37 on the professor’s cufflinks, which he realizes was part of the combination to the safe. Anyone who’d read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club or Sir Arthor Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four would have known in advance that this scheme of splitting the combination to a secret and (at least in those cases) ill-gotten treasure was not going to end well.

Meanwhile, detective chief inspector Fred Thursday is genuinely concerned about the whereabouts of his son, who is in the British Army but has been reported absent without leave – he got a weekend pass but never returned – and his wife Win (Caroline O’Neill) is even more worried about their son than he is, while their daughter Joan (Safa Vickers) couldn’t care less about her brother. This plot line ends with a maddening inconclusiveness that suggests the worship of the Great God SERIAL has regrettably crossed the pond: Thursday’s son never turns up and we don’t find out what happened to him. The result was a reasonably entertaining Endeavour but also one that was stronger on atmosphere than plot, and it’s hard to believe that the young, intuitive detective who periodically pulls himself from his alcoholic haze just long enough to gain insights that enable him to solve the crime and ten sinks back in we see here is going to grow up to be the cranky, dyspeptic Morse we all know and sort-of love from the later series.