by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the latest episode of the BBC TV
series Foyle’s War, a limited-run series
(they only make three episodes per year) that’s been running on BBC since 2002
but which I just caught up to now. It’s basically about Christopher Foyle
(Michael Kitchen), the police chief in a small town called Hastings until World
War II starts, Hastings is bombed to smithereens in the Blitz, and Foyle ends
up in the U.S. At the beginning of this episode, “The Eternity Ring,” the war
is winding down and Foyle finds himself along with physicist Prof. Fraser
(Stephen Boxer) and Fraser’s wife Helen (Kate Duchene) witnessing the Trinity
test of the world’s first atomic weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Then he ends
up back in England — not to Hastings but to London, where he’s forcibly
recruited by MI5 (the British counterintelligence service, their counterpart to
the counterintelligence division of the FBI — their intelligence service, the CIA equivalent, is MI6) and told his
job is to break up the “Eternity Ring,” an extensive spy ring that’s so deeply
penetrated Britain’s scientific and intelligence community that Moriarty’s
organization looks like a weekly poker game by comparison. Foyle teams up with
his prewar driver, Samantha “Sam” Wainwright (played by an actress with the
virtually impossible name “Honeysuckle Weeks” — when her credit flashed on the
screen both Charles and I assumed that was the name of a person!), who’s being
framed with a fake photograph to make it look like she’s a contact of the
Eternity Ring.
Also among the dramatis personae are Aleksei Gorin (Dylan Charles), a defector from
the Soviet embassy in London who steals important diplomatic papers and
delivers them to MI5 — though they’re not sure whether he’s a genuine defector
or a “mole” — and his theft of the papers is given some highly successful
suspense editing and visual atmospherics by director Stuart Orme, whose work
through the rest of the show is pretty TV-conventional; Maureen Greenwood
(Gabrielle Lloyd, who comes off as the person the BBC calls when they can’t get
Judi Dench), the formidable woman MI5 executive in charge of the manhunt for
the Eternity Ring; known Soviet spy Marc Vlessing (Nathan Gordon); Max Hoffman
(Ken Bones), a physicist colleague of Fraser’s at the British military’s secret
nuclear weapons lab, a German expat who was a Communist before the Nazi
takeover and who naturally is thereby suspected of being part of the Ring (his
defense is that before 1933 if you lived in Germany and had any political
involvement at all, you were either a Communist or a Nazi); Tomasz Debski
(Gyuri Sarossy, the hottest male member of the cast), a Polish expat who sneaked over into Britain to fly with the
RAF, flew 40 missions, then had what would now be called post-traumatic stress
disorder and deserted; and Sam Wainwright’s husband Adam (Daniel Weyman), who’s
being interviewed by a Labor Party candidate selection committee to see if he’s
worth running in a Tory-dominated district in an upcoming special election (or
“by-election,” as the British call them).
The sheer number of characters and
the quirky relationships between them make this show quite hard to follow — at
one point a shadowy male figure entered the scene and both Charles and I
wondered, “Is this someone new, or are we supposed to recognize him as someone
we’ve seen before?” — and the fact that all the dramatis personae are white and Gavin Struthers’ cinematography, in
the worst modern manner with virtually everything either dank green or dirty
brown, de-emphasizes their differences in facial features and thereby makes
them look very much alike (you can tell the men apart from the women, and the
relatively old characters like Foyle from the younger ones, but that’s about
all). Charles also had a distaste for the use of the Cold War in the plotting,
though that bothered me less than it did him — after all I’ve liked films like
Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest that used the Cold War in their plotting because, as St. Alfred says,
it really doesn’t matter what the
spies are after anyway; the political background of an espionage thriller
really isn’t important compared to the characterizations and the suspense. I
hadn’t seen Foyle’s War before
but I quite enjoyed this episode — more, I suspect, than Charles did — and I’d
like to watch the other two in this year’s installments as well.
