endeavour, dreadfully and always
We knew from the start that Morse had to be alone and now, nine seasons later, he knew it too.
Sunday 12th March 2023 and we knew how it would end. The path has been set for almost fifty years.
The first appearance of Detective Inspector Endeavour Morse was in 1975, in Colin Dexter’s novel Last Bus to Woodstock (a slightly unassuming novel, in my opinion, not one of his best, or at least one that has aged less well than others). The Morse of this novel is in his forties; when John Thaw started playing the character, he was 45. When Endeavour started airing more than ten years ago, Shaun Evans looked strikingly young in the role in comparison; he still does, even though we’ve watched him age into it for good and bad. Remember the season with the moustache?
Although the plot points of the final episode played on what we didn’t know – what would happen to the characters we’d grown to love and would they all survive? – the beating heart of a prequel is the opposite question, right? We are there because we know the ending: it’s the journey that is the challenge. The fascination of Endeavour was the way it offered the unfurling of a tragedy over nine seasons, the slow petrification of Endeavour into Morse. We were encouraged to laugh at some of the tensions offered to us along the way: would he quit the police force? Well, no, of course not. Could he date his boss’s daughter and maybe even marry her? What – the perpetual bachelor and womaniser Morse? Not bloody likely. But he fell in love with her, agonisingly, and what seemed to be presented as a would-they-won’t-they romance took on something more: a we-know-they-won’t-but-why? Joan agreed to marry Strange; there were some lingering looks, a suggestion that she might be doubting her choice, a missed connection (Morse, stopped and beaten up by some ‘bad apple’ policemen, stood her up at the pub), but ultimately a happy wedding.
One of the most successful decisions, in my view, was the silence that Morse ultimately kept about his feelings. A lesser show would have seen him confide in someone – Jakes, perhaps – about his love for Joan; or have Thursday mention it in a sort of ‘I know how you feel and I’m sorry’ speech. We almost got it: there was a confession of love, a reciprocation, a kiss. But it was a fantasy. (I hate dream sequences in TV – more on that at some point, maybe – but here it was so obviously a hope he would never act on that I felt inclined to allow it.) In the end he never said anything. We knew from the start that Morse had to be alone and now, nine seasons later, he knew it too.
So he stayed mute – his feelings about Joan ultimately shared only with the viewer. The police coverup of series three was finally untangled; the Thursdays went into hiding, effectively cutting Morse off from his mentor for good; Joan, newly married, and Strange settled into their life together, which Morse promised to protect. One by one, all the supporting characters peeled off, until he was left alone, passing himself by on an otherwise deserted road. It was a beautiful shot: the ghost of Morses yet to come, John Thaw’s unmistakeable eyebrows in the rearview mirror. An indulgence? Yes, but an allowed one, come on.
So here you are, Morse, alone. But not unloved. The prequel form, the perfect tragedy of it, tells us this. It says: you are not unloved, Morse. You will go on to be so loved that we demanded more of you, that we forced ourselves back into your story. Your future is so successful that it created your past. ‘I shall miss him, dreadfully and always’, says a woman to Morse about her deceased colleague. She may as well be talking about all of us who were so capable of missing a fictional character that we demanded more.
(Questions: does this make Endeavour fanfiction? is this the urge fanfic taps into, is this the same love? and how do we love a detective show and remain critical of the police? subscribe for all this and more &c)