Old-school detectives in a technological age
MARKING the 30th anniversary of Morse on ITV, popular detective drama Endeavour returns for a fourth series, penned by Russell Lewis.
Reprising his role as the young Endeavour Morse, Shauns Evans stars alongside stage and screen actor Roger Allam as his mentor Detective Inspector Fred Thursday for a brand-new set of complex cases.
The four-part series begins in the summer of 1967, barely a fortnight having passed since the events of the series three finale, and we find Oxford’s finest picking up the pieces of their personal and professional lives.
While Thursday and his wife Win struggle to process the departure of both their daughter Joan and son Sam, who has joined the Army, Endeavour waits nervously to hear the result of his sergeant’s exam, while coping with an array of perplexing new cases landing on his desk.
In the first episode, the “white heat” of technology takes centre stage, as Lovelace College is taken over by a team of research scientists who are developing a “thinking machine” to equal and even outstrip the capabilities of man’s own mind.
As a Russian academic prepares to do battle with the Joint Computing Nexus (JCN or Jason for short) in a game of chess, the Cold War is played out on a chequered field and Endeavour and Thursday are plunged into their most perilous, baffling and darkly terrifying case to date.
Throwing himself into his work to mask the heartache of Joan’s departure, Endeavour is quickly consumed by his duties when one of the research team is found drowned near Magdalen Bridge.
Assuming it to be a suicide on first inspec- tion, the circumstances become more suspicious when two more victims are found drowned nearby in East Cowley Baths. Could there be more to the deaths than meets the eye?