by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I looked for something I could watch on TV since the
Lifetime movies were reruns of things I’d already seen before, The Psycho
She Met Online and Sleepwalking
in Suburbia, and the networks were all
offering so-called “reality” garbage, and I managed to find something to watch amidst the Vaster Wasteland (“vaster”
because TV is so much worse these days than it was when Newton Minow coined the
term “vast wasteland” in 1961 — and to make it even more frustrating, most of
the good shows on today’s TV are
confined to premium cable channels or streaming services and therefore you have
to pay through the nose to watch them): a recently released episode of the
British TV series Endeavour, the
1960’s-set mystery show about the younger days of Endeavour Morse (Shaun
Evans), whom British mystery fans knew from Colin Dexter’s original novels and
the previous TV show based on them as an aging, dyspeptic, recovering alcoholic
inspector who nonetheless continues to work as a police officer and solve
crimes because it and listening to opera are the only two joys he has left.
I
think it was Russell Lewis who had the idea of doing a TV series on Morse’s
younger days, when he was the
hotshot young sidekick to a dyspeptic older commander, Inspector Fred Thursday
(Roger Allam), and it’s definite that Lewis wrote the script for this episode,
“Game,” which combined an early attempt to build a chess-playing computer at
Oxford University in 1966 (the computer played a Russian grandmaster, Yuri
Gradenko — played by Robert Lackey — imported for the occasion, and Morse was
assigned to guard Gradenko because he was the only one on Thursday’s force who
knew any Russian) and a series of bizarre murders in which the victims are all
killed by drowning. The other cops are convinced they’re the work of a crazy
serial killer targeting victims at random, but Morse of course deduces that
they’re all the work of an intelligent person planning revenge against
identifiable people who did him wrong. Among the dramatis personae are a wheelchair-bound professor in charge of the
artificial intelligence project at Oxford, George Amory (James Laurenson); his
daughter, also an Oxford professor, Pat Amory (Gillian Saker); local reporter
Tessa Knight (Ruby Thomas), who “breaks” the story of the multi-victim killer
by filching Morse’s notebook while they’re on a date and hopes it will be her
ticket to a big-time journalism job in London until she becomes one of the victims; and a couple of
assistants in Dr. George Amory’s lab, Clifford Gibbs (Abram Rooney) and
Broderick Castle (Chris Fulton). There’s also a hot young man named Mick
Mitchell (Daniel Atwell) whom we get to see a fair amount of in a white shirt
and very tight light blue shorts
— he was the sexiest guy in the cast and I’d have liked to see even more of
him, but his character is pretty peripheral: he and his wife own the public
baths at which two of the victims were drowned.
From the appearance of Chris
Fulton playing the stereotypical nerd, complete with glasses, in the Oxford lab
scenes I should have been able to guess he’d be the murderer, and indeed he
was: he was actually from a family in an out-of-the-way town near Oxford, whom
Morse is able to trace with the help of the computer (which sorts out all the
addresses in that area that match the partial name he has for the people he’s
looking for), and his father was a plastic surgeon who operated on George Amory
after his plane was shot down in the Battle of Britain — he could fix the burn
damage to his face but, of course, neither he nor anybody else was able to get
his legs to work (though some
part of his lower anatomy must have still worked because he was able to father
a child after the war) — the middle-aged woman he killed in the baths was a
woman who had had an affair with his dad; he also killed one of the professors
and the journalist as well as a young man with a criminal record who was doing
a sort of unofficial community
service to help what would now be called “at-risk youths”, and he picked the
pseudonym “Castle” because it’s also a name for the chess piece “rook.” “Game”
was an example of the British mystery at its best: no on-screen violence or
bloodshed, reasonably polite people who kill each other, when they do, for
comprehensible reasons, and a climax that manages to be exciting without going
over the top in the manner of most American crime stories and especially most Lifetime movies. It’s also yet more evidence
that the British produce the greatest actors in the world, nice, competent
people who don’t heave, strain or show off, don’t make a big to-do about the
Method or “what’s my motivation?,” but who just say their lines, hit their
marks and by quiet matter-of-fact understatement manage to convince us they’re
the people they’re supposed to be playing.
