Michael Kitchen as Christopher Foyle
Friends and readers,
I began watching Foyle’s War around my birthday this past November by renting DVDs from Netflix. I had been told how “wonderful” it is time and again, and stubbornly had resisted — why I don’t quite know. I did not realize how these are in structures and basic tropes formulaic (including comic helper-maid, and endings where the villains often just confess when confronted by the truth) murder mystery stories. Good thing for I might never have tried them. Well, it took only the first three episodes to persuade me here was a series that transcended this popular genre, not just superbly well done, but having a complicated moral center in them individually and as a group that offered insights and warnings into the politics of our own time, especially the growth of fascism and uncontrolled capitalism. I loved the character of Foyle, what a relief as he held onto his moral compass (as good as E.M. Forster in What I Believe); this group of traits in the hero has often been cited as the programs’ highest important achievement. The core beauty. I became so fond of Sam and respectful of Milner. I could see they could solace me in my lonely evenings (the way other of my favorite British serials seen over and over).
So I had to have the whole series, be able to watch more than one episode at a time, be able to see features about how it was made, and bought the 8 season set, complete (I was promised) with features and a pamphlets. When the tall box came, and I re-began, I also began to see that I needed these features and more to understand what I was seeing: the pamphlet that came with the 8 sets (=seasons) was a help, all the various wikipedia articles I could click on, and Rod Green’s The Real History Behind Foyle’s War. What this box is is a vast film-novel of moral stories conveying the extraordinary true history of World War Two as it was experienced in Britain.
More than reading and watching, to try to grasp each episode I needed to write notes on them one at a time to appreciate all that was interwoven in. There are often four stories or threads in an episode, not counting the development of the personalities and conveying of the history of our three very sympathetic protagonists: you see Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Inspector Foyle above in an unusually softly smiling moment: I just love the way he swings his body and his head and then asks, “Why is that?” Just below is Honeysuckle Weeks, Foyle’s improbable driver, as she appears appealingly as a young women (not much older than 20 to start with, if that old) in the earliest seasons — why Foyle never learned to drive we are not told:
Her heart shows her the morally right thing to do and to feel. A bit further down, Anthony Howell as Paul Milner, Foyle’s Deputy Sergeant, this photo giving us a glimpse below the usually guarded stern face to see a kindly wholesome sensitive man who cannot fathom himself killing anyone.
With each of them, less is more as a style of acting.
I’ve been wondering to myself what I can add to all that has already been said without going on too long — for what I am best at is explanatory details with moralizing inferences as framework. It can be fun to be reminded of what we so enjoyed, to, as it were, relive what’s in our memories, but in the case of complicated mystery stories, with never an empty moment, it would be easy to fall into too much of a good thing. Better just to watch the TV episodes? Well, there are some ideas or patterns that one might miss, strikingly repeated stances that hold the hours together as we watch the behavior of our three protagonists interact against ever-worsening counter war techniques and protect or aid the human behavior that makes life worth living. The question is repeatedly asked: what are we fighting this war for if we consent to behave as badly as our fascist hate-filled or ruthless enemies are doing. Again and again Foyle, together with Sam and Paul as his two team-members, resist the amoral and the immoral – it is, though, he alone who articulates the actuating ideas behind the decisions and actions we see the three make. We learn about their “private” lives too. Throughout the first through fourth seasons in most of the episodes Foyle dominates almost every scene, he seems to make things happen, knit them together. This is not true across the later seasons.
This blog presents you with few notes for the 1st season and 2nd season (looking at patterns especially), and then building on what we find, I’ll write another similar blog for the 3rd and 4th. The episodes move month by month until we get to season five where we fast forward a whole year. So we get a feeling for the different phases of the war, the different emotional temperature of everyone involved.
But first an overview: at season 5, the series changes. It is said that the series was suddenly cancelled after Season 5 because Simon Shaps felt like it (that’s about as much reason for this as one is given), “causing” Anthony Horowitz to discard a series of scripts going in the same pace for Season 6. This makes no sense, and feels like hurt angry spite: I imagine Shaps complaining about some aspect of the series: maybe it’s anti-capitalist stance? (Businessmen are generally very badly behaved in this series.) So I will write separately about Season 5 and 6, which are also cut back to 3 episodes each.
Then because it was so liked, so respected, it was given yet another two series, again with only 3 episodes (it might have been the expense) — but now our characters are in a different, and actually (it turns out) deadlier era when it comes to police and gov’t spy agency behavior (the problems themselves infected by knee-jerk anti-communism and an implicit nationalism it eschewed until Season 7). That is, we shift from the subgenre type of mystery which Andrew Marr describes as sleuths, to the subgenre, spy stories. And so I will again write a separate blog for these last two (where we lose Milner).
I will try to avoid concrete retellings of stories as these are amply covered in wikipedia. And not name all the superb actors across the years as they too are usually named, unless something or someone seems to me so outstanding
***************************************
Season 1: Episode 1: The German Woman, May 1940. In this episode we are watching the formation of the team: Foyle cannot convince his superiors to let him switch from domestic policing to being a member of the war effort, and partly to keep him comfortable, he is given a driver, Sam Stewart; a young man he knew previously has been very badly wounded, lost his leg, Paul Milner, and Foyle manipulates Milner out of an angry depression and despair about having but one leg by showing how he can make his talents useful. We meet Foyle’s son, Andrew (to my ears a very British name), see their close relationship and Foyle fish.
Julian Overdone as Andrew fishing with his face: look carefully and you’ll see a look of impatience on the young man’s face
Julian Overdone is a recurring important character, but not as central to the story structures of solving the mystery (sometimes he is part of the problem that led to the murder). He is growing up, with a little help from his Dad. We learn of Foyle’s wife’s death from lovely watercolor landscapes on his wall. Kitchen dominated the 100 minutes in ways he stops doing by the 6th season and I found the episode more satisfying because of this: his firm strong morality. The murderer (a sexual cad, predator after women’s money) is despicable, especially, but at least one of the victims (the rich German woman whose fortune the murderer was seeking) and their families are humanly flawed too. The episode is against knee-jerk hatred of Germans as Germans. A scholarly German man is thrown in prison with his wife; she dies of a heart attack before Foyle can put an eend to this injustice. An innocent girl is bombed to death, and then her reputation made to suffer until Foyle discovers and exposes what happened. Here the murderer himself asserts that his important war work makes it absurd to accuse, jail and then possibly execute him. This first iteration of this idea is as unconvincing to Foyle as it will be in the 8th year, 27th episode. Here he is in charge and has the power to make his accusation stick.
Not only how young is Sam but how uneager Foyle for having her around and begins teaching her not to pick up cant; how much he is responsible for bringing Paul Milner back to effective useful life … The episode is notable for having performances by Robert Hardy, Edward Fox, James McAvoy
Episode 2: The White Feather, May 1940 still. A pattern: In most of the episodes of these four seasons, after the initial setting forth and some interludes to feed us information Foyle does not see, he is brought forward. In these first four, Foyle shows himself very emotionally engaged even if the evidence is limited to bodily gestures, facial expressions, and the very occasional outburst of stern moral truth. At one point thinking of his son, he puts his head down.
The White Feather combines the reality of nazism and fascism, juxtaposing a particularly foul kind of anti-semitism in the UK, with Dunkirk. So the whole emotional temperature of that happening as felt on the coast where small boats are setting off to rescue people is felt. There is a trio of concerned fathers: the weak man with the domineering nasty (and willing to terrify others to her will) upper class anti-semitic wife and his (in effect) neglected and angry son (a young Tobias Menzies – stealing the scenes he’s in); the old fashioned working class fisherman and his son who is involved with a young girl, an ex-servant in the anti-semitic hotel, who finds himself arrested.
Tobias Menzies as Stanley Ellis
Another pattern: in both episodes is once Foyle knows for sure the person arrested for the crime didn’t do something that resulted in serious injury or death to someone else, or didn’t have malign motives, was bullied, tricked, deluded, he frees that person. That’s important. He is a cop and I find myself thinking were this a Black man (and I believe there is a episode about race prejudice), Foyle would not be casually putting such a person away for life.
The ending at Dunkirk, and arresting the lead Nazi (Charles Dance knows how to do evil): you are made to feel why this war is worth it. Both have beautiful photography of this semi-rural part of England.
Episode 3: A Lesson in Murder. June 1940. An total snob, cruel upper class judge at the center. He coolly murders, blows to bits an 11 year old evacuee whom his daughter (not understanding quite the amount of evil her father could do) volunteered to take in a evacuee. The poor boy has terrible time all the while desperately missed by his father. Foyle’s long time friend, an Italian man (Alan Corduner), a good person, dies at the end because when Italy declares war on England, because a mob comes and set fire to, blows up his restaurant. His son, very like the young man who became involved with the servant in The White Feather, is being pressured by a bad young man, a semi-crook type — whom Sam is rude to. A scene of coffin making (a hidden factory) has its effect.
The Italian man’s restaurant set on fire because the mob has heard Italy has entered the war: he dies upstairs (this is the episode’s penultimate scene)
There is a theme of good young men thrown away or hurt badly in these episodes. This includes Foyle’s son (flying spitfires); the twisted young man that Menzies plays (capable of being so much better). James McAvoy played the role in episode 1: he was engaged to the young girl whom the murderer smeared to cover his tracks. This is part of the fathers and sons, for a familiar actor (John Shrapnel, played Creon, Achilles) is a high class man who bribed the ugly murderer to give his son a conscientious objector status. The episode opens with another young man, genuinely ant-war, being denied status and then in prison mocked, beat up, humiliated, hanging himself. David Tennant is his best friend, who turns up to be with the wife and is suspected of murdering the ugly judge. His wife did it — she was right to she says. Of course Paul Milner is such another, with a wife who has no loyalty towards him, is in fact turned off because he has lost his leg; thus he was tempted by the fascist Charles Dance; at the end of The White Feather, Foyle scolds him intensely for disloyalty — and stupidity.
Episode 4: Eagle Day, August to September 1940. Eagle Day is about sexual harassment of women. It’s not called that but the story at the center is of a Miss Lucy Smith who throws herself under a train because an intelligence agency boss (a bully, amoral, horrible man) seduces, impregnates and then rejects her. Unknown to him, Foyle’s son is assigned to the place and once her friend tells him ever so little the boss and his accomplice are determined to get rid of Andrew – this is slightly improbable but it enables Horowitz to show how easy it was/is to get up a case against an innocent man who say once was part of the communist party, how easy to stash incriminating papers in his locker and under “secrecy” orders of war (deeply anti-democrat) ruin his life – put him in prison.
Instead of now where the girl would have to sue, we see parents who want to protect the daughter’s virginity. No sign of her having any right to an independent life or sexual liberation, but they are indignant or worried. This leads to Lucy’s father murdering two men –- and as with the ugly bully in A Lesson in Murder, the murderer shows no regret and says he did the right thing. Sam’s father come to fetch her home is the ultimate embodiment of such an attitude. He decides she’s safe and doing useful work not that she has the right to an independent life. Another pattern: the first and third episode show young women badly bullied by their fathers — having no agency — my feeling is this is criticized as the result of individuals; the pattern itself accepted, no subtext against it. Sam’s father turns up because he and her mother have become convinced she should return to their village. Being in Hastings was too dangerous and what was she really contributing to the war effort anyway? Despite her being a grown woman, because she wasn’t married, her parents assumed they could still control her life and she felt she had abide by their decision. Her only chance was if Foyle would intercede for her. So it takes a man’s help for her to live the life she has chosen.
Woven in is a story of theft from a museum where the thief (Anton Lesser playing this role) uses the export of art objects to places where they will be hidden to fetch some off for himself. Paul Milner is important in discovering this as is Sam’s father who before he became a vicar studied art.
The opening sequence of this episode shows a woman coming home from work a little later than usual to find her house bombed, her husband nowhere to be seen:
Woman whose house has been bombed — there are countless such tiny episodes which are usually linked to the central threads but also there to show how people experiencing this war
Why August 1940? a month later the bombs begin to drop on civilians. This is presented a sort of sardonic comedy where Foyle’s son tries to save him and his father from these by hiding in a bunch of bundles which turn out to have highly inflammable stuff in them. Young Foyle is a young man who is daredevil in a plane but not too good at protecting himself. This last one ends up with all four in the car Sam has driven up with Milner just in time to fetch the two Foyles away to safety.
To read about Season 2, Episodes 1-4, see comments: Episode 1, Fifty Ships: September 1940; Episode 2: Among the few: September 1940; Episode 3, War Games: October 1940; Episode 4, The Funk Hole: October 1940.
From The Funk Hole, Caroline Harker as Jane Hardiman protecting a beloved dog, whom Phoebe Nicholls as Amanda Reese, novelist, disdains: a tiny thread referring to how many thousands of pets were killed by their owners at the beginning of the war; Mrs Hardiman’s crime is to buy adequate dog food on the black market
To read about Seasons 3-4, see companion blog to this (perhaps next week because another syllabus blog must come inbetween).
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Thank you SO much for this posting!
Sent from my iPhone
You’re very welcome. I’ll try to write up Season 2 tonight.
Season 2, Episode 1. Fifty ships (September) is finally centered on an obnoxious American who has cheated a local working man who is now a failure in life, alcoholic, originally brilliant and went to Oxford: they had been friends there. This man invented something important and the American took it away and became rich on it. He murders the working class man when this man demands a share in the profits so he can send his son to engineering school. He is allowed to return to the US scot-free because he is someone influential who can get the US to share 50 ships. Every one who really knows this American knows he is despicable but the argument is the same as the later shows: the greater good. Foyle isn’t buying it but he cannot force these people to try this man for murder. He does say after the war he will come after him.
It has several skeins but they are linked by the intense class prejudice of upper class English people, an anti-nationalism: there is an English psychiatrist who is cruel to people (especially the working class man who came to him for help) and who beats his wife; she is cousin to a German spy who she helps land at Hastings and who is captured. The spy is a good man apparently and will be hung. The upper class theme is embodied in this businessman married to a woman who loved and still loves Foyle. Foyle is unwilling to open this jar of wormy emotion.
Sam is involved because this episode sees the beginning of the Blitz and at the opening the house she is living in is bombed and a close friend dies. She cannot get a place to stay and Milner takes her in; she cooks and dances and flirts and his wife interrupts. There is a parallel with the woman in love with Foyle. At the end Sam goes to live with Foyle and she will cook him coq au vin w/o the wine too. There is comedy in this part of the episode – Sam often carries the comedy
A secondary plot is the people who show up at bombings themselves steal from the homes or places they come to . At the head of them is a bully who is just the scum of the earth a bully. The young man in this team is the son of the man who failed. One of the best lines is Foyle telling this bully that in fact WW2 starts with him: his callous selfish thug cruelty is where the Hitler thing begins.
We see this man’s helpless wife, Amanda Root as helpless upper class woman, Sam unable to find lodgings. The psychiatrist’s wife is a craven woman. The working class man’s wife is passive. The women in this episode beyond Sam are not admirable. The book goes into at great length the amount of stealing that went on and the problem of getting Americans to come in to the war on the side of the British.
Ellen
Season 2, Episode 2: Among the Few, September 1940 still.
Among the few (2:2) is equally complicated. Again to go to the human core of it which we end on; one Rex Talbot, Foyle’s son’s best friend is “outed” as a homosexual man who has all his (young) life been hiding his sexual preference; he loves Foyle’s son, Andrew, carries Andrew’s picture about He pretends to be having an affair with Connie.
Connie is the linchpin of a complex racketeering game: what she does is drive trucks filled with petrol and siphon off part of the petrol to another truck which takes it to a man named Gannon whom Foyle used to know – a previous life as a criminal. She also used to wax barrels for Gannon. She is working class at best lower middle and can be used by these people. Gannon gets her pregnant; his plan was to help her get an abortion. Rex had no plan; he knew it wasn’t his, but he would not marry a girl beneath him, and when she tells him she is pregnant, they have an altercation and she falls down the stairs and breaks her neck. She is the central murder victim
This material – the siphoning off of oil and the British plans to hoard and protect it begin the episode. Sam is driving Foyle to one of these places gathering oil and shipping it out and a truck pulls round them and past a check-point; the truck driver shoots at them and the truck goes off the road and bursts into flame – it is filled with wooden barrels filled with petrol.
The larger quest is Foyle is supposed to discover who is siphoning off this oil and he plants Sam in the business run by Michael Bennet they were headed to – to find out what’s happening there. Another girl beyond Connie works there: Violet Davis. She is Connie’s roommate, also sexually adventurous and forward and invites Andrew to be her lover and demands in return he promise to marry her. He does and takes her to a hotel. She is not “that” liberated that she doesn’t care if he marries her or not and when she realizes Andrew wouldn’t (she is apparently beneath him – or he’s embarrassed in front of his father to be going out with her – though Foyle never objects on such grounds), she breaks it off.
One strand is that of an Irish worker who is belligerent and whom Andrew starts a physical fight that turns into a brawl with. In this episode Andrew clearly has a lot of growing up to do. A moving theme is how he is trying to keep things from his father and in the end (as in a previous episode) he has to rely on his father to keep him out of the mischiefs he’s involved himself with. A closing moment is Andrew’s grief that Rex has died in a spitfire dogfight (the suggestion to the viewer and Foyle is this was deliberate on Rex’s part) and Foyle and he apologizing to one another for the argument they had and Foyle (lying) reassuring his son what a good man Rex was. Foyle told Rex his problem was he should have trusted his friends and told, but we can see the commanding officer might just have fired Rex had he found out Rex was homosexual.
The women are exploited and used: Connie and Violet. But they also are choosing their own destiny not very wisely, without real regard for a longer future – possibly because there is none for them except be secondary to men. Here a core character is Michael Bennet’s wife. Bennet is a weak salacious man who salivates over the girls who work for him, and his wife has to watch this. She loathes the role she plays in life. MB gives her no money so when Gannon offered to pay her to be another linchpin for him to provide Connie to send him oil, she agrees. She confesses (as so many suddenly do to Foyle – as in Charlie Chan movies) in a bitter mode saying she could never escape MB or the life she has to live and hoped to accumulate money to escape with. But we see so much more is needed to make a good life for oneself.
Ellen
Patterns in Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2: In the first Sam is in the blown up house, loses her friend, has no lodging she can go to; in the second she becomes a damsel (a la Pauline tied to a train track with the train coming on at top speed) in distress. She is cunning and quick – Foyle has learnt this and is using her as an assistant. She is working for the Bennets and notices Mrs Bennet copes with papers and watches her open a safe. Eagle-sighted omnipotent memoried Sam takes down the formula in her head, and then returns to the building to filch these papers.
Unknown to her at the same time the Irish character (who is presented by Gannon as possibly IRA, a front) is coming to plant a bomb in the building to blow the whole place up. She hides under a table and he does not see her (like some comedy farce — only done seriously). He sets the bomb to go in less than 15 minutes and locks door behind him. Hey, maybe he did see her?
She sees she’s locked in, sees the bomb, and phones Foyle. Foyle proceeds post-haste with two other cars of cops, battering rams and experts in bombs. He makes it in time only because Gannon and the others are such lousy bomb-makers. It should have gone off and didn’t.
How conventional are so many of the tropes in Foyle’s War. Including the key heroine’s role.
Second, as opposed to the first season, the young men here are compromised or weak (very weak) or bad. I can’t think of an upstanding young man presented that way. Yes in Fifty Ships, there is a scientist sleeping in his car and he sees essential evidence – but he’s not this hero-in-making Andrew shows himself to be such a young man still but very naive … even if he displays sophisticated sexual behavior. He is lousy to Violet.
Season 2, Episode 3: War Games October 1940. The Blitz has begun.
Again Nazism equated with ruthless big business; giant food corporation secretly dealing with Nazis, and young woman secretary seen thrown out a building many flights up. Meanwhile absurd war games. Super – rich family Walker family where man now bullies his second wife, with arrogant son. On estate itself a tenant busies herself with bee keeping (Emily Blunt) and her brother, Malcolm, an ex convict bullied into stealing from safe.
Let’s practice idiocy going on (war games) where Foyle there as referee; ex convict part of this now bullied and threatened by other ex-convicts – no place on earth for him anymore. The Pentagon used to play war games in the 1990s. Jim participated in several.
The man bullying Malcolm into this deed turns out to be a friend of Foyle’s and a prosecutor: very ambiguous figure as far as I am concerned – it was he who hired the young woman we see thrown from a window. We see Hilda Pierce for first time, from secret service using this man who is an escapee from Germany and now being sent back as a mole.
Malcolm murdered during games, shot through head. Philby seen with Walker, and now at games. Rich man aware his son a fanatic pro-Hitler worshipping Nazi (Nietzchean). Children gathering salvage, gather papers from the rich-man’s fire (they are trying to burn all the papers), have dogs sicc’d on them, and one boy’s leg all bloody. But there is the incriminating paper. Miss Pierce eventually tells Foyle the uppers don’t care. But Foyle manages to find out the Nazi son murdered Malcolm, take him away, threatens to expose this business. Walker’s wife has left him. He despairs and shots himself – we hear shots through house.
It is hard to find anything redemptive except the idea that these Nazis are so evil you must be prepared to fight them to the death or they will make hash of you and all you might old dear. Emily Blunt as the sister of the ex-convict trying to live independently; having to endure the son’s sexual threats, losing her bother is the one plangent decent characters. So too the murdered girl’s father.
Maybe it’s reading E. M. Forster and thinking about non-binary people, here’s a suggestion: Honeysuckle Weeks is very boyish, more than boyish in a way. She doesn’t look quite right in the fancy dancing costumes with her hair down at first . she is being forced into maternal roles; like here mothering the children gathering salvage. But there is something forced here.
Season 2, Episode 4: Funk Hole, October 1940.
So I re-watched this one. It is such a complicated episode I again has trouble with it. So much happens and it all unfolds slowly. Often the first scenes in these Foyle’s War are not directly related to core of episode but later connected back.
So the first scene is the three young men trying to steal food (we later learn) from some gov’t depot and one is shot in the shoulder. Then the bombing of London and a powerful performance by Richard McCabe – going mad and talking against the war in a bomb shelter. The young man’s mother is seeking him and that leads to our team (all 3) going to a rich people resort-type hotel, Brookfield Court, where we see two upper class white men playing tennis (one Adrian Lukis) turns out to be the husband of a woman (Caroline Harker) taking care of her dog, which dog irritates the selfish novelist (played by Phoebe Nicholls, always memorable). The elegant hotel is “the funk hole” – where people are fleeing to escape the bombs who can afford it.
Then the shit hits the fan and (once again) Foyle is under attack. A repeated motif is him being separated from his job. Now he is accused of what we know the character played by Richard McCabe did, and frustrated because suspended and put under house arrest. The brilliant Nicholas Farrell plays this policeman who we detest – spiteful, deliberately ignoring clues, he takes over Foyle’s place and fires or sends back to a miserable job (Coventry) Sam. The woman’s dog finds a body on the estate. Lukis says his wife worries more “about that hound than me.” The body is the missing boy. A mysterious young gardener who knows nothing about gardening, Joanna David the proprietess and her blind husband are accused too of being part of some food black market when it’s this nasty vile man – at the core of many of these is an amoral male bully nasty and vile with nothing redemptive. Sometime expressed directly sometimes the feel is this is what is at the heart of fascism. The man who we see building card palaces throughout is discovered dead in the summer house; suicide says Farrell. But Milner thinks not.
So Milner defies Farrell and brings evidence to Foyle who escapes out a tree (we are told it was something to see by his son) to follow up and discovers the man’s name was Colin Fowler (CF) and he was grieving because his wife and two children were killed because someone forgot to sign proper documents. Another powerful scene with this desolate man. Foyle discovers that Farrell’s family was also killed in the same bombing raid. It takes a few steps to see that Farrell murdered this man because it was he who forgot to sign – he has been ridden by guilt.
Subplot Andrew seeks out Sam, starts to go out with her, they are developing an attachment Andrew has been wounded, several friends dead, he is beginning to be weary. The non-gardening gardener turns out to be another decent son – of the proprietess and her husband who deserted; he is allowed to go back as AWOL. Beautiful poetic speech by Andrew about his love for English landscape.
Upon being reinstated, Foyle returns for Sam, she sabotages her mean boss’s car and we see the four ride away and the woman run after angry. We are to laugh Again Sam part of comic plot.
This episode returned to having more potentially redemptive younger males.
One stand mentioned by the dog’s owner: she defends herself for buying the tins from the vile black marketer by saying how some scary number (80,000) dogs and cats (pets) were killed within a few months of the declaration of war. I’ve read that somewhere – they didn’t want to share their food? I don’t understand this. You can take your cat(s) or dogs down to the shelter with you and you can share your food. Your pet is a member of your family.
As episode ends our four are together – for now Andrew is included – an unconventional family has formed — as had happened by the end of the first season of the new All Creatures Great and Small. In a sense Foyle, Sam, Paul and Andrew are a family: they care about and care for one another.
Season 1, Episode 4, Eagle Day: This demonstrated a woman’s lack of agency: Sam’s father turns up because he and her mother have become convinced she should return to their village. Being in Hastings was too dangerous and what was she really contributing to the war effort anyway? Despite her being a grown woman, because she wasn’t married, her parents assumed they could still control her life and she felt she had abide by their decision. Her only chance was if Foyle would intercede for her. So it takes a man’s help for her to live the life she has chosen. Of course, her father also sees Foyle as a protective parental figure for Sam. It just annoyed me no end that as a product of that time, Sam didn’t feel as if she had the independence to thank her parents for their concern but that she was going to make her own choices.
Magpie Murders the series is based on a complicated murder mystery of the same name that Horowitz wrote several years ago . It will be playing on PBS I think later this year. It will be interesting to see how he adapts it. It had a pretty confusing plot.
Linda
On the second watching I noticed that the stories were meant as parallels over the same area of injustice and in the case of the girls who were part of the war effort as military people, and the story was one not at all in the news as a regular phenomenon oppressing and hurting — here killing women — sexual harassment. A bully type male, nasty, and utterly amoral (as we see in the bar by his treatment of Sam) is responsible for impregnating and then threatening a Lucy Smith who throws herself at a train. He and his assistant then threaten to destroy the career of her friend if she so much as tells another person. They can do this because they can use Draconian military regulations.
So Sam’s story in this context is a lighter version of the hard story. Her father does not recognize her as a person when it comes to sex; he wants to take her back lest she becomes sexually compromised. Seeing Foyle and then Milner he feels she is “safe. It’s her virginity or chastity that is at stake. It’s an excuse her mother needs her and this is a strange sort of job, not one where she is doing obvious good. Driving a man around, you see.
I wasn’t annoyed but rather glad to see the topic even brought up and the girls shown as victims. Horowitz extended this to vulnerable men, where the pair of soldiers even tried to kill him — as I said, I’m nor sure that was probable, but the point was to show how easy it would be to lock him up and with a political background of joining communists, smear and destroy his career.
Again we are shown real villains among the British, and with power.
Jim Seigel: “Thanks, Ellen. You remind me how much I loved the series.”
[…] second of a proposed 4 blogs on Foyle’s War: two years have passed since the first season was aired, and 10 months since the series began (May […]
[…] criminal behavior occasioned or allowed by war behavior, often on the British side (see my blog on Seasons 1 & 2, May to Oct 1940; and on Seasons 3 & 4, February 1941 to March […]
[…] bombs?) are flying overhead. When someone said estate country houses are hypo-objects, I thought of Foyle’s War, 7:2, “The Cage,” where one such country house has been turned into a secret prison for […]
[…] has come time for me to write my last blog for now on this magnificent series (see the lst 2 seasons; Seasons 3 & 4; and Seasons 5 & 6). In real time this wonderful project of summarizing, […]
We purchased the full collection of foyle’s on tbe recommendation of Pastor Alistair Begg, a Scotsman, so I knew it would be without the foul language and other filth much TV offers. It did not disappoint. Well worth the money. I waited for a sale. You will fall in love with characters and story lines. Everything is accurate and true to form. We have watched many times,. We give it 10 stars !