Nearly the last shot of the show: Sam (Honeysuckle Weeks) and Foyle (Michael Kitchen) beginning to say goodbye, to end their professional relationship
Dear friends and readers,
It 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, understanding and evaluating episodes has lasted five months. I would feel very sad were I not sure I shall re-watch the whole once again soon, and all the features too.
As I began 7:1 “High Castle,” I felt that the classic or central formula for Foyle, that he is the good man, the constant in an often bad world was no longer the paradigm; he was being forced to compromise too much. I put it down to the change in genre. Series 1-6 was (I’m following Andrew Marr’s brilliant distinguishing) the detective story where it was a pattern of finding out what happened criminally usually by a detached sleuth (here we had three, for beyond Sam and Foyle, Sergeant Paul Milner (Anthony Howell). While there was a use of M15 and M16 and some spy elements in 1-6, they were secondary, not centrally structurally; in Series 7-8 Foyle has been commandeered into working for the spy agencies himself, yes as a police officer, but taking on behaviors and assumptions that belong to the spy genre.
Hilda Piece (Ellie Haddington) becomes a central character; she often lies, is devious (personally ambitious), protects hideous people
Thus the episodes for 7 & 8 are the result of initiations and complicities with harmful evil (even) conduct) on the justification that ends justifies means — just what Foyle had been rejecting for 6 different sets of adventures. To put it simply, Foyle is asked to do something where he is lied to about what he is finding things out for — it is just so deceitful or dishonorable. They do not avoid nationalism, the way the first six seasons miraculously often managed to; there is knee-jerk anti-communism now and again. But these are, as it were, minor excresences, because Foyle is either able to remained uninvolved or himself undermine just those parts of the assignments that are so pernicious (and are, for example, in much of LeCarr anathema endured). Time and again Foyle also either refuses to enact harmful deeds or exposes them. Further, the stories themselves of these last two series are further or wider ranging in political and philosophical matter than were the first four seasons, touching on more troubling issues, with the programs sometimes giving a more truthful or accurate explanation for political events and history (for example, the founding of Israel).
I also realized I had not mentioned (though I was aware of this, how could one not be) that one paradigm at the center of all the seasons was that of the evolving father-daughter relationship between Sam and Foyle! Here they are when they first meet: how much younger Honeysuckle Weeks looks in Season 1:
Foyle confounded when confronted by Sam who has been told she is to work for Mr Foyle
Sam irresistibly round-faced (signifying youth), fresh, buoyant, all hope when they first meet — she can hardly wait to fulfill her job; she is the spot of sunshine in the series, all heart …
Anthony Horowitz keeps repeating that part of the steadying foundation for the series are conventional or classic values: and what we have is a girl with a boy’s name, dressing boyishly, seeking approval from a male authority figure, learning from him, imitating him. Foyle is to her someone stable, reasonable, offering her place where she can act in the world (as opposed to her vicar father who wanted her to come home and stay there). Foyle is her ally; provides her with important work, a role model, who, together with Milner (someone crippled by the war whom Foyle rescues too, but not as a parent, rather almost a rival), makes her part of a team. She intuits constructive feedback and over the course of the first 6 seasons she is learning, often on her own initiative, and, with her woman’s intuition and ethic of caring, she helps him solve cases and provide compassion and care for those they meet. An interesting difference in these last two seasons, is how Weeks is dressed differently: far more mannish; how much older and leaner she is made to look. She is now married to Adam Wainright who does not try to dominate and keep her to himself, allows her space and time. She transfers the skills she became so expert at with Foyle to help Adam in his career.
Above Sam has made friends with both the young women who becomes a victim, and a young woman who we find is complicit with thief — she is shepherding them to a dance for fun (6:2, “Killing Time”)
This is a man’s program — so female friendships develop between Sam and another young woman her age she can identify with now and again but are not central to the development of the character. That is much more often found in women’s writing and films. Further most of the time the girls are seen in relationship to the men they are with. Not always. But the first two seasons had many young men finding themselves, good and flawed, as sub-stories; this was still true of seasons 3 & 4. The girl’s and women’s stories are only glimpsed, to the side until Seasons 5 & 6 when the themes of home-coming, of women’s war work, and aftermath come to the fore. Throughout Horowitz is remarkably free of misogyny — maybe the influence of his wife, Jill Green, whom he says he worked closely with, and was the producer or one of the producers throughout. And while Foyle has an important relationship with his son, Andrew (Julian Ovenden), it is not developed in the intimate thorough way it is with Sam — and we feel saddened for him when it’s clear she is moving out of his life to become a mother, wife, and partner to Adam, Labor MP. They have been at the core of all the series.
Here they are mid-career (5:2, “Broken Souls”)
As in the case of Seasons 5 & 6, I won’t put the summaries in chronological order as the immediate moment no longer matters so much; it’s the general era of the new “cold” war Horowitz is dramatizing, critiquing, exposing. I know I am short-changing Sam’s relationship with Adam (now played by Daniel Weyman) this way as their courtship, young love, earliest marriage and now facing the world as a family is evolved over time. So too Foyle with other new recurring characters, for example, Arthur Valentine (Tim McMullan) who Foyle at first regards with suspicion as an amoral man who obeys orders regardless, but learns is to be trusted; like Hilda Pierce, Valentine means well, and unlike her, does not lie or seem complicit with the worst people (he has a lower rank), and importantly, we learn, is a homosexual whom Foyle treats with respect and loyalty.
Valentine confiding in Foyle (8:3, “Elise”)
One of the deeper pleasures of these series is the recurring character; some stay the same, but the major ones evolve, and are ambiguous. Foyle’s last near love (he experiences a few across the series), Elizabeth Addis (Hermione Guilford) first appears (we discover) in season 8 as a member of the M15 there to watch and report back on Foyle; he thinks they are developing a relationship for real; she changes and wants to be friends, perhaps lovers. The last moment of the series leaves ambiguous whether after Foyle discovers how she was using him, he could find it in himself to trust her again and have some company in life …
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Season 7, Episode 1, “The Eternity Ring:”
So I returned to Foyle’s War tonight, and found this episode & season very different in mood, feel and the kind of people Foyle gets involved with from the six previous: Dated August 1946.
The group of scientists waiting to see the denotating of the test atomic bomb
It opens night-time, 2 sets of trucks, New Mexico, July 16th, 1946, with a group of scientists, among them, Dr Michael Fraser (ands in for John Von Neuman – Stephen Boxer) and Dr Max Hoffman (Klaus Fuchs who was involved with the Soviets – Ken Bones) watching from a remarkably close shed the detonating of the first atomic bomb
We then have another opening scene, again the dead of night, a Mr Gorin (Dylan Charles) taking secret documents from some huge building, there is another man spying on him. He may be doing that for Fraser, or maybe the pro-Soviet Chambers.
A darker focus on Foyle’s face (Michael Kitchen is 3 years older and looks it). We see him getting off a plane, he has been to the US for a year and is coming home; he meets an ordinary ex-flyer, Frank Shaw (Joe Duttine), coming home for the first time in 6 years. He was a POW in Japan, had malaria, is dreading coming home to Ruthie (Jennifer Hennessey) and his son, now 16 and home-coming is rocky. They were bombed out of Hastings, His son works as a bartender to all hours, and his wife works She does not want to give up her job. Later in the episode when he turns up to be rehired as a police man he is sneered at and dismissed as useless.
Foyle has to leave Shaw because he is immediately (in effect) arrested and taken to a National Security secret service place and intensely pressured into becoming a policeman investigating “an eternity ring” of (dire tones) communists. References are made to the suicide of Howard Paige, the whole ambience is one of hostility and coercion, a fat faced sneering Arthur Valentine (Tim McMullan) and team seemingly headed by Hilda Pierce (Ellie Haddington) where they move to a chief, William Chambers (Nicholas Jones). He is blackmailed into joining them at MI5 by a photo of Sam apparently giving secret papers to a soviet agent outside the Victorian theater.
After several insidious twists and turns it emerges that the Eternity Ring is a complete fiction, the photo was a fake, putting Sam photographed outside the theater where she had been seeing Henry V with a man superimposed. Miss Pierce suspected Chambers was a mole and she was tricking him into revealing himself; he escapes to Russia, and she gets his job. Along the way they bully, lie, destroy people. He is told there is a new war, with the Soviets, the name Stalin is used as a talisman for evil that need not be explained. Sam to them is guilty by association; she married a politician, and she and Adam lived at Sevenoaks where there were communists – for 3 months. Just the sort of association that led to blacklisting in the US
Foyle is drawn into the same unscrupulous behavior investigating people. He seeks out Sam without telling her what he suspects; she happens to be working for Dr Fraser and his wife, Helen (Kate Duchene), sick (actually unknown to her dying of cancer from exposure to radiation), where he is invited to dinner. She’s one of the rare characters in this episode (like Sam, or Foyle) who shows genuine capacity for being cordial to others and wanting to help them – because she’s a woman? Doesn’t have to take things so seriously? Ouch. Foyle also meets Hoffman.
Sam and Adam in one of their happy — spontanenous feel — moments at home …
He goes to lunch with Sam and discovers she is not happy even if now happily married to Adam Wainright (semi-warm moments there when they succeed in this or that; we see they are struggling to get food through rationing, living in a poorer area). Wainright played by different actor (Daniel Weyman replaces Max Brown – they look alike): 3 real years have gone by. We are told she is herself a pro-Churchill person (“we ought to give him a chance” now the war is over?) but since Adam was invited to join labor, she has to support them (the National Health and other things aimed at are brought up with tones of disbelief); she does not seem to mind since Adam genuinely wants to do good. She and he need the money she makes, but the next thing that happens is she is fired. Why? She is accused of being in cahoots with Foyle who Fraser now thinks has come to spy on him. This is not done out of principle we learn by the end of the episode.
Sam is indignant and seeks out Foyle and very different from their earlier relationship she demands to know how he could have targeted her this way. He tells of the photo or shows it to her and she says that never happened. She calms down and two agree to investigate together as they used to. This is the first semi-warm moment in the episode apart from the Shaws first encounter together. Their investigation leads them to one of the places these anonymous spies we see were holing out, a room contaminated with radiation out of a thermos (It’s suggested). This is a room where a Fraser operative has been. Both she and Foyle are captured by a swat team and treated as criminals themselves. When it’s finally seen they are not, they have to be de-contaminated making her late for an appt with a labor committee Adam is trying to persuade to let him run for office in a hitherto Tory area.
The interview goes badly because Adam’s wife is not there. Again the whole attitude of mind has nothing to do with ideology – men running for office need wives by their side. Glenvil Harris is apparently Adam’s mentor? (Jeremy Swift). Sam comes late, dressed oddly but paradoxically makes a good impression because she is truthteller – this is one of several moments in the episode, unusual, where the episode of unconvincing. It is a parallel of Foyle having to get past the suspicions of him by those he is supposedly working for. Another place is when Foyle suggests to Fraser he tell MI5 what he’s been up to and Fraser basically agrees he should with the implication he will. Of course he won’t—they’d laugh at his idea of a brotherhood of scientists and feeling that the Russians are not bad people, just have some bad political leaders.
Shaw is getting into bad fights with his wife; his son insults him for having been away for so long; the wife’s mother tells him this is not his home (it was hers) and to get out Shaw follows the young man to a “gentleman’s club” we had earlier seen Valentine sneak into. It turns out this is a club for gay men and Shaw becomes incensed and beats Valentine up as Valentine comes out and sneers at him. Shaw of course hates homosexuals automatically. He thinks his son is doing a unworthy job in every way. He is taken into custody and we see Ruthie show up and forgive him by hugging him and taking him back to where they are living. Another semi-warm moment.
We see Hoffman suspected; we see him pass information to someone, but only at the end of the episode does Foyle accuse Fraser (apparently) rightly of sharing information with the Soviets (or “others”) He says he is doing this to prevent an atomic war holocaust, so the playing field is leveled for all combatants. We see Fraser and Hoffman go into the Arnwell Atomic Research center where Fraser takes a specimen of U233 – and only later realize this is what they were doing. This is an episode which takes at least 3 watchings.
The fundamental problem with this episode and the whole season and next is Foyle is presented as disliking these spies and their operation but is drawn into joining them. At the end of the episode when we see him at long last heading back to Hastings, Hilda comes by and lures, pressures him into her limousine, and tries to persuade him to work for MI5 (and her). He caves in too quickly: she promises to do what she can for Frank, it appears Sam can be hired as his driver again (so replication of the companion relationship, two people, older man, daughter-like girl, working together). But if he is out of sympathy with much of their thinking, how can he join? He is reminded by Hilda he wanted to join the Security group early in the war, and asked if he is really going to spend his life fishing and nothing else.
It appears this is the only place he can go to now – the world has changed not for the better. So what was he war for? And look at the weapon for the next war …
Spy stories are quite different from mysteries: they are nationalistic, about loyalty and betrayal not just to whom the people work for but to one another so amoral. It is much harder for Foyle to be our secure moral compass in this world – he is said to have hounded Paige to his death – he denies it the verb. There’s a 4 minute introduction to these two new seasons by Anthony Horowitz: he apparently feels the older world mystery is not suited to serious presentations of issues in our world today – only spy stories will do. Foyle’s 1st season was done in 2000; it’s now 2013.
Series 8: Episode 1: “High castle”
Foyle entering Monowitz Slave Labor Camp
Series 8 tells a story which allows the extrapolation out to the hideous capitalist enterprise I.G. Farben, investigation of whom necessitates Foyle’s visit to the slave labor camp of Monowitz. What Foyle unravels is the collusion of the UK and US govts who permitted “businessmen” who of course (I write this ironically) care more about profits to be made by selling gas and now other radioactive products to Nazi Germany which enabled them to fuel their planes and carry bombs that killed millions of people. There is a veil connecting these Nazis and US businessmen to the present Soviet Union in order to satisfy the propaganda still so alive in 2010, but it’s just a distraction to please the US backers.
We see Michael Kitchen filmed in what’s left of these fantastically cruel ugly places. The horrific conditions these slave Jews lived in are made emphatic by talk.
The episode opens with petty thieves/thugs trying to steal the 2000 pounds of whiskey said to be aboard a ship and one of them discovering this fuel is so much poison that he dies of it. This whiskey is bottled as High Castle.
The big businessmen exhibit not the least remorse. Horowitz in the feature that goes with this acknowledges a complaint by US viewers that the US guys seem mostly to be bad guys – in fact Horowitz’s target is capitalism and arms manufacturers, which to be sure where heavily US men.
The Nurembourg trials are going on and we learn that beyond the very top people, the Nazi s who profited so much from the war got off with light sentences. The UK M15 care only about information they can get from these moral horrors. Two of them are killed but our sympathies are kept from arousing for them in their utterly selfish hard mean dense personalities.
Its context Is also the forced coercion of women back to no jobs after the WW2 when men came home and asked for their jobs back. Adam is now a labor MP asked by one of his constituents to help her keep her job. She has been offered a job on a production line for half the pay; the returning man is profoundly physically maimed. Her union is run by men; all the MPs are men. They say it’s women’s job now to have babies. Sam is herself pregnant but not ready to spend all her time at home in the nursery Adam is preparing for her. How awful are jobs as companions to and readers for those who despise you.
Across this episode we meet a number of women who are tyrannized over by men or utterly dependent on them: from the wife of the US murderer running Global American Oil (Standard), to the wife of the scholar who went to Germany to bring back a bribe of diamonds to pay for her medical care in the US for a cancer. Sam is treated in the rudest way by this American’s Nazi-sympathizing old man. At the close when Sam has been rescued by Valentine (Tim McMullan as this closet homosexual is gradually shown to be a decent man) she apologizes to Adam for not caring enough for the potential baby; she said she had no right to endanger herself. She does uncover vital information which enables Foyle to stop these businessmen from continuing their practices to dealing with the Saudi Arabians and Soviet Union, not to omit the Shah of Iran (it supports this man to buy and sell oil with him for armaments). Adam apologizes back because he was trying to help a young woman whom he found he could do nothing for (the very unions are all male) and himself pressuring Sam to stay ‘home.” What’s important beyond the characters and story we care so much about (Sam) is we see this larger deeply exploitation of and bullying/threat of women context.
A terrifying Soviet spy named Leskov does a great deal of the killing. He is never caught.
Foyle’s son has now vanished – that is a loss. I can see we are expected to realize he Is attracted to and himself an attraction for a lone older women, Elizabeth Addis, who works in university and for MI5 (as a casual plant they can call upon) – the smidgen of loyalty felt to a good person seems to me not to go far enough.
I hope I left nothing out that mattered. This season I am driven not to tell the particulars of each story but their larger meaning against the backdrop of the dregs of WW2 and the “cold war. Jokes by a new regular at the Nuremberg trials to Foyle how he is still bothering himself with bodies in libraries stabbed in the back. At least three of these German ex-officials in Hitler’s Germany are murdered in the way of Agatha Christie deaths.
Series 8: Episode 2: “Trespass”
Sam with the desperately poor father and his seriously sick son
I found Trespass remarkable in its candor over the way Israel was being created in 1946/7 – analysing the events in such a way as we can see the origins of the situation today. Some of the matter takes us right back to the 2nd episode of the 1st season about Nazism in British society and among British politicians. Trespass opens with the bombing of the King David Hotel In 1946 by the Jewish terrorist Stern gang (with others). Foyle’s woman friend from the previous episode, Prof Addis, is supervising a class where Daniel Woolf a student is explaining the Balfour proposal was not intended to create a Jewish state but perpetuate British control of that area in the middle east which was a key to reach India, to do trade over oil, to use the Suez canal. What happens during the course of the 90 minutes is we slowly (very slowly) discover the British foreign secretary is playing a double game, and himself sending off bombs to ships to stop Jews from crossing to Palestine; and using MI5 as a clever disguise. A conference is to be held for Arabs and Jews to try to come to a solution, and both the local gov’t and MP (Adam Wainright) to prevent this conference from exploding in violence, which has been precipitated by one of these fascist groups (still around, still anti-semitic after all these years of hideous war & slave labor and extermination camps), which we are shown attract people who are poor and so tired and disappointed after the war is over as their lives are not improved at all. The labor gov’t is still working on producing the National health, and housing and still rationing food.
One set of characters is there to show us how desperate life was: a man with a boy who is very ill cannot get him any care because he lacks the money to pay for a doctor or hospital help; he is tempted to join the Nazi group that night and leaves his son with a kindly aging Polish couple. They are blown up by this Nazi group’s march and his son rescued from death by police. Sam secures for him a doctor’s help with his son.
The most interesting sub-story is that of the young woman who calls herself Lea Fischer and comes to stay with a Jewish family on the excuse she is going to go to a college course. In fact she has come because her father, Jewish, was killed when British brutal soldiers burst on their home in Palestine. She is part of a terrorist group who want to blow up the National Conference because they see it as not favoring Jews. She spends a day with this couple’s son, he grows to trust her and he thinks they are in love; what she does is sneak in a bomb to his equipment as a sound engineer for the conference. He is almost blown to bits – only prevented by Foyle and Sam and M15 discovering this aim at the last moment. She is play by a wonderful actress I recognized from Indian Summers – there too a understandably angry victim who in IS does not take revenge but sacrifices herself and ends up in jail for 9 years. One actress and another actor I recognized as having parts in Outlander! In similar roles archetypally speaking.
Amber Rose Revah as “Lee Fischer”
Again Sam and Adam are not having enough time together. At the very end of the episode we discover that Dr Addis did not find a room for Foyle to enable him to escape the far from friendly spying on him his colleagues and the disguised ruthless people do but for herself to keep an eye on him for the sake of thse colleagues. Again Hilda Pierce is the person who behaves in this distinctly untrustworthy manner. Hilda Pierce’s amorality washes over Dr Addis as Foyle realizes Addis’s friendship for him is part of the spy racket. She is feeling bad about this but she does not stop.
This one is so complicated – what is shown us are the origins of the realities of our colonialist and war-ridden world today. Several of the actors who are in MI5 who we started with and distrusted rightly are now turning into understandable men of compromised integrity.
To read about Season 7, Episodes 2, “The Cage,” and 3, “Sunflowers,” and Series 8, Episodes 3, “Elise.” All in comments.
Sam must leave this career and cross over to her husband …
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Series 7, Episode 2, “The Cage.” This one is about torture done by the British and Americans.
I can be shorter this time, mainly because what is so wrong, foul, horrible is what these British organizations are doing: this is an episode revealing the torture and casual killing techniques of the British M15. The utter indifference of these operatives to the British people they are supposed to e serving can only be matched (they say) by Stalin now in Hitler’s place.
People watching the episode might then come away with how this evil they are doing is to “fight” Stalin’s, and the mole responsible for kidnapping a wrong woman (she shares a name with spy he is in love with and whom does escape to East Berlin) is given (in context) this ironic speech about how he’s given his life up to communism, which is to replace the horrors of capitalism, the class system which he (and his female mole) saw so disgustingly in Cambridge. As a bye blow he kills a doctor who tried to save the life of one of the tortured people, thus destroying this man, his life’s work and his wife’s existence: she has no where to belong except as his wife now she’s survived Auschwitz; she is Jewish and we see no one cares for her at all, and she is at risk for being sent back to Germany.
But we don’t see anything equally evil in the petty tricks the Tories are up to as they fight Adam Wainright running for MP as a labor person.
We do see democracy at work even if some of the voters seem so indifferent. As Wainright and Sam work to find out for a grieving widow-mother where her daughter is, so Foyle as part of his staying with this foul organization gets a letter for her allowing her to remain in the UK – of course alone now
The cage is the code name for the place the tortures are taking place; it’s an ex-country estate mansion. The wrongly kidnapped woman (who are they to kidnap anyone) is rescued by an efficient operative whom Foyle’s bosses (for now) had rejected because he went to the wrong school.
In the introduction Horowitz details the vicious behavior or case this story is based upon. Its fuller history.
E.M.
Series 7, Episode 3, “Sunflowers.”
This was another remarkably powerful episode. I’ve changed my mind and now say that the last two seasons, although quite different in content, and spy-political stories rather than mystery-war ones, is as good, and in some ways better because the issues brought up are sophisticated one. Foyle is no longer investigating the body in the library.
It replicates 7:1, The Eternity Ring because Miss Hilda Pierce (Ellie Haddington) is again acting deceitfully and lying continually, this time to protect a Nazi who committed heinous acts because MI5 finds him useful. The episode is about his own paranoia: he fears someone or people are trying (rightly) to kill him in revenge. Foyle is told to find out who is trailing him and keep him secure. Kitchen’s poker face did not give away until near the end how much Foyle loathes this man.
The parallel in Sam’s life story is that she investigates a land deal that deprived a local citizen of his farm land; researching and interviewing people uncover the reality that the MP her husband, Adam Wainright, is working for actually took a bribe or himself stands to gain ownership or control of the land. He says he did this to be able to produce food while the original owner was going to turn it into the basis of a capitalist enterprise. Adam holds out this is wrong in the first place, never mind any supposed greater good.
That’s Foyle’s stance – except of course there seems to be no greater good anyone can think of except saving some of their operatives. Sam is blamed for doing what she should not have, though;, and at the end of Sunflowers when Foyle discovers that the Nazi had not died in a fake bombing episode (got up by Pierce) and is being taken to a plane to be flown where he won’t be arrest, he himself informs the American general who has been seeking to get Pierce to turn the Nazi over to them. The American general shows up just as the plane is getting ready to fly off.
There is another kind of parallel many episodes before where Foyle is maneuvered into letting a ruthless murderer escape justice in the UK because the murderer is at the head of a US agency building 50 (55) ships for the UK.
It’s the atmosphere that is so striking. As in The cage where we witnessed however tactfully torture, so here we witness the double crossing of American soldiers who lost a battle and honorably surrendered and expected to become POWs, just mowed down by machine guns. The landlady where the Nazi is staying was for a short while his lover and she tells how he laughed at her grief for her husband. The Nazi’s cover is that of being an art historian (Dutch, Rembrandt), which probably alludes to Anthony Blunt.
The episode is beautifully knitted together: Sam has a job as a typist-secretary for some political group, she is also driving Foyle once again, she does research for him (why she cottons onto what Adam’s boss is up to), and she is wife and by the end of the episode openly pregnant. Early on she is said to have gone to a dentist but we know better.
Remarkable scenes: the corpse in a morgue; Arthur Valentine who Foyle found distasteful for his bullying methods and open indifference to morality becomes a sort of side-kick to Foyle, helping him because Foyle kept Valentine’s homosexuality hidden when Foyle could have exposed him.
Hilda Pierce with her intensity of expression and cane is memorable in herself and as someone who has no qualms about what she does (short maybe of murdering someone herself or by her unit) if theoretically or in practical ways they are useful to her. There is a tinge of misogyny here as somehow her boss who does similar sorts of things is not presented as enacting the same kind of brutal unresponsiveness
Gone are the stories of young men growing up, trying to make good – now it’s older men come back from the war who are not being given what they deserve after their sacrifice. Foyle is seen as helping them to at least a job. Adam Wainright sort of fits the role only he is not finding himself; his behavior is of someone who knows who he is – a moral labor person.
Sunflowers refers to the outside of the place, where the atrocity over the American prisoners took place. One young man who is crippled and cannot take on his old job as a tutor in a boy’s school wants to kill this Nazi after he recognizes him for the Nazi shot him superfluously as he was in field of Sunflowers and the place has a German name referring to the sunflowers in the meadows of the place. Again not the same kind of story for he is shattered for the rest of his life and can only recover, not become what he would have had he not had such searing experiences.
This disk had Horowitz telling us the real history the episode was based upon, and there was a 17 minute dramatization showing the viewer how the machine gunning episodes were carried out.
E.M.
Series 8, Episode 3, Elise. The last episode
I was not sure I am understanding what happened in the last episode of the last season because it so horrifies me. Operatives sent to their death so the organization can carry on, save face. . This is how I understand it, and I would be grateful if someone would correct me and tell me I have it wrong.
It opens with a distraught young man shooting Miss Pierce as she walks from her cab to the SOE building — improbably w/o a body guard.
It turns out he’s the brother of a young woman, Sophie Corrigan, a group of young women who worked for the SOE under Hilda Pierce as spies and secret agents from say almost the beginning of the war until the war was won. What is claimed (to cut through all the deviations) is that the people running Hilda Pierce’s office behind her back knew that their codes had been broken and that when these “operatives” were dropped into France or Germany, they would regularly be picked up almost immediately, tortured, and executed. Sophie Corrigan called Elise was one of 9 (or some such number) murdered in a short period of time. Woodhead (head of M15) and those working for him, including Elizabeth Addis who first presented herself as an academic to Foyle, but in the last episode he discovered was an M15 person hired to watch and report on him.
Why did they keep on doing this program? because not to carry on would have looked bad, it might have been shut down and not “be there” at D-Day. This is what I am wondering about. Is this what is implied — not made quite explicit.
One of the improbabilities is that Hilda Pierce was kept from this knowledge. Throughout the series she has been revealed as doing evil horrific acts or allowing others who had done them to escape scot-free if they cooperated with M15 and gave information. How suddenly has she become blind? we are expected to believe that in this case she saw herself as a mother to these girls. She is shown to live in a completely impersonal flat, a sign of no private life.
Foyle is all sympathy with Sophie’s brother who manages to murder one of the people in the SOE giving information still, at this point to gangsters like Daimon White (an outsize business man running networks of black markets) – -and get himself killed in the process. Great sympathy for the mother of these two young Corrigans.
Other parts of the program are about the gangster, people he uses and has murdered, and how Usborne, the chief superintendant of West Peckham, Adam Wainright’s district is in collusion with Damion and set up the Wainrights to plant illegal cigarettes in their flat. In a semi-comic turn Sam persuades Glenvill (Jeremy Swift) to track White and Usborne and take a photo of them together; they are caught by White Henchman and only rescued by a trustworthy person in either M15 or part of some group Sam has learned about as in Trespass 8:2 saves them at the last moment with a gun and high speed chase. Jeremy says next time he thinks he shall become a Tory.
Of course this shows the labor gov’t or local officials to be utterly corrupt: Usborne is taking bribes to allow the black market to flourish and it’s Adam Wainright’s (feeble) attempt to stop this (because forsooth he sympathizes with people who need goods — and both Terry Charman and Horowitz in their talk are sympathetic to all those who bought black market stuff desperately needed or wanted — like cigarettes).
The episode ends on Hilda’s suicide but taking Woodhead with her — she can’t live with this one she says. Sam finally telling Foyle she is pregnant — a touching goodbye scene where she visually changes men whose side she will now live by. And I think Foyle turning away from Addis as having countenanced and done unforgivable things. I remember how she corrected Daniel Woolf’s analysis of why Britain was operating in Palestine – to control it and not to make a Jewish state (that’s why bomb ships with Jews on them and round up active Jews). Too cynical says she. We see in 8;3 that’s a lie.
So Foyle ends up alone as his son now busy in the city (we are told). He’ll be godfather to Sam and Adam’s child.
As I type this I probably answered my own question: yes for a couple of years MI5 knowingly sent operatives to their deaths rather than stop their compromised operation That is a terrible charge.
Ellen