Endeavour: The Striker

June 19, 2022 9:02 PM - Season 8, Episode 1

An explosive murder at an Oxford college has potentially far-reaching political ramifications. Meanwhile, Morse is tasked with guarding the life of a beloved football team’s star striker.

(Show description from PBS's website except I changed his name to "Morse," because it is ridiculous to call him anything else.)

posted by The corpse in the library (8 comments total)

I can't WAIT to see this!!
posted by cooker girl at 8:34 AM on June 20, 2022

(sigh) I love this show. I could watch Thursday and Bright sit around the table and talk all day. This episode though…it seemed very disjointed, jumpy. I’m going to watch it again. I liked the writing of the scene where the football player tells his former girlfriend that he still loves her and she replies that she’s not that girl any more. Also, the actor playing Jim Strange has lost so much weight that I wasn’t sure it was him.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:53 AM on June 20, 2022

I'm glad there were some callbacks to last season. It wouldn't feel right to ignore Bright's loss or Morse's -- like -- whatEVER one would call last season's total weirdness.
posted by humbug at 1:01 PM on June 20, 2022

> I could watch Thursday and Bright sit around the table and talk all day

Ha! During what I bet was the same scene, I turned to my watching companion and said "There's something so soothing about listening to them." They can be talking about the most terrible things, but the way the dialogue fits together? or the actors sound? or the clues fall into place? I don't know what it is, but I love to listen to them.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:15 PM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm unhappy to see Morse drinking this much. I know, as a longtime Morse fan, that he will be... well, not "fine," but he'll survive. But it's bleak.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:16 PM on June 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I just learned this is the final season! And it ends with 33 episodes, just like the original Inspector Morse (I thought the latter ran much longer, thanks to the perennial reruns on PBS). Now I’m getting nervous, all that foreshadowing in the early seasons…
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:32 PM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's been a few months since I've seen this, but I wasn't a great fan. Agree with TWinbrook8 that the direction (by Shaun Evans IIRC) felt a bit off, especially in the football scenes. (I suspect that football scenes are really hard to shoot for a one-off episode, and so they leant into a mildly expressionistic style that doesn't quite suit).

I do like the gradual coarsening of Morse. In any other drama, you'd feel all the drinking was foreshadowing a breakdown, but we know that it's instead about how the on-going trauma of a being a (TV) cop has built the walls that now surround the fresh-faced, wise-cracking, damsel-flirting [all -ish tbf] Morse of season 1.
posted by Hartster at 1:46 AM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’m an idiot. This series -8- is not the last series. They are filming the final season now, and it will be the last one. I blame the ridiculously long wait between seasons and between the UK and the US airings for the confusion.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:23 PM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]