Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, James Bradshaw, Anton Lesser, Simon Harrison, Caroline O’Neill, Sara Vickers, Sean Rigby, Abigail Thaw, Colin Tierney, Abby Barnes, Khali Best, Daniel Boys, Katherine Bubbear, Lindsay Campbell, Tom Canton, Ed Colman, Adam De Ville, Mike Grady, Simon Harrison, Simon Hepworth, Ava Masters, Roger May, Aston McAuley, Alison Newman, Cera Rose Pickering, Richard Riddell, Hugh Sachs, Fiona Skinner, Elizabeth Wells, Kit Young.
We move either with the times, or we are suffocated by them, we adapt to the changes that come our way, and in turn defeat them, own them even, or we throw away all that shaped us in the first place and retire, we close ourselves off from the world and we fall asleep to the sound of what could have been.
Even in adversity there is always hope, in the darkest moments there is redemption and reveal, and not every case that comes the way of any detective is formed of the absolute nefarious deed; it may feel like a hollow victory, there is still a crime that had been committed, however what must be reconciled when the arrest is made is how the sympathy of law can be applied for one who made just a small mistake in life, whose only crime was to be negligent and then tried to cover it up instead of atoning.
The age of social change, the great shift that was promised with the late 60s flower power generation could be seen to alter at the time and ultimately be betrayed, but it is the realm of detective series that it perhaps comes about more acutely, and when we see through the eyes of someone such as Endeavour Morse, demoted to being Woodstock’s uniformed policeman, his friends and colleagues paying the heavy price for centralisation, the modern policing times and the death of a young officer, it is there that we see that the dream had whimpered away and a more brutal age had come into being.
Endeavour has been passionate about reflecting the period it has been set in with absolute polish, and as it returns for a new series with the opening episode Pylon, it distinguishes itself with its ability to mirror the memory of what must be every parents greatest fear is, and the unspeakable act of laying the blame at the person’s door to whom will see the records show positive comments from higher up the command chain.
Pylon manages to bring these two elements together with subtly, and with a degree of frightening ease, for those who didn’t see the first hand of corruption possible at the time, and the way that the police didn’t learn lessons from the events of Saddleworth Moor just a few years earlier, Pylon is perhaps an eye-opener, and yet not every crime is one in which is perpetrated with an act of disgust to it, sometimes it is just a case of bad fortune and ill-timing.
Pylon also brings out the absolute best in two of the show’s stars, Roger Allam and Shaun Evans, the way they hold themselves during the case is to see them grow in a different direction to what faithful viewers have been used to from the pair, especially in the case of Mr. Allam’s D.I. Fred Thursday, busted down a rank and suffering from events at home, it is gratifying in many ways to watch this particular actor maintain his decorum and panache whilst showing how the system can attempt to break a person’s spirit.
The electricity flows once more, Endeavour is back, times change, standards rise and fall, however there are a few things in life that can be relied on and one of them surely has to be Endeavour Morse.
Ian D. Hall