Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Sean Rigby, Anton Lesser, Simon Harrison, Caroline O’ Neil, Sara Vickers, Richard Riddell, James Bradshaw, Abigail Thaw, Matthew Cottle, Michael Parkhouse, Benjamin Wainwright, Oliver Chris, Sargon Yelda, Sasha Willoughby, Sophie Winkleman, Alison Newman, Mary Stockley, Katie Faye, Robert Hands, Terenia Edwards, Alice Orr-Ewing, Blake Ritson.
To be defiant is a virtue, standing up to the lazy attitudes and closed mindedness of others is to show integrity, and yet there will always be those who seek to undermine such morality as insolent, insubordinate, they do not seek out the person who suggests with reason that something can be done a different way, preferring the hand over fist approach and the quick solution, drawn in fire and never logic.
It is being able to see the moon as more than just a way to navigate by the stars, it is to see beyond the face that is always shown to the world and to seek out the hidden features and darkness of the other person that makes police officers such as Endeavour Morse a class above the usual.
Perhaps more so than any other previous episode, Apollo shows the fight that Morse had with authority in his career, the wrong attitude in some people’s eyes as he refused to play the game and whilst John Thaw performed that particular side to the detective’s personality with great effect, honed by years of playing such characters with a dark streak weaved within their D.N.A., in an actor such as Shaun Evans, it glows like red hot embers, the sparks fly out of the confined grate and onto the stone floor, they burn and leave their imprint on the watcher and no amount of whitewash will remove what has been aired; the indelible stamp of anti-corruption, of unwillingness to bend the knee and rightly accept the word of the establishment.
It is to this end that the tension brought out between Mr. Evans’ Morse, the loyalty shown to Roger Allam’s D.I. Thursday and Simon Harrison’s D.C.I. Ronnie Box is compulsive viewing, in an era of change, finding the right way is a hard ask, but being a person of principle is forever the correct way to live.
When you have to fight the twin systems of murder and oppression, your own natural aggression will automatically take stock of the situation and you can either cower in the harsh light, or you can stand up straight and be more than just a figure locked away in a basement, you can take on all, even your own failures and flaws. It is in this embrace that Endeavour keeps on attracting such decent story-lines, the situation between Thursday and his wife Win a reflection of the times in the change of attitudes, that women no longer had to be silent when something hurt them, betrayal, or foolishness on behalf of their husbands, the fight between institutions and the lack of respect the challenge that all must rise too eventually.
The winged messenger of a different age may have seen humanity take its first step out of our earthly confines, and yet the two faces of the moon still hold secrets, one to which murder is often the most determined one to encounter.
Ian D. Hall