Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Sean Rigby, Anton Lesser, Caroline O’Neill, James Bradshaw, Sara Vickers, Abigail Thaw, Jack Bannon, Jack Laskey, Danny Webb, Phil Daniels, Mo Sesay, Brian Pettifer, Will Brown, Christopher Godwin, Victoria Alcock, Meg Kubota, Jo Stone-Fewings, Joseph Macnab, Tomi Ogbaro, Richard Ridings, Laura Branigan, Philip Wright, Jack Hamilton, Ross Green, Rufus Wright.
In the end, everybody must leave for pastures new; only those with unfinished business or the ones that guard the memories and secrets of their fallen comrades remain in vigil.
As the players exit, only the trusted and silent remain, and for Endeavour Morse, the guilt and the far-reaching effects of his time as a serving member of Her Majesty’s Police Force means that the end has already been prepared for as the final episode of the long running series leaves its sizeable mark in Exeunt.
The beauty of the series lays partly in its comfortable assurance in which the lead character is bound to live to fight another day for a few decades after his first appearance, and yet that sense of comfort is tested routinely and with drama always nipping at the heels of the erudite and cultured man.
The depth of the series has been reliable, and in its final episode the bringing together of the strands that bind doubles down with a sense of the absolute, the reasons to why Fred Thursday and his family are never mentioned again in the Morse series, the reasons behind the occasional bouts of paranoia when confronted by criminal actions of those who believe they are above the law, and the much need clarification of Robert Lewis’s path to joining forces eventually with the refined man of Oxford C.I.D.
Exeunt is a divine, almost classical way, to bring a series of such quality to its conclusion, and perhaps it is also Shaun Evans and Roger Allam’s finest moments in the much loved roles of Endeavour Morse and Fred Thursday, the connection between the two men is one of sheer respect, and it showed in the final emotional scenes where they left one another’s company, the seeds of farewell driven by the telling phrase of “I know ye not old man”.
In Russel Lewis’s final script for the series, he brings together a deluge of warmth and pity, combining both emotional states of being with a gentleness that would come to define John Thaw’s time at the helm in Morse.
A final fitting farewell for one of the most exacting police drama series of the last 20 years, thrilling and worthy of all that is to come for the character of Morse.
Ian D. Hall