The cozy father-daughter relationship between Sam and Foyle also feels watered down now that Sam is married and later becomes pregnant. Its streets are gritty and instead of charming cottages, we see rows of identical newly-built boxlike houses. Unlike bucolic Hastings, post-war London offers few physical attractions. Sam marries a budding politician but still chauffeurs Foyle around and acts as his secretary, while Milner is no longer part of the team. World War II has ended and Foyle has been coerced into working for MI-5 in London.
#FOYLES WAR AMONG THE FEW SERIES#
In Seasons 7 and 8, however, the tone and setting of the series shifts. The worldview that Foyle espouses in the “The German Woman” remain true throughout the first six seasons. But despite plot threads that lead Foyle down diverse and troubling alleys-he crosses paths on and off with MI-5-the series remains grounded in the town of Hastings and its local police department. While the crimes at first are local, as the years progress, newcomers like the Americans arrive and Foyle finds himself investigating crimes committed in US army camps that involve issues of race, for example, that the series hadn’t previously tackled. The narrative arc of the first six seasons covers the war years from 1940 until the end of World War II in 1945. You stop believing that and we might as well not be fighting the war. If I start bending rules, I might as well pack it.” When Sam observes that the victim was German, Foyle replies, “She was a human being.
Hanging him is not going to do anybody much good… But I’m a policeman, and I’m here to do a job. Sam asks Foyle: “Were you tempted to let go?” Foyle replies, “Yes, I was. His outlook is clearly expressed in “The German Woman,” the opening episode of the series, in which Foyle discovers that the murderer of a German woman also happens to be crucial to the British war effort. Generous to those facing social censure and other hardships, his rules are simple and adamant: There is no excuse for murder, or for harming those who can’t defend themselves, not even the desperate requirements of war.” Even while the world around him seems to have lost its moral bearings, for Foyle there’s always right and wrong. But Hastings remains tranquil and beautiful, and as Mary McNamara puts it in the Los Angeles Times, “Though other detectives and lead characters twist and shuffle through addiction, attraction, corruption and a generally fluid morality, Christopher Foyle doggedly remains a fixed point in an uncertain universe. Of course, crime intervenes, and the characters involved, as well as the resolution aren’t unconnected to the events that occur in the wider world: there’s a shifty grocer who sells rations illegally, the hotelier’s husband has lost his eyesight in World War I, and Foyle himself is accused of causing panic in an underground bomb shelter. Sam asks: “You think it’s going to get as bad as that here, sir?” “God forbid,” Foyle replies. “You wouldn’t think that there’s a war on.” Earlier Foyle, who has just returned from a trip to the capital, describes the state of the city in unsparing terms: “Quarter of a million homeless, civil administration almost non-existent, no builders, no materials for repairs, rest centers overcrowded…”. “How the other half lives,” Milner remarks, when he and Sam arrive to investigate a missing person who worked at the hotel. In “The Funk Hole” (Season 2), much of the action takes place at Brookfield Court, a luxurious hotel where wealthy Londoners have retreated to ride out the war playing tennis and relaxing in manicured, green surroundings. In the final two seasons, which take place after the war has ended, however, the tone of show becomes bleaker and more despairing, almost noir-like.įor me, the first six seasons are quintessential Foyle. There’s no gratuitous violence, no sex, no swearing to speak of, and most of the action takes place in and around the picturesque environs of Hastings with its ivy-covered, white-washed homes and winding roads. Despite the undercurrent of darkness running through each episode-homegrown spies, refugees and immigrants who are wrongly accused-there’s an element of narrative coziness that runs through the first six seasons of the show.
Multiple seemingly unrelated strands coalesce into a sequence of cause and effect that Foyle pieces together in order to solve the central crime-usually a murder. Foyle’s War combines historical events with mystery.
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