OUR WEEKLY "ENDEAVOUR" - "QUARTET"

Here we are with the penultimate episode for the fifth season....

'ENDEAVOUR'
"QUARTET"

From the IMDb:

An assassination attempt at an international sporting event opens a new case for Endeavour and Thursday, but their investigation is quickly brought to an unexpected end.

Karl Fucher is shot dead during a televised games tournament and Max believes he is an East and not West German. Special Branch relieve the local police, removing the body, before two mysterious men approach Morse and point him towards perfumier Sebastian Fenix, who employed the dead man as a translator. Despite warnings Morse investigates alone, discovering a safe spy house in Oxford and a link between Fenix and the sale of secrets to the Russians, also involving a respected academic. Thursday meanwhile deals with a turf war and a domestic abuse case which ties in with Morse's sleuthing. 

I think it's going to be that the third episode this season, "Passenger", will have the most items of interest for Toobworld study, but this didn't disappoint in that regard....

Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright:

Good God! 

It's a machete-wielding West Indian 

with a distinctive facial scar we're trying to find. 

In Oxford! 

It's not the Scarlet Pimpernel!

As there was no indication that the Scarlet Pimpernel was mentioned in connection to movies, TV mini-series, or the play and novel written by Baroness Orczy, then our standard practice here at Toobworld Central is to accept that such name-dropping is about an actual person.

And the official version of the decepticely fey Sir Percy Blakeney in Earth Prime-Time was portrayed by Marius Goring in a TV series which ran from 1955 to the following year.

DCI Fred Thursday:

Chasing down Communist spies? 

We're meat-and-two-veg coppers. 

Not Danger Man. 

Leave the "do or die" to Special Branch.

This reference is a bit trickier.  Thursday, even if he knew who secret agent John Drake was, he wouldn't be bandying that nickname about like that where they might be overheard.

I think he was referring to the TV series 'Danger Man', which starred Patrick McGoohan as Drake.  But I think he was real in the TV Universe and that the show was depicting fictional adventures from his career as a spy.

This was the work of the shadow organization known as UNReel, which would fictionalize the lives of people who should have been kept secret from the prying eyes of the public - spies, superheroes, Gallifreyan Time Lords, and the like.  These media portrayals - books, films, TV shows, comic books, etc. - provide them with plausible deniability should their secret adventures get noticed by the masses.

So there was a TV show about John Drake, two in fact - 'Danger Man' and 'Secret Agent'.  From the minimal research which I usually do on pop culture Zonks like this, I don't see any TV show which mentions John Drake by name.  So the 'Danger Man' of Toobworld could be so fictionalized, Drake was never mentioned as a character, that he had a roman a clef televersion.  It looks like only the name of the show was cited by characters in other TV shows, just like this example.

But thanks to the 'Rock & Chips' episode "Five Gold Rings", we at least know Patrick McGoohan was hired to play the role because of his resemblance to John Drake.

The TV show which was covering that international contest of carnival jousting, 'Jeus Sans Frontieres', was meant as an echo of a real show 'It's A Knockout'.  And that in turn was based on the French series "Interville".  All three shows co-exist in Toobworld.

28 Sebastopol Terrace
East Acton

A Russian hit man almost killed Morse in a (hardly) safe house on Sebastapol Terrace.  In the TV show 'Sykes', Eric and his twin sister Hattie also lived in a house on Sebastapol Terrace.  But that was in East Acton in the London area.  So this is just a trivial note in which the streets have common if distinctive names but which don't serve as links.

Similarly, one of the characters, the news agent named Dozier, called his wife a "silly old moo".  This was a phrase used by Alf Garnett of 'Til Death Us Do Part' in describing his wife.  (His American counterpart, Archie Bunker, called Edith "dingbat".)  It's just a phrase which probably had widespread use among the abusive husbands of the time.  So I'm dismissing its relevance for crossover potential.

I'm going to need to do more research into Ellie Haddington playing Hilda Pierce in the last few seasons of 'Foyle's War'.  I loved that character and now it looks like I never did get to finish that series because there were seismic events in Hilda's life in that last episode.  This would affect my hopes to conflate her with Millie Bagshot.  So there will be a sequel to this post.

From the wonderful site "Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour": 

We find out that Dorothea Frazil wrote a book called My Time in Korea. (Korean War, 1950, began when North Korea, supported by the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea, which was supported by the United States. War ended in 1953). The Korean War was the backdrop to the film and wonderful series 'M.A.S.H.'

It would only be wish-craft on my part to claim that Dorothea visited the 4077th, but I'd like to think she did so.  If so, I think she would have developed a friendship, perhaps even more, with Corporal Walter O'Reilly.

Okay, this is Lt. Linda Nugent.
But you get the idea...

From the IMDb:
On the wall outside the Doziers' shop is an advertisement for "Grimsby Pilchards", a non-existent product for which Tony Hancock made a series of disastrous commercials in the famous 'Hancock: The Bowmans' (1961) episode of his final BBC series in 1961. 

This is a legitimate, if trivial, connection between both series.

From the IMDb:

It is possible that the two mysterious characters whom Morse encounters during his inquiries, "Singleton" and "Louis", are inspired by the characters played by Richard Vernon and Michael Aldridge (and later by Vernon and Denholm Elliott) in the 1960s series, "The Man In Room 17", although the gimmick of that show was that the two characters were never seen outside the eponymous room.

I've also seen comparisons to Charters and Caldicott of "The Lady Vanishes" for Louis and Singleton, but I have to reject them both as being of any use for Toobworld.  All six characters exist in Toobworld and no believable reason exists as to why they were using aliases if they were conflated.  And they don't resemble each other enough to ignore the recastaway discrepancies.

We do have one last O'Bservation - one of "The Numbers" from the Valenzetti sequence in 'Lost' showed up in the episode.  The numeral "4" was on a pillar in the Phenix labs.

So, there are a couple of connections to be found in this episode.  Not many on its own, but the series overall is quite the hub for crossovers.

Remember to check my blogroll to the left for the site "Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour" where you'll find a detailed look at this episode and all of the other episodes in all three shows of the Morse universe,

See you next week for the season finale!