Recap / Endeavour S 1 E 03 Rocket

Without fear or favour. Isn't that the job?

The missile factory episode. First broadcast 28 April 2013.

September 1965. On the day that Princess Margaret visits the British Imperial Electric Company's factory to unveil the new "Standfast" missile, factory owner Henry Broom announces a proposed French merger, which his abrasive, estranged wife Nora opposes. Soon afterwards the corpse of unpopular workman Percy Malleson is discovered. It's suggested that the Brooms had been using him to spy on the workforce following the suspension of another employee, Lenny Frost.

Morse, however, learns that Percy was actually Eustace Kendrick and he was investigating the disappearance of his girlfriend Olive Rix, who had been romantically involved with Harry, the now-deceased elder son of the Brooms. Following a second murder, though, another suspect and motive come to Morse's attention, although he is also having to deal with the prospect of a romance with Alice Vexin, an old acquaintance from his student days.

This episode contains examples of:

• The Alcoholic: Richard Broom, as pointed out by his mother.
  Nora Broom: [kissing her son and sniffing his breath at the same time] Bourbon for breakfast?
  Richard Broom: [grimly] I knew you were coming.
• All Germans Are Nazis: Thursday becomes confrontational with a German engineer and questions him about his past in Germany prior to coming to England. While Thursday is presented as showing a less pleasant, paranoid side of his character, he might not be wrong, as the man is a rocket engineer who lived and worked in Germany during the War, a likely reference to Wernher von Braun.
• All Men Are Perverts: Brenda, the tea lady at British Imperial, is of this opinion as she often gets felt up by the workers. Reg Tracepurcel is dismissive of her complaints.
• Always Murder: Two deaths in this episode, both of them murders — although the second is staged to look like it was an accident. There's also another murder which happened 12 years previously, which is found to have a significant bearing on those two.
• Always Someone Better: Why Alice decides not to pursue a relationship with Morse, as she knows he is still in love with Susan. She initially thinks she can live with that as she quite fancied Morse herself when they were students, but ultimately decides against it.
• Ambiguous Situation: Whether or not Alice Vexin, Henry Broom's secretary, is also his mistress. Her name is very similar to Alais, the Countess of Vexin who was a mistress of Henry II — which, given the obvious connections between the Broom family and The Lion in Winter (see Whole-Plot Reference, below), seems to imply that she is, although she flat-out denies it, and by the end of the episode she appears to be interested in his son Johnny.
  • There's also the question of the extent to which Estella is being used by her family to ensure that Prince Nabil does a deal with them. Is her visit to him at his hotel for, ahem, business or pleasure?
• Artistic Licence – History: Henry Broom, the chairman of British Imperial, claims that his family has been manufacturing weapons for the nation since the Thirty Years War — a seventeenth-century conflict in which England played no part.
• Bluffing the Murderer: How Morse ultimately wins the day when he tells Tracepurcel that he has already found the latter's blood- and paint-stained jacket, to which he replies that he never thought anyone would look there.
• Brand X: Another fictional Oxford college in the Morseverse! This is the first and only mention of Curtmantle College, which Eustace Kendrick is said to have attended in the early 1950s before he fled the country when he came under suspicion over the disappearance of Olive Rix. Appropriately given the many nods to The Lion in Winter in this episode, "Curtmantle" was a nickname of Henry II.
• Chekhov's Gun: Jacket, actually — or lack thereof in the case of Reg Tracepurcel when he is lined up to meet Princess Margaret. Also, Reg’s dismissive attitude towards Brenda’s complaint about workplace sexism turns out to be an example of this, as Reg raped and killed Olive Rix, and when confronted with this, he claims to have done "nothing she didn’t want".
  • Oh, and that piece of ceramic that was dug up with Olive Rix’s remains? That’s important.
• Chekhov's Skill: Early on, Estella Broom surprises her brothers by knowing what Percy Malleson did in the factory, showing that she’s more than just a pretty face. Towards the end, she is the one chosen to take over as chairman.
• Comically Missing the Point: Strange, on learning what Morse is going to see at the cinema.
  Morse: There's a new Bergman.
  Strange: Oh, yeah? I thought she was cracking in Casablanca.
• Continuity Nod: Alice Vexin recalls her student days, when she and Morse would often be part of a "foursome" with the latter's girlfriend Susan and Alex Reece. He appeared in the pilot episode.
• Cool Car: Johnny Broom's Jaguar E-Type.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Alluded to, as Morse points out that Eustace Kendrick, alias Percy Malleson, died because he was unfortunate enough to confide in the one person who had a vested interest in making sure that no-one started talking about Olive Rix's disappearance — Reg Tracepurcel, the man who actually killed her. Kendrick assumed she'd been killed by the late Harry Broom, and confided in Tracepurcel as he saw a man who clearly disliked the Brooms as a potential ally. Needless to say, had Kendrick not revealed his true purpose to Tracepurcel, he would not have been killed — although his planned confrontation with the Brooms (on the day of the royal visit to the factory) would've created a major headache for the Oxford City Police.
• Creator Cameo: Colin Dexter can be seen sitting on a bench at around the 40-minute mark.
• Cunning Linguist: Fred Thursday can speak German, most likely as a result of his war service (this in addition to Italian, which we learned he knows in "Fugue"). Also, Alice Vexin uses the Latin phrase Contra Mundum ('defying or opposing everyone else') to describe what Morse was like as a student.
• Deadpan Snarker: Fred Thursday's at his best here. Before the royal visit, he quips about how "ma'am" shouldn't be pronounced to rhyme with "smarm" (a dig at Bright's obsequiousness that only Morse seems to pick up on), and afterwards he has this response to Bright recalling his encounter with Princess Margaret:
  Bright: Protocol dictates of course that one has to wait for Her Royal Highness to speak to one first, of course. "Have you come far?" she said. Just like that. Regular, familiar as you please. "Have you come far?"
  Thursday: What did you say?
  Bright: That I hadn't.
  Thursday: One for the memoirs, sir.
  • Nora Broom also shows herself to be one of these. For example, when she arrives ahead of the royal visit:
    Nora Broom: I do hope there will be sandwiches. There's only so much insincere obsequiousness I can take on an empty stomach.
• Dysfunctional Family: The Brooms are a high-class version of one of these. The return of Nora, the estranged matriarch, puts the rest of them on edge.
  Estella Broom: Might we forgo the amateur traumatics for once?
• Fictional Counterpart: A couple of examples.
  • Prince Nabil is staying at the Rudolph Hotel. While there is no hotel of that name in Oxford, there is a Randolph Hotel — which appeared as itself in the original series, suggesting some Expy Coexistence in the Morseverse.
  • The British Imperial Electric Company and its Standfast missile allude, with a bit of artistic license, to the Real Life English Electric Company and its Thunderbird surface-to-air missile.
• Foreshadowing: The introduction of Joan and Sam Thursday sets up a couple of long-running storylines:
  • Joan brings up how her father seems to disapprove of every boy she wants to date, foreshadowing various sub-plots about her sometimes-rocky love life (and, of course, the Morse/Joan ship).
  • Sam states his ambition to join the Army, foreshadowing a military career which will recur at various times for the rest of the show's run.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Reg Tracepurcel wears glasses and has no qualms about killing a man when he believes that he's trying to uncover the truth about a murder that Tracepurcel himself committed twelve years ago. And then goes on to commit another murder.
• Going by the Matchbook: Or rather, going by the shoes. When going through Percy Malleson's effects, Morse notes that his shoes were custom-made by an Oxford bootmaker. He goes there, and finds that the shoes were actually made over a decade earlier for a student called Eustace Kendrick, who never paid the bill. Enquiries into the past of Eustace Kendrick lead to the investigation into the disappearance of Olive Rix on Coronation Day.
• Grammar Correction Gag: Morse tells a protestor wielding a placard that he does not doubt his sincerity, but that he might get taken more seriously if he spelled 'Levellers' correctly.
• Hidden Depths: Estella Broom shows signs of having these. Both of her parents pick up on this, which is why she ends up in charge.
• High-Voltage Death: The second murder, that of Lenny Frost, is one of these — he gets electrocuted when he walks through a puddle that Reg Tracepurcel has run a live wire through. The clear intention is to Make It Look Like an Accident, taking advantage of British Imperial's poor safety record. However, Tracepurcel makes a mistake, killing Frost as he's leaving the building, rather than entering it.
• Historical Domain Character: Princess Margaret, albeit in a non-speaking role.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: In a fairly mild example, Morse recalls that as a student, he tried to like "Trad, the Angries, Sartre" in order to fit in. He's talking about three cultural trends that were popular among intellectual (or would-be intellectual) types in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s — British versions of traditional Jazz tunes (popularly known as "Trad Jazz"), the "Angry Young Men" (writers such as John Osborne and Colin Wilson) and an enthusiasm for Existentialism (personified by Jean-Paul Sartre).
• Mistaken for Murderer: Richard Broom found Olive Rix’s body and, knowing that his older brother Harry had broken up with her the previous day, assumed that Harry had killed her. He therefore buried the body and kept quiet about it. He and Harry never spoke of it.
• The Mole: A lot of the employees at British Imperial think that the man they knew as Percy Malleson was a "time and motion man" who was secretly monitoring their performance for the Brooms. They're wrong — but there is an actual mole at British Imperial, and he's not working for the management; Lenny Frost is stealing confidential information and passing it to Prince Nabil. The fact that he's suspended from work barely seems to harm his activities, as he manages to get into the factory anyway, and there are enough people who are willing to cover for him.
• Never One Murder: Two murders during the course of the episode, in addition to which the historic missing person case is revealed to have been a case of murder. All committed by the same person.
• Newsreel: In-universe. We see a newsreel camera as everyone prepares for the royal visit, and some of what we see of that visit is presented as black-and-white newsreel-style footage. Morse later sees this in the cinema, where he gets a vital clue as he realises that Reg Tracepurcel was wearing a jacket early in the day, but was in his shirtsleeves when he was presented to Princess Margaret.
• The Nicknamer: Nora's nickname for Johnny is "Little Boots". He doesn't like it, most likely due to the association with Caligula.
• No OSHA Compliance: The British Imperial factory has a rather poor safety record — which the murderer hopes to use to his advantage when it comes to dispatching his second victim.
• Old Flame Fizzle: Alice experiences this when when she realises that Morse is not romantically interested in her because he's still carrying a torch for Susan.
• Red Herring: The notion that Percy Malleson (the first victim) was secretly spying on the rest of the workforce (he wasn't).
• Serious Business: Bright, still in his Obstructive Bureaucrat phase, is tetchier than usual thanks to the pressure from on high for the case to be solved quickly, given that the murder occurred on the day of the royal visit and the importance of British Imperial getting the contract from Prince Nabil.
• Ship Tease: Hinted at with Alice and Johnny.
• Shout-Out: A few.
  • Reg Tracepurcel could be related to Bertram Tracepurcel, the character played by Dennis Price in the Peter Sellers film I'm All Right Jack; subverted, though, because Reg is a union man and Bertram runs the missile factory in the film which, just like the one in this episode, has issues with union militancy.
  • When Reg Tracepurcel sees Johnny Broom driving his E-Type, he refers to him as "Turd of Turd Hall", a crude nod to Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows.
  • When Estella mentions that she was friends with Olive Rix, she says that Olive had a "Sara Crew fantasy". This relates to a character in Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1905 novel A Little Princess.
  • The name of the missile, Standfast, could be a nod to the John Buchan novel Mr Standfast (the title of which was itself a shout-out to a character in The Pilgrim's Progress).
• Take a Third Option: Henry Broom decides that it's finally time for him to retire. He agrees to let his estranged wife Nora name which of their surviving children should be his successor. It looks as though it's a choice between the two boys, Richard and Johnny, although neither of them are without their flaws. In the end, though, Nora goes for their daughter, Estella.
• Take That!: Prince Nabil directs one of these towards Britain in general:
  Morse: You should be aware that to take receipt of stolen property is an offence in law.
  Prince Nabil: And you should also be aware, Constable Morse, we are not the same little people Colonel Lawrence left behind. We learned much from our colonial masters. Perfidious Albion. An unkind name to hang upon a country. But not perhaps wholly undeserved.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Broom family are basically the Plantagenet Royal Family as depicted in The Lion in Winter. Patriarch Henry has an estranged wife and three sons — Harry (deceased), Richard and John. The death of Harry (the favourite) has caused a Succession Crisis. On top of that, there's a proposed merger with the French. Their home has the same name as the Plantagenets' palace — Chinon — and even their surname refers to Plantagenet, which comes from planta genista, meaning 'broom flower'.