History Series / Endeavour

%% ** In "Neverland", Thursday suggests that if he retires, DS [=MacNutt=] could take Morse under his wing. Morse recalls [=MacNutt=] as his mentor in the ''Inspector Morse'' episode "Masonic Mysteries". [=MacNutt=] is mentioned a few more times in the show but, as of Series 8, he's never shown.

** Jakes leaves both the police force and Oxford (on a literal bus) in order to start a family in "Arcadia." Also counts as EarnYourHappyEnding, considering what we found out about him in "Neverland."
** Monica, after being a recurring character and potential love interest for Morse (even if any relationship would have been DoomedByCanon) throughout Series 2, is DemotedToExtra for the first two episodes of Series 3, and then dropped altogether after that. She comes back for a brief appearance in "Lazaretto," which mostly just serves to close the book on her character.
** After the events of the bank robbery in "Coda," [[spoiler:Joan Thursday]] suffers a HeroicBSOD and quietly leaves Oxford, asking Morse (and her parents via a letter) not to try tracking her down. Halfway through the following series it turns into CommutingOnABus, and she starts appearing again.
*** Joan does not make any appearance in Season 7 with an explanation that she is working outside Oxford. This was due to her actress having a baby during the filming period.

* RailEnthusiast: Follows where ''Inspector Morse'' led - basically, any man who lives with his mother and has a model railway in the attic is AlwaysChaoticEvil. LampShaded by Trewlove:

* RealMenCook: Subverted with Strange. In "Raga", he's cooking along to a TV cookery show - only to give up, pick up the phone and order a takeaway curry instead.

** In the second series there's also a kind of running gag involving a billboard advertising Grimsby pilchards.
* ResignedInDisgrace: The very first episode features Richard Lovell, a respected government minister with a taste for prostitutes (including several underage teenage girls). When one is murdered and throws a spotlight on the issue, he initially believes he'll get through it with his career intact thanks to MI-5 covering up his involvement. However, in the climax, Agent Dempsey reveals that the government has deemed him too big a liability and he's been instructed to take early retirement. When he tries to protest, Dempsey makes it clear his orders come from Harold Wilson himself and if he does not agree, he'll shoot him dead on the spot and frame it as a burglary gone wrong.

* SerialKillerBaiting: Convinced that the police are not doing enough to catch the "Towpath" serial killer in "Zenana," students and teachers at Lady Matilda's college set up a trap: one student acts as bait then the others swarm the attacker. During his ensuing escape the attacker is run over by a car and mortally wounded. [[spoiler: Unfortunately the attacker turns out to be a [[JackTheRipoff copycat killer]], leaving the real killer free to carry on]].

** Jakes starts out appearing to be an all around JerkAss and stereotypical OldFashionedCopper. However, he starts to become somewhat more likable throughout series 2, culminating in the reveal of his [[DarkAndTroubledPast horrendously abusive childhood]]. He then parts with Morse on friendly terms early in series 3.
** Bright, of all people, goes from an ObstructiveBureaucrat with SleazyPolitician tendencies in the first two series to a much more sympathetic character in Series 3. As penance for railroading Morse in the 'Who Shot Thursday?' case, he exposes himself to serious danger while protecting his subordinates in "Prey" and "Coda." It is also revealed he personally watched over Thursday in hospital after the events of "Neverland", to protect him from the corrupt coppers trying to finish the job. This probably has something to do with the actor, Anton Lesser, striking gold with ''Series/GameOfThrones'' and needing to be enticed back to his (rather thankless) old role.

%% * VomitDiscretionShot: After Morse comes within a split second of being [[spoiler:killed by the tiger]] in "Prey."
* WeakButSkilled: As Thursday points out, Morse might be a good detective, but he is a ''horrible'' policeman, and that "no one can teach you the first, any fool can learn the second."

* WellDoneSonGuy: Cyril Morse (Alan Williams, incidentally a dead ringer for John Thaw). He's not exactly a people person, either. He never liked coppers -- as he blithely admits to the newly-minted Constable Morse! Morse's stepmother, Gwen, has always treated him as an interloper and basically kicked him out of the house. By then Joyce had been born and Cyril probably didn’t want to divide his time between the two.\\\
We do learn in "Home" that he took his son out shooting, and while this is probably not how lil' Endeavour wanted to spend his afternoons, he ''is'' nevertheless an expert shot. So the gist of it is that Cyril's personality (cold and exacting) rubbed off on Morse.

** The series 5 finale "Icarus" as well, ending with [[spoiler:The gang war that has been building up over series 5 culminating in a shootout leaving the vast majority of both gangs, both their leaders and Fancy dead. On top of this, a grieving Trewlove leaves for Scotland Yard, Thursday's retirement money is lost to fraudsters, Cowley station is closed and the team is separated due to the creation of Thames Valley Police and Morse finally asks Joan Thursday out for coffee.]]

%% * WickedCultured: The entire plot of "Fugue".

* BlasphemousBoast: At the end of "Quartet", Morse accuses Thursday of playing God. Thursday, unmoved, replies that God's away and left him in charge.

%% * BoardingSchoolOfHorrors:
%% ** Blenheim Vale in "Neverland".
%% ** Coldwater in "Icarus" isn't exactly a bundle of laughs either.

** In "Neverland", Thursday suggests that if he retires, DS [=MacNutt=] could take Morse under his wing. Morse recalls [=MacNutt=] as his mentor in the ''Inspector Morse'' episode "Masonic Mysteries".

** "Zenana" features a side plot in which a motion to make all-female college Lady Matilda's coeducational is defeated. Fast forward to the ''Lewis'' episode "Old, Unhappy, Far Off Things", and Lady Matilda's has become the last Oxford college to go coed.

** Played for comedy in "Cartouche", when the manager of a cinema is poisoning the local pigeons, and then pushing the corpses off the roof. One of them lands on the bonnet of Thursday's police car, occasioning blank looks from both Thursday and Morse.

* ContinuitySnarl: In the Series 8 episode "Striker", Thursday asks Morse if he's into football. Had he recalled the events of "Nocturne" in Series 2 (set five years previously, during the 1966 World Cup), he'd've known that Morse neither knows nor cares about football.

* AbortedArc: At the end of the first series, Thursday's daughter is dating Jakes. Thursday has got the wrong end of the stick and thinks she's dating Morse - which he isn't thrilled about, but is willing to let go because at least it's not Jakes. When the second series picks up four months later, the whole arc seems to have been resolved off-screen.

* AllGermansAreNazis: In "Rocket", Thursday becomes confrontational with an engineer of German extraction 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 off base, as this is a [[UsefulNotes/NazisWithGnarlyWeapons rocket engineer who lived and worked in Germany during the War]], a possible reference to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun Wernher von Braun]].

** In "Degüello", Max discovers concrete in a victim' sinuses, mouth and lungs, meaning he was still alive the killers dropped into the wet concrete of a building's foundation.

** Subverted with the rooftop scenes in "Fugue", which could have provided an origin story for Morse's fear of heights. However, Morse does show some fear of heights on the rooftop in "Trove," after the events of "Fugue."

** Strange gets a significant Call Forward in "Trove" as well: the episode deals with his first brush with Freemasonry. He goes along with it, thinking it could be good for career advancement. Given that he goes on to rise higher in the police than the more capable Morse, maybe it was.

** Also in "Ride," a minor character makes a reference to dating Julian Hanbury, who appears in the ''Inspector Morse'' episode "Ghost in the Machine."

** "Coda" depicts the bank robbery that eventually leads to the events of the ''Inspector Morse'' episode "Promised Land." The funeral scenes at the beginning of both episodes, in particular, are structured in a parallel manner, with Strange and a colleague (Thursday/Morse) watching the proceedings from a distance through binoculars and commentating on the participants.
** The classics don Jerome Hogg (one of the hostages in "Coda") appears again in the ''Inspector Morse'' episode "Greeks Bearing Gifts."

** In "Pylon", it's Chekhov's Public Information Film. [[spoiler: Yes, Bright's publicising of Pelican crossings has more to it than showing that he's been posted to the Traffic division. It turns out that the little girl whose body Morse finds in the field wasn't murdered: she was run over while crossing the road. Later, Bright is being followed by villains who wish to do him harm, but he's saved by a crowd of his young fans who've seen the film and want his autograph. Since the villains can't hurt him in front of witnesses, they back off.]]

** Subverted in "Home". Early on, Morse is established as an excellent shot, and this is brought up a couple more times in the episode. In the end, however, [[spoiler:it's Inspector Thursday whose skill with a pistol saves Morse, not the other way around.]]

* ChemicallyInducedInsanity: The episode "Canticle" has the murderer giving massive doses of LSD to their victims in order to make killing them easier, or even having them get themselves killed in a delirious state. One of the intended victims does survive, but is left in an insane state from which we are told they may never recover.

** Many characters from the pilot episode, in particular Superintendent Crisp and Sergeant Lott, disappear without any explanation in the first full series (although Thursday clearly wanted the corrupt Lott gone in the pilot, and it's plausible that others met a similar fate).

* ConsultingMisterPuppet: In "Neverland", [[{{Ventriloquism}} ventriloquist]] Benny Topling can only speak about his suppressed trauma through his dummy.

* CrosswordPuzzle: This is the [[Series/InspectorMorse Morse]] prequel, so it would be surprising if this wasn’t present.
* CryptidEpisode: "Prey" has Morse and colleagues investigating a series of mysterious deaths which are eventually found to have been caused by [[spoiler: ''an actual tiger'' that's on the loose in rural Oxfordshire; it had been kept by the gamekeeper of a stately home whose owners had wanted to convert some of their land into a drive-through safari park, but had escaped. Bright has a SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome when he shoots it.]]

* DayOfTheWeekName: DI Thursday.

* DownerEnding: Series 5 ends with [[spoiler: the gang rivalry between Eddie Nero and Cromwell Ames resulting in a shootout in which both gang leaders and the majority of their gangs are killed, and in the process Fancy is killed trying to stop the shootout with the unknown person who shot him escaping. The other major arc of the series, the impending closure of the Cowley station, where all the main characters have been based up to this point, also comes to a downbeat close with all of them being sent to separate positions around Oxford and some being demoted. Trewlove, while grieving for Fancy, departs for Scotland Yard and leaves the series. To top it all off, Thursday's retirement plans are shattered when his brother Charlie loses the money that Thursday lent him to criminals using his shipping business as a front for fraud, leaving Thursday with a much longer career than he'd hoped, as well as leaving him looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life worried that his name on the cheque he'd given to Charlie could be traced back to him and lead to his arrest for involvement in fraudulent activities. The only bright spot seems to be Morse finally making a move and asking Joan out for coffee, only for the next series to reveal that even this ended badly and she refused, leaving the pair frosty with each other.]] Overall this sets the tone for the much DarkerAndEdgier series 6.

* FamilyRelationshipSwitcheroo: In "Pilot", the VictimOfTheWeek is a teenage girl who is actually the daughter of her older 'sister'. The 'sister' had gotten pregnant as a teenager and her parents had taken the child on as their own so she would not ruin her life.
%% * AFatherToHisMen:
%% ** Thursday. It helps that he has two kids of his own.

* HighClassCallGirl: In "Muse", Morse has to locate, and the protect, a high-class call girl (and artist's model) named Eve Thorne who seems to be the only connection in a series of murders. When Morse says she is nothing more than a common prostitute, Eve retorts that there is nothing common about her.

** In "Pylon", it's Chekhov's Public Information Film. [[spoiler: Yes, Bright's publicising of Pelican crossings has more to it than showing that he's been posted to the Traffic division. Turns out that the little girl whose body Morse finds in the field wasn't murdered, she was ran over while crossing the road. Later, Bright is being followed by villains who wish to do him harm, but he's saved by a crowd of his young fans who've seen the film and want his autograph. Since the villains can't hurt him in front of witnesses, they back off.]]

* GirlOfTheWeek: In series 5, Strange is [[LampshadeHanging moved to comment]] on Morse's proclivities after he's had four girlfriends in the space as many episodes.

* PlotBasedPhotographObfuscation: In "Nocturne", Morse looks into an unsolved Victorian era murder of a wealthy family which was popularly blamed on the youngest daughter (who was the only person left alive who was in the household), and support seems to be lent to this by the fact that the daughter died in an institution and her father scratched her face out of all photographs and even painted over her portrait, leaving her TheBlank. At the end of the episode, after having figured out she wasn't the killer, Morse comes across one photograph which was unscathed, and reveals the daughter had Downs Syndrome, indicating that far from being an AxCrazy monster, she was a disabled person who suffered horribly due to [[DeliberateValuesDissonance Victorian mores]] and her jerkass father.

** At the end of Series 4, [[spoiler:Morse is promoted to Detective Sergeant, and preventing a nuclear incident and being awarded the George Cross]].

* BadgesAndDogTags: Morse did his National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals. Thursday served in North Africa and Italy during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.

* MasterApprenticeChain: [[{{Literature/Discworld}} Vimes]] -> Thursday -> Morse -> Series/{{Lewis}}.

%% * MasterApprenticeChain: [[{{Literature/Discworld}} Vimes]] -> Thursday -> Morse -> Series/{{Lewis}}.

* CryptidEpisode: "Prey" has Morse and colleagues investigating a series of mysterious deaths which are eventually found to have been caused by [[spoiler: ''an actual tiger'' that's on the loose in rural Oxfordshire; it had been kept by the gamekeeper of a stately home whose owners had wanted to convert some of their land into a drive-through safari park, but had escaped. Bright has a MomentOfAwesome when he shoots it.]]

%% * MasterApprenticeChain: [[{{Literature/Discworld}} Vimes]] -> Thursday -> Morse.

* ResignedInDisgrace: The very first episode features Richard Lovell, a respected government minister with a taste for prostitutes (including several underage teenage girls). When one is murdered and throws a spotlight on the issue, he initially believes he'll get through it with his career intact thanks to MI-5 covering up his involvement. However, in the climax, Agent Dempsey reveals that the government has deemed him too big a liability and he's been instructed to take early retirement. When he tries to protest, Dempsey makes it clear his orders come from Howard Wilson himself and if he does not agree, he'll shoot him dead on the spot and frame it as a burglary gone wrong.

** Morse starts the series as a teetotaller, and is slowly introduced to alcohol through his time in the police force. If you've watched ''Series/InspectorMorse'', you know he eventually becomes very fond of beer
** We know Detective Constable Morse ''will'' become Detective ''Inspector'' Morse ... eventually. [[spoiler: But given that Morse's Sergeant Exam goes missing because he's made enemies with the wrong people for exposing corrupt coppers, it'll be a very long wait.]]

* GirlOfTheWeek: In series 5, Strange is moved to comment on Morse's proclivities after he's had four girlfriends in the space of four episodes.

* HaveAGayOldTime: Strange tells Morse his colleagues think he's a "Queer fish, stand offish... rude".
* HeelFaceTurn: In "Degüello", Thursday, horrified at what he has become by taking a share of departmental kickbacks from Box, returns the money he received in "Confection"; Box tries to persuade him to change his mind back with a visit to two occupants of higher rungs on the corruption ladder, [[spoiler:Councillor Clive Burkitt and construction mogul and prominent Freemason George [=McGyffin=], but this just enrages Thursday further. Box then confesses that he didn't start out corrupt himself, but one kickback led to another until he was in over his head. In the climax, he takes a step toward redemption by gunning down the even more corrupt DS Jago, who has Morse and Thursday at gunpoint - though he takes a bullet himself for his trouble]].

%% * HospitalHottie: Monica, Morse's new neighbour in "Trove." He asks her out in "Nocturne".

** Most of the police force in the pilot, to the point that Thursday hires Morse partially because he actually trusts him.

* CunningLinguist: In consecutive episodes, it is revealed that Thursday speaks both Italian and German fluently as a result of his wartime experiences.

** In "Game", the original purpose of the JCN computer was to run a postal address database. Later in the episode Morse and Thursday need to locate an address, and find that the computer can look it up in mere hours, as opposed to the days a manual search would take.

** In "Pylon", it's Chekhov's Public Information Film. [[spoiler: Yes, Bright's publicising of Pelican crossings has more to it than showing that he's been posted to the Traffic division. Turns out that the little girl whose body Morse finds in the field wasn't murdered, she was ran over while crossing the road.]]

* CunningLinguist: In consecutive episodes, it is revealed that Thursday speaks both Italian and German fluently.

'''[=DeBryn=]''': Better hope so, hadn't you. Otherwise I'm making one hell of a mess of your scene of crime.

* {{Fingore}}: In "Girl", the post office robbers cut off two of the postmaster's fingers to force him to open the safe. [[spoiler:And then it turns out that he did it to himself to establish an alibi]].

** Morse starts the series as a teetotaler, and is slowly introduced to alcohol through his time in the police force. If you've watched ''Series/InspectorMorse'', you know he eventually becomes very fond of beer and wine.

* BadassMustache: Morse sports one throughout Series Six - although as this follows him being reassigned to a uniform position ''and'' rejected by Joan Thursday, it could be a moustache of sorrow. Nicknamed the 'Morsetache' by fans, it was gone by the following series.

[[caption-width-right:300:The name's Morse. Just Morse.]]

** In "Harvest", he tracks down Joan and beats up the (married) man she's living with, in addition to which he threatens to fit him up as a "nonce" (British criminal slang for a sex offender). [[spoiler: This backfires on Joan who becomes a victim of domestic violence and suffers a miscarriage.]]

** He's at it again in "Pylon", beating up a local pervert with Ronnie Box, and later laying one on [[spoiler: the doctor who's been abducting you girls so he can take pervy photographs of them]].