Sun always comes up. Just got to hold on for a bit longer sometimes, is all.
The snowstorm episode.
November 1971. In the midst of winter, the foundations of Morse and Thursday's relationship are profoundly shaken when Thursday unwittingly discovers that the extent of his sergeant's problems are greater than anybody could have suspected.
Meanwhile, things at home become very tense for Thursday and Win when they receive disturbing news — their son, Sam, has gone missing in Northern Ireland.
A snowstorm splits CID, forcing them to work independently of each other to solve the murder of a university professor. Thursday enlists the help of Dorothea Frazil, while Morse finds himself stranded at an abandoned hotel, a pawn in a game of gruesome revenge.
This episodes contains examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Morse, who's taking an increasing amount of "sick leave" due to his drinking. Things come to a head when it's revealed that he was on the same bus as Professor Stanton on the night he was murdered. Stanton had actually helped Morse when he fell down the stairs while trying to get off the bus, but he was so drunk he can't remember anything about it.
- Asshole Victim: Everyone who gets killed in this episode, basically. Stanton, Yeager and Hobbs are all killed in revenge for their treatment of Warren Loomis. Walsh survives, but will likely go to prison for his crimes.
- Bait-and-Switch: When the bus gets to the end of its route, the driver has to take his obligatory break before turning around and heading back to Oxford. The conductor makes it clear that he's popping off for some sex, and seemingly follows a young lady who was a passenger on the bus. But she is not the murder victim — it's actually a university professor who was on the same bus. It's later revealed that the conductor was actually going to visit a woman nearby with whom he's been having an affair. The young lady, meanwhile, was one of three people — the other two being the driver and another passenger — who murdered the professor.
- The Bet: How the whole thing started — Stanton, Walsh, Yeager and Hobbs were in a betting syndicate together, using Stanton's autistic numbers prodigy Warren Loomis to win the big prize on the football pools. Having thus defrauded the pools company, they had Loomis falsely committed to stop anyone finding out. In this episode, Loomis's loved ones get their revenge.
- Call-Forward: A big one from Morse at the end, seemingly when he's talking about the weather...Morse: It's beginning to thaw.
- Also, the notion of a murder at a fancy-dress ball is reminiscent of the Morse novel The Secret of Annexe 3 which was not adapted for TV.
- Consulting a Convicted Killer: Fred Thursday visits an asylum to meet with Flavian Creech, the psycho who knew Warren Loomis, the young man who went on the original killing spree at Tafferton Park. Well, that's what everyone thinks — Creech reveals that he was the one who did all of the killing there; Loomis, who everyone thought was a killer, was actually not one for "wet work".
- Continuity Nod: A few.
- One of the passengers on the bus is seen reading a book by Stephen Fitzowen, a character who appeared in the Series 2 episode "Nocturne" in which he had written a book about the Victorian murder that happened at Blythe Mount. According to Blake, he also wrote a book about the Tafferton Park murders.
- Win Thursday refers to that time Joan moved to Leamington after she left home at the end of Series 4, something that has hardly ever been brought up since her return near the end of the following series. How much Win knows about what happened to Joan there is unclear note , but it was a dark time in the history of the Thursday family.
- Thursday and Bright discuss what happened in Venice (at the end of the Series 7 episode "Zenana") and how this has affected Morse. His abortive transfer to Kidlington (planned in Series 7 and then seemingly forgotten about for Series 8) also comes up.
- Creator Cameo: The picture of a young boy on Professor Stanton's desk is that of a young Colin Dexter. Also, the name "C. Dexter" appears on the guest list for the Masquerade Ball at Tafferton Park.
- Driven to Suicide: A rather grisly example. Maths prodigy Warren Loomis was taken advantage of by Stanton and the rest, who had him falsely committed to a lunatic asylum in order to cover up their defrauding of the pools company. He then came under the influence of Flavian Creech, an actual psycho who — believing Loomis to be a fellow-psycho — went to Tafferton Park with him to help him get revenge on those who'd wronged him. Once there, Loomis — unable to kill anyone on account of him not actually being a psycho — witnessed Creech's killing spree. Accused of perpetrating that himself, he committed suicide.
- Everybody Did It: There are three people going around in jester costumes at Tafferton Park: Linda Travers (the young woman), Hilda Bruce-Potter (the older lady), and John Peckett (the driver). The two women are seeking revenge for their relative, Warren Loomis — a brilliant young mathematician who was institutionalized on a false report and committed suicide. Peckett was an attendant at the institution where Loomis was incarcerated, who went on to become a bus driver and who joined them to help get revenge.
- Fictional Counterpart: A classic Morseverse example — Wolsey College, where Professor Stanton worked, is this for the real-life Christ Church (which was originally founded by Cardinal Wolsey
note ). - Headscratchers: A few.
- Since when has Morse lived outside Oxford and had to take a rural bus to get home?
- His house could be on the outskirts of Oxford, and the route of this particular bus goes near where he lives before leaving the city. In the books, it's stated outright more than once that he lives in the northern end of the city (off the Banbury Road, not far from the bypass).
- Given the extent of his drinking problem, it's just as well he does take the bus rather than drive home.
- Why have Bright and Thursday left it so long to have their conversation about what happened in Venice at the end of Series 7 and Morse's abortive transfer?
- The conspirators' plan to hide the pools money in the hotel safe with parts of the combination on each of their cufflinks (meaning they all had to be there together to open it) is rather elaborate. Why didn't they just split the money between them at the time, and go their separate ways?
- In a similar vein, the surviving conspirators have obviously known that the money is in the manager's safe in the hotel. How come none of them broke into the place to try and crack the safe during the last eight years?
- Tafferton Park is a hotel that's been abandoned for eight years, yet once the passengers force their way in, they find a well-stocked bar and plenty of silverware and antiques. How come the owners never emptied it? And, since they evidently didn't, how come no-one's looted it?
- If the killers' plot hinged on trapping the conspirators in the hotel, how did they plan on a convenient snowstorm that would force everyone to abandon the bus within walking distance of the hotel?
- Why murder one victim one day, and then go for all of the others the following day?
- Given that the snowstorm is taking out phone lines and forcing buses to stop, how does Dorothea Frazil manage to visit the Thursdays? Same question goes for Fred Thursday visiting the lunatic asylum shortly afterwards.
- Which Hawkwind album is Richie talking about?
- Since when has Morse lived outside Oxford and had to take a rural bus to get home?
- Last-Name Basis: Despite having proposed to her and asked her out (only to be turned down both times), Morse still addresses Joan as "Miss Thursday", and she calls him "Morse". It's not clear whether she even knows what his first name is (her father does, but it's unlikely that he's told her).
- Numerological Motif: The bus route is number 33. "Terminus" is the 33rd episode of Endeavour.
- Old, Dark House: Tafferton Park, a country hotel that has been closed ever since a gruesome murder spree took place there eight years ago.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Win Thursday, deeply upset by her son's disappearance, lashes out at both her husband (calling him — a war veteran and holder of the George Medal — a coward) and her daughter (bringing up the time she ran away from home).
- The Reveal: By way of Consulting a Convicted Killer, Fred Thursday finds out that Warren Loomis (the supposed perpetrator of the original Tafferton Park killing spree) was not actually a psychopath, he was just set up as one by the conspirators.
- Ship Tease: Joan Thursday really needs a shoulder to cry on. Jim Strange is there for her.
- Shout-Out: As ever with Endeavour, a few.
- Les Grant, the randy bus conductor, could've walked straight out of On the Buses (he even shares his surname with Bob Grant, the actor who played bus conductor Jack in that sitcom). A defaced poster in the background at the bus depot, originally reading "It's a grand life on the buses" but altered to "It's a randy life on the buses", continues that reference (as a gag taken directly from the series' first film).
- Professor Stanton is murdered in the churchyard at Chipping Compton. The church is called St. Agatha's — a nod to the Queen of Crime herself.
- A group of people stranded in a snow-bound hotel with a murderer in their midst is reminiscent of The Mousetrap and The Shining.
- The scene where Walsh and Yeager play snooker is reminiscent of scenes in the 1945 and 1974 adaptations of And Then There Were None, which also centred around an isolated hotel in which people were being killed one by one.
- A murderer wearing a costume while on his spree is a nod to Halloween. The references to this film continue — here, the name Loomis is used for the (presumed) initial murderer; in the original Halloween movie, this is the name of the doctor who's trying to stop the murderer. Haddonfield, the Illinois city in which that movie is set, lends its name to one of the villages on the no. 33 bus's route.
- Thursday going to an asylum to speak to Creech is a nod to The Silence of the Lambs.
- Thursday mentions a drying-out clinic in Surrey run by a man called Wain that he thinks Morse should go to to get himself sorted out. When James Bond's drinking was found to have become too much of a problem at the start of Thunderball, M sent him to the Shrublands drying-out clinic, run by one Joashua Wain, in the same county.
- The notion of a British soldier going missing in Belfast in 1971, as happens to Sam Thursday, is reminiscent of '71.
- Shout-Out to Shakespeare: The "WSW3MA?" message is one of these — it stands for "When shall we three meet again?", the line spoken by the witches in Macbeth.
