“Always”

That smile could be a clue to one interpretation of the Endeavour finale gunshot mystery. Because it’s not just any gun, and it’s also not just any churchyard. Endeavour shoots the weapon while sitting on a bench outside the church in which Joan and Jim were married. (Jim calls it All Angels, perhaps in reference to Saint Michael and All Angels Church in Oxford’s Summertown – the old stomping ground of Morse creator Colin Dexter – though the filming location looks different to the real place.)

In that same churchyard, Morse discovered the headstones connecting corrupt Inspector Lott to the false identity he adopted to buy Blenheim Vale. Next to the Lott family plot was the grave of infant Lionel Godfrey Chambers, whose birth certificate Lott had obtained to create the persona behind his hooky front company based in Bermuda.

So that’s the context for the gunshot, but what might be the explanation?

“Morse, Sir. Just Morse.”

One interpretation is that the scene functions as a symbolic suicide for the character of Endeavour, allowing for his figurative rebirth as simply Morse, the iteration of the character as played by John Thaw in Inspector Morse. In this scenario, Endeavour pulled the trigger in the churchyard as a final ending to this version of our man. It didn’t kill him – obviously – but it ended this timeline (which, as the more pedantic among us have noted, doesn’t always quite tally with the established Morse series of events.)

Left behind by his father-figure Thursday, with his true love Joan lost to another, perhaps Endeavour went to the churchyard to end himself. The Blenheim Palace rehearsal scenes therefore function as a kind of afterlife in which Endeavour exits the stage (as Bright’s speech from The Tempest describes their world) just as John Thaw’s character enters – hence their two cars crossing on the bridge.

Staying on more solid ground, fans might choose to believe that Endeavour had no moribund intentions, but instead shot the gun in that location as a symbolic release of the love he held for Miss Thursday – now Mrs Strange. That could explain the choice of locale. Perhaps he went to All Angels to kill off the part of him still in desperate love with Joan and to start anew, knowing a future with her would never be his.

Danofgeek

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