Foyle's War, Season Seven

   

Christopher Foyle is one of television's most beloved detectives. A charming, personable man nevertheless with an unflinching attitude toward crime, it's no surprise ITV has brought him back for further episodes after the "end" of the series. The new series has a different flavor but is still enjoyable.

 

The war is over and rationing continues in England. MI-5 has its hands full with the new threat of Stalin. Handling political defectors, rooting out Nazis, and trailing Russian spies is the norm. The sharpest mind on the retired police force, Foyle (Michael Kitchen), has spent six months in America harassing the criminal that got away. He returns to find MI-5 wants to recruit him to discover whether or not a defector scientist is selling military information to the Russians. Foyle has no interest... until he finds out his former driver, Samantha (Honeysuckle Weeks), is implicated in the conspiracy.

 

Sam works as a secretary for the scientist, while her husband Adam has been asked to run as a Labor Party Member of Parliament. Juggling Foyle and her responsibilities as a candidate's wife isn't easy but she tackles it with her usual enthusiasm. Subsequent episodes cover mysterious disappearances, secret government conspiracies, and death threats against a Nazi under British protection. While the backdrop is different and the plots can sometimes be confusing, happily the characters are the same. We can rely on Foyle to be methodic, irritated at being manipulated, and fatherly toward Sam, and for Sam to be her usual sweet, smart and bumbling self.

 

What the series has always done well is to highlight lesser-known aspects of wartime, and this season is no exception -- this go around we deal with some hard questions with no real answers (such as the right of private property, the sacrifice of one for many, whether or not torture is moral, and prejudice). Overall, it works and the final episode in particular packs quite an emotional clout, but I miss the smaller murders and little-town dynamic of the earlier series. Foyle working for MI-5 just doesn't click with me, since it means all future episodes will likely deal with espionage instead of just plain old murder.

   

Sexual Content:

Implications of a cross-dressing bar and a homosexual character.

  

Language:

Occasional profanity, mild abuses of deity.

  

Violence:

A man is hit by a car; a man covered in blood stumbles into a hospital and dies; a man is beaten up (off-screen); men are viciously gunned down by Nazis in flashbacks.

 

Other:

None.