Endeavour: Fred Thursday’s Final Scene Is Even More Devastating Than We Thought

So much for celebration. 

‘Someone’s Son’

In “Exeunt”, Fred’s son Sam Thursday is spiralling downwards after leaving the army in Northern Ireland. The ex-soldier is drinking, stealing cash from his parents, and dealing drugs. Sam’s drug-dealing makes him an enemy of the Death Head motorcycle gang. When one of their members, Tomahawk, threatens to kill Sam, Fred Thursday steps in to protect his son. Fred fatally stabs Tomahawk, unbeknownst to Sam, and pins the blame on DI Lott’s corrupt police officers.

Fred should have realised though, that one exceptional mind would solve Tomahawk’s murder: his former bagman Endeavour Morse. The pair’s penultimate scene together is a quite brilliant one in the context of a detective series – Morse confronts his perp with the facts of the case, only this time, that perp is Fred. Over a pint, the young detective lays out the truth of the matter: it was Fred who killed Tomahawk, but the biker gang will blame Sam, so the Thursdays need to disappear. Fred says he’ll take them away, and Endeavour promises to keep the secret and to keep an eye on Fred’s daughter, newly styled Joan Strange. 

What might not be clear in that scene until a third or fourth viewing – or at least, wasn’t for me – is just how bitterly Endeavour feels towards Fred, and how Fred’s actions and attitudes have so thoroughly destroyed Morse’s former image of the man. Not only is Fred a murderer outside of the battlefield, but he sneered at his victim, saying “That type, he was nothing.” 

That “type” was in fact Peter Williams, the abused child for whose body they’d been searching the grounds of Blenheim Vale. Morse keeps that fact from Fred perhaps as an act of grace for the man he once revered, but his patience is clearly worn through, as Shaun Evans’ blistering performance shows. Morse can barely contain his anger at Fred, the captain he says he “would have followed into hell.” When he quotes Henry IV and tells Fred “I know thee not, old man,” the words are spit through tears. 

‘But Not Mine’

Tomahawk/Peter was “someone’s son” Morse insists to Fred. “But not mine,” answers Fred. “Not mine.” A moment of understanding seems to pass over Endeavour’s eyes as Fred says those words, as if the ersatz familial connection between this pair has been severed. Endeavour is also not Fred’s son, and never was.