All things, good and bad, must come to an end, and now this dire truth includes one of the best shows on British television, Foyle’s War. Recently aired on PBS, the final three episodes of the series, which take Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of Hastings to the very end point of WWII, whence he started out in May of 1940, 18 episodes and seven years earlier, the conclusion has recently been released on DVD by AcornMedia (AcornMedia, $49.99, street date, Tuesday, August 5). The three discs of Foyle’s War: Set 5 are a valediction and a celebration, as well as a long goodbye.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Foyle’s War is a nifty series about a socially reserved investigator in the south coast of England during the war years, but with the crimes he takes on at first seemingly pallid in comparison with the looming war. Michael Kitchen has an Anthony Hopkins-like reticence as Christopher Foyle, as he chews his lip and ruminates quietly over small details. His team is fairly stable: Honeysuckle Weeks as his batman, and Anthony Howell as his assistant. Foyle is widowed, but has a grown son in the RAF.

The first season of four movie-length episodes aired beginning in October of 2002 on Britain’s ITV, and the show was conceived from scratch by Anthony Horowitz, who had just come off of Midsomer Murders. Foyle’s War from the start beautifully recreated wartime England, was superbly photographed, and most important, offered interesting points of information about the times and an unvarnished portrayal of differing British reactions to the conflict, including such now near-forgotten aspects of the Home Front such as the looting of bombed out houses. For example two of the episodes in the second season reveal how some industrialists profited from the war. The series also reveals peculiarities of war time, such as “trekkers,” people who sleep in their cars far outside urban areas in order to avoid being bombed, and a term that sounded to me like “funcourts” (the set isn’t subtitled), which refers to well off Britishers who hide from the war in London by renting digs in B&Bs in obscure places. Curiously, the series has an interestingly bleak view of marriage, nearly each episode portraying a particularly harsh or violent union of one kind or another. The first four episodes covered stories set from May 1940 through summer. Season two covered September 1940 to October. Season three starts in February 1941 and goes to June. America’s season four (different from Britain’s) went from April 1942 to March, 1943. Finally, the last episodes take us from April 1944 to May 1945.

But what was best about Foyle’s War was that the mysteries were damned clever. I have never figured out a single one of them before the denouement, while the narrative journey of getting there was fascinating and entertaining.

I don’t know if there was a huge British bear hug that surrounded Foyle’s War, but there should have been There is a shot in the middle of the second episode in season three of fly-fishing that is so beautifully pastoral I had to believe that English viewers swooned over it. The series takes place in Hastings, location of the Battle of Hastings between King Harold II of England and Duke William of Normandy, a site that looms large in the British lexicon.

Foyle’s War does traffic in certain cliches about England and its emotional stillness and stiff upper lip, but might be the element that would attract more middlebrow English viewers. But creator Anthony Horowitz’s real achievement is to ransack the history of the era to find unusual yet highly indicative subject matter as plot premises.

Fans will recall that in the previous box set ends with Foyle resigning his post. Of course, we knew he would be hired back, and one of the main tasks of “Plan of Attack,” the first of the last three eps, is to reassemble the team, which requires that Foyle be summoned from the task of dictating his memoirs to find out who killed a highly strung and religious aerial map analyst. “Broken Souls” tracks two stories that intersect, one about the problems of returning vets, the other concerning a murder in a psychiatric institution. Finally, “All Clear” deals with a community attempting to adapt back to a non-war world, with a character from a previous episode returning to reveal that the wounds of war are not so easily healed.

Horowitz is a children’s author turned TV-movie writer and from the evidence of his own website, he is a very busy chap. His wife, Jill Green, produces the show and has written a book of her own about Foyle’s War that may appear someday as part of a complete series box set. That the makers of DVDs realize the rising esteem in which Foyle’s War is held finds evidence in the increasing number of supplements that appear on Acorn’s DVDs. Set five includes a 12-minute making-of documentary, along with text-based statements by two key cast members reflecting on the conclusion of the series, and a text-based account of a “real life” Foyle, plus, finally, cast filmographies. They are all indeed helpful but the first thing to do is simply watch the show, let the characters grow on you, and marvel at the cleverness of the mysteries. To that end, I highly recommend starting with Season 1 and going on from there. And, though I don’t usually say this, avoid spoilers at all costs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.