Endeavour pays tribute to the late John Thaw who played the original Morse with a touching scene in the final moments of the last ever episode
Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour harked back to the original series during its final show after a 36-episode run which concluded on Sunday evening.
The end of the episode included a touching tribute to the late John Thaw, who played the older version of Morse between 1987 and 2000.
Endeavour is a prequel to the iconic detective series which ran for more than a decade, before ending two years before John’s death in 2002.
The eyes of the Thaw could be glimpsed in the rear-view mirror of Shaun Evans’s younger version of the character as he drove away from Blenheim Palace.
The scene was an echo of the first episode of Endeavour, which in its final minutes saw Evan’s Morse asked by his boss Fred Thursday where he imagined himself in 20 years, before seeing Thaw’s reflection in his rear-view.
Touching: Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour harked back to the original series during its final show after a 36-episode run which concluded on Sunday evening
Tribute: The eyes of the Thaw could be glimpsed in the rear-view mirror of Shaun Evans’s younger version of the character as he drove away from Blenheim Palace
Endeavour producer Charlotte Webber admitted it was a tricky scene to pull off but it was managed thanks to some special effects.
She told the Times: ‘It was an ‘agonising’ procedure of precisely matching the two actors’ eye lines to make the shot ‘as simple but as effective as possible’.
Charlotte confirmed that permission for the footage – taken from Morse series seven episode Deadly Slumber – to be used was granted by Thaw’s widow, Shelia Hancock.
A second tribute to the late actor was paid during the episode when Thursday suffered a health emergency in the Oxford university quadrant.
It was filmed at Exeter College, which is where Morse was filmed having a fatal attack in his last ever episode.
While Morse did not recover, Thursday managed to pull through.
To this day, Morse tops polls of favourite TV shows, and in 2018 was voted greatest British crime drama ever by Radio Times readers.
When Endeavour first aired, back in 2012 with a pilot set in 1965, there was much pearl-clutching at the prospect of usurping the original.
Original: Endeavour is a prequel to the iconic detective series which ran for more than a decade, before ending two years before John’s death in 2002
Thoughtful: The scene was an echo of the first episode of Endeavour, which in its final minutes saw Evan’s Morse asked by his boss Fred Thursday where he imagined himself in 20 years, before seeing Thaw’s reflection in his rear-view
Tough one! Endeavour producer Charlotte Webber admitted it was a tricky scene to pull off but it was managed thanks to some special effects
But in the end it turned out pretty well, thanks to a combination of clever casting and if-it-ain’t-broke-why-fix-it writing.
The Blenheim setting for the final scenes was also a subtly poignant tribute to Morse’s creator, Colin Dexter, who died in 2017.
Scriptwriter Colin Lewis said: ‘Blenheim was the last place that Shaun and I were together with Colin Dexter at a question-and-answer event one Sunday afternoon.
‘My last view of Colin is him taking Shaun’s arm across to his car. And so I wanted to come back to Blenheim for Shaun and for Colin and just to say goodbye, really.’
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