Endeavour star on final season: ‘You can’t please everyone all the time’

Shaun Evans said the team wanted the finale to “leave people feeling emotionally satisfied”.

By James Hibbs

Published: Saturday, 18 February 2023 at 12:00 am

The highly anticipated ninth season of Endeavour will surely be a bittersweet watch for fans when it arrives on ITV later this month.

While it will surely be a fond reunion with Shaun Evans’ Morse, fans will also know that this is the last time we will see him onscreen, as this is set to be the final season.

Bringing a long-running and beloved series such as Endeavour to a satisfying close is a difficult task – and it seems that Evans and the team are very aware of that.

Asked what the team behind the programme wanted to achieve with the show’s final episode, Evans said: “Final episodes are always very difficult. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

“What we wanted to do was to end Endeavour in a way that was fitting to all of the enormous work we had put into it over the last 10 years and also to all of the huge support we have had every year from the audience. To not leave anybody feeling short changed. To leave people feeling emotionally satisfied.”

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Endeavour season 9
ITV

He continued: “It’s also a thank you, in a way. To say, ‘Thank you so much for sticking with this over the past number of years.’ To honour and respect that. So it’s all of those things.

“Also for it to feel irreconcilable. For it to feel closed. In terms of we won’t be seeing Joan and Thursday again. We will see Morse and Strange again ‘later on’ in Inspector Morse but they will be very different versions of themselves. But our story is at its end.”

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Evans’ costar Roger Allam, who plays Fred Thursday, said: “We have given a satisfying junction for all of our regular characters. That was the difference between Inspector Morse and Russell Lewis’s work on Endeavour. There is a lot of story in Endeavour devoted to relationships between the regular characters to a greater degree than there was in Inspector Morse.

“I remember when we were filming the wedding scenes we thought, ‘Actually we’ve never all been in a scene together.’ And that’s true. We never ever have. So we had to have a commemorative photo taken.”

Evans previously also teased that they had added “subtle” nods to Inspector Morse and the work of John Thaw in the role during their final episode.

He said that there are “nods and echoes in the final Endeavour episode to the very first Inspector Morse film – The Dead of Jericho – and the very last – The Remorseful Day”.

He added: “But it’s only the more discerning viewer who will realise what we have done. Those who have maybe watched all of the Inspector Morse episodes and all of the Endeavour series. We wanted to be fleet of foot about it.”