'Endeavour' Recap: Season 9 Episode 1

Endeavour airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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As the final season of Endeavour begins, Morse is actually in a good place. He has returned to Oxford after several months from a clinic with his drinking problem under control. And the first case he gets is related to classical music, a love of his.

A man was found dead in a college garden the morning after a reception was held there for the homecoming of the Oxford Concert Orchestra. He’s missing a shoe, and has no identification on him, although a bracelet that says “AL” is near his body.

Morse speaks to members of the orchestra and its imperious conductor, Sir Alexander Lermontov. None of them recognize or noticed the man. But Christina Poole, the orchestra’s guest soloist and a protégé of Lermontov’s who is premiering a concerto written by him, tells Morse that she has been receiving harassing messages: “bitch” written in lipstick on her dressing room mirror, notes slid under her hotel door. She invites Morse to the concerto premiere that evening and an awards ceremony earlier in the day at the private musical school she attended, the Belasco.

The dead man’s last meal was alphabet spaghetti, so it’s not likely he attended the reception. Morse notices that his one shoe is new, and goes to the department store where it was sold. A store clerk promises to retrieve records and let Morse know when they are ready.

Another body is found: a man, beaten and shot twice, his tongue torn out, nailed to the floor of a warehouse in a crucifix form. Thursday recognizes him from his London days decades ago as Mickey Flood, a thief and sometime police informant who was terrible at his chosen path but came from a family of thieves. He has a train ticket from London to Oxford from the previous day, and there’s a warrant out for him in London pertaining to a protection racket, to Thursday’s surprise—that’s not the kind of work Flood did.

Thursday’s phone number is written in a matchbook found on Flood—and he tried to call Thursday the other day, but didn’t respond when Thursday picked up.

The deaths keep coming. At the concert premiere of Lermontov’s concerto, Margeaux Quincannon, the concertmaster, falls to the ground in the middle of the piece, dead.

There’s another defamatory message on Poole’s mirror, but that seems minor now, except that the lipstick it was written in matches one amongst Quincannon’s things.

Quincannon died of a severe allergic reaction. She didn’t have adrenaline to counteract it amongst her things at the concert, but it is in her home—perhaps someone removed it from her bag. There’s also a drafted letter in her home threatening someone not to put her aside.

Rumors swirled in the orchestra about a relationship that went further than protégé-mentor between Quincannon and Lermontov. But Mabs Portman, Quincannon’s friend and seatmate, dismisses them, as does Lermontov himself. Portman attended the Belasco, Poole’s school, with Quincannon. Orchestra members noticed that Quincannon avoided some foods, but no one ever heard anything explicitly about an allergy.

Was Quincannon’s death an accident or intentional? The same can be asked of the still-unidentified man found in the garden. He died of a drug overdose, but the fact that the heroin and barbiturates were injected between his toes (hence the missing shoe), suggests he didn’t give himself the drugs.

The department store ledger reveals the address and details of a man who recently bought the correct shoes, and his apartment contains both the other shoe of the pair and cans of alphabet spaghetti, as well as a business card for a private investigator.

The PI is familiar to Thursday and Morse: he’s Ronnie Box, their corrupt former colleague who in the end saved Thursday’s life, despite all his egregious acts. Box reveals that the dead man’s name wasn’t the one listed in the ledger but Andrew Lewis—initials “AL,” which were on the bracelet found near him.

Lewis came to Box to search for his mother Brenda, who had left home after a falling out with her husband years ago. She worked for a time at Landesman Construction, which was owned by a gangster Thursday and Morse once investigated (back in season 2).

Morse picked up another piece of information from the department store ledger: Joan was there for bridal shopping. Morse assumed she was a bridesmaid and was hopeful that he could be her date, but when he brings it up to her in person, she reveals that she is engaged—to Strange.

Morse was at Joan’s house because he saw her brother Sam wandering and offered to give him a ride. Sam has just been released from military prison for deserting the army after witnessing the death of a comrade in Northern Ireland. He’s still struggling, and finding comfort in drink and lashing out at his mother.

Sam’s return home has distracted Thursday from Joan’s exciting news—and he also thought Morse had better hear it from Joan, he tells his younger colleague. Strange says they are keeping the engagement quiet, given that his future father-in-law is his boss. In Morse’s absence, Thursday and Strange have also made a habit of having lunch together—once a tradition of Morse and Thursday. But Strange does ask Morse to be his best man.

More change is coming, too: Bright tells Thursday that he is planning to retire. He suggests a promotion to Thursday that would require a move, meaning Thursday would also have to leave Morse behind. Wynn doesn’t like the idea, but Thursday is considering it.

Morse has to think of the past and not the future to solve his cases, however. He learns that Quincannon’s best friend at the Belasco died in a swimming accident there. Newspaper reports reveal that the girl’s guardian testified that she was bullied at the school, but no note was found so suicide was never definitively accepted.

By strange coincidence, the girl’s guardian works at the hall where Quincannon’s orchestra now practices. She tells Morse about a note found years later in the girl’s jacket that said “Kill yourself.” She kept it, and gives it to Morse.

Morse finds a hotel receipt in Quincannon’s house with notations in red pencil. He realizes that she and a bassist insisted on adjoining rooms with a shared door. The bassist tried to end their relationship, and Quincannon threatened to reveal it to Lermontov. But the bassist called her bluff, knowing she wouldn’t blab, and she instead said she was going to a different orchestra. The bassist also thought he heard Quincannon threaten Donald Fischer, the orchestra’s manager.

Mabs Portman, Quincannon’s close friend, explains that Quincannon thought Fischer was overcharging hotels and pocketing the difference, hence the marked-up receipt. Fischer explains that he simply has to engage in creative bookkeeping to keep the orchestra running. He was about to fire Quincannon, however, having realized that she was the one leaving harassing messages for Poole.

After the coroner contacts Quincannon’s doctor to learn that she was allergic to nuts, Morse finally figures out what happened: someone added ground nuts to the rosin she used on her violin bow, causing an allergic reaction once she played.  

Who was that someone? Mabs Portman. She was always second best to Quincannon, but looked up to her; she even helped her cover up the bullying that led to the girl at the Belasco’s suicide. But the shared complicity in that death—Portman wrote the “Kill yourself” note, trying to hide it in Quincannon’s handwriting—grew to be a distressing part of their relationship. When Quincannon mentioned to the bassist that she was going to leave the orchestra, Portman realized that she could finally move up in the ranks and be first. And she couldn’t be around Quincannon anymore, so the realization that leaving the orchestra was a bluff led her to kill Quincannon.

Morse also sees his friends growing more distant, and turns to a drink—in moderation. When he asks Thursday to share a beer with him, his mentor refuses—he has to be home with his family and Sam.