Casualties of War

Casualties of War is about immunity from justice, and it ends in the only way such a story can. A woman and her lover kill a man, the state knows it, and the state decides that the killer's work matters more than the killing. The episode opens elsewhere, with two local brothers, Terry and Frank Morgan, breaking into a mansion; they are caught and, rather than being handed to the police, are blackmailed into working as saboteurs for the Spanish diplomat Jose de Perez. On the police side, Milner is asked to infiltrate and break a gambling ring, and Foyle has to deal with the new Assistant Commissioner, Henry Parkins, who is rigid and correct where his predecessor Rose was flexible. Into Foyle's private life comes his goddaughter Lydia Nicholson, unexpectedly from London, with her young son James, a boy so badly shaken by a bombing raid that he no longer speaks. She later goes missing and is found alive after a suicide attempt.

A local man reports hearing a shot near a secret Admiralty research centre. A search of the ground turns up the body of Michael Richards, a schoolteacher with gambling debts, half buried in the woods near the centre where his wife Evelyn works. The head of the facility, Professor Henry Townsend, is unhelpful at first. Evelyn Richards then gives her account: she says she was working late alone at the research centre when her husband arrived without warning, and that when he began to attack a key piece of the research equipment she shot him to protect their work. Foyle arrests her, but Parkins demands her release, and she is released.

Foyle's own reading is different. He tells Parkins that Richards was drawn to the centre by his wife and was killed by her Danish lover, Hans Lindemann. He is stopped from arresting the people he believes responsible because of the value of their work to the war effort, and Parkins will not allow it. Faced with the impossibility of doing the job he holds to, Foyle tenders his resignation, and the episode ends on it. The record does not establish what becomes of the resignation, and no source consulted states the aftermath, so this account stops where the episode stops. The research centre is built on the development of the bouncing bomb and Operation Chastise, the Dambusters raid of 1943, and the silence of the boy James stands on the Sandhurst Road School disaster in Catford, in which thirty-eight children and six teachers were killed.

The ending is the episode's strength, because Foyle's resignation is earned by the whole episode and delivered as a conclusion he has reached rather than a protest, and it is the sharpest statement of the argument the series had been running since series 3, that the war can place some people beyond the law. The plot makes the culprit known to the police, so the obstacle is not evidence but the national interest, and there is nothing left for the detective to do. Michael Jayston's Parkins is the counterweight, and the episode is careful to make him neither a villain nor a fool, only a man who has decided what the war allows. Kate Fleetwood's Lydia and Joshua Lewis's James put the domestic cost of the war on screen in the middle of an investigation about sabotage.

The weakness is that the sabotage strand and the gambling strand are both subordinate to the research-centre case and take time to feel necessary to it. Casualties of War closes series 4 and is the last of the four-episode series, since from series 5 the run used three episodes; it is also the last wartime episode before the programme's first transmission break. It drew the lowest audience of the series, around 7.89 million, and the criticism that survives attaches to the DVD release rather than the transmission, where the Set 4 reviewers singled out the episode as a study in the expediencies of the war effort.