All Clear

The end of the war in Europe is days away and Hastings is preparing to celebrate, but the town is full of people the war has damaged. Foyle sits on the council's celebration committee alongside the Austrian general practitioner Dr Henry Ziegler and Martin Longmate, the owner of the Majestic Hotel and an aspiring Conservative politician. Into the hotel comes Major John Kieffer, an American officer Foyle knew in the earlier episode Invasion, now a heavy drinker haunted by visions of dead American soldiers and wanting only to go home. Another committeeman, the former Royal Signals major Mark Griffiths, is haunted too. Ziegler is found stabbed to death, and the weapon is one taken from a display case at the local museum whose aged, anti-German curator cannot explain how it left the glass. Foyle also learns that Griffiths has killed himself, and Kieffer's intense interest in Griffiths draws his suspicion.

Foyle travels to London and confronts Hilda Pierce, of Special Operations, and forces out of her the details of the botched Operation Tiger in Devon, the rehearsal landing behind the Slapton Sands disaster of 1944, in which German torpedo boats killed hundreds of American soldiers and the incident was covered up. Confronting Kieffer, Foyle learns how he had tracked down and hounded Griffiths, whom he held solely responsible.

The solution points away from the men damaged by the war and towards the man who was not. Longmate killed Ziegler to stop him exposing Longmate's fabricated army medical discharge: the politician, not the traumatised soldier, is the murderer. The episode ends with the VE Day celebration on 8 May and with Foyle leaving the Hastings police station. Milner is promoted to Inspector and transferred to Brighton, and when his wife Edith goes into labour Foyle drives them to the hospital and their daughter, Clementine, is born. Stewart is uncertain about her post-war life and Foyle suggests she volunteer with the military charity SSAFA. His son Andrew, back from Malta and discharged, proposes to Stewart; she first repulses him and dances with him at the end.

Its strength is the design that puts a secret wartime disaster behind a domestic murder, so that the police solution measures the official one against it: the killing that went unpunished and denied dwarfs the one the police can clear. It also makes the victim the foreigner and the killer the politician, which keeps the episode elegiac rather than triumphant.

The weakness is that the murder plot is slight for the weight it is asked to carry, and its culprit is the least developed of the suspects until the reveal. What distinguishes it is that it is the only record in the run made and transmitted as a finale, and watched as one. Its audience of around 7.3 million and a 28 per cent share was the reported basis on which ITV reopened negotiations and recommissioned the programme for three further series, so the episode that was meant to end Foyle's War is the hinge on which the whole run continued.