Sunflower

Sunflower gives Foyle a task he plainly dislikes. Karl Strasser, a former senior officer of the SS, is living in London under a false identity as a Dutch art historian, teaching as Professor Van Haren. British intelligence is protecting him because he supplies counter-Soviet information, having proved his usefulness by exposing a Soviet network in Sweden known as Red 5. Foyle is asked to find out who is threatening Strasser and to keep him alive.

Three parties want Strasser, or want him dead. Captain Thomas Nelson, a survivor of a wartime atrocity, has recognised him in the street and follows and threatens him. American officials, led by Lieutenant Colonel Hoyt Jackson, want him handed over as a war criminal. Foyle interviews Nelson and establishes what Strasser did: in 1944, in northern France after the Normandy landings, Strasser commanded a unit that captured Allied soldiers and had them executed after they had surrendered. Nelson, an observer attached to an American artillery unit, was caught in the atrocity, ran, was shot by Strasser personally, and survived only because the bullet grazed him and he lay still. The killings give the episode its title.

The service's plan is to get Strasser out of the country rather than surrender him to the Americans, and Strasser's superiors stage a death, an exploding car, to move him quietly abroad. Foyle exposes the attempt to foil the Americans by faking the German's death and works to subvert the escape. Strasser is taken alive and arrested by the Americans, though the sources differ on how they were reached, one attributing the arrest to a tip-off from Valentine and a detailed review placing the call from Foyle himself at the airport; they agree that Strasser is delivered after Foyle wrecks the exit plan. The operation costs Foyle his standing on his own side: Pierce tells him he is a traitor to the service, and a colleague answers that if the service shelters the former SS officer, it is no better than he is.

The episode's strength is the reversal of Foyle's function. For six series he pursued wrongdoers; here he is assigned to protect one, and the drama rests on his visible distaste and on the way he turns the assignment against the people who gave it. Its weakness is detection. The case is light on the mystery business that had driven the programme, and reviewers divide sharply: one called it the most outstanding of the three, another found it heavy on history and politics and thin on crime. The parallel thread about land valuation makes the same point in a domestic key, a man's farm taken for the war effort and then priced beyond his reach by the establishment that took it.

Sunflower is the point at which Foyle's cooperation with MI5 first breaks, and it closes on the line that the whole of series 8 answers. Sam asks where he wants to go, Where to, sir, and Foyle replies only, Good question, leaving open whether he means to go on working for the service. It is the least tidy of the three films, and the least interested in tidying: the villain is delivered, the service's ethics are left on the table, and the man Foyle was ordered to protect was the man who ordered the killings.