Trespass

Trespass opens on the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in July 1946, using newsreel to set its background of conflict in British Mandate Palestine. In London, the case begins quietly: Daniel Woolf, son of a wealthy and prominent Jewish businessman, Sir David Woolf, is assaulted on the grounds of a university, and Foyle is asked to look into it informally by Daniel's tutor, Doctor Elizabeth Addis. The question is whether the attack was racially motivated.

The political weather complicates it. A right-wing leader in Peckham, Charles Lucas, who heads an organisation called the International Unity Party, is stirring anti-immigrant, anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic feeling, and his rhetoric draws a crowd; a rally and the agitation that follows lead to a riot and to the firebombing of a house, and graffiti reading PJ, for Perish Judah, appears in the district. When Daniel's father is killed, the informal enquiry becomes a murder case.

Foyle establishes that the group claiming responsibility for bombing empty transport ships in France, the Defenders of Arab Palestine, does not exist. It is a fiction created by Clive Ord-Smith of the Foreign Office to disguise the real purpose, which is to reduce illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Ord-Smith's operatives, not Palestinian or Jewish militants, were behind both the assault on Daniel Woolf and the murder of his father, and the bombings in France were their work, staged under a false flag. Meanwhile MI5 is providing security for a Palestine conference in London, and the strands meet when Foyle uncovers a bomb threat to the conference and works it through to stop it. The climax puts Valentine on the spot to cut the wires, and his low-key intervention saves the day. In a personal turn, Foyle is set up while trying to make contact with an Arab delegation and resigns from MI5, briefly and without fuss.

The strength is the merging of a hate crime with a state operation: the murder and the false-flag bombing turn out to be the same conspiracy, which gives the episode a scale the earlier films had not reached and puts British policy in Palestine on trial. Its weakness is that the two most vivid elements never meet. Reviewers agree that the Mosley-like figure is the episode's best invention and that he is left unconnected to the solution, so the confrontation the material seems to promise never comes. The Radio Times found the plot's early circuitry slow to charge but building to a tense climax.

The episode is the most political of the run, and it plants the reveal that settles Addis's identity: the academic who brought Foyle the case is working for Hilda Pierce. That confirmation sets up her part in the finale, and the episode's argument, about the persistence of the hatreds the war was meant to have settled, makes the final film's private betrayal read against the public ones of the Foreign Office. Sam's concern for a boy in Adam's constituency who cannot get help for whooping cough is the run's clearest nod to the coming National Health Service.