Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I enjoyed the Oxford setting of A Discovery of Witches. Jean enjoyed Miss Mackenzie by Anthony Trollope. Gaele reviewed Dear Mrs. Bird by A.J. Pearce set in WWII London. Tina reviewed the Friday and Saturday books in the Freida Klein series of mysteries set in London. Sim shared the Netflix series, Kiss Me First, and the book that inspired it.

PBS Passport Video is becoming one of my favorite locations on the Internet!

Season 5 of Endeavour puts the force at Cowley Station on edge for a variety of reasons.

I watched all six episodes in the fifth season of Endeavour in a binge over a couple of days. Endeavour is the prequel to Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis, in the same Oxford setting but a few decades earlier when Endeavour Morse was a young inspector. I wrote about earlier seasons of Endeavour a few months ago.

Each episode has a murder mystery, but we also have multiple longer story arcs, including the uncertainty of the future of the station where DS Morse and his bosses, DCI Thursday and Chief Superintendent Bright, work. The city and county police forces have joined to create the Thames Valley Constabulary and it’s not at all clear what impact that will have on our characters.

I got a kick out of Morse getting his first younger partner, DC George Fancy, and not at all convinced that he wants to work that way. We know that he’ll eventually grow into the role of senior partner from Inspector Morse, but there always was some awkwardness in developing a good working relationship and in conveying the complicated thought process in Morse’s prodigious mind.

Here’s a quote from the last episode that felt like a good analysis of some of what’s going on today:

Cruelty is like cancer. It starts with one cell. And, if it’s left untreated, it spreads until the whole body’s riddled with it.

Endeavour, so far, has been set in my pre-memory childhood. In Season 5, we heard about Dr. Martin Luther King’s and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations, events that my parents carefully protected me from being exposed to, since I was six years old. Season 6 is expected to be set in 1969 which contains my first world event memory–the moon landing on July 20. I just realized that next year, and for the rest of my life, I will experience the 50th anniversaries of things I remember!

Have you watched Endeavour? All five seasons are available at PBS Passport Video, a perk of being a member at my local PBS station (Nine Network, Channel 9 in St. Louis).