Foyle's War: Set Four

Amazon.com The excellent Foyle's War returns with four episodes (each on its own disc) that first appeared on television in 2006 and '07. As before, the show's "history meets mystery" tagline pretty much sums it up, as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle solves murders and various other heinous crimes in and around bucolic Hastings, England, while World War II rages on at home and abroad. "Invasion," the first episode, marks the arrival of American forces in 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor. Not all the locals are thrilled to see them; disparaging remarks about the G.I.s showing up "late" are common, and many a stiff upper lip curls at the Yanks' brash, boisterous behavior. Thus when a Hastings barmaid turns up strangled at a dance arranged by the Americans to get to know their hosts, fingers are quickly pointed at the "invaders." But Foyle and his assistants, Sgt. Paul Milner (Anthony Howell) and driver Samantha "Sam" Stewart (the delightfully named Honeysuckle Weeks), have other suspects, and the detective, who comes on a bit like Columbo without the trench coat and other idiosyncrasies, manages to sort through them while somehow keeping the Brit-Yank enmity from festering and dealing with the deadly effects of the illegal "hooch" the barmaid and her employer were brewing. This balance of deftly intertwined elements typifies a series in which each installment is essentially a 90-minute movie; in "Bad Blood," murder, romance both illicit and international, and the appalling specter of Britain's experiments with biological weapons like anthrax are all on the bill, while gambling, sabotage, personal tragedy, and yet more murder feature in "Bleak Midwinter" and "Casualties of War." The mysteries aren't especially confounding; what the quietly persistent Foyle does is less interesting than how he does it. And while it's set in wartime, the war and its impact on the English (who endure the death and injuries visited upon their young men, along with shortages of gas, electricity, and such) is more often a backdrop than a central focus. Each disc includes a several pages of often fascinating text about the "historical truth" behind a given episode, while other bonus features include cast filmographies and a brief "making of" documentary on disc 1. All in all, while it may not appeal to fans of the fast-paced, effects-laden cop procedurals popular on American TV, Foyle's War is a classy production, well written (by creator Anthony Horowitz), nicely