TS: Lewis vs Morse

i've just googled and maybe the jacket is in the very first one, Dead of Jericho?

or i have some kind of bizarre long-term fetish hallucination

k i found a reference

Thankfully, Morse’s leather jacket and hat combination never resurfaced in future episodes.

https://morseandlewisandendeavour.com/2014/01/30/the-dead-of-jericho/

lol i went back and yes, it's the scene where lewis (still working for a different boss) catches a mysterious someone snooping round the dead lady's house in the dark, except it's morse!! tho i think it's more for the purposes of viewer-misdirection than off-piste character-construction… we're not meant to guess who it is until the reveal (scene also includes first appearance of the sophocles misdirect)

then they go a crappy pub together and bicker

i've always liked to think of it as Morse clinging to his hipster ladies man dreams

well his squeeze-interest is by then no more, maybe he was hoping to pull later on that evening (in the crappy pub)

except he encountered lewis instead, sadly cramping his style

hackstory for e2: every single oxford college is wildly and murderously corrupt, everyone employed by them is noxiously snobby (and also fvcking)

backstory also hackstory

twice in two eps that morse gets biffed on the noggin by a sharp object bcz he thinks he's cleverer than he actually is, and serve him right

e3: murder in a church (poison-stabbing during communion to be precise)

michael hordern cameo: he does his usual and it's fine :)

i feel like "morse! people just call me morse" does his sex life no good at all

im totally turned around on endeavour now because it kept being on in the background whether i liked it or not and ive grown to pretty much love every performance in it, and i got fondernof the stylistic directorial/production nods

😔

meanwhile this is a very silly ep of morse (s1 e3)

s2 e1: has a bunch of ageing american tourists and simon callow and it's annoying

ok just saw callow's stunt bubble-butt so things are looking up (they're not)

s2 e 2/3: two fairly poor eps, both over-freighted w/frantic explanation at the end

the first is set at a posh girls' school and features liz hurley's first ever TV appearance (blonde so it took me a bit to recognise here despite w/her trademark dark eyebrows; she's fine as the missing girl's friend i guess); second very implausibly involves a japanese drugs dealer and morse complaining (correctly) abt drugs as a v crappy plot point

at the girls' school morse manages to be less goatish than usual tho he does make one untoward comment abt the aesthetics of the sports skirt (lewis raising a disgusted eyebrow); in the second an old morse gf acts well enough when indicating how fed up of him she is (relatable since he is as always insufferable) and then increasingly badly as the bodies pile up. it has a vague feel of gaudy night.

in both there's a posh boss-level type who is unwatchably dickish (headmaster; master of college)

s2 e4: this was in fact p good: just a bunch of sordid, shabby, small-beer behaviour ending in catastrophe: nothing too elaborate, plus a commentary on or thru jacobean love poetry, the latter not laid on with a trowel for once

morse behaves himself and abstains from music 👍🏽

s3 e1: lordly family up to no good, morse solves the crime by applied cultural snobbery (spelling and opera)

stars patsy byrne reupping her role as nursie from blackadder, but serious this time -- which tbh distracts a bit from the general gravitas

now wondering if ppl in real life scream when they find bodies, esp.when it's basically someone just lying there

turns out this was was missing a head, so fair enough

is that the one with the gardener using his old school tie as a belt and a snotty kid telling a policewoman " how dare you call me Georgie!"

yes and yes!

the child has been quietly seen but not heard until that moment and only now grasps that her parents have both been taken away, by the grim reaper or the even grimmer detective chief inspector, so her feelings are justified, if not perhaps the pretext of her tantrum

morse is more disgusted than amused by the tie (harrow) as a belt and clearly files the gardener as a wrong'un there and then: later he discovers that the same gardener spells "civilised" with an "s" not a "z", which he says is "illiterate" (it isn't, it's fine) and adds this to his crimes

"Oxford" spelling retains the z in words with the "ize" form whereas the standard UK English spelling tends to go with "ise"

my understanding is "ize" is actually more etymologically correct, but my further understanding is this matters to only the kind of pedants you'd expect to try and score points off it

therefore that's a joke on Morse imo

i feel like the early eps especially are pretty good on drawing out his massive insecurities about class and Oxford, intentionally or not. god if i think about it too hard he's such a tragic figure it's hard to watch

xp morze

now wondering if ppl in real life scream when they find bodies, esp.when it's basically someone just lying there

The one that gets me is I wonder if IRL people are as snotty, begrudging and uncooperative when the police show up at their door to investigate a murder of someone they know or are, occasionally, related to. "Oh, you'd better come on then".

The snotty suspects tend to be obvious red herrings. I suppose

(xp) That should be "Oh, you'd better come in then, I suppose"

yeah that always grinds me gears, especially when the cops don't pointedly explain that they're trying to find out who killed this alleged love one

NV correct re the logic of "ize": it derives from the greek root (latin doesn't really have a z) and so sticklers continue to favour it

but it's a pig to handle if yr a hard-pressed copy editor as there are a bunch of words that nevertheless have always to be "ise": including advertise and improvise

as a consequence mistakes are less likely to creep into tired proofing (or find-cut-and-paste proofing lol) if you just make everything "ise"

(the ep is called {"the ghost in the machine" and there's a subtext abt the rise computers -- which morse of course hates and lewis likes -- and the triumph of the robots and also of crappy soft porn over true artistic eroticism, but i can't pretend it's especially convincingly developed)

The snotty suspects tend to be obvious red herrings. I suppose

In Morse they tend to be very quickly end up dead too.

max the pathologist -- who is fun bcz he always gives morse a hard time -- seems to be being retired in favour of dr russell, who will i believe become one of morse's ladies of interest

at the moment she is trying to teach him not to be such a patronising old sexist all the time

i love Grayling Russell, she isn't in enough episodes tbh and even tho she starts off not tolerating Morse's nonsense she sadly, unbelievably ends up kind of tolerating his nonsense

i am busy using my computer to change "ize" to "ise" all afternoon for money -- but i may write up some quick thoughts on morse's adventures in music and dating later

i love Grayling Russell, she isn't in enough episodes tbh and even tho she starts off not tolerating Morse's nonsense she sadly, unbelievably ends up kind of tolerating his nonsense

― Let's talk about local tomatoes (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Had a crush on her. Was a bit pissy at how she started tolerating Morse's nonsense.

Same

the ep i watched last night (s3 e2: "the last enemy") starts well enough -- it's abt ambition, petty jealousy, power and the dynamics of academia, political and sexual -- and rolls along, with various business-like cameos from well known faces (inc barry "van der valk" foster and michael "percy alleline" adlridge, the latter morse's tutor once upon a time (so we also get a glimpse of what academia thought of morse (had great potential, ruinously distracted -- by love of course). but it ends as they too often do with a big splurge of infodump backstory fulling in all the details

we've also now had two glimpses of how morse interweaves his love of music -- which is deep and very genuine, and which i find extremely irritating -- with his dating: an earlier ep when he tells grayling russell that he likes music, she says "oh! jazz?" and her replies (plaintively but also irritated) "music!"

then in this one he has a meal with a lady-of-interest (not dr russell) which takes place in a cheerily noisy and bustling jamaican eatery full of children and reggae and dreadlocked waiters. reggae is also not his thing viewers will be startled to discover

his issue of course is he uses taste as a social filter and an emotinal maginot line and then finds himself stranded miles distant from those he's drawn to: while all the choirs he's in are immediately shadowed by the corpses as they stack up lol

his love of music -- which is deep and very genuine, and which i find extremely irritating

New board description for ILM?

lol omar

The music thing is interesting. A lot of intellectual snobbery tics are cheap and reflexive - he's the scholarship boy desperate to prove his worth to social betters who will never give a shit and he can't/won't see this, and it's curdled him something rotten - but irrespective of what he affects not to like you're right mark, his love for what he does like is genuine and unaffected

he surrounds himself in it like an impenetrable armour

kinda wish ppl called me "pagan" tbh

Yeah it's quite a cool nickname if you're not poor self-conscious Endeavour

Is that the cricket team ep?

yes

I do like in morse how p much every villain is completely unremarkable and banal. one of the early ones about a missing schoolgirl has a terrifically whiny head teacher basically killing someone because it was "intolerable" that she would try to tell him what to do with HIS school.

think the only culprit I've been genuinely scared/creeped out by was the driving instructor one. and morse completely loses it during the entire episode persecuting the wrong guy.

When I was first watching them at the original broadcast date I used to argue that they nod to politics and conspiracy but the motives almost always end up being tawdry and personal. Don't know if I think that's good or bad now, but it's kind of good I guess. Law and Order often does a similar trick, the big motives are always supplanted by the small, sad motives

i'm only at no.10 right now but yes, so far i feel the Big Issues™️ have always been red herrings and it's actually at its best when everything is v small and crappy beer and ppl being dumb weasely shits

"his love of music -- which is deep and very genuine, and which i find extremely irritating"

Wonder how much it maps to someone like Scruton (not someone I am ever likely to read on music).

that definitely falls under "background research i will NOT be undertaking as an adjunct to this rewatch"*

my kneejerk impression is that morse uses it as kind of full sensualist wash which can be relied on to protect him from an ugly stupid world: where scruton actually wheels out the analytic and structural dimensions of classical composition as proof of (and key prizes in) the Western Civilisational Achievement etc

however this is second- or even third-hand apprehension of content so i may be quite wrong

*i just rewatched the cricket episode and was mildly amused to note that the two paperbacks abt zen buddhism which briefly feature as plot points are two books i myself own -- welcome to the first items you could grab off the shelves in a bookshop in the 80s

(adding: i found the cricket one p tiresome but it's probably the ep i've seen most often so the judgment isn't really fair maybe -- such comedy as it involves has become a little stale)