Morse

Jennie and I are in the process of watching the second season of Lewis on DVD. They arrived in the mail the other day and we are slowly watching them - slowly because we want to savour and enjoy them. And there are only four episodes.

I must say that Lewis was a pleasant surprise for us. We are great fans of the Morse series, and used the movie-long episodes intensely in 2006, during some very difficult patches, to switch off. Morse is the antithesis of American-style crime drama with their gritty hyper-realism, interest in the mechanics of detective work, and bold colour schemes. And about the only title in that style that we enjoy at all is the show House (and that’s because he’s really a medical version of Sherlock Holmes), Bones, and as a guilty pleasure, NCIS (the latter two primarily for the interactions between the characters rather than anything to do with what the plot is about).

Morse is really about life, not detective work. It’s main character, Inspector Endeavour Morse (and you only get that first name once in the entire series), is an ‘Oxford man’, who, it is suggested, never graduated in the course he read for, and brings his literary and aesthetic values to his policework. He is a bachelor, who regularly finds a relational connection to the female characters (often romantic) caught up in the murder he’s investigating. (In fact, in the first couple of seasons you can fairly reliably be sure that the murderer or accomplice will be whichever woman he falls for. A dynamic that they cleverly twist in the pilot episode of Lewis.)

The murders are solved, in that the Byzantine causes that led to the terrible deed are finally unravelled and exposed. But it rarely does much good. The murderer often dies instead of being caught, and often not before they finished killing off all or most of the people caught up in the state of affairs. Morse rarely does much, in terms of what American style shows look for—justice is rarely served on the murderer, and the heroes don’t save anyone. There’s no great Law and Order style speech where the bad guy is sermonised by the hero and has to sit there and wear it.

And the pace of the movies reflect this. They are slow, s-l-o-w, very slow. A sloth moves faster while carrying several tortoises. There are long periods with no dialogue and no action, where we just watch the characters move from point A to B. Scenes where the plot doesn’t move forward at all—Morse just sits in a pub with Lewis and talks. There’s long sweeping shots of the glorious Oxford countryside and magnificent Oxford mediaeval architecture, and generally put to some powerful piece of classical music. I’ve lost track of the number of people who have told me that they love the show, but admit that they’ve never seen one to the end, because they fell asleep part way through. There’s no plot driving the movie on. It’s the kind of viewing experience where you stop for a while and watch life unfold around you.

And this is because these movies are really about the nature of life, and the kind of strange and potentially disastrous turns it can take. The murder/s are almost incidental, except inasmuch as the blackness of murder highlights the importance of the things that Morse is discovering about how humans tick, and how relationships can lead to very wrong courses of actions. They make Morse’s discoveries significant in the way that only a lamented death can.


That's what makes this show stand out. It uses the context of murder to create a seriousness about reflections on human beings and life. The murder is more than an intellectual puzzle to be solved. The solving of a crime is not about meeting the post 9/11 need for authority figures to be utterly reliable and omniscient. Morse is a statment about human life; its highs and its lows. We were always impressed that they managed to do it with Morse, and are a bit startled that they have continued it with Lewis. But it is their success in accomplishing this that makes the combination of Morse and Lewis something extraordinary. Morse dies at the end of the series, soon after Sergeant Lewis receives his promotion to Inspector. The death of one main character and his sidekick becoming the main character for a new series says something eloquent all on its own about how life is to be lived and taken for what it is in the face of death. MDB