Interesting to go back in time and get acquainted with what some consider as the old Morse, the end of Morse's long career as Chief Inspector Detective, and in this original series CID Morse dies less than two years before retiring, and he is shy about his first name, Endeavour.
It was a time - in Oxford - when the general society was not exactly all-inclusive. The campus is extremely hierarchically organized, even structured, and you are not supposed to mix the various layers or tiers of this university society which is a caricature still then of what the aristocratic English society probably used to be before the second world war when a king could not be married to a divorcee. Then around this intellectual, hierarchically patterned ghetto, you have the rest of society and beyond the city's boundaries, the rural "classes," mostly farmers and some professions that are necessary for this agricultural society to work.
The series is thus extremely sensitive to social protocols and ethics which appear nowadays as vastly anti-social, segregative, even in many ways racist or discriminatory. Don't expect to see many "colored" people, except in the lowest layers of this universe, and music is seen as having to be classical, operatic too, and a luxury for the elite. That's why the "casual," in the last but one episode, who was educated in Oxford is opening a completely different can of worms because he listens to hard rock or metal music, not in concert or on a record player or withdrawing room hi-fi, or a cassette reader of the type sound-cassette reader in his car, but on a Walkman with two earphones plugged in his ears. That's some kind of crime for Inspector Morse who is a member of a choir that may perform in concerts or even in some operatic productions, and who listens to music in his withdrawing-room deep armchair, or at times, and that is the limit of good taste turning sour, in his vintage jaguar car with the audio-cassette reader there, in itself a crime in vintageness, just like a harmonica would be an iconoclastic crime against the eternal British social order if positioned in the mouth of the Queen, playing a song like Clementine, or even God Save the Queen, and we all know what the Sex Pistols did with this second title.
But you can disregard this passé and archaic vision of a society that seems today to be defended if not advocated, let alone fantasized, by Brexiters, if not Brexiteers who still have to find a D'Artagnan. Then you have the dear Inspector Morse, his personality, and his style. He is a bachelor, and I would even be redundant and say, a single unmarried bachelor who cannot understand really what the evolution of society is all about and we see him slipping down the soapy slope of life, of his life, drowning his lack of understanding in Beer and whiskey or scotch, as if that could make him think right.
A control freak with his Sergeant, Lewis by name, he dominates and exploits him in all sorts of ways, and that is often a sad vision, a colorless view of the chain of command. True enough Morse is himself controlled in the same way by his superior in that chain of command. But altogether, he little by little commits suicide to remain in control of himself with his daily beer (counted in one to five pints) and his evening scotch or any other whiskey (counted in full one- or two-pint bottles, though maybe not per day). He is an alcoholic and that's a shame because that makes him grumpy, unbearable, unlivable, even if he is a very good investigator. After all, he has the trendy habit of following his instinct, his imagination, his intuitive hunches. Does it work like that in real police work? The series wants us to believe it and then the difference between Morse and other detectives is the fact that Morse is right in his hunches more often than most other detectives who follow easy and segregative hunches, which is already bad, but at the same time, they lock out all other alternative possibilities and refuse to consider more complicated solutions.
In other words, the cases presented in this series are all, absolutely all, complicated and twisted in innumerable ways, revealing some social depth that very often questions both the hierarchized absurdity of the academic world and the segregational inequality of the social world, both in Oxford and around. And at the same time, it is a rather convincing discourse against the policework that does not get out of this narrow-minded frame. But against it, if you do not want a revolution, you can only become socially autistic, locking yourself into a mental and logical world with no real human dimension, only transient contacts from time to time that will never get to anything long-lasting. In fact, Morse has only two daily contacts from beginning to end, his Sergeant Lewis who he controls impulsively and compulsively, and his superior chief-anything who is both obese and a control freak of his own type. And in this harsh world Inspector Morse dies of his alcoholism with two ulcers first and then a heart attack. His last words to his superior on his death bed are "Please, thank Lewis." And that is maybe the only and most obvious touch of humanity, but so late since in the next scene he is getting ready for burial and Sergeant Lewis pronounces the final guillotine sentence "Morse is dead."
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
It was a time - in Oxford - when the general society was not exactly all-inclusive. The campus is extremely hierarchically organized, even structured, and you are not supposed to mix the various layers or tiers of this university society which is a caricature still then of what the aristocratic English society probably used to be before the second world war when a king could not be married to a divorcee. Then around this intellectual, hierarchically patterned ghetto, you have the rest of society and beyond the city's boundaries, the rural "classes," mostly farmers and some professions that are necessary for this agricultural society to work.
The series is thus extremely sensitive to social protocols and ethics which appear nowadays as vastly anti-social, segregative, even in many ways racist or discriminatory. Don't expect to see many "colored" people, except in the lowest layers of this universe, and music is seen as having to be classical, operatic too, and a luxury for the elite. That's why the "casual," in the last but one episode, who was educated in Oxford is opening a completely different can of worms because he listens to hard rock or metal music, not in concert or on a record player or withdrawing room hi-fi, or a cassette reader of the type sound-cassette reader in his car, but on a Walkman with two earphones plugged in his ears. That's some kind of crime for Inspector Morse who is a member of a choir that may perform in concerts or even in some operatic productions, and who listens to music in his withdrawing-room deep armchair, or at times, and that is the limit of good taste turning sour, in his vintage jaguar car with the audio-cassette reader there, in itself a crime in vintageness, just like a harmonica would be an iconoclastic crime against the eternal British social order if positioned in the mouth of the Queen, playing a song like Clementine, or even God Save the Queen, and we all know what the Sex Pistols did with this second title.
But you can disregard this passé and archaic vision of a society that seems today to be defended if not advocated, let alone fantasized, by Brexiters, if not Brexiteers who still have to find a D'Artagnan. Then you have the dear Inspector Morse, his personality, and his style. He is a bachelor, and I would even be redundant and say, a single unmarried bachelor who cannot understand really what the evolution of society is all about and we see him slipping down the soapy slope of life, of his life, drowning his lack of understanding in Beer and whiskey or scotch, as if that could make him think right.
A control freak with his Sergeant, Lewis by name, he dominates and exploits him in all sorts of ways, and that is often a sad vision, a colorless view of the chain of command. True enough Morse is himself controlled in the same way by his superior in that chain of command. But altogether, he little by little commits suicide to remain in control of himself with his daily beer (counted in one to five pints) and his evening scotch or any other whiskey (counted in full one- or two-pint bottles, though maybe not per day). He is an alcoholic and that's a shame because that makes him grumpy, unbearable, unlivable, even if he is a very good investigator. After all, he has the trendy habit of following his instinct, his imagination, his intuitive hunches. Does it work like that in real police work? The series wants us to believe it and then the difference between Morse and other detectives is the fact that Morse is right in his hunches more often than most other detectives who follow easy and segregative hunches, which is already bad, but at the same time, they lock out all other alternative possibilities and refuse to consider more complicated solutions.
In other words, the cases presented in this series are all, absolutely all, complicated and twisted in innumerable ways, revealing some social depth that very often questions both the hierarchized absurdity of the academic world and the segregational inequality of the social world, both in Oxford and around. And at the same time, it is a rather convincing discourse against the policework that does not get out of this narrow-minded frame. But against it, if you do not want a revolution, you can only become socially autistic, locking yourself into a mental and logical world with no real human dimension, only transient contacts from time to time that will never get to anything long-lasting. In fact, Morse has only two daily contacts from beginning to end, his Sergeant Lewis who he controls impulsively and compulsively, and his superior chief-anything who is both obese and a control freak of his own type. And in this harsh world Inspector Morse dies of his alcoholism with two ulcers first and then a heart attack. His last words to his superior on his death bed are "Please, thank Lewis." And that is maybe the only and most obvious touch of humanity, but so late since in the next scene he is getting ready for burial and Sergeant Lewis pronounces the final guillotine sentence "Morse is dead."
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU