The Settling of the Sun

I agree this is not one of the best episodes. The plot line, performances and production are all below the usual standard. And the references to "Japs", drugs, and WW2 certainly do not age well but that's how it works. However I am an Inspector Morse fan. I watched it as a student when it first started in the late 1980s, have seen every episode several times and still like dipping in now and then on a wet Sunday afternoon.

What I DON'T understand is all the negative reviews starting "I have never liked Inspector Morse..." Why bother watching it in that case? Just so you can enjoy trashing it?

I enjoyed The Settling of the Sun but was very surprised at the poor directing, sound, and photography. It seemed like it was shot by a film school student who was attempting for the first time to be artistic in their directing, but only achieving an awkward quality to the shots. Some very weird use of the camera, which at times whirls around for no apparent reason, and other times seems glued to the floor in a medium shot, causing the scene to feel like it's dragging on. The worst shot was when Lewis bent over to pick up something that had dropped, and his entire posterior blocked out the camera! Lots of shots that were washed out, many that were too dark. And the sound was so uneven! I found myself turning the sound up to hear barely audible dialog, when another sound in the track would suddenly blast out my eardrums.

I love the entire Inspector Morse series, but this ones stands out as the flabbiest production-wise.

More a case of Inspector Clouseau than Morse, I'm afraid. The solution to the mystery of a murdered Japanese student is silly, and the direction is freakish. It just isn't believable at all and is one of the worst episodes in the Morse canon. Thank heaven this is an abberation. Normally Morse is much better than this.

I had seen the Inspector Morse series some years ago, and was re-viewing episodes when I started watching the prequel series, "Endeavour." I agree with the issues others had with the writing and somewhat clumsy editing and camera work, and I found some elements to be rather anachronistic. Had it been set in the mid- to late sixties, when "Endeavour" is set, where you had characters like Thursday who were war veterans with relatively recent memories of WWII, the anti Asian bias may have been more persuasive. Also, at one point a girl (on of a group of foreign students) makes an observation that all of the books in a room are written by men - again, something that seemed more 1960s rising-of-women's-lobe era than the late '80s, And a lot of the dialogue seemed very disjointed and artificial - people were making remarks at one another rather than conversing. On the plus side, the Morse series, like the Endeavour series, understands the importance of ensemble, something that I wish other British mystery series offered.

The worst Morse episode I have seen. Poorly scripted, poorly photographed, poorly lit and irritating performances. You will be lucky to last beyond the first 10 minutes of this dire story. Morse is lecherous, Jane is annoying, Sir Wilfred a creep and Lewis hardly appears!! Episodes before and since have been much better than this one. Even the appearances of Derek Fowlds cannot lift this beyond poor. Most of the characters are half-lit, the camera is usually focused on theor feet or up their nostrils and half the time there is silence, even in the middle of dialogue. Some characters (eg Supt Dewar) appear that any reason why.