The Settling of the Sun

I'm re-watching this series after a few years, and I must fondly remember later seasons because so far it's been a disappointment. The dialogue is often stupid or incomprehensible, and the direction is herky-jerky. Thank goodness for the Max and Lewis characters who keep things moving and entertaining.

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.

It's quite unbelievable what I saw. There were moments where I was asking myself whether I was watching a prank. The acting is cringe-worthy, the dialogue is so bad it is literally grotesque. The sound is badly managed and camera looks, as mentioned in other reviews, like a student is failing an exam. Fortunately the screenwriter didn't work on any other episode and the director did only two other episodes, one of them rated as the worst Morse episode on IMDB.

Compared to other Morse episodes, this falls very short. Nearly every scene is horribly clunky and deliberate. It made the whole episode very flat and plodding. Morse's interest in a female character (a recurring theme in Morse and often awkward) is very awful in this episode, it couldn't be less believable.