#nobel prize for advances in morseposting

[dnickels]

its so beautiful to me that morse tries as hard as he can to live in like the world of beauty truth and the mind palace and fred thursday is like the 40s are over when i Say they're over

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[dnickels]

Re your most recent Endeavor gif set, I would be curious to know your thoughts:

The whole "detective being driven mad by city" trope is a thing, but it's usually a big busy callous alienizing city, like London or New York, or maybe a particularly rough or desperate city or area, the whole "Forget it, it's Chinatown," thing. So when I was first watching Endeavour, there was something unintentionally funny about seeing the trope play out in what looks like a bucolic little university town.

But then I started overthinking it, how Oxbridge is like the last stop before the imperial slaughter house in the veal calf raising of future British elites, something something the decline and fall of Empire, something something reproduction of the symbol sans meaning, something something the cycle is inescapable... But I don't know if I'm going crazy or if any of that is intended by the creators?

Like I know Morse's whole thing is he's a man between worlds, who never quite fits the police social structure but can never be accepted by the intellectual or upper class, and he's too old fashioned and snobby for the mods but too uppity and outspoken for the traditionalists. Oxford is a good clash of civilizations for drawing out those contradictions, but do you think there anything more to it than that and would he be less alienated in another city or is he Fully Doomed by police work?

This ask is so fucking good and I said to myself "I've got to chew on this one for a while" and then six weeks went by. I am so sorry!!!

It is impossible to know if we are overthinking it and that in and of itself only adds fuel to the fire. It's a show written in response/in dialogue with two other shows that are in turn dialoguing with/based on a series of books...its meant to be looked at that hard. I don't know how fair it is of me to invoke Colin Dexter himself when talking about Morse but he gave much of his own background to his creation (except, of course, that Dexter went to Cambridge). His Desert Island Discs interview where he talks very briefly about how much is autobiographical is really interesting. So I would love to know what Dexter's thoughts about going to the big university were...and what Morse was expecting out of his time there.

I mean, does anyone really know what they're supposed to get out of college? But yeah, you work your ass off to get to the Premier Institution to access its thousand years of prestige and hope some of it rubs off on you...and then what? He refuses that final fence and has a huge meltdown and never takes his degree, but what was he going to do? He has a pretty cynical view of most institutions, academic, social, governmental etc. By the very first ep of Endeavour he's been burned by the police...but he stays.

So yeah I think you are right on with the specific place, I think he loves the idea of the place-- the cultured life of the mind, the pursuit of the most beautiful, the most exquisite, the places that stay-- even though he's repulsed by the power of the institutions and the awful bottom-feeder they attract. Is he fighting for a city that just straight up doesn't exist? Driven insane trying to make this place Camelot?

I think he spends his entire life trying to make the city the place he dreamed about as a boy but-- you can't! It wasn't real! It can only be what it is! He wants so badly for everyone to transcend their base cruel nature but it ends up make him mean and often cruel himself! FUCK! The themes!!

God this is a good ask I want to come back to it. I haven't said half of what I want to...