The biggest mystery is how this scrawny, sensitive,"musical" type ever became the world-weary but unflappable Inspector Morse.
There is interesting character development in the early part of the episode with the usual office politics and pecking order as Endeavor Morse seeks to establish his place in the Oxford Police to which he has been reassigned. It is a sort of homecoming as he had been a student at the famous Oxford University.
It is once the story gets going that things become incredible and abnormal. A cruel joke involving a Pygmalion-like attempt to pass off a well developed local fifteen year old as a university student turns into an affair between that girl and a forty-ish Oxford tutor. The man's wife, an elegant former opera singer, gets wind of the affair and rather than risk "losing him forever" (a small loss, it seems to me), she embarks on a plot of unbelievable complexity involving crossword clues, a murder, impersonation, **another** murder (to cover the first one) made to look like suicide, all of which have the local police thoroughly baffled until young DC Morse shows up.
But our Endeavor nearly flubs it, too because, musical guy that he is, he has become infatuated with the murderess cum **diva**, a woman easily fifteen years his senior. This puppyish attraction is undiminished even when DC Morse is fully aware that the woman has coldly killed two innocent young people who never did anything to her.
Suddenly the director runs out of time The coda is a series of rushed, soundless scenes, all with the Puccini aria **Un bel die** playing shrilly over all. We're meant to find it all so tragic but the effect is mawkish, nearly comical.
If this is to be a series, the writers will have to come up with plots that the viewer can swallow, and perhaps a few girls his own age for the hero.
There is interesting character development in the early part of the episode with the usual office politics and pecking order as Endeavor Morse seeks to establish his place in the Oxford Police to which he has been reassigned. It is a sort of homecoming as he had been a student at the famous Oxford University.
It is once the story gets going that things become incredible and abnormal. A cruel joke involving a Pygmalion-like attempt to pass off a well developed local fifteen year old as a university student turns into an affair between that girl and a forty-ish Oxford tutor. The man's wife, an elegant former opera singer, gets wind of the affair and rather than risk "losing him forever" (a small loss, it seems to me), she embarks on a plot of unbelievable complexity involving crossword clues, a murder, impersonation, **another** murder (to cover the first one) made to look like suicide, all of which have the local police thoroughly baffled until young DC Morse shows up.
But our Endeavor nearly flubs it, too because, musical guy that he is, he has become infatuated with the murderess cum **diva**, a woman easily fifteen years his senior. This puppyish attraction is undiminished even when DC Morse is fully aware that the woman has coldly killed two innocent young people who never did anything to her.
Suddenly the director runs out of time The coda is a series of rushed, soundless scenes, all with the Puccini aria **Un bel die** playing shrilly over all. We're meant to find it all so tragic but the effect is mawkish, nearly comical.
If this is to be a series, the writers will have to come up with plots that the viewer can swallow, and perhaps a few girls his own age for the hero.