What I thought of Inspector Morse:  Second Time Around

YOU WON'T BELIEVE HOW I SPENT MY NEW YEARS'!

It wasn't planned, either.  It just worked out this way.

... so we're sitting there waiting for it to be Y2K.  The End Of The World As We Know It.  Although hope of anything really rousing happening diminishes as New York, Chicago, Denver, etc., all switch over without a hitch.  We're in Seattle, the city with the dubious distinction of having *cancelled* its signature New Years' event at the bottom of the Space Needle.  The only city in the US that I know of that cancelled its party, from sheer chickenheartedness, without even any threats.  *Hangs head in shame*, not that I would have gone, though.

We don't usually go to bed exactly early, so waiting for it to be midnight isn't such a big deal.  We had watched The Avengers earlier in the evening.  I lost interest after the first 1/4 and wandered about doing housework.  (Lost interest in Ralph Fiennes?  But, yes...  though I must note that certain other parties remained interested in Uma Thurman)

I must note that we don't have TV.  We're totally dependent on videotapes.  The only thing lying about to watch during our final hours on earth was... *drum roll please*  INSPECTOR MORSE!  "Second Time Around."  I had gotten it from the library.  Now, seriously, I was expecting your standard British TV stuff, which I normally don't like.  I was expecting to do the same thing I had been doing with War and Remem, which is FF'ing most of it looking for the 'good' parts.  Only I accidentally started to watch it.  And it was BLOODY EXCELLENT!!!  It was nerve-wracking.  It had me glued to my seat.  I had to rewind every time I missed one word because every word was so important.  It was a GREAT story.  Even if Ken Colley hadn't been in it it would have been great (although I never would have watched it, so I never would have known) and that's saying a lot.

BUT, next surprise, is, MY LORD that man can ACT!  My previous experience of him is mostly in the one-dimensional stuff like War and Remem, Hitler: The Last Ten Days, Plot to Kill Hitler, Mussolini the Untold Story... whoops, are we seeing a leeeeeetle bit of a *pattern* here?  Measure for Measure was refreshingly different but hey, it was Shakespeare, and they talked funny back then.  This was so totally different.  Yes, he was a policeman, but he was a mystery.  He had *issues*.  He was a PERSON.  I got so wrapped up in this story I was sitting on the floor three feet in front of the TV yelling encouragement at the characters.  The first *hint* of any depth is when they say he-- okay, his character-- okay, "Dawson" was the name of the character-- is "an unhappy man".  The wife says that's because they never had any children, which she admits is *her* fault.  I think I began to get emotionally involved right then.  I had to spend the next two hours waiting for this [!!!!!] to explain this to me, tell me some good MEDICAL reason for this "fault" on her part, and why I shouldn't send a squad after her.  (She never did explain it, but that became a sideline anyway.)

Then, just when I'd recovered from the trauma of that revelation, they began to heap on all the other horrible things this poor guy's suffered during his life; you don't get the basic facts, first all you get is his reaction.  Talk about pain!  They were hurting my baby and it was unbearable...

Cool as a cucumber all the time, you know how he is-- as [www.piett.org] captioned one of those pictures, "Piett can do stoic with the best of them."  Then occasionally 'stoic' would go away and he would just say something really weird... or there was something in his eyes, you know?  Or you could see him in the background (arms folded, of course) hearing something stupid somebody says and there's this little impatient movement... then he's trying to kill somebody with his bare hands.  Oops, I think we have boiled over again!

At one point there's a group of burly young men holding him against the wall after one of these incidents-- then he suddenly recovers, decides to be normal again, and says real calm to the guy holding him:  "Hands off."   I loved that!

Some old lady has to be 'questioned'.  She's been pretending not to be home every time the police come.  Morse decides to let Dawson do it.  Next scene, Dawson's got the place surrounded, got a bullhorn, breaks a window, charges in and (among other things) calls this poor old gal a "(you know what word)", which is all very cool, but I was thinking, "Oh, no, him saying that, on TV, automatically makes him the bad guy."

Oops, just dawned on me that I have to go to bed.

Okay:  so there we were (in real life), and it was 11:50 before Y2K.  Suddenly we had to make a decision.  Which do we want worse?  Whipped cream for our pie while there's still power for the beaters, or to finish the end of this movie while there's still power for the TV?   It was a fateful decision.

It actually never got made.  I squandered my last ten minutes on earth doing a bunch of stupid stuff, but I did at least manage to be at the window and hear the horns honking and firecrackers.  After midnight the lights stayed on and we had pie and whipped cream AND watched the end of the show.  Wish I could talk about it, but if anybody hasn't seen it and plans to, I don't want to spoil the surprise.  Death to Spoilers.

Good night everybody.  (There'll be more later.  I had something else to say.  It wasn't about Inspector Morse though, it was something else.)

Future Empress Blitzen.
 
 

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