In this Movie Hotline informal chat, I’m looking at the classic British mystery series to re-evaluate “Settling of the Sun” (Season 2, Episode 3), widely considered one of the weakest entries in the entire series Inspector Morse.

Listen to hear about the hilarious dynamic between John Thaw’s Morse, Kevin Whately’s Detective Sergeant Lewis, and Peter Woodthorpe’s iconic pathologist Max, and how a good laugh about bad television can completely change your perspective. Or scroll down to read the full transcript here.

Last night the power went out and it stayed out for 2 hours, and my dog was scared. He was panting and I thought it’s going to get too hot for him and I’m going to have to throw out all the food in the fridge, and I started having a panic attack. I was just laying in the dark quietly realizing that I couldn’t breathe and I thought, “well, I’ll tell myself a story. I will start thinking about TV shows.” Then, because I have pressure of speech (which you never could imagine from listening to this channel) I started telling my husband the plot of the worst episode of Morse.

It is The Settling of the Sun. It’s ridiculous. They use that stupid trope where the ring of murderers invites the detective to an event. In this case, it’s a dinner party. Poor Morse, he’s so happy to be invited and give a talk, and it’s all a ruse so that they can have him see this Japanese guy—and this is important that he’s Japanese—run out of the room sick, and then go and find a body. It will establish the alibi of these murderers, but it goes wrong. Their little doppelganger plot goes wrong. I couldn’t tell my husband last night what the actual outcome or the motive was, and I’ve rewatched it since then and I still couldn’t tell you. But when I got done trying to tell him about it—and remind you, if you haven’t listened before, he hates Morse and it’s a running joke with us, and I love it; I’m the preeminent Coastal Georgia Inspector Morse expert…I couldn’t tell you the point of The Settling of the Sun. It’s just an hour and a half of watching this woman be mean to Morse, and then the thing that most people hate about it is the creative camera work.

Well, so I reassessed the show, and it is still a really crappy episode, but the camera work is actually beautiful. If you will refer to the screenshot I’ve provided (note that this is the thumbnail of the YouTube video for you WordPress readers), you will see that Morse is on the left, but Lewis is in the door and he’s looking to the right because the Morse on the left is in a mirror, and I didn’t realize that at first. The real Morse is off-screen on the right and Lewis is talking to him, and the Morse in the mirror is kind of cut off at the knees. So you’re getting clues here that there’s some doppelganger action happening, and it’s not going to work because the mirror image has been cut in the middle.

What’s going on in this scene is great. It’s just classic Morse. They’ve got this pathologist named Max, and he and Morse don’t get along. He was only in seven episodes, but it seems like he was there longer because their interchanges are so amusing. He’s needling Morse; he’s trying to make him look at the body, and it’s a particularly bad murder. You don’t see much because this was the kind of thing that was on Masterpiece Theater, but you see John Thaw’s reaction to it, and you know at the best of times he doesn’t like to look at the body. In this case, he’s standing looking out the window. It’s in his face, it’s just so distressing for him. Max is going, “take a look, take a proper look.” He won’t look.

Then Lewis comes in, and Lewis is Morse’s punching bag in a lot of the old episodes. He takes his frustration out on Lewis. He says, “Lewis, I’ve been here the whole time, where were you?” “Well, Morse, you were at the dinner where this murder happened, so of course you were here the whole time.” And Morse says to Lewis, “Take a look at the body.” Well, Lewis isn’t squeamish. He takes a look and he says, “Look at what’s been done to this guy, but there’s no blood.” So what Morse hadn’t seemed to notice is that the body had been moved.

The clever plot does not work. They were planning on this; this bunch of white European, mostly English people, were planning on nobody else being able to tell the difference between two Japanese guys. So they were planning on everybody being essentially racist. But of course, when you invite like drunk Sherlock Holmes to your dinner party to establish your alibi, you have messed up because Morse is going to get you, and he does.

All this is to say, you know, I was having a terrible night last night. I couldn’t breathe. I started telling my husband how funny this episode was, and then I realized I could breathe, and I was talking and laughing. Then we started saying our favorite Mystery Science Theater lines to each other, like “this is where the fish lives” and “are you ready to put him back in his own body?” Then the lights came on and everything was fine.

On your worst day, you may find that you have a good time talking to someone unexpectedly. We wouldn’t have had a good conversation that in-depth if the lights had been on and we both had been playing games. I wouldn’t have rewatched that episode of Morse and noticed that beautiful mirror shot, and the scene that basically solves the mystery after the first 20 minutes of the episode.

A bad episode of Morse is still an episode of Morse: the best show, the best 33 feature-length TV movies ever made. And your worst day above ground is still a day that you have to find something good in. So the next time that you’re panicking, just start talking. Even if you’re alone, start telling your story, and maybe you will find that you can breathe.