Spectre
Review by John L. Ng
November, 2015
Spectre is the latest James Bond movie. Like all Bond films, this one is just as formulated and predictable. James Bond, a British secret agent with license to kill, saves the world one kill at a time. Here the world order is threatened by a secret organization whose acronym stands for Special Executive Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (retro reference to Thunderball). Led by Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), Spectre seeks world domination through the evils of those acronym letters. There is also an added threat from the new head of British intelligence service who seeks to kill the "00" program and replace it with a worldwide surveillance consortium.
That is all you need to know. Sit back and enjoy. The visuals almost make you forget your troubles. The signature opening action scene holds your breath. The camera and Bond become one as we watch him adjust his shirt cuffs, leap across roof tops, climb building ledges, slide down collapsing walls and wrestle a terrorist in a careening helicopter over Mexico City’s Zocolo Square. Of course there are chase scenes. In a propeller plane, Bond chases black SUVs up and down the white Austrian Alps. In his Aston Martin, he is chased up and down the narrow streets of Rome. Between chases, Bond makes out with a widowed wife (Monica Bellucci) and orphaned daughter (Lea Seydoux) of nemeses.
Many agree that Sean Connery is the quintessential Bond with whom all other Bond actors are compared. A half a century later, I offer that Daniel Craig’s Bond is his equal. Yet unlike Connery’s imperious nonchalance, Craig’s portrayal is more humanly nuanced. He broods, he sweats, he bleeds, he hurts inside and bruises outside. His Bond betrays a certain human realism that is at once morbidly dark.
With director Sam Mendes' guidance, this realism pushes Spectre to a new existential level. Its meta-narrative is a meditation of loss, death and dying. Metaphorically dark, the film is literally dark. Most scenes are at night or in dark places, as if the entire narrative is in mourning. It begins with Bond in a skull mask and skeleton costume in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, when the dead is honored. From a distance, Bond watches a widow, draped in black, mourning her dead husband. When Bond confronts an old nemesis, before he kills himself, he quips, “Ah. Two dead people together in one room.” Staring at a slap of marble with names of agents who have died in service, Bond notices his name spray painted on it. Face to face with Oberhauser, Bond promises, “I come here to kill you.” The super-villain smirks, “No, you come here to die.” In another scene, the villain offers that all struggles are “on your way to your grave.” At the end, lying on a bloody street, mortally wounded, Bond’s Beretta pointing at him, he begs, but in a singsong voice, “Go ahead, finish it!”
There is no eyes-wide-shut sentimentality here. Our dread is not in super-villains and our hope is certainly not in super-spies. Bond may save us from an evildoer's world domination, again. But our "spectre" of hope is more in the life ordinary of Ms. Moneypenny. She chaffs at Bond when he interrupts her at home nurturing a personal life. What do I hear in the background, he asks. “It’s called life. You should try it sometime.” After his latest kill, as Bond walks away from the dead and dying, he obdurately avers that he has “got something better to do.” Perhaps by getting a life with the love of his life.
November, 2015
Spectre is the latest James Bond movie. Like all Bond films, this one is just as formulated and predictable. James Bond, a British secret agent with license to kill, saves the world one kill at a time. Here the world order is threatened by a secret organization whose acronym stands for Special Executive Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (retro reference to Thunderball). Led by Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), Spectre seeks world domination through the evils of those acronym letters. There is also an added threat from the new head of British intelligence service who seeks to kill the "00" program and replace it with a worldwide surveillance consortium.
That is all you need to know. Sit back and enjoy. The visuals almost make you forget your troubles. The signature opening action scene holds your breath. The camera and Bond become one as we watch him adjust his shirt cuffs, leap across roof tops, climb building ledges, slide down collapsing walls and wrestle a terrorist in a careening helicopter over Mexico City’s Zocolo Square. Of course there are chase scenes. In a propeller plane, Bond chases black SUVs up and down the white Austrian Alps. In his Aston Martin, he is chased up and down the narrow streets of Rome. Between chases, Bond makes out with a widowed wife (Monica Bellucci) and orphaned daughter (Lea Seydoux) of nemeses.
Many agree that Sean Connery is the quintessential Bond with whom all other Bond actors are compared. A half a century later, I offer that Daniel Craig’s Bond is his equal. Yet unlike Connery’s imperious nonchalance, Craig’s portrayal is more humanly nuanced. He broods, he sweats, he bleeds, he hurts inside and bruises outside. His Bond betrays a certain human realism that is at once morbidly dark.
With director Sam Mendes' guidance, this realism pushes Spectre to a new existential level. Its meta-narrative is a meditation of loss, death and dying. Metaphorically dark, the film is literally dark. Most scenes are at night or in dark places, as if the entire narrative is in mourning. It begins with Bond in a skull mask and skeleton costume in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, when the dead is honored. From a distance, Bond watches a widow, draped in black, mourning her dead husband. When Bond confronts an old nemesis, before he kills himself, he quips, “Ah. Two dead people together in one room.” Staring at a slap of marble with names of agents who have died in service, Bond notices his name spray painted on it. Face to face with Oberhauser, Bond promises, “I come here to kill you.” The super-villain smirks, “No, you come here to die.” In another scene, the villain offers that all struggles are “on your way to your grave.” At the end, lying on a bloody street, mortally wounded, Bond’s Beretta pointing at him, he begs, but in a singsong voice, “Go ahead, finish it!”
There is no eyes-wide-shut sentimentality here. Our dread is not in super-villains and our hope is certainly not in super-spies. Bond may save us from an evildoer's world domination, again. But our "spectre" of hope is more in the life ordinary of Ms. Moneypenny. She chaffs at Bond when he interrupts her at home nurturing a personal life. What do I hear in the background, he asks. “It’s called life. You should try it sometime.” After his latest kill, as Bond walks away from the dead and dying, he obdurately avers that he has “got something better to do.” Perhaps by getting a life with the love of his life.
Interstellar
Review by John L. Ng
September, 2015
The sage of Ecclesiastes says wonderfully an enigmatic thing - . . . . God has put eternity into man's heart, so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. Whatever else these words posit, I suspect they also mean that we humankind are made for eternity. While living in time and space, we are forever maladjusted. From the beginning to the end, it is a terrestrial angst in all of us that longs for this sense of eternity's permanence.
Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, and written with his brother Jonathan Nolan, is a dark space spic about our human longing for permanence. It is a composite of natural sciences and the super-natural. Higher physics advanced by Einstein and Hawking enter its conversations with black holes, relativity, singularity and fifth dimension. While the intergalactic visuals are a spectacular emotive experience, without a down to earth text, both the movie's scientific subtexts and philosophical pretexts are beyond my cognitive. For an uninitiated, sitting through an almost three-hour movie seems like eternity.
This is what I take away. The earth is in trouble. Diminishing oxygen level, frequent dust storms and worldwide crop failure have reduced humanity to a desperate remnant. God (or a higher intelligence from space. Nolan does not dispose) offers salvation. Across the universe, from the far side of a wormhole near Saturn an encrypted message reaches earth. Earth is represented by rural middle America with wind-swept plains, corn fields, battered pick-up trucks, dirty blue jeans and drawl-spoken farmers. Although there is still a neighborly goodness, a deeper sense of human brokenness pervades. Everyone seems contrite about something. They have plainly messed up their home on earth and seek a better world.
At a NASA outpost, Director Brant (Michael Caine) recruits Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to lead a mission with Brant's daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and others to retrace a previous flight to explore other planets that can sustain human life. The crew enters a distant altered space-time continuum passage. What do they discover and uncover? Where are the previous mission crew members? Can the earth’s survivors be transported through the wormhole? All answers are inconclusive! In time, they long to return to earth.
Whether on earth or in space, the notion of time allows them to live, move and have our being. But they are never quite comfortable with time. Cooper travels a 67 hour day in space and his daughter, Murph (Jessica Chastain), spends a 24-hour day on earth. That is, Cooper is aging three times as slowly as his daughter. Those living on earth are slowly running out of time. The dying Brant confesses that he is afraid of time. Cooper wishes he can retrieve time to re-enter his children's childhood. Time's impermanence is moving either too fast or too slow.
And then there is our longing for the permanence of home. In the stark dying earth, its inhabitants only yearn to stay home with those they love. When a dust storm threatens, people instinctively run inside their homes to feel secure. The crew's mission is "to find us a new home." While in space seeking a new home, Cooper gets homesick and wants to go home to be with family. In essence, Interstellar begins as a space exploration but ends as an odyssey to go home. It is a curious emotion embedded in all of us. We long for the permanence of time and space so we all can be home, feel safe, find acceptance and enjoy a sense of eternal permanence.
September, 2015
The sage of Ecclesiastes says wonderfully an enigmatic thing - . . . . God has put eternity into man's heart, so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. Whatever else these words posit, I suspect they also mean that we humankind are made for eternity. While living in time and space, we are forever maladjusted. From the beginning to the end, it is a terrestrial angst in all of us that longs for this sense of eternity's permanence.
Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, and written with his brother Jonathan Nolan, is a dark space spic about our human longing for permanence. It is a composite of natural sciences and the super-natural. Higher physics advanced by Einstein and Hawking enter its conversations with black holes, relativity, singularity and fifth dimension. While the intergalactic visuals are a spectacular emotive experience, without a down to earth text, both the movie's scientific subtexts and philosophical pretexts are beyond my cognitive. For an uninitiated, sitting through an almost three-hour movie seems like eternity.
This is what I take away. The earth is in trouble. Diminishing oxygen level, frequent dust storms and worldwide crop failure have reduced humanity to a desperate remnant. God (or a higher intelligence from space. Nolan does not dispose) offers salvation. Across the universe, from the far side of a wormhole near Saturn an encrypted message reaches earth. Earth is represented by rural middle America with wind-swept plains, corn fields, battered pick-up trucks, dirty blue jeans and drawl-spoken farmers. Although there is still a neighborly goodness, a deeper sense of human brokenness pervades. Everyone seems contrite about something. They have plainly messed up their home on earth and seek a better world.
At a NASA outpost, Director Brant (Michael Caine) recruits Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to lead a mission with Brant's daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and others to retrace a previous flight to explore other planets that can sustain human life. The crew enters a distant altered space-time continuum passage. What do they discover and uncover? Where are the previous mission crew members? Can the earth’s survivors be transported through the wormhole? All answers are inconclusive! In time, they long to return to earth.
Whether on earth or in space, the notion of time allows them to live, move and have our being. But they are never quite comfortable with time. Cooper travels a 67 hour day in space and his daughter, Murph (Jessica Chastain), spends a 24-hour day on earth. That is, Cooper is aging three times as slowly as his daughter. Those living on earth are slowly running out of time. The dying Brant confesses that he is afraid of time. Cooper wishes he can retrieve time to re-enter his children's childhood. Time's impermanence is moving either too fast or too slow.
And then there is our longing for the permanence of home. In the stark dying earth, its inhabitants only yearn to stay home with those they love. When a dust storm threatens, people instinctively run inside their homes to feel secure. The crew's mission is "to find us a new home." While in space seeking a new home, Cooper gets homesick and wants to go home to be with family. In essence, Interstellar begins as a space exploration but ends as an odyssey to go home. It is a curious emotion embedded in all of us. We long for the permanence of time and space so we all can be home, feel safe, find acceptance and enjoy a sense of eternal permanence.
Last Night
Review by John L. Ng
July, 2015
“Last Night,” written and directed by Massy Tadjedin is an indie movie about a New York couple’s struggles with marital fidelity. Joanna (Keira Knightley) is a frustrated novelist making a living freelancing. Her husband, Michael (Sam Worthington) works in a real estate company. With the normal angst of dangling conversations, clumsy misunderstandings and visceral jealousy in a modern marriage, they are relatively content together. It helps that they are willing to fight and able to talk through things. In the first scene, after Joanna watched Michael’s co-worker, Laura (Eva Mendes), flirt with him at an office party, she and Michael argue about flirtation and infidelity. Like the movie, they cannot agree on what defines them.
While Michael is away on a business trip, Joanna runs into Alex (Guillaume Canet), with whom she had a love encounter while in France. While getting ready to meet Alex, she shows all the apparent signs of adulterous inclination. She changes dresses several times. She takes long to paint her face and pick the right shoes. Over drinks, they playfully converse while waiting for dinner with Alex’s friends. Both flirt with their eyes and words and invite intimacy within the narrow space between their bodies. Obviously both enjoy each other’s clever intelligence, flirtatious implication and opened hiddenness. If the older etymology of “making love” means to have a romantic conversation, Joanna and Alex are making love.
While Joanna is with Alex and his friends, Michael is having dinner with Laura and colleagues. Their eyes are all over each other. After dinner, they find their way to the nearest bar and over a drink, they talk about nothing. Actually they spend few spoken words. Much of their feelings are hidden but in plain view. They trade more with their longing eyes. Soon, they are in their underwear in the hotel pool. Before the night is gone, they are in bed in her hotel room. If the newer etymology of “making love” means to have sexual intercourse, then Michael and Laura are making love.
Has Joanna cheated on her husband with her heart? Has Michael cheated his body? Adultery has many nuances, from romantic conversations to sexual intercourse and every variation in between. Joanna and Michael’s cheating seems to suggest that men and women's needs are different. And they respond to extramarital temptations differently. Adultery occurs when inclination to cheat clashes with opportunities to cheat. Without one, the other makes not infidelity.
Men’s natural inclination for sex is only waiting for an opportunity, in or outside of marriage. There is little conversation between Laura and Michael. Much of their conversations are brief with few actual words. Much of what they communicate is with their longing physicality. Laura is sexy and offers an opportunity to Michael’s inclination. Women incline to have sexual encounters only when an opportunity has certain elements, like romantic notions or emotive attractions. Joanna enjoys Alex’s company because she enjoys his charming and witty conversations. He conjures Joanna’s inclination love interest by entreating her emotive longings.
“Last Night” hints at the nuances of adultery with women and men. It is an entertaining movie that deals with a thorny subject intelligently. The realization remains that both Joanna and Michael in their own ways had an affair during that last night.
July, 2015
“Last Night,” written and directed by Massy Tadjedin is an indie movie about a New York couple’s struggles with marital fidelity. Joanna (Keira Knightley) is a frustrated novelist making a living freelancing. Her husband, Michael (Sam Worthington) works in a real estate company. With the normal angst of dangling conversations, clumsy misunderstandings and visceral jealousy in a modern marriage, they are relatively content together. It helps that they are willing to fight and able to talk through things. In the first scene, after Joanna watched Michael’s co-worker, Laura (Eva Mendes), flirt with him at an office party, she and Michael argue about flirtation and infidelity. Like the movie, they cannot agree on what defines them.
While Michael is away on a business trip, Joanna runs into Alex (Guillaume Canet), with whom she had a love encounter while in France. While getting ready to meet Alex, she shows all the apparent signs of adulterous inclination. She changes dresses several times. She takes long to paint her face and pick the right shoes. Over drinks, they playfully converse while waiting for dinner with Alex’s friends. Both flirt with their eyes and words and invite intimacy within the narrow space between their bodies. Obviously both enjoy each other’s clever intelligence, flirtatious implication and opened hiddenness. If the older etymology of “making love” means to have a romantic conversation, Joanna and Alex are making love.
While Joanna is with Alex and his friends, Michael is having dinner with Laura and colleagues. Their eyes are all over each other. After dinner, they find their way to the nearest bar and over a drink, they talk about nothing. Actually they spend few spoken words. Much of their feelings are hidden but in plain view. They trade more with their longing eyes. Soon, they are in their underwear in the hotel pool. Before the night is gone, they are in bed in her hotel room. If the newer etymology of “making love” means to have sexual intercourse, then Michael and Laura are making love.
Has Joanna cheated on her husband with her heart? Has Michael cheated his body? Adultery has many nuances, from romantic conversations to sexual intercourse and every variation in between. Joanna and Michael’s cheating seems to suggest that men and women's needs are different. And they respond to extramarital temptations differently. Adultery occurs when inclination to cheat clashes with opportunities to cheat. Without one, the other makes not infidelity.
Men’s natural inclination for sex is only waiting for an opportunity, in or outside of marriage. There is little conversation between Laura and Michael. Much of their conversations are brief with few actual words. Much of what they communicate is with their longing physicality. Laura is sexy and offers an opportunity to Michael’s inclination. Women incline to have sexual encounters only when an opportunity has certain elements, like romantic notions or emotive attractions. Joanna enjoys Alex’s company because she enjoys his charming and witty conversations. He conjures Joanna’s inclination love interest by entreating her emotive longings.
“Last Night” hints at the nuances of adultery with women and men. It is an entertaining movie that deals with a thorny subject intelligently. The realization remains that both Joanna and Michael in their own ways had an affair during that last night.
TV Series Review: Daredevil
Review by John L. Ng
May, 2015
Action hero movies or television series don’t capture my leisure interests. Their typical tissue-thin characters, soupy relationships and gratuitous actions don’t make a good story. But I like Netflix’s “Daredevil.” The series is based on Stan Lee and Bill Everett’s “Daredevil” comics first published in the 1960’s. The TV series is a story well told. With 13 one-hour episodes, it takes its times in character and plot developments.
The Daredevil is a black-clad vigilante who fights crimes by night and is Matt Murdock who fights injustice, as a lawyer, by day. Because of a chemical related accident when he was a child, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) develops some extraordinary abilities. His blind disability is vested with other enhanced sensory perceptions. His law partner is Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson). His once damsel in distress and now office secretary is Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll). Foggy and Karen’s goodhearted presence is his urban-tribal comfort and security. They keep him grounded with acceptance, loyalty, affection and courage. His love interest Clare Temple (Rosario Dawson) is a ghetto-seasoned nurse who nurses his hurts, in body, heart and soul.
His antagonist is Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onotrio) who is the “Kingpin” of a crime syndicate in New York’s Hell’s kitchen. Like all evil personified, Fisk is delusional with self-grandeur and deceptively self- possessed that he is doing good by doing bad. His self-justification excuses evil intents with Biblical parables and philosophical discourses. What is more unsettling is his assistant’s banal evil. Most evil, Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore) carries out his boss’s brutal cruelties with acute professionalism in amoral quietude.
Far from being a perfect hero, Matt’s Daredevil also has a propensity for violence. After beating a thug to a pulp, he freely admits that he enjoys it. But Matt's conscience is conflicted. Before and after every violent encounter, he agonizes over its moral implications. Implicitly, Hell’s Kitchen is still part of a moral universe governed by God. Matt’s moral compass is his Christian faith. His path finder is Father Landom (Peter McRobbie), a Catholic priest. Unlike how clerics are often portrayed as a tragic parody or a whimsical caricature, Father Landom's earthy spirituality is refreshingly genuine. His authenticity is at once sensible and sensitive, wise and righteous.
Matt's faith in God is both his source of strength and sacrifices as well as doubts and guilt. When Father Landom asks where he is going, Matt replies, “I’m off to do my Father’s work, Padre, off to do my Father’s work.” His life calling is to fight evil. But his soul is tortured for want of violence to do good. Clare offers this to Matt's angst, “I remember from Sunday school – that all those martyrs, the saints and saviors, they always end up bloody.”
"Daredevil’s" murky world is a dark place, where even good intentions are soiled with blood. It is so because its inhabitants are dark with sinfulness - even the hero. But as a study in contrasts. Fisk and Matt respond to their dark side differently. Fisk justifies his evil intent with self-delusion and deception. Matt's better angel wrestles his sinful demons with prayers. In earnest, he seeks redemption and transformation from God.
TV Series Review: Masterpiece Mystery Inspector Lewis
Review by John L. Ng
March, 2015
My wife and I don't always agree on what to watch on TV when we cuddle up for a quiet evening. But we enjoy British murder mysteries. Since Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the British seems to own this literary genre. The basic plot by Doyle is basic: in a closed setting (a town, house, train or ship) a corpse is discovered. A brilliant, seasoned or hardened, detective, alone or with a partner, investigates (or inquires, as the British puts it) the murder. A small band of suspects, one by one is gradually exposed. Through rational deduction and visceral intuition, the means, motives and opportunities of the suspects are explored. At last, the truth is exposed, the murder solved and justice served. For more than a century, this formulaic plot remains rudimentarily simple in each murder mystery complicated and embellished with subplots, side-stories and divergences.
For decades, a long list of British murder mystery series have entertained us. Here is a partial listing: Prime Suspect, Foyle's War, Agatha Christie's Poirot, Inspector Gently, Sherlock, Endeavour. In their inimitable ways, each murder exhumes human depravity. Whether the perpetrator is a sociopath or a house wife, murder is committed for the most selfish/self-serving way. Most of us may think that we do not have the fortitude to kill another human being in cold blood, but a reasonable person would admit that all of us are capable of an egregious crime when inclination and circumstance collide. St Paul speaks truth about total depravity in all us in Romans 7.
Out of this trove, my favorite is "Inspector Lewis" (2007 - 2014). Inspired by Colin Dexter's character Inspector Morse and as a sequel to the "Inspector Morse" series, "Inspector Lewis" is of the Sunday PBS Masterpiece Mystery. In its seventh season, each episode's layers of cultural, literary, theological and philosophical references centered in Oxford, England are most gratifying. But the main reason why I, a Christian, enjoy this series more than others is its apparent subtext perplexity: Is this universe governed by morals and overseen by a good God?
Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) is life weary and a working class widower. He is not polite to fray invidious disdain for Oxford's academic elites. Their mendacious morality is distasteful to his working class morale. His partner, Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), is learned in ancient Greek philosophies and the Romantics. A seminary graduate, Hathaway is moodily introspective. Unlike Lewis, he finds Oxford's academia, in all its pretenses, fascinating. He chain smokes and is attracted to attractively smart women. After the death of his wife in car accident, Lewis wrestles with and gives up on God. He admonishes the grieving son of a victim, "People die every day for no good reasons. It's never fair." Another time, he wails, "Don't give me that God moves in mysterious ways and all that mumbo-jumbo." In contrast, Hathaway embraces the God of goodness and wants to believe humanity's potential for goodness. When God or people disappoint his faith, he broods in disquiet quietude. Often we find him interrupting an inquiry to consol a troubled soul in a quiet corner. While Lewis is the antagonist to evil's proponents, Hathaway does his priestly work with victims of that evil.
For an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating evening, there is nothing better than an episode of "Inspector Lewis." It informs as well as entertains our souls. You don't have to look hard to find the series on reruns, streaming or DVD.
March, 2015
My wife and I don't always agree on what to watch on TV when we cuddle up for a quiet evening. But we enjoy British murder mysteries. Since Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the British seems to own this literary genre. The basic plot by Doyle is basic: in a closed setting (a town, house, train or ship) a corpse is discovered. A brilliant, seasoned or hardened, detective, alone or with a partner, investigates (or inquires, as the British puts it) the murder. A small band of suspects, one by one is gradually exposed. Through rational deduction and visceral intuition, the means, motives and opportunities of the suspects are explored. At last, the truth is exposed, the murder solved and justice served. For more than a century, this formulaic plot remains rudimentarily simple in each murder mystery complicated and embellished with subplots, side-stories and divergences.
For decades, a long list of British murder mystery series have entertained us. Here is a partial listing: Prime Suspect, Foyle's War, Agatha Christie's Poirot, Inspector Gently, Sherlock, Endeavour. In their inimitable ways, each murder exhumes human depravity. Whether the perpetrator is a sociopath or a house wife, murder is committed for the most selfish/self-serving way. Most of us may think that we do not have the fortitude to kill another human being in cold blood, but a reasonable person would admit that all of us are capable of an egregious crime when inclination and circumstance collide. St Paul speaks truth about total depravity in all us in Romans 7.
Out of this trove, my favorite is "Inspector Lewis" (2007 - 2014). Inspired by Colin Dexter's character Inspector Morse and as a sequel to the "Inspector Morse" series, "Inspector Lewis" is of the Sunday PBS Masterpiece Mystery. In its seventh season, each episode's layers of cultural, literary, theological and philosophical references centered in Oxford, England are most gratifying. But the main reason why I, a Christian, enjoy this series more than others is its apparent subtext perplexity: Is this universe governed by morals and overseen by a good God?
Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) is life weary and a working class widower. He is not polite to fray invidious disdain for Oxford's academic elites. Their mendacious morality is distasteful to his working class morale. His partner, Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), is learned in ancient Greek philosophies and the Romantics. A seminary graduate, Hathaway is moodily introspective. Unlike Lewis, he finds Oxford's academia, in all its pretenses, fascinating. He chain smokes and is attracted to attractively smart women. After the death of his wife in car accident, Lewis wrestles with and gives up on God. He admonishes the grieving son of a victim, "People die every day for no good reasons. It's never fair." Another time, he wails, "Don't give me that God moves in mysterious ways and all that mumbo-jumbo." In contrast, Hathaway embraces the God of goodness and wants to believe humanity's potential for goodness. When God or people disappoint his faith, he broods in disquiet quietude. Often we find him interrupting an inquiry to consol a troubled soul in a quiet corner. While Lewis is the antagonist to evil's proponents, Hathaway does his priestly work with victims of that evil.
For an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating evening, there is nothing better than an episode of "Inspector Lewis." It informs as well as entertains our souls. You don't have to look hard to find the series on reruns, streaming or DVD.