once upon a time, it was a family. a mother and a father, and you were married in a church, before the sight of God.
he was nothing, and you see it hit morse like a blow; it's the breaking point. and he almost tells thursday *exactly* who the man he killed was, or rather, had been. but mercy prevails and he falls back on their shorthand, their talisman, the guiding light that was supposed to make the work they do worth it: he was someone's son.
but not mine, says thursday.
it's the final, unknowing cruelty.
morse has boundless empathy and believes in justice for the dead, but maybe he also can't stop imagining himself in their place. the detail he couldn't let drop in the andrew lewis case, which he mentions at least twice in the final episode: he was just a boy looking for his mother.
everybody is someone's something -- except morse, of course. how many times throughout the series have people asked, both to each other and to morse directly: what's keeping him in oxford? he has no family, no ties. he's the odd man out ("same as always" -- thanks jakes). as if all this wasn't enough emphasis, the killer in this episode even selects morse to be his next victim -- for convenience sake, sure, but it also happens to place him as the latest in a line of, to his mind, dangerous outliers to decent society.
morse is no one's son. and we see him realize how much that counts for, in the end.
we here on tumblr reply insistently: he has people! he has friends! but his people, that kind of love, is discounted by the world of the show and honestly, often our own as well. what we're left with, us the audience and morse the doomed figure is only
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