《摩斯探长前传》第五季第三集

Passenger

W.H. Auden’s poem Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

//

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

//

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

//

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

//

Snorting noisily, she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

//

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

//

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;

They slumber on with paws across.

//

In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

//

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends,

Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes,

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs,

Men long for news.

//

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

Letters of joy from girl and boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or to visit relations,

And applications for situations,

And timid lovers’ declarations,

And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

News circumstantial, news financial,

Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,

Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts,

Letters to Scotland from the South of France,

Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands,

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,

The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

//

Thousands are still asleep,

Dreaming of terrifying monsters

Or a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

But shall wake soon and hope for letters,

And none will hear the postman’s knock

Without a quickening of the heart.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

奥登的诗是剧里的铁路爱好者Cedric朗诵的。

关于学校女生的案子，真凶在一开始就给了线索。

这集的星期四小姐好美。

“爱丽丝的橙色斑猫”，这个名字很容易让人联想到《爱丽丝漫游奇境》，然而书里的柴郡猫和家猫“黛娜”都不是“橙色斑猫”。

而红色鞋子的价格标签上，画的这只猫却是柴郡猫，隐藏得非常深的对《爱丽丝漫游奇境》的一个引用。柴郡猫画者是John Tenniel（1820－1914）。

这集很多从某容器——车厢或烤箱——深处向外的摄影镜头，类似之前某集停尸房内的拍摄。像是有人在暗自偷窥，也有一种幽闭恐怖的感觉。

《惊魂记》Pdycho, 1963

摩斯大雨中把车停到国王十字路旅店门口，特别像Psycho里女主角大雨中到达贝茨旅店。

“The Ghost Train” ，是1920年代的一出著名戏剧，由Arnold Ridley编剧写作，剧中被遗弃的火车站也被用来进行非法活动。

“Tommy Brock”是电视剧集“Peter Rabbit”中的一只獾。彼得兔原著作者是Beatrix Potter：