isitandwonder:

theleftpill:

isitandwonder:

You know, I think what they did with Mary was foreshadowed with Mycroft.

I mean, when he first appeared, he was clearly coded as a villain. Later in that episode, it became clear that he wasn’t the baddie-baddie in this ep, but still remained a very shady and morally ambiguous figure that could easily be more than he seemed, perhaps even the driving evil force in the background, together with Moriarty. No wonder many of us saw him in cahoots with Moriarty – if as the actual Moriarty or under his thumb.

I mean, he had Moriarty – and he let him go to destroy Sherlock and drive him to suicide. Just – why?
Because Eurus wanted him as a Christmas present??? This is all equally stupid and illogical as Mary’s actions in CAM tower –
shooting the man who offers her help while letting her enemy live.

What was Mycroft’s motivation in the series? First, we are to believe he’s a controlfreak, meddling with Sherlock’s life, Sherlock’s arch enemy. But suddenly, we are told that he is protecting his little brother? Well, how about show, don’t tell? But I don’t see Mycroft caring… Sherlock has chosen a profession of fighting violent crime. Does Mycroft think he can’t handle the truth as an adult, that he couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he has a sister who killed his best friend? Perhaps Sherlock would now be old enough to work through the trauma, even figure out what happened, could find closure to this festering wound that allegedly – so we are told – shaped his whole life. Doesn’t Mycroft see that his so-called ‘protection’ (that we are told about but that actually seems like emotional manipulation to me), the not talking about the trauma, disguising it as the death of a dog, drives Sherlock into drug addiciton? That his way of telling him that caring is not an advantage prevents Sherlock from truly engaging with other human beings. How is that a good thing?

Mycroft is just as manipulative with Sherlock as Mary was with John, exploiting Sherlock for his own purposes (government business, utility): Mycroft repeatedly humiliates Sherlock (calling him slow and stupid) – like Mary did with John. Mycroft tries to scare off potential other friends of Sherlock – like Mary tried when she shot Sherlock. Mycroft tries to control his brother’s life – like Mary did with John (’you can’t go, I’m pregnant’). And so on.

But suddenly, Mycroft becomes the protective big brother, who only wanted to keep Sherlock from harm, who cared for him? Seriously?

Mycroft’s character turn is just as unbelievable and badly written as Mary’s: set up as a villain or at least a shady, ambiguous figure, he gets his cheesy redemption as he first can’t see the governor killed and then offers himself up for killing in Sherrinford, only to vanish at the showdown. Suddenly, we are told he’s the good big brother, and Sherlock forgives him via telling Greg to look after Mycroft, just like John forgave Mary for shooting Sherlock. There’s never any real talk about what Mycroft did to Sherlock and Eurus, separating them, locking her up, manipulating Sherlock; what Mycroft did to the whole family. Mummy just scolds him like a naughty boy and that’s it – no emotional pay off, no working through their issues, no consequences for his character development, nothing.

We could have been warned. We saw what would happen to Mary in what happened to Mycroft – a great set-up reduced to a farce in a fat suit.

You don’t see because you do not observe:

But suddenly, we are told that he is protecting his little brother? Well, how about show, don’t tell? But I don’t see Mycroft caring…

Mycroft “kidnaps” his brother’s new flatmate (before he’s really his flatmate) to get a measure on the man and test his loyalty to his brother;

Mycroft, who hates doing legwork, arrives at the scene where his brother was involved in a fatal shooting during a confrontation with a successful serial killer;

Mycroft is at the blown-up 221B Waaaay before John;

Mycroft tries to distract his brother from his deadly game with Moriarty with tracking down the missile plans;

The scene in the hallway in ASIB, the cigarette, “danger night”, warning John fuck me that’s an emotional scene;

Mycroft doesn’t have his brother arrested for breaking into a highly classified security facility, and helps him gain re-entry to allow him to finish his case;

Mycroft assisted with The Fall.  If you truly think at this point that Mycroft wasn’t planting personal information with Moriarty and working together with Sherlock then I don’t know what to tell you I could lay it out in detail but I’m at work;

Operation.  Whoopsie.  Get yourself a goldfish.

Mycroft takes his brother’s call when he’s panicking over giving his best man speech and wants his company at “the night ‘do”;

Mycroft is one of the most powerful voices in Sherlock’s mind, far stronger than John (with the exception of the drug-induced fever-dream) ;

Mycroft quietly asks John to look after his brother.  Please.

That’s all just off the top of my head.

Mycroft is “coded” as the Bad Guy at the beginning to build powerful tension, to present a red herring and a fantastic twist (which still fills me with glee.)  The brothers have a contentious relationship where they *both* call each other names and throw spite “How’s the diet???”  Frankly that’s far more entertaining to me than sunshine and rainbows would be – definitely a more intriguing story, which I find satisfyingly reversed and resolved by the end of S4.

Yes he’s not always healthy, yes he’s presented as dangerous, but ultimately it is undeniable that Mycroft is a Good Guy.  Just like Mary.

@theleftpill – I wasn’t really sure if I should reply to your comment, because it seemed very condescending and righteous, and in my opinion it is rather futile to talk to people who act like this, but anyway, I also don’t want to let your words stand unchallanged, so here we go.

Let me also say that if you think that manipulation, lying, stalking, controling and threatening can form the basis of a healthy relationship, then we are just so absolutely opposed that you, and everyone else who shares your views, can stop reading here. Because that is simply not what love is about.

Having said that, of course a TV show needs conflict and flawed characters. Otherwise it would be very boring, watching perfect people living perfect lifes. So a story needs drama, climax, character change and develop. That is what good, consistent writing does – it takes you on a journey with a character.

But for that, a character needs trajectory, a consistent arc. It doesn’t matter so much where this leads, as long as it is consistent. This is a basic writing rule: if you create a character or people your story with them, you, as a writer, have to ask: what motivates him/her? Where does he/she come from? What do they want? And then you have to stick to what you’ve worked out. Otherwise, you really irritate your audience – especially if you take well established characters like Holmes and Watson, significantly alter them, and then bring them back only every odd year with long hiatuses in between.

And here is the core problem of BBC Sherlock: That you can make the points you made above and people agree with your reading, and that I can make the points I did above and people agree with me; that shows that Mycroft just doesn’t have consistent trajectory. He is not a consistent character with a comprehensible arc and motivation. Same goes for Mary, Sherlock, John, Irene, Anderson, Mrs Hudson, Molly. Perhaps the only characters that have a consistent arc are Lestrade (who is hardly in S4, for example) and Donovan, who dropped out after S2.

All other characters are so ambiguous that you can almost make any point about them: Mary is a saint or a villain. John is a saint or a brutal, hetero macho. Molly loves Sherlock, oh no, she loves Tom, oh no, she loves Sherlock. Irene is a lesbian but falls for Sherlock. Sherlock is a saint or a cock. Mrs Hudson is the motherly landlady – ah, no, she’s a retired exotic dancer, drug dealer’s widow, a stunt driver and has kinky sex. Huh?

See what I mean?

No important character on this show has trajectory or a consistent arc of itself. For example, you can argue that Sherlock is already a good man in ASiP. Only, he’s a true arsehole to John sometimes – ? I know that there are tons of meta out there explaining why one or the other reading is right, but a TV show that needs people write long essays about it to explain what’s happening is not very well written. I don’t want warm past, but a narrative has to make sense of itself.

The writers of Sherlock didn’t achieve that. They use the characters they created like puppets, bending them this way and that to suit  the superfluous stories they want to tell. And we never see the interesting bit – the character development.

Take Abderson: He is clearly Sherlock’s enemy in S1-2, helping to ensure his downfall. Then, suddenly, in TEH, he’s Sherlock’s biggest fan. Because he felt guilty and tries to compensate for what he did, supposedly… I can only guess here and go by what Greg says, because I never see Anderson feeling guilty. I don’t experience his development, I’m only suddenly confronted with it’s outcome. That is boring and bad because it deprives me, as a viewer, of the interesting bit in Anderson’s story.

Same for John: At the end of TRF, he’s grieving, broken, sad. At the beginning of TEH, he’s angry (and stays that way until TFP). I know that grieve can turn to hate – but I never see this development with John. It is never addressed, never discussed. Again, I am deprived of vital character development. Call me shallow, but instead of a boring and pointless bikeride through London (pointless and boring because I know that Sherlock will save John from the bonfire, otherwise the show would be over), they could have explored John’s feelings a bit more, his inner conflicts, don’t you think? But they didn’t – and that’s bad writing that leads in the end to total ambiguity, because we just don’t know what goes on in the character’s heads. And we never will, because the indeciciveness of the writing will allow for any and all readings, which means there never was a plan, or a message, or a goal to this story. It just fizzles out. THAT IS BAD WRITING!

I’m not even talking about Mary’s arc here.

I could go on and on but I won’t because all I’m saying can be countered by other scenes – again, ambiguity all over the place, no goal of the story, no trajectory, nothing but some nice scenes good for giffing and some beautiful shots of the leads. Form over function.

Now, an argument I have seen around is that this is all intentional, that it is theatre of the absurd or Brechtian alienation. I, too, toyed with this idea, but I have to say I can’t stand by that any longer. Because 1) have you all ever actually watched a whole Brechtian play? I studied this kind of theatre extensively, and I have to say, to modern audiences it is so boring it pains you to tears. It was inventive about 80 years ago, because it broke with well-established rules how theatre was expected to be at that point (as some argue Mofftiss did with Sherlock) but now it is simply outdated as a narrative tool. Those rules have been broken and evolved into something else, something new. Going back to Brecht is just very old-fashioned and not a good idea for a moving medium like television, because he works with very static scenes that are incredibly boring to watch on telly. We just have developed different viewing habits from the 1950s. Today, we don’t want to alienate the audience (that has been done), we want to engange with it.

Anyway, Brecht’s plays were 20th century morality plays, contradicting standard moral attitudes of their time. The Three Penny Opera, for example, puts the lower criminal classes at the focus of an opera, an art form that usually dealt with kings, queens or fairies, not ordinary, morally grey people. But this worked because there was still a moral to the story – it was a mirror for capitalistic society and asked question as to how to succeed in such a society. Or Mother Courage – a play with the message that war leads to ultimate destruction of everything, even the things that are alegedly fought for. Or Good Man Of Sechuan – again a play criticising capitalism and its excesses via alienation effect.

But what is the message of Sherlock? Where is the moral to this story? Great man to good? Was solved in ASiP or at least in S1-2. Family is all we have? Seriously – that is the moral of a Sherlock Holmes adaption, a man who never had or cared for family apart from a scarcely mentioned brother? If you want to do such a story, why chose Holmes/Watson as a template? Love conquers all? Seriously, that kind of controlling, damaging love I see in this show?

I can’t find a meaning, a message, because the characters didn’t carry one – because they were inconsistent, illogical, had no or contradictory motivations, ever changing from series to series, without showing me how and why they changed (only telling me about it, which is against the established story telling rule show, don’t tell). Everything drowned in ambiguity, because the writers didn’t dare or care to take a stance with their characters. They bend them this way or that to lead to yet another surprising rug pull or explosion – and that shows in the end and makes everything shallow. It wasn’t that the characters shaped and carried the story anymore (as might have been in S1-2 if it had ended after TRF) – it was the other way around in the end – a crazy story swept them along no matter what had been established about them prior. Perhaps Mofftiss were already engaged with their Dracula project since TAB and simply lost interest in Sherlock and just wanted to finish it somehow. Who knows?

That was the point I wanted to make with my post. If you think this is brilliant story telling and that you still love the show – go on then, good for you. Love Mycroft, love Sherlock, love Mofftiss – just don’t tell me I have to as well and call me unobservant if I don’t.

Should you be interested in a respectful exchange of opinions, @theleftpill, I’m looking forward to your reply. If you want to continue to tell me how stupid I am, you won’t hear from me again. I don’t need more pointless drama in my life, thank you very much.