Pursuant to the discussion about writing and Sherlock and Stephen Thompson’s role in it all that’s happening on this thread over here, I am going to celebrate Friday by doing a bit of a core dump about plotting.
Wow, this is great background on story vs plot and how that plays out for us in Sherlock. I think that your observation of this in Doctor Who is an excellent explanation for why some of us find that show so frustrating, and frustrating in a way that undermined what we found enthralling in Sherlock’s s1-2.
I will note that s3 was also when Sherlock shifted to the Doctor Who mode of different directors (and the same stable Moffat was working with in DW) for each ep, each of them admittedly working to put their own spin on the show and its characters. By itself, not a cause but indicative of and surely a contributor to the move away from plot as the major show mode.
This made me wonder what Aristoteles/Forster thought about “it was all a dream” as an ending to a story. There seem to be quite a few Sherlock fans who have embraced that as a theory. Sure, it doesn’t matter what happens and how crazy everything is if it’s a dream but shouldn’t it at least be made clear to the audience when something is not meant to be real? And it would hardly be a fitting solution to a mystery show. But of course some Sherlock fans think that we are supposed to solve the mystery and the answer is that someone is dreaming, or it’s all MP. To me it sounds like the easiest way out and something all great sleuths would laugh at but who knows.
I mean, I feel like the only thing making Mofftiss writing worse would be if they ended up saying that what happened in the last few episodes wasn’t real. They’d be admitting they failed at writing all of them if they suddenly decided to do s5 and, say, have Sherlock wake up at a hospital after the fall/the shooting. It’s not like Benedict’s some sort of Patrick Duffy or whatever. I don’t know much about what is “allowed” in modern shows but I’m wondering if it would be thought clever or just cheating their audience. They made TAB already and have had MP scenes. If they don’t need to make up an excuse to reintroduce an actor, what legit excuses could they possibly have to make half of their episodes not reality? What excuses do shows use? Yes, Sherlock fell/was shot and is now in coma sounds reasonable but why would they need to do it? For so many episodes?
@milarvela
The problem with this theory is that lots and lots of people are sure that it is nothing more but just an excuse for “poor” writing, plot holes, inconsistencies/contradictions of S4.
But, first of all, this idea appeared not out of nowhere and not as the best explanation that would cover all the fuckiness of the latest episodes. It’s been built on huge amount of facts: visual, textual, subtextual.
It doesn’t necessarily has to be something like “and then he wakes up and it turns out that everything was a dream”. As for me (and some other people), I see perfect metaphorical sense in S4 if I apply Sherlock’s POV here. I don’t need to do any difficult mind gymnastics, it’s hiding right below the surface level.
I, personally, don’t like the idea of “waking up”, because, though it’s possible to “explain” visually/textually, the majority of the audience won’t buy it. If the explanation of HOW and, more importantly, WHY isn’t convincing enough, it’ll be a disaster.
If they used dream logic (like disappearing blood or people, or repeated scenes and lots of mirroring), hired the same actors (the girl from ASiB as the girl on the plane), used the same physical objects, created something that begs for attention (glowing skull), wrote something that makes absolutely beautiful sense metaphorically (especially Eurus) ACCIDENTALLY and there won’t be any outcome, I’ll be laughing like crazy.
This idea (of extended mind palace) has.never.been and will.never.be just an “excuse” for their “poor” writing. Personally, no matter what resolution is coming (if there IS any), this reading will be my favorite for being the most convincing and deep in its importance.
By the way, is there something wrong with believing that we’re, as an audience, have to solve a mystery to understand what’s going on? I’ve always thought that “Sherlock” is practically made for that. Of course, the writers went out of control a little bit if S4 is indeed a mystery for the audience.
If it turns out that S4 has to be taken at face value and it is what it is, I’ll accept that Mofftiss are actually shitty writers, and I’ll be wondering till the end of my days how was it possible to film something so deep and beautiful metaphorically.. by accident.
But for me, Sherlock’s inner understanding of himself hasn’t ended with TAB. The motifs of being “deep” (deep waters) and “high” (I’m lost in a sky) are stretching through S4. Here we’re faced with his worst fears (especially about John), his low self-esteem (and we know that deep inside, in his MP, he thinks of himself poorly, remember HLV), his struggles between brain and heart, mind and sentiment. There’s been a lot of amazing posts analysing Eurus as Sherlock’s inner part. Again, it doesn’t make me do any weird mind gymnastics, it’s right below the surface, and if it’s true and the writers will be able to explain how and why they did it, I’ll be glad. @monikakrasnorada made a series of posts analysing the increasing amount of time Sherlock spent in his MP from S1 to TAB. In TAB it’s become almost impossible to distinguish Sherlock’s mind palace from reality. There’s a lot to think about.
To sum up: I hope there IS some logical resolution, logical and convincing for the audience (because, if they were ready for post-TFP backlash, as they said, I don’t think they would do it without any plans for future, but who knows). I hope there is something more than “waking up” from a dream, because 90% of their audience won’t believe that it’s been planned, they will label it as an excuse for the plot holes.
How can it be explained, why we’re dealing with Sherlock’s POV, but not in show’s reality, who the hell knows.
Sorry for long comment.
I don’t think it’s deep or beautiful, metaphorically or otherwise. The sharks are
unintentionally funny, Sherlock’s orange and stupid, the tale of the merchant fails because it’s about Mary but for some reason Sherlock is telling it like it’s about him, John’s ugly (literally in TLD), angry and violent, Eurus is ridiculous, and Mycroft hiding her for decades would require mind gymnastics beyond my capacities. Not to mention how tasteless the whole dogboy thing is and what it does to earlier episodes.
I don’t know when the idea made its first appearance but it became popular after TAB when even the most eager Johnlockers started to doubt the idea that John had a plan and was secretly in love with Sherlock.
But I do agree that very few people would believe they’d been planning a wakening all along. Most people wouldn’t believe it no matter what. The more they would try to explain it, the worse it would look for them, I think. Which they wouldn’t do anyway, because they didn’t intend TFP or anything else in S4 to be a dream. It was the ending of the show for now, no cliffhanger to ponder, just what they undoubtedly thought was a beautiful and deep tribute to the boys uttered by Mary.
Didn’t they say someplace that they aren’t nearly as clever as some fans think?
And let’s not forget that they gave Smith bad teeth because it’s supposed to symbolise the character’s evilness or something.
The boy Carl Powers drowns in a pool. The boy Victor Trevor drowns in a well.
Carl is killed by Jim Moriarty, another child. Victor is killed by Eurus Holmes, another child.
Sherlock calls this the case “where I began”. Eurus calls this his “very first case”.
Jim uses the murder to taunt Sherlock. Eurus uses the murder to taunt Sherlock.
So far for the astonishing parallels. But the differences are equally interesting:
The death of Carl Powers has been established.
The death of Carl Powers has been investigated by the police.
The death of Carl Powers has been documented by the media.
The death of Carl Powers has not been suppressed or forgotten by Sherlock.
But what about Victor’s death? We never learn anything about it. It is as if the boy had disappeared and no one but Sherlock had ever cared about it. It was apparently never investigated with the police. It was not even dramatic enough to send Eurus away at this point – for killing a little boy. Instead the Holmes family waited until she set fire to the house to put her away in an institution. The whole Victor Trevor case is strangely private, a family affair, nothing else.
The funny thing, however, is that TFP tries to substitute the Victor case for the Carl Powers case. The episode wants to make us believe that Eurus was always more important than Jim, that her first murder was his first case and not Moriarty’s, that Sherlock began at Musgrave Hall instead of the pool. But this does not really work for me because the Carl Powers case is so much more elaborate and believable and supported by police records and media coverage.
You know, I’d felt something nagging at me about Victor drowning (I mean, aside from the fact that Victor in the books was not a drowned not-dog) , but could never really pin where that feeling was coming from.
THIS, though! You did it! I do feel like the Carl Powers case is the one that Mofftiss went out of their way to highlight to discuss, to point the finger back to Where It Started, and I feel like if they HADN’T made the (self-admitted) mistake of killing Moriarty off too early, there would have been zero need for Eurus. Eurus was created, then, to be a Moriarty placeholder, which makes Victor’s death a sort of ersatz Powers death
“which makes Victor’s death a sort of ersatz Powers death” yes!
Sublimation is a hell of a drug, right? @privatelyvex
Great thoughts, @privatelyvex.
it also seems weird to me that they wrote the whole carl powers story, which has zero basis in ACD, and then (pardon the expression) shit all over the victor trevor story, by making up this ridiculous nonsense, which again has zero basis in ACD besides the name. I get that the ridiculous nonsense means that it’s symbolic, but it still irks me. The compare and contrast is interesting, but why? What are they trying to get across?
@sarahthecoat, I tend to be a bit cynical when it comes to second-guessing producer intent, but while I’d love for the Carl Powers storyline to have been this crazy, mad thought-out thing that extended for four seasons and had some impossible-to-predict payoff at the end (”Molly Hooper is Carl sister? Whuuut?!”) it could be something as simple as justifying the pool location for the season one finale. Visually it’s pleasing, and the way the words echo is nicely ominous.
As to shitting all over Victor Trevor, dude, as someone who’s written that character often (albeit, only barely canonically), I was cut to the quick by that plot twist, and I can’t see why you’d trash that character UNLESS you really want to make the point that John is the only adult friend (read that as you will) that Sherlock’s ever had, ever. Which, okay, but why?
(And wouldn’t The Wig count as a friend, kind of? But that’s another story…)
YES. Not to mention mike stamford, mrs hudson, angelo, lestrade, molly, raz, the entire homeless network, etc. I get that john still stands out in that group, but he’s much more friendless than sherlock… BUT, trying not to go off topic… the carl powers case is kind of “opposite day” to the gloria scott story too, in that “nobody listened” to sherlock about Carl’s shoes, but in GLOR, the trouble happened because the trevors did listen to him. (well, and mr trevor’s old enemy did come back around, which had nothing to do with sherlock) I’m never sure with these writers, if they expect us to know the canon characters whose names they attach to their OCs, and do some kind of mental gymnastic… and/or to recognize canon characters, or characteristics, they give “decoy” names to…
There were a few scenes that have now become ‘the missing scenes’ of s4. Some people think they are evidence of a LS. Just want to address some of the speculation from a setlock viewpoint:
All of us on Ruther2′s setlock team can attest, the research and investigation on every scene we knew was being filmed was intense. Often we had set lockers on location at the time a scene was being filmed. We also had connections with the crew to see if any info could be obtained via that source. Some of us took time off work to cover the setlock period to just work on incoming information. Certain set lockers worked tirelessly for hours deciphering scripts, notes, partial written documents, you guys were awesome. It was indeed a well run organised operation. Kudos always to Ruther, he was excellent at running the entire thing, and the rest of the team that gave input, time, finances, hours, countless boring vigil at locations that were less than enjoyable, artworks, photographs, videos and of course dedication and energy.
It must be noted that filming of several unused scenes is normal for BBC Sherlock. S4 was not an anomaly. So lets’s look at some of those now fabled lost scenes from s4:
Martin on a camel
Niagara Falls
MI6/Vauxhall Cross
Mint and Mustard
Taking these scenes one by one:
Martin on a camel; Ruther himself debunked this one as being Martin. He discovered the project that was using the camel footage and it had nothing to do with BBC Sherlock. Yes, the profile of the person on the camel looked a little like Martin, but it wasn’t him.
Niagara Falls: Nick Hurran was working in Canada before he came home to direct TLD. The timing was tight, Nick could not do recees with Arwel and the team. Tom Guy, from the locations dept went over to Canada to get Nick’s approval on locations for TLD. This would usually be done by Nick in person but due to the work project in Canada he couldn’t be there. Nick as director has to sign off on the locations. During the time Tom was in Canada he sent this tweet.
Now we all ran with this. It was a romantic location. Niagara is also a waterfall, and thus has a link to Sherlock via the idea of falling over a waterfall. It was great fun playing with this idea that John and Sherlock would end up in Niagara Falls for an adventure and finally kiss. It didn’t help that lurker Arwel joined in the fun, as a couple of weeks later in soggy London, now working on TLD, Arwel tweeted this:
It is a ‘stock’ photo of the falls, not one personally taken by the Sherlock crew. Arwel was very in tune to the fandom and despite his protestations later on, he very obviously and deliberately did ‘play’ with fandom theories.
Following the first tweet from Tom Guy the setlock crew kept a close eye on anything coming out of the Niagara area; scanning tweets, looking at local Niagara filming agencies, looking at any hint that cast and crew left the UK for Canada and were seen at airports, checking acting agencies recruiting for support actors in NF, or any support actor tweeting that they had been in a secret project there. None of the above came to light. There were a couple of fans who live in the area monitoring it too, and they didn’t see anything indicating a filming crew was at work at the Falls during the period. It’s not impossible that a scene was secretly filmed at a major tourist attraction with hundreds of people present on a daily basis but it is unlikely. Tom Guy appears to have taken a day trip to the Falls during a work assignment to get the locations OK’d by Nick Hurran. It was the boring conclusion most likely to have occurred.
MI6/Vauxhall Cross John and Sherlock scene: Two of the setlockers on location the day Benedict filmed the scenes on Vauxhall Bridge for the end of T6T were told by the security guys on site that a scene had been filmed inside the MI6/Vauxhall Cross building. They said that there was a scene with Martin that was filmed in an unused part of the building. This was never verified.
Mint and Mustard: Filmed, we had evidence.
Recently Mark and Steven mentioned they had filmed a ‘date night’ with John and Mary, but didn’t use it in the final cut for TST.
So in conclusion maybe some scenes were filmed to use in future projects, such as games/apps or in the Sherlock attraction if the BBC get their theme park. There are also copious unaired scenes from s1-TAB that they have stored away. It’s all additional footage chosen to be unaired by the show runner. It’s an industry practice. Maybe at Sherlocked in October Arwel will show some new stuff, as he does that, maybe Claire will discuss Amanda in various wigs that never made it to screen, and Loo dressed up in the Sherlock wig. There may be a new book or photos on sale of unaired images. They could put out a DVD one day of the unaired scenes. We just need to be careful that we don’t think certain scenes are fact when in truth they were only ever speculation. I advise that everyone checks out Ruther2′s Storify if ever in doubt.
I think one of Mofftiss big problems is that they think the success of Sherlock is due to them. When actually the success of Sherlock is mostly due to Ben and Martin as Sherlock and John and their fantastic chemistry and great acting.
You separate John and Sherlock or have a chaperone there the whole time, as was done in S4, and their pretty lackluster writing really starts to shine through.
You know, I remember reading somewhere that Mofftiss were batting around the idea of this new project (which we now know to be Dracula) as far back as when they were writing for Sherlock Season 4. And I felt at the time that one of the reasons Moffat probably quit Dr. Who was to focus more on this new project.
So for me that sort of explains Sherlock S4, and especially TFP. Their hearts, minds, and creativity were already focussed somewhere else. Basically they were just getting bored with Sherlock, and it showed.
I just want to add @sussexbound‘s tags because that sums up even more of my opinion on this new project:
Moffat and Gatiss are clearly unable to separate their affection for Amanda Abbington from the character she plays.
As much as I hate to think about it, I think this is what it came down to. I think they prioritized wanting to give their buddy a cool role over the integrity of the show.
It just so happened that it fell at right about the time they needed to pull the great No Homo…so it served multiple ends.
I still have nefarious thoughts concerning all of this. Something is sooo fishy.
I think part of the problem is that Moftiss really aren’t “planning ahead” types of writers. They said in an interview that they honestly had no idea how they were going to bring Sherlock back after TRF but they liked the drama of it so they just did it and figured “eh, we’ll solve that later.”
Eurus, to me, feels a lot like that. Maybe they were thinking “oh, we should tease the Sherrinford thing and then have it turn out the Holmes brothers have a sister! That would be a cool twist!” but then they had to pretend they were foreshadowing it the whole time and that’s how Mycroft’s weak “I’ve been dropping subliminal code words” got rammed into canon. And yeah, S4E3 was a really well-done stand-alone episode – but as a culmination of four seasons of drama, it just didn’t live up to the hype. (Either the hype Moftiss deliberately generated for S4 or the expected hype of “something’s gotta give” from the character arcs in the rest of the show).
I feel like they never did fully commit to the character of Mary. They didn’t want her to be too passive (which I applaud – ACD wasn’t big on 3-dimensional female characters) but they didn’t want her to have a cliche bad guy betrayal, so instead they got this weird mix where she’s an assassin who lies to John in what I’d consider a totally unforgivable way, but John and Sherlock both wave that aside because, what, baby? Momentum? And then she’s this great addition to their team, except when she’s not, and then she has the most cliched death ever despite that fact that hello, she’s got an infant at home, does she really not care enough about her daughter to have a sense of self-preservation? And through some hand-waving we’re supposed to believe that Mycroft – who obsessively has eyes on his little brother even when there’s no reason to – hasn’t at LEAST had a background check done and thought hey, this woman’s backstory is a little weird, maybe I should kidnap her and interrogate her a bit?
I love the show because I love the characters, but there’s a reason so many of my fics end up in some nebulous “Sherlock and John are living together and All That Weird Stuff hasn’t happened” time frame. I just can’t reconcile the plot with the way the characters were developed and how they’d act in those situations.
I completely agree that a big issue with the show is it’s just not planned out very far ahead and a lot of things are thrown in for the “cool” factor. (One of the biggest: “if we make it so Sherlock almost dies, we can do this cool Mind Palace sequence!” But they didn’t realize fans would then think Mary was more of a villain than if she had say, shot him in the arm or just tried to talk to him instead.) Luckily for me I’ve never been much interested in over-arching plots–I like the show for its witty dialogue and character interactions.
As for Mary herself, I was a very casual fan (casual enough that the show made almost no impression on me–it was just there in the background) until she showed up, and then s3 blew me away with its….witty dialogue and character interactions, which I found worked much better when there were three characters on the screen playing off each other, rather than just John and Sherlock. This is even true for some of TFP–there are some nice moments between Sherlock, John and Mycroft that wouldn’t have worked with just two of them.
I’m always a fan of things that demonstrate why planning is so important in fiction. Many people hate to do it, but this is why it’s important! We knew they hadn’t planned anything after the pool when they wrote S1, and you can tell they hadn’t planned S3, which required John to be secretive about what the H. in John H. Watson stood for, when they had John casually offer up Hamish as a baby name in S2. Outlining for the win.
As for Mary: I agree that they seemed to have a sense of what they wanted from her, but got tangled up in how to get there, and seem to keep trying to justify something that I don’t think needs more justification (personally).
I think the story works much better if Mary fully intended to kill Sherlock when she shot him in S3, given what we now know about her, the way she sometimes just reacts and does the wrong thing, even though she wants to be a person who does the right thing. Her judgment is TERRIBLE, and I think that’s sort of the point. Or, it makes sense to me if that were the point!
It would make sense to me that Sherlock took that fateful step in S3 and ceased to be a friend in that moment. He became Generic Threat That Must Be Eliminated. The moment she felt he threatened her, their fun friendship ceased to be a factor and her instincts took over. She meant him to die, and he did die, because she’s efficient and deadly. She remains a cocked gun even when she doesn’t want to be one anymore.
I’m sorry that everyone’s still so invested in her being a villain. I liked the rug pull of her not being a villain in the story, personally. I thought she was going to be a big bad after S3 too, but when she turned out to just have terrible instincts that ruined her relationships (like shooting Sherlock and then threatening him, and vanishing on John at exactly the wrong time), I kind of liked what that made her. A bad guy who aims for goodness and fails over and over again.
I liked that they put me in John’s shoes: distrusting, kind of angry with her, frustrated with the situation, stuck pretending everything’s okay, but uncertain if this is really going to work (or should work!). I think it makes John that much more understandable and sympathetic in his own failings and anger towards Mary in the end.
But I don’t think we need to go back and redeem Mary in S3. I don’t know why they’re retreating to that. It’s way more interesting if Sherlock forgives her for actually killing him. That’s an insane thing to forgive, but that’s Sherlock for you.
This is in haste because I’m very interested in this thread but I don’t have a lot of time, but:
I agree that you can see that this show was not planned very far in advance. However, you CAN put together a coherent plot even if you have not outlined it all ahead of time. I don’t necessarily recommend this method to others; but I do a LOT of plotting, and most of the time, when I get started, I don’t really know how it’s all going to fit together. I have actually been thinking about why it is that I hate Moffat’s Plot Twists so much when I am so enamored of them in the writing of other people, and it comes down not so much to the lack of advance planning as the refusal to commit.
See, you CAN develop a plot on the fly–a serially published narrative really makes that almost necessary–BUT, at some point in the arc, usually around the midpoint, you need to stop introducing things and start working on tying all the things you’ve already introduced together. No matter how disparate these things may appear to be to you, they CAN be tied together if you do the work of figuring out, at the midpoint, how all your plot lines relate to each other and which piece each will contribute to the ultimate solution.
I think what ivyblossom is talking about with Mary as a character in the post just above this one is an example of Moffat and Gatiss’s reluctance to commit. I disagree with ivyblossom’s interpretation of Mary, but what she says makes total sense: to have Mary OWN the shooting AS an attempt to kill Sherlock, and then deal with that in the aftermath, would be in every way a stronger choice than this “she was saving my life by trying to kill me” bullshit. That’s an attempt to *avoid* commitment by having it both ways: you get the drama of the betrayal, but then you get the reassurance that Mary hasn’t actually betrayed anyone. But this authorial CYA ends up making nonsense out of the shooting and, over time, out of Mary’s entire character arc.
Similarly, the fact that they didn’t know, when they made TRF, how they were going to get out of it is not an excuse. Doyle didn’t know how he was going to get Holmes out of it when he wrote “Final Problem.” Hundreds, if not thousands of fans figured out how to craft a logical explanation without any advance planning based just on what we were given in the episode. They didn’t give us a straightforward explanation because, IMHO, they were afraid to. Instead, they embedded their explanation in the middle of a bizarre and displaced conversation with Anderson, who then rejects it, so that their explanation becomes deniable as a trick or a hallucination of Anderson’s if people don’t like it.
With an arc, you want the second half to be the development and resolution of things you introduced in the first half. That way, as the arc goes on, it means more and more to the reader because you keep gaining new perspectives on things that you already thought you understood. But instead of building on what they’ve already got, what Moffat and Gatiss have historically done is evacuate it and then start again. That’s definitely what happened in Series 4, where instead of really dealing with the issues that would normally arise after the events of “His Last Vow,” Mycroft retcons it, Sherlock and Mary become best friends, and the resolution of Mary’s arc is driven by people we’ve never met and events we never knew about. And when you evacuate your narrative instead of developing it, what happens is that as it goes on, it starts to mean less and less.
This was not immediately obvious on Sherlock for a few reasons: one, the introduction of Moriarty does sort of provide the first series with a coherent plot arc which builds on what has already been introduced, and to some extend that arc extends to encompass TRF. Two, the production values, which continue to astonish me even though I’m SUPER fed up with the writing, created so many layers of meaning in the filmic text that they camouflaged, for a long time, the disposability of the plotting. So it isn’t really that they didn’t plan far enough in advance. It’s that they never really committed to the resolution phase, either in the individual series arcs or in the arc of the show as a whole. To me, that’s emblematic of a general refusal of sincerity that characterizes almost every aspect of Sherlock except for the actors’ performances. THERE you have commitment aplenty, and that’s what really gives the show its gravitational pull.
rebooting for @plaidadder‘s excellent addition. This in particular interests me:
what Moffat and Gatiss have historically done is evacuate it and then start again.
I agree re: commitment. I think it likely that they were trying to please too many people all at once. Or, again, the difficulty of too many cooks in the kitchen and no one strong editorial voice to keep things under control.
“The obsession, particularly online, with the homoerotic tension between
Sherlock and Doctor Watson… The template for us was the Billy Wilder
film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which deliberately
plays with the idea that Holmes might be gay. We’ve done the same
thing, deliberately played with it although it’s absolutely clearly not
the case. He’s only a brain, ‘everything else is transport’ to him and John clearly says, “I’m not gay, we’re not together” but the joke is that everyone assumes that in the 21st century
that these two blokes living together are a couple– what they wouldn’t’
have assumed in the 19th century. They’d have assumed they were bachelor
best friends and now they assume they’re lovers. That’s
obviously such fun to play with and the fact that people now assume, in a
very positive way, that they’re together is a different joke to it
being a negative connotation.” Mark Gatiss in The Gay Times, February 2012
Hmm, I’m actually not so sure about that. Because I never got this joke (and no, that’s not a generation thing. I’m round about the same age as the show creators). Honestly, to me, two blokes sharing a flat in central London in the 21st century are just two blokes sharing a flat because it’s fucking expensive. I’d never assume anything else.
Even if one of the man was depicted as obviously gay (Girlfriend? Nor really my area. – Boyfriend? I know it’s fine.) – I wouldn’t assume any kind of romatic interest between them. I can’t see a joke there either.
But when their flat sharing gets laden with innuendo? For example, their landlady asking them if they share a bedroom. Another acquaintance taking them for being on a date. Those two blokes gazing at each other as if they were about to eat each other alive. One of the man killing for the other, who, in return, protects him from being prosecuted… Well, then I’d start to assume something’s going on – because it is shown to me and hammered home.
Only, I can’t see a joke there either…
So, what Gatiss described in the above interview wasn’t what happened. They were not just showing us two blokes living together. Because then no one in the 21st century would think of them as a couple. Moffat and Gatiss had to actively insert innuendo for their viewers to catch up on their ‘joke’ in the first place. They encouraged this on many levels: text, acting choices, casting, costume, music, lighting, cinematography.
They actively implemented homoerotic (sub)text in their show – only to lament at the same time that people cought up on it? That some viewers expected something to come out of it. Because, in the 21st century, no one thought it possible that it could just be a lame joke! Because there just is no joke to it.
The viewers took the positive attitude Gatiis desrcibes a step further and expected positive representation from the writers after playing with the inherent homoeroticism of the original stories. The fandom was far more advanced than the show runners, it seems.
And why play with the
homoeroticism
it in the first place? I really can’t see where the fun might be in there, apart from cracking some cheap gay jokes that feed an outdated no-homo attitude?
What is there to play with when it’s not an issue anymore? And if it’s still an issue, I’m not sure that making fun of it ist the appropriate approach to it.
We’ve done the same thing, deliberately played with it although it’s absolutely clearly not the case.
Clearly not the case??? How can a gay man, an LGBTQ advocate be so obtuse? They have used every gay trope in the book. The result is a desperately broken gay man who is in love with his repressed flatmate. Can Mark and Steven be this stupid, this unobservant, this deep into their own form of homophobia, that they cannot see what their own creation has become? Sorry Mark, but it was never clearly not gay. It was clearly the opposite.
I agree. Sorry Gatiss but that’s bs. In Friends Joey and Chandler shared a flat and nobody expected them to get together.
You know, for a brilliant man, Gatiss can be remarkably thick. Total BS, in my book.
Here’s the thing from my perspective: there were enough tent poles in the writing (not even the acting or the direction or the cinematography, but just the writing) for people to come up with a reading that Sherlock and John had unusual, deep, possessive feelings for each other that many would not categorize as simple friendship. It’s not even the multiple lines of dialogue where others assume that Sherlock and John are a couple (including everyone cited above, together with the gay innkeepers and Dr. Frankland and Henry’s psychologist and Kitty and arguably Magnussen and ….) I find it morbidly fascinating that despite evidence in the writing itself that was more than third party characters making joking assumptions about John and Sherlock, the creators in their public statements basically chalk it all up to the “delusional fangirl” stereotype and say “play online but don’t talk about it with us, the writers.”
The Battersea conversation between John and Irene is one example of relationship implications being directly in the writing, despite some posts I’ve seen attributing Johnlock to some manifestation of acting and editing. We all know the scene by heart. John says they’re not a couple; Irene says that they are. John says he’s not infatuated with Sherlock because John is not gay, and Irene counters that she is gay, and “Look at us both [being infatuated?].”
What are we looking at, Moffat? Genuinely, I would like that answered and am confused about Moffat and Gatiss’s hostility towards discussing romantic interpretations of their writing. What was that line supposed to do if not invite us to examine the nature of both John’s and Irene’s feelings towards Sherlock and perhaps the immutability (or lack thereof) of romantic attraction? I know that script page floated around ages ago that said that John then laughs at the absurdity of the situation in response to Irene’s comment, but whether he laughs or gives that rueful huff that we get in the final version, John has no spoken answer to Irene’s comment. Was she right? Was she wrong? What was Moffat trying to convey? Was it only about Irene in that moment? Is she the only one with a bendable sexuality? That’s an ugly implication.
And then someone on their team wrote a scene episodes later where John and Sherlock are the only people at a bachelor party (when there certainly would have been comedic value in Lestrade or Anderson or relatives we’ve never met or Mycroft (like the Ritchie movies, right?) being in on this little celebration). But instead we’ve got no explanation for why there are no guests other than our assumption that Sherlock and John wanted a night alone together, and John saying he doesn’t mind touching Sherlock’s leg. Why is that line there if it doesn’t mean something? That’s 15 seconds of screen real estate that could have been spent elsewhere. I want to hear what Moffat and Gatiss say about this scene, the dialogue, the setup, etc.
These are two examples. We all could pull out at least one bit of written dialogue per episode where something in the writing itself implied “couple” or “attraction” that was not a joke made by a third party. And I really just want to ask them what they were trying to do in any of these types of scenes, because these were not jokes made by third party characters. But no interviewer will ever go beyond asking the question of whether John and Sherlock are a couple with Gatiss pulling out that stock reply about how in the 21st century, it’s cheeky to say that everyone will assume that they are together. Maybe Gatiss’s real answer is that they delighted in the ambiguity, never settling on one thing, raising issues and questions about character motivations without any definitive answers in a way that gives their writing (an illusion of) depth (a show like Mad Men played with raising different questions and not always answering them), and they never thought that anyone would seek to insert answers to these little questions that they toyed with.
I also think from my vantage point of reading and watching some of their interviews that Mark especially is not a fan of ardent fans. I know some interpreted TEH as an affectionate homage to the fandom, but I saw then and still see now his discomfort with fans reading anything into this show beyond the emotional context that they are trying to generate in any individual scene. It doesn’t matter how Sherlock survived or what John went through: what matters is that we have a little laugh at John’s successive losses of temper that send them to progressively seedier establishments in TEH: it’s a joke, it’s a show, it’s not serious beyond taking an emotional journey contained to 90 minutes. I can only see S4 as a massive repudiation of quite a lot of what ardent fans liked about the show, and I think part of it does stem from discomfort with fan expectations (and part of it from writing the season in too short a time period at the last minute).
Yeah, I honestly have no idea, anymore, what show they thought they were making . Two bro’s hanging out, solving crimes, and repeatedly hurting one another in one way or another, forever, with zero redemption, I guess?
I’ve been doing mental gymnastics to try to take them at their word and see the show this way but I can’t because it does not make any sense.
Keep in mind it sounds like they were making a lot of it up on the fly, which is sometimes a Very Bad Thing. At one point they may have been making the show we thought we were watching. I believe to some extend they’ve changed their tune over the years.
@ellipsisaspired, I agree, that is exactly what it feels like to me too. It’s lazy, shitty writing, imo, but fair enough. It’s their show, if they’re okay with that approach, then ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
However, what I don’t appreciate is the repeated suggestions by tptb that anyone who read any of the show’s content ( and now apparently going so far as to say, any of the show’s post-ASiP’s ‘of course we won’t be needing two rooms’ comment) as anything other than two straight dudes sharing a flat, is somehow delusional, and their desiring answers from the writers is an irritant, and demanding answers is an act of bullying.
What is an act of bullying, imo, is what I saw a lot of queer johnlock fans subjected to on twitter, tumblr, and even by their own families post-S4, and the rude way the BBC coldly dismissed their concerns about the queerbaiting not only in the show itself, but specifically in the BBC’s S4 promo materials. Yes there were a few fans who probably took things too far in the heat of the moment, but the majority of the people I saw writing to the BBC or even posing questions of the content creators at the con this weekend were respectful and articulate.
But you know, Sue pretty much said it here. They want to cater to the 99% of their audience who doesn’t care about a queer Holmes, who doesn’t see the queer subtext, who are more than happy to laugh at all their ‘gay jokes’. We’re small potatoes and don’t matter. They still manage to keep us hooked with all the gay ‘jokes’, queer text and subtext, and promotional teasing, but in the end we really don’t matter, and we should learn our place and not raise a fuss. Sit back and be queerbaited without a peep of objection.
Sorry, I’m bitter tonight. It will be better in the morning, but whew am I ever furious right now.
“Learn Our Place”. BULLSHIT.
Just because a group of people may be in a minority DOES NOT MEAN
that they should let themselves be steamrolled over, used and abused!! That is NOT right.
What they did is not appropriate. It is NOT right to queerbait a group of people and then yank it away so as to sell it to a larger audience. It is NOT right to use people like that!! It is harmful, damaging to people and WRONG.
I think my biggest problem is the lack of humility on mofftiss’ part. let’s say you work your hardest and your big series finale is a flop. it just…doesn’t work (and clearly there was already fear that this might be the case, hence the hedging beforehand–”if we pull this off” “If we haven’t messed it up”) you start getting criticism, and you take a step back and evaluate. you see fans crying queerbait. you would put out a statement. something to the effect of “while we in no way intended to hurt a portion of our audience, we understand that we may have done so inadvertently and would like to apologize” or something of the sort. you don’t say “well we said” because…you fucking lied about a lot of things, why would we not also assume that was a lie.
and this one has been really bugging me. The first (and only) time I watched TEH, I was devastated. That episode left the worst taste in my mouth. The opening, with the fan theories–it was so cruel. And please remember that Mofftiss specifically put out a casting call for an overweight girl. They made a caricature of who they believed their audience was, strung her up in front of that same audience, and laughed at her. I was crushed by that. By how specific and spiteful it was to an audience that had been holding its breath for this episode. But fandom was able to bring me around, to help me enjoy the rest of the season (although I’ve never forgiven TEH and it remains my least favorite episode of any of them).
But now, in light of this, I’m…i’m just livid. I’m appalled at not just their lack of respect, but their seeming hatred and contempt of their own audience. How…how do you get like that? How do you look at the people making your show successful–the same brand of people who made ACD’s stories successful–and not be thankful? How do you look at them like a parasite, like an intruder? How do you mock them–their ideas, their passions, their hobbies, their fucking appearances?
drag them over the coals, friends–but remember, they dragged you first
The Sheriarty shipper in TEH (much as I love the actress herself) was the writing on the wall for me.
The character description for the casting call was “overweight, greasy hair, probably goth.”
Even Kitty Riley in TGG was masquerading as fan, and Sherlock told her, basically, that fans only come in two varieties: killer/lunatic or groupie/slut.
Their disdain for female, queer, introspective, transformative fans has been palpable for a long, long time.
They told us who they were. I wish more of us had believed them.
“We sort of don’t need to listen to fans. We are fans.” – Steven Moffat
What I want to say is: PLEASE, WAKE THE FUCK UP, PEOPLE.
I know there was a part of the fandom who still thought that Moftiss were brilliant writers and that we were gonna get the ending we all dreamed of. And I understand that, really I do. But we all need to wake up.
Moftiss admitted they used homoerotic subtext in their series. They knew that would bring people towards the show. All the speculations, the metas, the discussions… that was stuff only the passionate fans would do, not the casuals. And they knew that hinting, implying something regarding Johnlock would bring the “fangirls” and the show would gain popularity. So, they kept doing that for whole 3 seasons (+ TAB).
Then, something happened. I think that they wanted to end the series with S4, but there was a problem. They didn’t want to make John and Sherlock a couple because that was never their true intention, but the situation had gotten away from their hands by that point. (translation = “too gay”) and they panicked.
So what did they do? They wrote S4 sloppily, completely retconning everything, changing the personality of the characters, giving Mary a central role and minimizing the interactions between John and Sherlock. They made that season the most #NoHomo possible because that was their plan all along: Sherlock and John solving crimes together, Sherlock alone and John marrying and then mourning his beloved wife (who shoots nicely, let’s not forget that).
S4 is the true BBC Sherlock they wanted to do but never could because
they were very aware that they wouldn’t have gotten so much success if they did #NoHomo from the beginnin’.
Honestly, that was such a smart move because now they are famous and rich and the show is successful and they can tell whatever they want because the series is probably over forever (despite what Moffat says), so they won’t have repercussions of any kind. In fact, they just blame the fans because ugh, they were too stupid, too naive, they should have known that John and Sherlock were straight when they didn’t want to share a bedroom after knowing each other for 10 minutes.
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