me: Thank you Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for creating the Sherlock Holmes stories, I love them and I love you
ACD:
I fear that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences. This must cease and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary…
So, it’s been discussed since the airing of The Final Problem that there were two main marketing instances used to make the audience believe that Sherlock was going to wind up in a romantic relationship by the end of season 4. The first one was the way the second trailer was edited to go from Culverton Smith saying the worst thing you can do to your best friends is to “tell them your darkest secret” to immediately cut to Sherlock saying, “I love you.” The second one was the tweet from one of the official BBC accounts (I think it was BBC Radio?) that said, “Sherlock’s in love! But who with?” The editing of the trailer may directly lead this audience to think Sherlock loves someone, but the tweet explicitly states it. Because s4 didn’t actually amount to Sherlock seriously confessing his love to someone, these two instances are seen as prime examples of queerbaiting.
Here’s the thing: if you do not believe there is more to come, then that’s a logical conclusion. However, what really gets me is that it wasn’t just queerbaiting: it was general baiting.*** What I mean by that is the marketing baited the audience into believing Sherlock was going to be in love with someone, and did not deliver at all. Sherlock is still completely romantically unattached by the end of the season. It’s not like there were years of romantic and sexual subtext between John and Sherlock, and TFP turned around and made Sherlock get together with Irene, or Molly. That would have solely been queerbaiting, but that didn’t happen.
It wasn’t just the marketing, though. I’ve talked about this line before, but I’ll bring it up again. By directly telling the audience that romantic entanglement would complete Sherlock as a human being, The Lying Detective made it clear that in order for Sherlock, the show and the character, to be complete, he must wind up with someone in a romantic capacity. That. Did. Not. Happen. Like the trailer and the tweet, that line baits the audience in general. Obviously, it’s more queerbaiting than anything else because of 3 and a half seasons of subtext between him and John, but Sherlock didn’t become romantically entangled with anyone by the end of the season.
This is one of the biggest loose ends left dangling, and as I’ve discussed before on my blog, I believe it will be resolved. If they made Sherlock be in love with a woman, if they decided to complete him as a human being by pairing him with Irene or Molly, then I would have thrown up my hands, tagged every johnlock post as #queerbaiting for the rest of time, and pulled a Patchy the Pirate and gotten rid of all my Sherlock stuff.
But was not what happened. If anything, the line from TLD, the editing in the trailer, and the “Sherlock’s in love!” tweet only count as evidence, to me, that this story is not over, but when it is, we’ll have canon johnlock.
***Please note that I am not trying to diminish the severity of queerbaiting, and believe it’s a worse thing to do than baiting a straight pairing. This post is just meant to emphasize the weirdness of not delivering romance in any way, shape, or form in season 4.
So BBC Sherlock was actually a fanfic with initial good chapters which kept the readers hooked and then it tried to change the genre and introduced lots of new characters and then it was just shit. And now it feels like it was shit for a long time. We were just blind. i don’t blame any of the characters. They were fine in the earlier chapters. They were not angels. but they were humans. but then writer tried to over-do things, brought too much drama, raised questions, but never answered them. Killed their own characterisations. Forgot what was in the previous chapters. Forgot the rules of the universe they made. Then it was just shit. utter shit. It was a love story.I am sure of it. Then it stopped being a love story.It stopped being a story altogether.
One of the worst adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s work.
Moffat™ tbh.
@cumberbunny221b That’s true. But things change from script to screen. There’s now music, transitions, coloring, things edited in and out, etc. Louise may have the script, but she was not there for most of the filming for TFP. Meaning she hasn’t seen anything of that episode. She may have an idea of what the ILU scene represents, but in context of everything else…it changes. And do you think that mofftiss actually gave her the entire script? Highly doubt it when was in 2 scenes for that episode.
Having a script doesn’t make anyone an authority on a specific scene. Being in the scene doesn’t make anyone an authority on said scene either. Having a script does not excuse someone calling others wrong where everything is open to interpretation.
The author is dead at the end of any work and the viewer, reader or audience takes over. If you like Loo’s interpretation of the scene, that’s great. I personally understand where she’s coming from, but I don’t. I have my own and that’s fine. This whole argument is old and I’m not sure why it’s getting brought up again. Let’s just agree to disagree and move on.
Sherlock Fandom Archive 