Fans have had a lot of issues with alleged inconsistencies in Sherlock Series 4–especially The Final Problem. Some I agree with, many I don’t, and others I’m undecided on or just don’t care about.
But there is one issue that, to my mind, carries more weight than any of the others.
“Brecht’s plays were performed in traditional proscenium arch theatre houses. However, the stage curtain was often dispensed with or a half curtain used instead of a full one.” (x)
Thanks @twocandles for making me aware of this – there is a short, new report about Sherlock on 3sat’s Kulturzeit, starts at 31:13 (x).
It is terrible, but some of my favourites:
In this movie (”Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace”), Sherlock Holmes is very intelligent, like all the classical Sherlock Holmeses, and very effective when it comes down solving cases, but at the same time a drug addict and unable to have relationships.
The BBC adaption makes the highly intelligent character from the books into a modern super hero with almost supernatural abilities. (Have they seen Eurus?) – And, with self-destructive tendencies. Sherlock Holmes becomes a junkie who outsmarts himself. *THoB scene where he’s on cold turkey and paid off everyone not to sell him cigarettes* (Because cigarettes are such junkie-drugs, right. Also, wasn’t the drug addict thing so singular to this one (1) other movie that you just pointed out before?)
Expert: “Doyle already describes this drug addiction in detail, especially in the earlier stories.” (Now I’m very confused about the drugs thing.)
Oh, fuck… are we talking about Sherlock’s sex life now, ooookay, let’s go.
Unlike Doyle’s stories, in the BBC version we don’t have Victorian sexual morals anymore – that’s why the detective falls in love for the first time – with a dominatrix. *naked Irene sits on his lap* (I’m retching.)
Expert: “[Humanising Sherlock] leads to a loss of the character’s sovereignty. And it’s this loss of sovereignty which leads to people liking the character.” (YOU DON’T FUCKING SAY)
*pictures of the S4 trailer start to play, without the original sound* – Bring it.
Now, the long-expected series 4. We will finally learn, why Sherlock Holmes became who he is. A secret, buried deep in his childhood. (Fucking spoiler alert!?)
funny story I was listening to classic fm earlier and the radio presenter was like ‘this next piece of music is related to Sherlock Holmes somehow, see if you can work out how’ and this beautiful romantic string piece came on, it was exquisite, and I was like he’s gonna say it’s related to Irene or some shit, but when it finished he said it was the music from the concert that Holmes and Watson attend in the Red Headed League (one of my favourite canon stories) where Holmes sits and gets lost in the music and Watson spends the whole time staring at Holmes like ‘wow, look at how much he loves this’ and yeah. ACD intentionally wrote that as romantically as it could have been.
“All the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes, the sleuth-hound Holmes, the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent as it was possible to conceive.”
Exactly the same. TFP is about as realistic as Jurassic Park – that’s what I’m getting from this.
It’s a dangerous thing to post this @tjlcisthenewsexy Maybe some people get ideas an then in S5 we get dinosaurs …. :)))))
And there is even evidence for this … it happened before …. (X)
This is amazing, I love dinosaurs! And let’s not forget this:
And the book from which the movie Jurassic Park 2 was adapted was also called The Lost World by Michael Crichton… So, is the plane scene a hidden tribute to ACD’s The Lost World?
Guys…… so, there was a brief reference to Sir Richard Burton in Doyle’s The Lost World, and I suspected that the butler Richard Bruton in The Musgrave Ritual was based on Sir Richard Burton. You know, a bit of a Don Juan, well-grown handsome man, speaks several languages…… anyway, Sir Richard Burton life was “a mad adventure filled with danger, sex, scandal, and drugs… he was a Victorian rolling stone.” His last great act of defiance: translated and produced the Arabian Nights in all its massive 16-volume glory; wrote essays on homosexuality and pornography; and to avoid prosecution, he published a series of sex guides, including Kama Sutra, anonymously. The 1880s press was outraged, calling his publications “revolting obscenity” or “morally filthy.”
Sir Richard Burton died in 1890, and his wife burned nearly all of his papers –diaries, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts – 40 years worth of work, all gone in flames. Because she wanted to “protect public morality.” It kinda reminded me of TFP when the ancestral home burned, and with the way butler Bruton died (buried alive and silenced), perhaps ACD was using The Musgrave Ritual as a commentary and a protest, about the way he had to write Holmes and Watson? Since his readers in 1893 would know who Sir Richard Burton was. And of course, only two years after, Oscar Wilde trial. There’s…… something else going on with all the seemingly bizarre references in series 4and I think it’s to do with the allegories and allusions in ACD canon……
So like, It occurs to me that the appearance of tjlc directly corresponds with season 3 hiatus. Before that, I think, most people didn’t think they would make johnlock canon even if they did see all the romantic tropes quite plainly.
It was just a fun show that toyed with homoeroticism and had no intention of canonizing the ship.
But then when season three happened suddenly it seemed like maybe they were building towards something. It seemed like the cases didn’t matter like we thought they did. It seemed like they were more interested in the disastrous effect Sherlock’s death had on John’s life; it seemed like they were more interested in Sherlock’s heartfelt and heartbreaking best man’s speech at John’s wedding; more interested in Watching Sherlock and john collapse on themselves after spending a month apart…
And in retrospect I see now that what was really happening is that the writers were losing control of their story.
So much of what we thought was a shift in focus from the mysteries onto the romance turned out to be a combination of lazily written puzzles, queer-baiting, and convoluted plots with ever unresolved story threads.
This reminds me of when I was in college and my neighbor, who was getting his masters in philosophy, was telling me a bit about some of the concepts he was writing about – he told us he was fascinated by the human brain’s ability to create meaning out of nonsense. “I could say to you ‘pink, wire, chicken’ which doesn’t mean anything, but your brain is already filling in the blanks to instinctively create sense out of that.”
I think this is what began to happened in season 3, and why it, and tab, created such ample fodder for meta and interpretation.
They said “queerbait, meat dagger, gun surgery” and we built worlds out of steven moffat and Mark Gatiss’ lazy, badly written trash.
It wasn’t our fault. It was just the worst possible, most unfortunate combination of terrible writing and queerbaiting I could possibly imagine – we couldn’t help trying to fill in the gaps in the input
So true! Parts of this fandom made gold out of shit. And when Moffat, Gatiss and Vertue eventually saw what they had provoked by their conspirational secrecey in connection with everything Sherlock – it was too late to backpaddle. They had unleashed a monster.
They had already lied so much that nothing they said was taken serious anymore. Them denying johnlock was seen as proof for it by some (many?) fans, because TPTB had so often lied about stuff or kept secrets (even from their cast), told one thing and then did the opposite… like, for example:
The other one is unimportant / just a red herring Gatiss wrote in
Redbeard is just a dog
TAB is a stand alone, wholy set in 1895
Moriarty is dead (well, he was, but kept reappearing anyway)
the whole Fall Scenario with encouraging fan theories, then never explaining, even retconning what happened
Why all this secrecy in the first place? Why all the lies? Would it really have spoiled anything if we’d known that parts of TAB were (presumably) set in the present day? Or that Rebeard was connected to something that happened in Sherlock’s childhood? Or that there was another Holmes sibling? Why lead your audience on by filming fake scenes? Why encourage speculations, only to criticise the direction some of those were heading, based on your own writing?
A sibling / TAB being a dream of Sherlock on the plane / a childhood trauma etc. were speculated about anyway. A bit more honesty from the writers / producers, respect and trust in their audience could have dried up the quagmire of lies, red herrings and surprising plot twists that encouraged conspiracy theories to blossom. The smoke would have lifted and fans might have seen the story for what it was – a story about a detective, his blogger, and, from S3 onwards, that bloggers wife. That was apparently the story they wanted to tell – why hide it behind a smokescreen of homoeroticism, lies, insinuations, games and jokes?
If your show can only attract an audience because of encouraging false assumptions, you are running headlong into harm (aka backlash). If the writers had abandoned the ‘will they, won’t they?’ between John and Sherlock after S2, why not openly (and on the show itself) say so? Why keep up the gay ‘jokes’ in S3 (they actually bookend that series, with Mrs Hudson’s ‘live and let live’ in TEH up to the aborted love confession trope applied on the tarmac)? Why not tell your audience ‘We love Mary Watson, they will now be a trio, solving crimes, until all goes to hell, but then Sherlock finds out what happened during his childhood, what made him, so he can heal.’? Why not show this in your show, like, film a real wedding, show John and Mary kissing, show Sherlock coping well, accepting Mary as a friend, put the cases more centre stage, don’t have Mary kill Sherlock etc.?
Then I could have stepped away or at least tuned down my expectations.
But they loved the hype too much. They loved their show being the centre of intense speculation and attention. But, at least within me after having watched S4, all the hype and built-up just left a feeling of disappointment. I feel betrayed. Why show me stuff like Mycroft’s notebook – that meant nothing in the end? Why show me evil Mary – only to make her the hero of the narrative? Why write in all the homoeroticism – and then never resolve the built up tension, not even by Sherlock stating that he’s gay and John saying that he’s not interested? I could go on and on about all those loose threads, all the disappointment – but I’m tired and shut up now.
There are so many great points in this addition, but I just want to bold and italicize this point, because I’ve literally been screaming about this for a couple months:
“film a real wedding, show John and Mary kissing, show Sherlock coping well, accepting Mary as a friend, put the cases more centre stage, don’t have Mary kill Sherlock etc.?”
Show the wedding, show us that John and Mary LIKE each other, don’t have John chomping at the bit to get away from Mary and his wedding planning, don’t have him sitting there looking devastated the night he’s planning to propose to her,
Hell, don’t let Sherlock ruin that night for him if she’s so much more important to John than Sherlock is! Don’t show John pacing around his living room like a caged animal because he hasn’t seen Sherlock for a month. Don’t don’t don’t show sherlock being a miserable sad sack because his friend is getting married!!!!!! It just makes him look like a spoiled man-baby without Johnlock!
Don’t write stupid and implausible mysteries that make no sense and call it a day! Jesus Christ???? Don’t give us a missing train car that just can’t be in a secret tunnel but then actually is; don’t give us a murderer who just can’t be working his way up a specific employers pecking order but then actually is; Don’t give us delay action stabbings, and secretaries that give people conflicting information. Focus on writing good mysteries if you want people to take them seriously, for god’s sake.
And, perhaps most importantly, Don’t have Mary kill Sherlock! What the hell was Moffat thinking we would think after including something like that???
Johnlock and villian mary are all part of a much better story that they didn’t seem to realize they were writing. We did not weave this narrative out of whole cloth, and it’s frankly unreasonable and insulting that anyone would think we had.
I, for the life of me, can’t understand why they wrote S3 the way they did. I really can’t.
After watching S2 I thought there was somethin’ between John and Sherlock but honestly, I wasn’t expecting Johnlock to become canon anytime soon. But jeez.. I vividly remember jumping on my seat while watching TSOT and HLV. Like, what the hell? John willing to get drunk on his stag night,
the way Sherlock and John looked at each other when he told him and Mary
that they were gonna have a real baby and they didn’t need him around, Sherlock leaving the wedding early.. I mean,what? I understand that they wanted to show a bittersweet episode, to make everyone realize that was the end of an era, but c’mon. At least show us that Mary and John at least LIKE each other. Show us that they’re in love. Show us WHY they’re in love. They skipped it all, they were like: he’s a man, she’s a woman, they’re getting married. End of the story. Whatever. They didn’t want to us to get invested in their story. Why?
Not only that, but they made us see how unhappy John was at the beginning of HLV and how miserable Sherlock was without him. For what purpose? And for the love of God, why make Mary a villain if they didn’t have any interest in making her an antagonist in the first place? She could have been the sweet innocent Mary they showed us in TEH and no one would have questioned a damn thing about her. And she could have died anyway in S4; in fact John’s reaction to her death would have been way more believable and heartbreaking if Mary were a lovely wife and mother instead of..you know.. an assassin who also shot the main character in the chest. And TAB? I really would like to know from Moftiss what was the meaning behind TAB. Like, they ended it at the waterfall, with John saving Sherlock from Moriarty, then Sherlock woke up saying that he knew what Moriarty was gonna do next but… in S4 he had NO FREAKING IDEA of what Moriarty was gonna do? I mean, what purpose did TAB have? To make him realize that he needed John by his side, maybe? Well, in S4 Sherlock and John were more apart than ever and when John was drowning in TFP, Sherlock was too busy with Sister Edgelord to even care, so…? What? I’m tired.
I’m not trying to hijack this post, but it somehow got me thinking. What went wrong with S3 and the introduction of Mary. Here’s one possible solution to make you care about John and Mary’s relationship and put an end to Johnlock. First of all and this goes for all episodes: no gay jokes, no ambiguity concerning John and Sherlock’s feelings, no sad pining!
TEH My first problem with Mary? Even though we’re meant to like her in the beginning, I was annoyed by her (and that before I shipped Johnlock) because of her “I agree. I’m the best thing that could have happened to you.” Instead, make her at least a bit humble while John struggles to propose to her. It’s fine to let Sherlock interrupt this moment, delay this emotional scene. Cut at least one of the fake theories, give us one plausible solution after all, and save some time to let Sherlock and John resolve the issues concerning the fall. When John is kidnapped, let Sherlock figure out where he is, but let Mary dive headfirst into the fire to save John. In the end of the episode give us a proper proposal. The set up was perfect, all their friends were around, let John fall to his knees, let Mary cry, and let Sherlock smile in the background, because he knew all along that John would propose in this exact moment.
TSOT We should be happy about the marriage right? You still want to make the episode bitter sweet? Fine. Spend the first third with Sherlock sulking, talking with Hudders about losing close friends, show him being not interested in the planning and instead being miserable/delving into cases. Now give us a proper wedding ceremony, vows, tears and kisses. Show us exactly (!) how Mary improved John’s life and the other way around. Cut to best man speech, this is the turning point for Sherlock, while he talks about their friendship and stag night something switches. He realizes that John will always be his best friend and that he found a new friend in Mary. Everyone’s happy, Sherlock and John share a hug, John and Mary a passionate kiss, and off they go to save a life. Now to the final, Sherlock deduces that Mary’s pregnant and this should be the happiest moment of the episode, give it some comedic relief with Mary panicking and let them all dance for the rest of the night in perfect bliss.
HLV We won’t strip Mary of her past entirely, let’s try to make her into a flawed character, not a psychopathic villain. First of all, show us how happy John and Mary are, let them be affectionate. Now, Mary tries to reveal her past to John (she did some shady jobs for the government, no freelance killing for fun and money) but eventually she chickens out and tries to resolve it on her own, because (and this should be made clear) she wants to save her beloved husband and her dear friend Sherlock. Good intentions, that’s important. Of course her plan backfires, Sherlock walks in on her and Magnussen, offers his help and just as she is about to to accept his help, Magnussen grabs her from behind, they struggle, she shoots. It’s a tragic accident, Sherlock collapses. She knocks Magnussen out. The reason Sherlock survives is that she actually saves his life by performing first aid. She reveals her secrets to John, it puts a strain on their relationship, John blames her for Sherlock’s state, but after all she saved Sherlock’s life, this time for real. She shows remorse, apologizes over and over, no lies, no threats. In the end they come up with a plan to bring down Magnussen, it all goes to hell, Sherlock has to shoot him. On the Tarmac we have a long and intimate talk between John and Sherlock, no innuendos, just an honest depiction of an outstanding friendship, we end with Mary coming up to Sherlock, hugging him, holding him for just a bit too long and hear her whisper a quiet ‘thank you’ to his ear.
Wasn’t too hard, right? That way I would have actually cared about her death in TST.
If the intentions of the show were this clean, this clearly drawn, s4 would have still been WTF City, but at least some of the plot points wouldn’t have seemed so mystifying.
Reblogging because this post with additions is a master class in plot doctoring.
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