myladylyssa:

a-candle-for-sherlock:

porcupine-girl:

pennypaperbrain:

notagarroter:

pennypaperbrain:

beltainefaerie:

a-candle-for-sherlock:

This post (”What Moffat Doesn’t Understand About Grief”) fascinated me, because the author talks about Moffat’s fear of consequences–how he’ll introduce world-shattering grief, or sacrifice, or hurt, or change, in his Doctor Who characters’ lives, and then never follow up on it. There are no apparent consequences.

That’s exactly what makes BBC Sherlock feel so unresolved. We kept waiting for the consequences to come home, and they never did. There are huge things and subtler ones unaddressed, things that should have changed them in meaningful ways: Sherlock being tortured.

Mary shooting Sherlock. Sherlock nearly confessing his love on the tarmac. Sherlock overdosing on the plane, reading John’s blog. Mycroft begging John to take care of him. John attacking Sherlock after Mary’s death. John saying he wanted more than his marriage to Mary. John confronting Sherlock about his need for love. Mycroft lying to Sherlock about his sister.

The emotional stakes keep being upped, but there’s no closure. The things happen, there are tears or shouting, and then the story simply continues, without change, or growth, or discussion, or resolution. They end up in the exact same place as they began; 221B, two friends solving crimes and cleaning up after explosions, still more myth than men.

Emotional moments can’t be introduced just for the hell of it; they have to lead somewhere, mean something. Once I thought the authors had a plan. But now I think we’ll have to go on making our own meaning out of it all, through fanart and fic and meta and whatever means we have; for the sake of these characters’ sanity, and our own, and for some kind of truly happy ending.

All of this! As a writer, there are some WIPs that I’ve been refining for years because the emotional consequences must be dealt with and I didn’t want to go on as if nothing happened or slap-dash a cheap fix.  We were told this season was about consequences, but was it, really?

This is a large part of what’s lead to Moffat’s wild popularity, I think. As a writer, he’s in the rather unusual and ambivalently enviable situation  of his major weakness being a huge part of what draws readers (viewers) to his work, because it doesn’t become apparent until some time has passed that it is a weakness. It looks like a setup for a wonderful payoff… that doesn’t come.

I don’t think that anyone would claim that, as a writer, Moffat is very invested in *realism* – that much is true. 

And yet, in a way…  I think his approach as a writer is much truer to my experience of life than the above comments allow. 

The emotional stakes keep being upped, but there’s no closure. The
things happen, there are tears or shouting, and then the story simply
continues, without change, or growth, or discussion, or resolution.

Closure isn’t something guaranteed by real life, nor is resolution.  Nor even discussion, since a lot of real people in this world are not comfortable discussing heavy emotional topics. 

These are things fanfic writers and readers love because they are emotionally satisfying, not because they are honest or true to our lived experience.  The idea that everyone will sit down and talk out their problems, and speak openly about their true feelings, and have epiphanies, and at last become mature, healthy, actualized, emotionally honest people – this is a fantasy.  It’s a fantasy that comes from self-help books, not fairytales, but it’s a fantasy nonetheless.

I think one of the funniest and yet truest moments in all of Sherlock is this exchange:

SHERLOCK:
Well, we’re in a good place. It’s, um … very affirming.
JOHN: You got that from a book.
SHERLOCK: Everyone got that from a book.

Here, Moffat is playing with this self-help fantasy – the idea that if you use the right words in the right order, that will somehow demonstrate proper emotional growth and maturity.  When really it’s just using borrowed language to fulfill an appealing cliche. 

We love this stuff in fanfic exactly *because* it rarely happens in real life.  In real life, change happens, but it isn’t always change for the better.  Growth happens, but not without a lot of backwards slippage into bad old habits, neuroses, and defense mechanisms.

One thing you can say about real life: things happen, the “story” continues, whether or not anyone has acheived closure or learned any valuable life lessons.  We have no choice but to keep moving forward.

You all are perfectly entitled to see this narrative choice as a failure on Moffat’s part.  Personally, I see it as an example of the way he consistently reaches for greater, larger truths about the human experience.

Ah, but while closure might not happen in reality,
consequences of some kind almost always do. Emotions do mean *something*, even
if it’s effed up and strangulated and comes out in involuntary behaviour while
never being spoken of. That was acknowledged to some extent in S1 and S1 – John
is clearly affected in some way by his war experience, whether you call it PTSD
or not – then largely abandoned in S3 and S4 – Sherlock seems to feel no
physical or psychological consequences of being tortured in Serbia.

It seems pretty unlikely that Moffat is entirely unable to
grasp the dynamics of emotional consequence, but judging strictly by the end result they aren’t his strong
point or his interest. Once the audience for Sherlock was built, he was free to
shelve that element entirely in favour of those that play to his strengths. The
resolution of the S1 climax at the start of S2 was unsatisfying but it existed;
by contrast the resolution of the S2 climax at the start of S3 was
non-existent. That’s a step change from a world where certain conventions are
regarded, if half-heartedly, to one where they are ignored.

In order to get something out of S3 and S4, I’ve taken to
regarding each episode as a self-contained AU – this seems to work pretty well,
and it does allow for that most positive of interpretations, the idea that each
episode contains its own set of truths. You do indeed get more emotional and
psychological truths per square inch if you freely contradict yourself, because
of the shifting and messy nature of those truths.

Still, getting yourself into Moffat’s professional position
in highly commercial TV and then shifting your focus entirely to your own artistic
idiosyncrasies seems rather like reaching for your great truths from the top of
a stepladder while shouting ‘stepladders are for wimps!’

Ok, fair warning, I am about to wade into some stuff that I am not an expert in. So people should feel free to correct me.

First off: If you like stories without any closure, where questions are not answered (even if the characters clearly know the answers to those questions), then great. I’m glad you enjoyed S4.

But it is entirely predictable that it was unpopular, and it has nothing to do with fanfiction.

Closure is not something people only want in fanfic. In Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting by Robert McKee (often considered a Very Important Book when it comes to screenwriting), he identifies three types of plot: archplot, miniplot, and antiplot. He portrays them as three corners of a triangle. None of these are inherently good or bad, but he does note that the farther you get from archplot and closer to miniplot or antiplot, the less popular your story will be. People are drawn to archplot: clear cause and effect, external conflicts, linear time, consistent realities, a single, active protagonist, and… closed endings. Changing some of the variables moves you toward miniplot, changing others moves you toward antiplot.

Many successful movies move toward miniplot or antiplot by messing with one or two of these qualities. Some movies that are considered very high quality push hard in one of these directions – but these movies are generally not huge commercial successes.

Taking this frame and applying it to Sherlock, it’s easy to see why S4, and especially TFP, were very unpopular, even (maybe especially) with rabid fans of the show.

The first two seasons tended very strongly toward archplot. Timelines were messed with occasionally, but other than that, the show very clearly had a consistent reality where events were causal rather than coincidental (this is actually sort of the entire basis of Sherlock Holmes, or else his deductions don’t work); a single, active protagonist in Sherlock; external conflicts (cases to be solved); and closed endings. The few exceptions to this are the things that a lot of fans don’t like – for example, the pool scene being resolved by the coincidence of Moriarty receiving a phone call rather than by some active decision on the part of any of the characters.

S3 started to move away from the archplot, with many different decisions that work against each of these principles. Fans disagree about which of these decisions they like or dislike. Did you find the extremely nonlinear storytelling in TSoT fun, or confusing? Did you think that leaving the question of why they forgave Mary so easily open was a solid nod to realism, or sloppiness/inability to actually figure out an answer themselves? (Ha, guess which side I’m on.) Did you like that the conflicts became more internal, or do you miss the old school cases?

S4 (and TAB, but like honestly I barely remember what actually happened there so I’ma ignore it) basically threw everything about the archplot out the window (except, arguably, that Sherlock was still the single protagonist). And the thing about throwing everything out the window, all at once, especially in TFD, is that it didn’t even solidly go into the miniplot or the antiplot camp – it did it all. Which to many people made it seem like a mess of bad storytelling, rather than a calculated breaking of certain rules because they needed to be broken.

I think the thing that hit a lot of people the hardest was the move away from a consistent, causal reality. Sherlock Holmes has to have a consistent reality that obeys cause-and-effect in order to function as Sherlock Holmes. You throw in random factors that he couldn’t possibly have known about, memory-wiping, mind control, and things like that, and we’re not really telling a Sherlock Holmes story anymore.

But then when you couple that with open endings… Okay, open endings are realistic, but when suddenly nothing else in the show is realistic, even by its own universe’s standards, it’s extra-jarring and feels very out of place. There’s a reason open endings is over on the miniplot side and consistent realities is over on the anti-plot side: when you combine them, it feels less like they wanted to make it realistic and more like they went too far in making their universe inconsistent and just couldn’t resolve everything, or didn’t try hard enough at least.

Now I’m going to wander into my personal opinion, not anything McKee actually said… Personally, I think that the passive protagonist is the hardest of these non-archplot elements to pull off. It’s the one that’s most likely to kill your story all by itself, and the one you have to compensate for most carefully to make it work. It can certainly be done, and one well, but if you’re not careful you can have all the other elements of archplot and then have a passive protagonist drain all the life out of a story.

So in TFP, adding Sherlock’s passivity (he’s always reacting to what Eurus throws at him, rarely making his own decisions to move the plot along) to what is already a bit of a jumble of non-linear storytelling, inconsistent reality, lack of coherent cause-and-effect – it just makes the whole package harder to salvage for most viewers. Plus the conflicts are almost all internal. Yes, Eurus is an external opponent, but all the challenges she presents involve internal struggles. Which, honestly, absent all this other stuff could have been amazing! It’s possible that the sense of frustration and futility caused by combining this with the passive protagonist could have really been emotionally hard-hitting… if it weren’t combined with all of the above.

If all they’d done was leave lots of threads untied, lots of decisions unexplained, lots of plots hanging open, then (especially if they didn’t do it in a particularly methodical manner) people would probably still have a vague sense of dissatisfaction. When you combine with everything else, though, it starts to feel like they just got so distracted by their own cleverness that they forgot to tie things up, or didn’t even notice it was hanging open to begin with. (Especially given that in interviews before S4, they promised that lots of plot threads would be resolved. Were they lying, or did they actually think they did that?)

So basically: If you liked S4 and TFP in particular, good for you. It’s unconventional storytelling, that’s for sure, and I’m sure that alone attracts some people.

But it’s not at all surprising that it wasn’t popular. It’s not because we don’t like things that are “honest” or “true,” or because we read too much fanfic. It’s because they lured us in with episodes that were mostly structurally solid archplots (which, remember, archplot doesn’t mean trite or cliched – lots of really excellent writing is archplot), then threw literally all of it out the window this season. And it didn’t feel like they did it to be “honest” or for any other principled, sound storytelling reason. It felt like they did it because breaking rules is cool and clever, so they wanted to break all the rules just because they can.

Holy crap, the additions to this post are amazing.

What’s even worse about this unconventional storytelling–the unresolved, the open, the anti-plot–is the very *artificial* way in which the show ends: that voiceover and montage. It is jarring. And given to us by a character that doesn’t deserve it and removes us from the protagonists.