ivyblossom:
missdaviswrites:
wendyqualls:
monikakrasnorada:
seducemymindyouidiot:
ellipsisaspired:
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.
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.
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