your daughter’s disappeared without a trace, your youngest son is playing fetch with an imaginary dog in the garden and you’re avoiding phone calls from Victor Trevor’s parents
It comes to me in waves of sad what BBC Sherlock could have been and then what it ended up being. I keep thinking I’ve processed it, and then another wave of regret? nostalgia? wishful thinking? hits me. I would never have started watching this show if I knew The Final Problem was going to be where it ended up. God, remember how amazing S1 and S2 were? The episodes crackled with life and energy, and dare I suggest it, sexual tension between the leads. I had never seen anything like it. S3 got goofy, and TAB was a real head scratcher, but it was still recognizable as Sherlock. S4 just ruined it all for me. I can only think S1 and S2 were a happy accident. Despite themselves, the showrunners managed to make magic without even realizing it.
So, I try to let S4 exist in some parallel dimension, some fever dream or mind palace romp that has nothing to do with the edgy, exciting, dripping with meaning universe of broken, but evolving people who CARE goddamn it. They care so much it twists them up, just like we the fandom CARED.
So I’m going to keep caring about this universe and these characters, but I’m going to find the fan-made extensions, the stories and art and vids that make stories that MEAN something out of the mess that BBC Sherlock left us with.
You have put in to words what has been rattling around in my head for a few weeks now. As far as I am concerned season 4 never happened, (unless someone is writing a fix-it for it.) These characters are ours now. The show runners abused them and denied them the love, and happy ending that they deserved – so we will. A thousand times over, our Sherlock and John will find peace and more importantly, each other.
*hugs*
I have complete faith in this fandom, and that we will continue to do what we do best.
Reblogging in love of fix-its! We need them!
This is exactly what I said in my 4,500 word reaction post to series 4, the day after TFP aired:
I’m emotionally exhausted by all of this, but relieved that the series is over, because I was frankly dreading it, apparently for good reasons. At least I know now what I’ll be busy fixing for the next three years, or possibly forever if they never make another series. Mission: accepted. And now my watch begins. As I said the other day, this is why we here in this fandom exist: because the canon will end someday, and after that, their world belongs to us.
Someday, at some point, they will stop creating canon. And upon that day, we inherit these characters. We will always, always have the last word. Speaking for myself, at least, I plan on having quite a few of those. Suck it, Moftiss. The sad truth is that we’re better than they are. They could have built something great if they’d only gotten their tongues out of their cheeks and their heads out of their own asses, but instead they decided to kill the central element of any incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, which is always, always the dynamic with John Watson. They pushed it severely off-centre with the introduction of Mary, then made it worse and worse and worse in ways that were by no means necessary or even understandable at times. It’s as though they meant to. It’s sad. I’ve been depressed since series 4 aired. But damn it, I will do my small part in righting this mess, along with leagues of my talented colleagues. Not for them: for us.
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.
Something changed with BBC Sherlock. Series 4 was very different compared to everything that preceded it, even TAB. The direction, the tone and dare I say ‘soul’ of the show drastically altered. Something occurred that rocked the boat and changed it’s essence. I would suggest that it happened in the summer of 2015.
In February that year there were rumblings that Ben Stephenson was leaving the BBC. A key person in the development and backing of BBC Sherlock. In March 2015 the announcement came that Stephenson was leaving to join Bad Robot in LA. Ben was replaced by Polly Hill in May of 2015 who stayed at the beeb for a year before being poached by ITV. In June 2016 Piers Wenger took over the job. By the time Ben Stephenson left, s3 had aired, TAB was written and filmed. So it was during Polly’s tenure that series 4 was written.
Looking at the three people involved in this chain we go from Ben Stephenson a gay man who clearly recognised the gay/bi goals of BBC Sherlock, to Piers Wenger who championed Cucumber [the LGBT drama that was explicit and very real in it’s depiction of LGBTQ life in the UK] for Channel 4 and who had previously worked on Dr Who with Steven Moffat. Polly Hill in the middle is the more conservative of the three. In the Royal Television Society Journal she is cited as: “If you are Jimmy McGovern, Tony
Jordan, Kay Mellor, Billy Ivory – or,
now, Hugo Blick – it is fine. She gets
popular drama, but she has quite a
closed mind.” The majority of the writers in that list write gritty working class drama, strong women, and historical dramas. Not much LGBTQ stuff. Mark and Steven would have been writing s4 during Polly’s tenure at the BBC. Piers came in just as setlock was in full swing and the handover between Polly and Piers wasn’t complete till TFP filming had finished. I did notice at the BFI event that Steven was uncharacteristically physical and emotional when he was introduced by Piers. [Huge man hug and story of how close they were..a slight air of relief from Steven] We also have to look at the big picture too, and one event under Polly Hill’s tenure: In Jan 2016 Steven Moffat quit Dr Who. Plus don’t forget the cryptic tweet from Mark at the time that Steven was now free from tyranny.
Basically I am theorising that due to the leadership of the Drama Controller at the BBC the direction of s4 changed. But the fuckery clearly continued on Piers Wenger’s watch. As evidenced in the weird to and fro following SDCC.
The change in rhetoric concerning the end of the show. We went from Steven correcting the press over Benedict’s statement of ‘good time to pause’ with the ‘it is not the end, we never said that’, to an official party line of ‘series 4 could be the last we ever do’.
Reduced PR, both before and after s4 airing, for the two leads, including official photographs, appearances at events, joint interviews
Limited press exposure of Ben and Martin when attending an episode screening
Lack of interviews from the cast post airing of s4. Well in all honesty it’s only being Mark out there in the press
Announcement of the closure of John’s blog [announced pre screening] and direction that Sherlock would now be tweeting. But he didn’t, well only in the Kermit event.
Arwel told to explain the ‘elephant’ tweets with a clear statement that they did not tie into johnlock [TJLC]
Ben Caron exiting Twitter
Sue and Steven cancelling the Oxford University appearance
The BBC’s defensive and closed shop replies to complaints about s4
Is it damage control? Is it just one big fuck up and Sherlock got caught in the middle of it all? Let’s face it, this type of thing occurs all the time in corporations, especially if in-house politics are in play and there is rapid turnover of key people. You can’t change administrations without some backlash, back peddling, and backing out of difficult decisions that you see as screw ups. And one thing that clearly is evidence that a corporation is in turmoil is the actions of the employees as they scramble to adapt, correct, salvage, vent, and fudge their way around forced changes that they cannot admit occurred and very clearly pissed them off.
I think that where I most diverge (other than over the ludicrous quality of the writing) with the show Sherlock s3-4 is over his growth arc. I was all for the original “great man to good” emotional maturation, the notion the writers put forth that we were going to see young Sherlock grow up to be the mature Rathbone Holmes, tempering his cold intelligence with a greater understanding of the human heart. Sounds good, yeah?
And yet the manner they chose to foster that growth, having Sherlock be abandoned and attacked, done emotional or physical violence by almost everyone he was forming nascent emotional relationships with, is a distasteful and offensive one. Is that truly what these writers think best fosters growth to maturity and emotional balance? How horrifying!
Well, maybe they don’t believe it. Maybe they just find it titillating, that violence upon a figure they claim to love themselves. We shouldn’t mock someone’s kink, after all, and nobody signed a contract that the show would remain consistent in genre, tone or even plot.
But that kind of violence just isn’t my kink. Further, I don’t find it plausible that a healthy and mature emotionality would grow out of abuse. And, sadly, even in the most fanciful fantasy, my own mental structuring of what I read or see demands some degree of plausibility: even an AU must conform to certain rules or it’s all just noise, without order at all. Visual pyrotechnics, whether in the form of an unrealistically attractive cast or in terms of explosions and special effects, are all very nice in their way, but for me to understand things in a role other than mere spectator, there must be some fundamental plausibility.
And that’s where the show, Sherlock s3-4, and I part company. It’s not about plot outcomes; it’s not about how it diverges from canon; it’s not about any one character and their relationship to any other. Not only do I find the notion that one can beat a person into growing up (the fundamental terror wrought by the abusive parent) repugnant, but the fact that I know it doesn’t work makes the entire premise as flawed as though the writers had suddenly turned off gravity.
So for everyone who has suggested that I’m critical of s3-4 out of pique that some plot/character element or other failed to be manifest, no, that’s not it at all. What offends me even more than the fact of violence itself is the underlying premise that abuse and alienation can create a mature, happy and well-balanced individual. What lives those writers must lead, that such things seem like entertainment and worthy “correction” of canon in their heads.
I agree. Sherlock is:
called a freak
has to hear someone say how much he(they) hated him
reprogrammed by his own brother..for his own good
beaten up and drugged
gives up his life for his friends, goes it alone
is harshly beaten and tortured
hit repeatedly by the friend he left to saved
loses that friend to another
that ‘other’ shoots him
forced to live alone all through S3-4
shown consoling himself with drugs
avoided by his best friend
beaten by his best friend
manipulated by…whatever Eurus is
Yeah, so all in all, not good.
Agreed, completely. They’ve essentially turned Sherlock himself into the villain. Moriarty, Mary, Eurus, Smith, and even John and Mycroft all see fit to inflict violence and abuse, both physical and emotional, upon Sherlock – and then to stay or leave the picture, not defeated at Sherlock’s hands, but on their own terms (they even made sure we knew Smith would have gotten away with his crimes if it hadn’t turned out he enjoyed confessing). All of this after two years of god knows what, ending with Sherlock being tortured.
And we are told time and again by the narrative that all of this – ALL of it – is somehow deserved because of Reichenbach. We’re barely allowed to remember Moriarty’s role; it hardly matters what Mary did. Sherlock somehow deserves all of it. To make him a good man. Because of course the man who left everything behind to save his friends’ lives somehow wasn’t already a good person. It’s deeply disturbing, and makes zero sense to me.
And frankly it destroys John Watson as a character. He’s left vacillating between useless victimhood and avenging rage that somehow never has any other target than Sherlock himself. What kind of friendship is that?
By the end of series four, I would have been quite happy to see Sherlock give Irene a ring and ask for her to return the favor of helping him disappear. It would have been a far more satisfying outcome than showing him “happy” to still have his abuser in his life.
A John Watson who is dangerous physically and emotionally to his Sherlock Holmes. Having seen that, I still feel the same way I did on 15 January. Moftiss has lost the plot.
they announced rosie’s birth in a right wing newspaper and it wasn’t sarcastic
It would have been inconsistent not to have used a right wing newspaper. The entire show takes place in an alt-right vision of London where all the following things are so normalized that most of the world-wide audience accepts them without question:
1) almost all white;
2) women who largely depend on men for agency [yes, even Mrs. Hudson who got her property by remaining in an abusive marriage until her husband died, and yes even Mummy Holmes who gave up a brilliant career to stay home and keep house];
3) foreigners being dangerous and scary [Did you notice that when Mary was acting like a villain she was deduced to be foreign but when she decided being a good wife was everything she became “that English woman”?];
4) LGBTQ+ characters who are all, every single one, untrustworthy and/or weak and/or substance abusers and/or villainous [A broad range of such characters including lesbian, gay, trans or gender-fluid or gender-nonconforming “cross-dresser”, bisexual, pansexual];
5) admirable/decent people who are all straight, so much normalized that the very idea of any of them being involved in a single-sex romantic relationship is a ridiculous joke;
6) governments that cutely spy on and lie and attempt to control citizens without much regard for law or truth and without being seriously criticized for it;
7) a barren prison atmosphere without affection or stimulation for the mentally ill, even a child.
Yes, queerbaiting is cruel and inexcusable, and the show reeked of it. But I wonder whether if more people had made the entire far-right universe of the show the focus of their complaints to the BBC, rather than only “The showrunners made it seem like Sherlock and John would eventually be in a romantic relationship but they never were,” the BBC might have paid more attention.
All great points. And every single one of these were bones I had to pick with Season four, and with the show in general. And many of these criticisms had been brought up as far back as S1.
Though, to speak to your last paragraph, I’m not sure if the BBC would have been more receptive. I know I complained about the treatment of mental illness, the show’s handling of female characters and the queercoding of villains, and got the same copy/paste response as everyone else. In fact, I heard of some folks who wrote in just to complain about the declining quality, and how far S4 diverged from the heart of ACD’s stories, and got the same copy/paste response about John and Sherlock not being in love.
I honestly think the BBC just didn’t care, and they responded to every complaint, no matter how articulate, with the exact same script, so they could just clear out their inbox, and report that they had responded. It was extremely unprofessional, imo.
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