plaidadder:

very-grumpy-bisexual:

olichki:

plaidadder:

delurkingdetective:

plaidadder:

Well, I was not in the fandom when S1 and S2 actually aired. I watched S1 and S2 for the first time during the Hiatus. So I don’t know how fandom responded to Sarah, though I have seen some recommendations for Johnlock fics that include Sarah.

When I joined the fandom, though, I definitely did not see a lot of Sarah-bashing still going on. That may be because she exits the scene after S1, and by the time the Hiatus happened it was clear she wouldn’t be coming back. 

The thing that differentiated Sarah from Irene Adler, Mary Morstan, and Eurus, apart from her not being a sexy ninja dominatrix (though as I recall she doesn’t do too badly in the fight at the circus) is that generating conflict within the John/Sherlock relationship was not her raison d’etre. It’s true that there is this running joke in “The Blind Banker” about Sherlock not getting it that John wants to go on this date with Sarah WITHOUT Sherlock tagging along. But despite all the many ways in which this first date goes horribly wrong, Sarah continues dating John anyway, presumably realizing that he will continue to have his craziness with Sherlock regardless and presumably, at least for the time being, being OK with that.

In other words, Sarah Sawyer is a lot like the canon Mary Morstan. She’s kind and supportive (her first act is to cover for the fact that the exhausted John has fallen asleep in his office), she likes Sherlock, her romance with John is inextricable from the case John is investigating at the time, and she tolerates John’s continued adventures with Sherlock. She is in fact so much like the ACD canon Mary Morstan that I assumed, when she was introduced, that she essentially WAS Sherlock’s version of Mary Morstan and that she and John would eventually marry.

But “Blind Banker” was written by Steve Thompson, who was kicked off the team sometime after “The Reichenbach Fall.” So Sarah Sawyer was his character; and evidently Moffat and Gatiss weren’t interested in retaining her (Moffat makes it clear in “Scandal in Belgravia,” the first episode of S2, that Sarah is long gone, and that since her John has had a string of interchangeable short-term girlfriends). It’s never occurred to me before, but maybe some of the batshit craziness of Mary Morstan’s character/arc has to do with wanting her to be NOTHING LIKE that boring old Sarah Sawyer, who was just a doctor with a kind heart and a good sense of humor who had a thing for John and also liked Sherlock and did not have any Secret Past or fancy riding crops or ninja assassin skills.

In fact, we are eventually shown that ‘Mary Morstan’ is not really Mary Morstan, and that the identity she’s been using the whole time John knew her has been stolen; so whereas Sarah Sawyer may have been a real (ACD canon) Mary Morstan, Mary is explicitly identified as a fake Mary Morstan–someone who pretends to be like ACD canon Mary (and Sarah), but only as her cover.

Huh, I never thought of Sarah Sawyer as “Stephen Thompson’s” character before, but that framing makes sense.  I really like TRF, Thompson’s other episode, and one of the things I like about it is its use of female characters.  TRF is Sally Donovan’s best episode, and arguably Molly’s as well, and I think Kitty Reilly makes for a villainous character of a different and more interesting style than Irene/Mary/Eurus.  I wonder how much of that is Thompson’s influence.

My guess would be a lot of it.

This is in fact Donovan’s best episode, and that’s because something that was established early on about her character–that she has always been skeptical of Sherlock’s abilities and his motives–finally produces some entirely understandable and yet devastating consequences. It’s a legitimate payoff–the culmination of 2 years of preparation. And there are just so few payoffs like that in S3-S4. It’s never “oh…you know I should have seen that coming.” Instead it’s always, “I…wait…WHAT THE FUCK?”

I’ve always assumed that the “Sherlock is a fraud” plot was either Thompson’s idea or Thompson’s execution. Since Kitty’s part of that plot, that would make her Thompson’s character. Well, Kitty vanishes completely after TRF, and so, essentially, does the fraud plot. Gatiss clearly had zero interest in resolving that and zero interest in continuing with Kitty Riley. It’s hand-waved in 30 seconds at the beginning of TEH.

But the fraud plot is genius, really, because in addition to raising the stakes for those of us who know Sherlock won’t really die, it allows for the culmination of so many different character arcs. It gives Molly the chance to show how much she now understands about Sherlock and to really convey to him the depth of her feelings by making it clear that she wants to help *him,* regardless of what happens to the Myth of Sherlock the Genius. (He asks if she would still want to help him if he really was exposed as a fraud; she doesn’t hesitate.) It gives John the opportunity to realize how closely tied up he is with Sherlock now and how deeply invested he is in both Sherlock the man and Sherlock the myth. It gives Sherlock the opportunity to finally confront his self-destructive fascination with Moriarty as well as his tangled emotions about John and about life itself (and his life as John has helped shape it). It gives Donovan the chance to finally act on the not unreasonable doubts she’s always had about Sherlock. And it requires Lestrade, who is often harried and anxious but emotionally speaking has generally been a low-angst character who knows who he trusts and what he wants and how to get it, to grapple with some new and really distressing emotions. 

So TRF is the beginning of an arc that really NEEDS resolving; but it is also the payoff for a lot of development that’s already been done. It’s the closest thing this show ever gave us to the successful resolution of a prepared and sustained narrative arc. It doesn’t FEEL like a resolution because all of these relationships seem to be flying apart into chaos. But in fact this episode is the culmination, not just of Moriarty’s arc, but of everyone’s s1-s2 character arc.

In other words, it may be that Thompson was better at writing for women characters; or it may just be that he was better at character development, period. 

This is fascinating to me.

I was rewatching Sherlock not long ago, and after S1+S2 just stopped. Overall, TRF is a very satisfying episode and the the fact it was really great was the reason I was excited for more Sherlock at the time, but looking back TEH is the begging of the end since it was my first true disappointment with the show.

I wonder why Thompson was kicked off. Considering he did pen one the more popular episodes of the show, were they unhappy with his execution of their outline?

My guess is jealousy. Mofftiss saw this as THEIR show – it was THEIR idea. So how dare Thompson be better at writing their own show than them? They wanted all of the credit and all of the glory so he had to go. I heard somewhere that he also wrote the drunk scenes in TSo3 but that could be myth. But if it does it makes even more sense why he got kicked off. They just gave him the silly scenes and it still managed to be one of the best bits of the series. So they decided to get rid of him completely after that, which explains why season 4 is such a sharp downhill turn. It seems Thompson was 100% of their success and professionalism.

OK, I feel a responsibility now to point out that I was wrong about Thompson being kicked off the show, and about when he left. @i-love-the-bee-keeper has the 411 about that over here:

What Ever Happened to Stephen Thompson? 

Salient points:

* Yes, Steve Thompson did write the ‘stag night’ scenes in TSoT

* Steve Thompson left the team because he was offered his own show, which did not take off for whatever reason

* Steven Thompson did some interviews about TRF after it came out but otherwise Moffat and Gatiss have handled all the publicity since then

* probably they were jealous though.

One of the things I hate about tumblr is that if you make an error you will never catch up with it, because the reblogs always repeat the original error. Nevertheless: Thompson was involved in S3, he did write the stag night scenes, and probably he left the team voluntarily though I imagine that writers’ room sometimes got kind of tense.