I have enough. I am going to say my piece, and perhaps after this, I can already move on.
After series two was aired and during setlock season 3, I realized that Mofftiss loved to lie. Lie they might, lie they would just because they wanted to protect their narrative, which was darn understandable. Of course, many people were hurt, heartbroken. But since I fell so hard with this series, I let it pass. Months dragged, with so many spectacularly written metas I read, fan fics and fan arts i devoured, a few friendships were forged ( @andrealein , who I got to meet personally, hello girl!) , rewatching the seasons, buying Sherlock BBC merchandise, even attending the first fan-run Sherlock convention in my city, it was all fantastic.
But after season 4, and its disappointing turns and results, the massive plot holes, its horrible treatment (erasing his significance) of JW, TPTB’s petty treatment of fans, who saw the relationship between JW and SH was more than platonic, it time for me to stop pining for this show.
I despise the contradiction (as revealed by the result of this convention) and the condescending manner some fans displayed here, who still believe that Mofftiss have an agenda. Listen, I don’t think they have one. They have botched it all up. They contradict themselves, they play with our minds, I don’t want it anymore.
There are other shows out there, better ones. I will still reblog the first three seasons (and maybe the moments I love in season 4), still adore MF and Cumberbatch. But I have enough of wanting, of believing that Mofftiss only want to protect their story. You see, they could shove their secrets to their arses. I don’t care. This time I refuse to be played with.
They might be lying (or not), as sad and unfortunate as it is, it is time to disengage.
Totally understand your point of view. I agree with you. Thank you for posting.
I agree too. Sherlock gave me many things and I am glad for that but I’m far past hoping. The new quote about purposely baiting about Hiddles is simple and minor but somehow drove their sick love of fooling people home to me. They take perverse pleasure in having the power to get hopes up and dash them, to take advantage of people’s very love for them and their show so they can then laugh at them. Perhaps they feel justified because they look down on fannishness (especially in women) so therefore think anyone who bothers to care that much (about anything) deserves to get fooled. Been hurt too much themselves, which turned them into nasty Teachers? Or just naturally heartless pricks? Idk.
They have proven themselves to be arrogant, supercilious men.
You know, I remember reading somewhere that Mofftiss were batting around the idea of this new project (which we now know to be Dracula) as far back as when they were writing for Sherlock Season 4. And I felt at the time that one of the reasons Moffat probably quit Dr. Who was to focus more on this new project.
So for me that sort of explains Sherlock S4, and especially TFP. Their hearts, minds, and creativity were already focussed somewhere else. Basically they were just getting bored with Sherlock, and it showed.
I just want to add @sussexbound‘s tags because that sums up even more of my opinion on this new project:
As I said yesterday about Sherlock, I’ve definitely observed that a lot of people think that the last book or the last season in a series is often… problematic. If you’ve been in enough fandoms, you’ll see this is a very common phenomenon. It’s also very common for people who’re particularly attached to a pairing or a character to feel ‘cheated’ and rant irrationally at the creators (unfortunately). As I said, this is just what fans and fandoms are *like*. I literally– literally!– cannot remember the last time a final season or book truly pleased most diehard fans, or there was a lack of wank at that point at least. Being a diehard fan means being unreasonable to some degree, and when you translate this to the way most people act on the Internet, it’s a matter of trolling waiting to happen. My point is that there’s certainly plenty of pure wank, and this is what people who’re frustrated with the discourse often focus on. As for me, I’m more concerned with the fact that most of the more thoughtful metas aren’t really… that much better, in terms of the depth or closeness of analysis being performed.
In general, I’ve been thinking that fans are often most frustrated when they feel that things didn’t change enough, so the writers actually kept going with their MO in ways they’d hoped *would* change, while adding new stuff they feel unprepared for. That type of rug pull or ‘gut punch moment’ Moffat said he likes so much is actually something many fans tend to hate, especially when they’re simultaneously confronted by the fact that many of the undesirable aspects of the style remained. This was a huge problem one could see with the overwhelmingly negative critical and fan response to the ‘transgressive’ approach Gatiss took with ‘The Final Problem’, as I’ve written about recently. Of course, this is also precisely what happened with Moffat and Gatiss’s clear, consistent interest in queer subtext (largely remaining just that). It *feels* like a bait and switch, leading to claims of the lack of character progress combined precariously with criticism of the apparent inconsistencies.
In the Raven Cycle fandom, I’ve noticed the more mature sounding, analytical drive-by critiques of ‘The Raven King’ saying that the characters didn’t grow enough, at least aside from Ronan and Adam. That is, the others’ arcs didn’t *resolve* enough. This is definitely a common refrain for the last book or season of a show, when people come into the story with a lot of preset expectations and projections onto the text. In the case of the last book in The Raven Cycle, it’s common to see people say that Noah in particular just disappeared, somehow. And this critique is always presented as being somehow more hard-hitting than pure squee about the books, a sign the person is thinking deeply and critically about the text. In fact, it’s generally a sign that they didn’t pay enough attention to the story.
Do many narratives actually go off the rails at the last minute? Sure, yeah. But it seems to me that if your critique is primarily that things about the characters didn’t change *enough*, or they changed in the *wrong way*, then that warrants a second look. It’s a sign there were certain expectations being applied, certain standards as to what sort of thing qualified as a ‘resolution’ as well as what *needed* an explicitly textual resolution to start with. And unlike these fans’ implicit assumptions, there’s no rules about what a writer would *have* to address explicitly in terms of characterization and what they can leave to be inferred or simply understood by connecting the dots of related events.
Posts on my dash today about Moffat & Gatiss’s intentions vs. posts depicting scenes from the show with the actors in Sherlock, and the way they’ve played their parts made me think, at first – maybe there is something out of phase in how the writers think about these characters vs. how the actors do… but then I thought, no… that’s not likely.
As much as a it is difficult to place authorial intention at any one locus in a thing like a TV show, if they have always intended that this is a story about the best friends that ever lived, and that the story they’ve told is about how they got to be the men of legend that they are, then I think everyone involved must have known that. So, why is it that the whole story is so outrageously, undeniably romantic, and why is it that I am absolutely positive that Sherlock is in love with John, and that John, though he can’t perhaps embrace it, loves Sherlock, too, and that both of them loved Mary?
Then I thought: maybe the actors really were endeavoring to act friendship. Deep, self-sacrificing friendship, once in a lifetime friendship, and the way they show it on screen simply LOOKS like love. Maybe its that in the imaginations of those actors as expressed by their actorly instruments, those two relationships – deep, true friendship and love – simply express themselves similarly?
Maybe it’s not that there is anything out of phase, it’s just that friendship like theirs LOOKS a lot like love. Maybe the real revelation is how little air there is between the two? How little real distinction.
Just an idea.
Let me see if I can do this. I’ve been up and at it for three hours and I may be out of good words.
Maybe it looks like Sherlock and John love each other because they do. Love and friendship are two words that we expect to cover a lot of ground. Which is why you used so many lovely words to describe the relationship you are seeing on the screen. What if they love each other deeply, steadfastly, selflessly without whatever element is necessary to tip that into the realm of romance?
What would that element be? Sex? Physical affection? Poetry and flowers? An all-consuming desire for one or all of those things? Is it like porn? We just know it when we see it? Or not. If we are being shown all of the elements of a great romance without the actual romance, what does it mean that we are filling that missing element in?
Maybe it’s a gendered thing. I see women speak of their friends in terms that seem very romantic all the time. Maybe we aren’t used to seeing two men behave in the same way.
Maybe we’ve lost the language for romantic relationships that aren’t sexual.
Reblogged because I love these thoughts and want to think more about all of them.
Yeah, I love love love this discussion, and I’ve also been thinking about how to articulate my response. The older I get, the less obvious to me is the distinction between friendship and romantic/sexual love, and the privileging of one over the other (YES, HELLO, TOPIC OF NEXT NOVEL!). And the less interesting/productive/healthy/compelling is the defining and policing of that line. (What even IS that line? Is it, as I suspect, intimately tied to patriarchal imperatives to control women’s sexual behaviour? To own us?) What would our relationships look like if we hadn’t all internalized this, I wonder? What would my life look like?
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I love Holmes in the first place – that line is so blurry, and neither Sherlock Holmes nor John Watson really seems to have a problem with that lack of definition (at least, in my headcanon). And yes, I find this more novel in depictions of masculine relationships, so maybe that’s part of why it’s so compelling.
I agree so much. I don’t see the line so clearly as I once did, and I also I see no point in ANY of the policing. Things are what they are and no amount of policing can change them. Why do we always need things to be so rigidly defined and why are we so attached to reifying the codes that define them?
Also, this is the thing that, I think, makes me not have any problem with the ambiguous, in-processness of the relationship depicted on Sherlock. I love the blurry line and the lack of finished-ness and the uncertainty. I love the vulnerability of where they are with one another. I like that it’s hard to tell where their lines are. I’m not sure I’ve seen male friendship depicted in that way, and I love the sense that it could be both and it could be either. I like that they have refused to define it. It feels like something I recognise. Something a bit real.
I think you’re right, too, about the way we treat sexual relationships vs. friendships and about the policing of that line. I think it is a way of exercising control over what is happening between people. I feel like the whole project is so misdirected, because friendship, love and desire emerge out of our interactions without our control, and it’s pointless to deny their existence when they do. It just makes people unhappy to police themselves and others.
The world is full of tales about male friendships that make it perfectly clear that if it weren’t for sex, the men involved would have no interest in women at all. It’s not Mofftiss’ invention and their show doesn’t even count as a story like that.
The only thing that’s even remotely novel about the way Moffat and Gatiss write this once in a lifetime friendship is that it includes ugly violence and lots of it. Don’t know how you are capable of forgetting that but whatever. No policing intended.
If ambiguity is such a desirable goal and an admirable quality in a show, why don’t the writers and actors say they were being ambiguous about the relationship on purpose? Why do they say it was all gay jokes and fangirls’ imagination?
Also, you must have noticed that there isn’t anything romantic about Sherlock and John’s relationship in s4. Or give me examples of the scenes where Benedict and Martin act in a way that could be interpreted as “outrageously, undeniably romantic”.
I’d love to have an example of a scene where Sherlock does his romantic friendship thing with Mary too. I mean, if the relationships are all equal and similarly ambiguous, let’s see those two have a long staring session and Mary could lick her lips or something. And then John could kick Mary like he did Sherlock, and Sherlock could shoot John and to seal the friendship we should see John and Mary saving Sherlock’s life and being sent away to die as a thank you.
I don’t know what anyone intended, neither do you, but it kind of bugs me when fans try to give the writers depth they themselves never said they had. And when fans pretend that there isn’t anything wrong with the way this friendship is depicted in the show.
Maybe we’ve lost the language for romantic relationships that aren’t sexual.
There’s nothing wrong with shipping and/or wanting your favourite characters to get together in canon romantically and sexually. Nobody’s lost anything because of it. It is, however, possible that something has been lost if Sherlock and John’s relationship is considered romantic after s4.
I recently went back and watched the 2009 Guy Ritchie
Sherlock Holmes movie again. Pairing that with “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes”
by Billy Wilder released in 1970, I can REALLY see the modern influences that
brought the BBC Sherlock series about.
Moftiss themselves have said TPLOSH was a big impetus behind
their modern reboot series. Wilder’s movie has a comedic silliness too it, but
a deep sadness under it as well. Sherlock is coded queer and deeply in love with
Watson, who seems purposefully oblivious. The film has to keep up a tap dance
of laughs to stay above the tears.
There are whole scenes that are lifted into BBC Sherlock.
After Holmes intimates that he and Watson are queer together to get out of fathering
a child for a pushy ballerina, Watson is furious. He blusters at Holmes that
they need to be more careful with their public image– much like John after
reading the Boffin and the Bachelor article in the paper.
Just as John keeps bugging Sherlock in the Moftiss version
about his sexual history (surely you must have had experiences) this Watson prods
at Holmes “I hope I don’t presume too much, but surely there were women?” To which Holmes archly replies, “Yes … you do presume too much.” (To quote sloppily.)
TPLOSH’s Sherlock is a tall and foppish dandy, doing drugs to keep his
feelings under control. The Watson is an angry, shouty little man who grows jealous
at the pretty femme fatale fawning over the detective – without even seeming to
know WHY he is jealous. He has an attachment to Holmes, but is so
deeply in denial it just comes out as smoke and bluster that doesn’t make a lot
sense. Sound familiar?
Funny moments are played with Holmes and Watson handing each other
things and saying “yes, dear” absent-mindedly, and it
seems sweet and domestic, but it’s just a BIG JOKE. Ultimately their attraction can never be named aloud, and they can never be together. Har, har har.
Fast forward a few decades to the Guy Ritchie’s movies with Jude Law and
Robert Downey Jr., and the WHOLE movie is about pining and pain. Watson is moving out of 221b to join
his new fiancé, Mary, with Holmes desperately trying to keep him in his life. As
Drinkingcocoa from Three Patch Podcast said once, the whole film is a “tone
poem” of loss and longing. RDJ’s Sherlock is wasting away like any jilted
regency heroine, while Watson, though fond of Holmes, seems utterly unconcerned
with the rift forming between them. It’s a sad imbalance, and the puppy dog
looks Holmes sends his friend’s way are heartbreaking.
The movie adds a modern sensibility to the Holmes universe with
a kind of steam-punk aesthetic that Ritchie enjoys. There’s quirky, fast camera
angles, snappy dialogue, anachronistic hats and coats that look more cool than
period, and a fast-paced comic-book violence set to rousing music that has
people swinging from bridges high in the air, and jumping away from deadly
explosions with only a scratch or two. It’s more flash and dash than substance, but modern audiences loved it and ate it up, clamoring for more.
Enter, BBC Sherlock just a year later, stage left. It boasts a tall, stylish
man, and his angry shouty side kick. It brings fantastic camera work and
cinematic tricks, fun banter, and gratuitous violence that plays out so
beautifully in a visual medium. Fight the bad guys, throw some slow mo punches,
and the hero saves the day – wheee! Like its predecessors, the show played with
fast-paced danger, queer coding and pining looks, fancy clothes and femme
fatales, but that didn’t seem to be ALL the show was about.
BBC Sherlock felt thinky, aware of its audience, and savvy
in a way that earlier shows had not. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock was a
complex character with needs and foibles, and finally the Watson didn’t feel like
just a side character or a bumbling helper. Martin Freeman’s John Watson lived
and breathed, had quirks and personality, and looked at his Sherlock with both
conflict and devotion in his eyes. Far from playing out just another cheap gay
joke, these men seemed to be developing something touching and real as a
heart-felt romance unspooled between them.
Sadly, as the show continued, and the writers boxed
themselves into corners, they fell back on the
tried and true for what makes “fun television.” They amped up the violence, and instead of
defeating the bad guys with cool moves, Sherlock’s friends lined up to slap, head butt and beat
him into the hospital. An homage to horror films thundered in while the nascent queer
romance between the leads shrank back to “cheap gay jokes.” Sherlock devolved into some kind of martyr, while the complex
character of John Watson withered into an angry, shouty puppet with no motivation or explanation for his actions.
It’s sad, very sad to me that Moffat and Gatiss looked to have
learned and improved over what had come before in the Holmes and Watson
universe only to change course midstream. In some bid for bigger and better,
they tossed their characters and plot onto a raging bonfire, ultimately arriving
at something flashy and thrilling, but empty and meaningless for their last season. Pass me
the Kleenex. I’m still not over series 4.
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.
rebooting for @plaidadder‘s excellent addition. This in particular interests me:
what Moffat and Gatiss have historically done is evacuate it and then start again.
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.
“The obsession, particularly online, with the homoerotic tension between
Sherlock and Doctor Watson… The template for us was the Billy Wilder
film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which deliberately
plays with the idea that Holmes might be gay. We’ve done the same
thing, deliberately played with it although it’s absolutely clearly not
the case. He’s only a brain, ‘everything else is transport’ to him and John clearly says, “I’m not gay, we’re not together” but the joke is that everyone assumes that in the 21st century
that these two blokes living together are a couple– what they wouldn’t’
have assumed in the 19th century. They’d have assumed they were bachelor
best friends and now they assume they’re lovers. That’s
obviously such fun to play with and the fact that people now assume, in a
very positive way, that they’re together is a different joke to it
being a negative connotation.” Mark Gatiss in The Gay Times, February 2012
Hmm, I’m actually not so sure about that. Because I never got this joke (and no, that’s not a generation thing. I’m round about the same age as the show creators). Honestly, to me, two blokes sharing a flat in central London in the 21st century are just two blokes sharing a flat because it’s fucking expensive. I’d never assume anything else.
Even if one of the man was depicted as obviously gay (Girlfriend? Nor really my area. – Boyfriend? I know it’s fine.) – I wouldn’t assume any kind of romatic interest between them. I can’t see a joke there either.
But when their flat sharing gets laden with innuendo? For example, their landlady asking them if they share a bedroom. Another acquaintance taking them for being on a date. Those two blokes gazing at each other as if they were about to eat each other alive. One of the man killing for the other, who, in return, protects him from being prosecuted… Well, then I’d start to assume something’s going on – because it is shown to me and hammered home.
Only, I can’t see a joke there either…
So, what Gatiss described in the above interview wasn’t what happened. They were not just showing us two blokes living together. Because then no one in the 21st century would think of them as a couple. Moffat and Gatiss had to actively insert innuendo for their viewers to catch up on their ‘joke’ in the first place. They encouraged this on many levels: text, acting choices, casting, costume, music, lighting, cinematography.
They actively implemented homoerotic (sub)text in their show – only to lament at the same time that people cought up on it? That some viewers expected something to come out of it. Because, in the 21st century, no one thought it possible that it could just be a lame joke! Because there just is no joke to it.
The viewers took the positive attitude Gatiis desrcibes a step further and expected positive representation from the writers after playing with the inherent homoeroticism of the original stories. The fandom was far more advanced than the show runners, it seems.
And why play with the
homoeroticism
it in the first place? I really can’t see where the fun might be in there, apart from cracking some cheap gay jokes that feed an outdated no-homo attitude?
What is there to play with when it’s not an issue anymore? And if it’s still an issue, I’m not sure that making fun of it ist the appropriate approach to it.
We’ve done the same thing, deliberately played with it although it’s absolutely clearly not the case.
Clearly not the case??? How can a gay man, an LGBTQ advocate be so obtuse? They have used every gay trope in the book. The result is a desperately broken gay man who is in love with his repressed flatmate. Can Mark and Steven be this stupid, this unobservant, this deep into their own form of homophobia, that they cannot see what their own creation has become? Sorry Mark, but it was never clearly not gay. It was clearly the opposite.
I agree. Sorry Gatiss but that’s bs. In Friends Joey and Chandler shared a flat and nobody expected them to get together.
You know, for a brilliant man, Gatiss can be remarkably thick. Total BS, in my book.
Here’s the thing from my perspective: there were enough tent poles in the writing (not even the acting or the direction or the cinematography, but just the writing) for people to come up with a reading that Sherlock and John had unusual, deep, possessive feelings for each other that many would not categorize as simple friendship. It’s not even the multiple lines of dialogue where others assume that Sherlock and John are a couple (including everyone cited above, together with the gay innkeepers and Dr. Frankland and Henry’s psychologist and Kitty and arguably Magnussen and ….) I find it morbidly fascinating that despite evidence in the writing itself that was more than third party characters making joking assumptions about John and Sherlock, the creators in their public statements basically chalk it all up to the “delusional fangirl” stereotype and say “play online but don’t talk about it with us, the writers.”
The Battersea conversation between John and Irene is one example of relationship implications being directly in the writing, despite some posts I’ve seen attributing Johnlock to some manifestation of acting and editing. We all know the scene by heart. John says they’re not a couple; Irene says that they are. John says he’s not infatuated with Sherlock because John is not gay, and Irene counters that she is gay, and “Look at us both [being infatuated?].”
What are we looking at, Moffat? Genuinely, I would like that answered and am confused about Moffat and Gatiss’s hostility towards discussing romantic interpretations of their writing. What was that line supposed to do if not invite us to examine the nature of both John’s and Irene’s feelings towards Sherlock and perhaps the immutability (or lack thereof) of romantic attraction? I know that script page floated around ages ago that said that John then laughs at the absurdity of the situation in response to Irene’s comment, but whether he laughs or gives that rueful huff that we get in the final version, John has no spoken answer to Irene’s comment. Was she right? Was she wrong? What was Moffat trying to convey? Was it only about Irene in that moment? Is she the only one with a bendable sexuality? That’s an ugly implication.
And then someone on their team wrote a scene episodes later where John and Sherlock are the only people at a bachelor party (when there certainly would have been comedic value in Lestrade or Anderson or relatives we’ve never met or Mycroft (like the Ritchie movies, right?) being in on this little celebration). But instead we’ve got no explanation for why there are no guests other than our assumption that Sherlock and John wanted a night alone together, and John saying he doesn’t mind touching Sherlock’s leg. Why is that line there if it doesn’t mean something? That’s 15 seconds of screen real estate that could have been spent elsewhere. I want to hear what Moffat and Gatiss say about this scene, the dialogue, the setup, etc.
These are two examples. We all could pull out at least one bit of written dialogue per episode where something in the writing itself implied “couple” or “attraction” that was not a joke made by a third party. And I really just want to ask them what they were trying to do in any of these types of scenes, because these were not jokes made by third party characters. But no interviewer will ever go beyond asking the question of whether John and Sherlock are a couple with Gatiss pulling out that stock reply about how in the 21st century, it’s cheeky to say that everyone will assume that they are together. Maybe Gatiss’s real answer is that they delighted in the ambiguity, never settling on one thing, raising issues and questions about character motivations without any definitive answers in a way that gives their writing (an illusion of) depth (a show like Mad Men played with raising different questions and not always answering them), and they never thought that anyone would seek to insert answers to these little questions that they toyed with.
I also think from my vantage point of reading and watching some of their interviews that Mark especially is not a fan of ardent fans. I know some interpreted TEH as an affectionate homage to the fandom, but I saw then and still see now his discomfort with fans reading anything into this show beyond the emotional context that they are trying to generate in any individual scene. It doesn’t matter how Sherlock survived or what John went through: what matters is that we have a little laugh at John’s successive losses of temper that send them to progressively seedier establishments in TEH: it’s a joke, it’s a show, it’s not serious beyond taking an emotional journey contained to 90 minutes. I can only see S4 as a massive repudiation of quite a lot of what ardent fans liked about the show, and I think part of it does stem from discomfort with fan expectations (and part of it from writing the season in too short a time period at the last minute).
Yeah, I honestly have no idea, anymore, what show they thought they were making . Two bro’s hanging out, solving crimes, and repeatedly hurting one another in one way or another, forever, with zero redemption, I guess?
I’ve been doing mental gymnastics to try to take them at their word and see the show this way but I can’t because it does not make any sense.
Keep in mind it sounds like they were making a lot of it up on the fly, which is sometimes a Very Bad Thing. At one point they may have been making the show we thought we were watching. I believe to some extend they’ve changed their tune over the years.
@ellipsisaspired, I agree, that is exactly what it feels like to me too. It’s lazy, shitty writing, imo, but fair enough. It’s their show, if they’re okay with that approach, then ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
However, what I don’t appreciate is the repeated suggestions by tptb that anyone who read any of the show’s content ( and now apparently going so far as to say, any of the show’s post-ASiP’s ‘of course we won’t be needing two rooms’ comment) as anything other than two straight dudes sharing a flat, is somehow delusional, and their desiring answers from the writers is an irritant, and demanding answers is an act of bullying.
What is an act of bullying, imo, is what I saw a lot of queer johnlock fans subjected to on twitter, tumblr, and even by their own families post-S4, and the rude way the BBC coldly dismissed their concerns about the queerbaiting not only in the show itself, but specifically in the BBC’s S4 promo materials. Yes there were a few fans who probably took things too far in the heat of the moment, but the majority of the people I saw writing to the BBC or even posing questions of the content creators at the con this weekend were respectful and articulate.
But you know, Sue pretty much said it here. They want to cater to the 99% of their audience who doesn’t care about a queer Holmes, who doesn’t see the queer subtext, who are more than happy to laugh at all their ‘gay jokes’. We’re small potatoes and don’t matter. They still manage to keep us hooked with all the gay ‘jokes’, queer text and subtext, and promotional teasing, but in the end we really don’t matter, and we should learn our place and not raise a fuss. Sit back and be queerbaited without a peep of objection.
Sorry, I’m bitter tonight. It will be better in the morning, but whew am I ever furious right now.
“Learn Our Place”. BULLSHIT.
Just because a group of people may be in a minority DOES NOT MEAN
that they should let themselves be steamrolled over, used and abused!! That is NOT right.
What they did is not appropriate. It is NOT right to queerbait a group of people and then yank it away so as to sell it to a larger audience. It is NOT right to use people like that!! It is harmful, damaging to people and WRONG.
What I want to say is: PLEASE, WAKE THE FUCK UP, PEOPLE.
I know there was a part of the fandom who still thought that Moftiss were brilliant writers and that we were gonna get the ending we all dreamed of. And I understand that, really I do. But we all need to wake up.
Moftiss admitted they used homoerotic subtext in their series. They knew that would bring people towards the show. All the speculations, the metas, the discussions… that was stuff only the passionate fans would do, not the casuals. And they knew that hinting, implying something regarding Johnlock would bring the “fangirls” and the show would gain popularity. So, they kept doing that for whole 3 seasons (+ TAB).
Then, something happened. I think that they wanted to end the series with S4, but there was a problem. They didn’t want to make John and Sherlock a couple because that was never their true intention, but the situation had gotten away from their hands by that point. (translation = “too gay”) and they panicked.
So what did they do? They wrote S4 sloppily, completely retconning everything, changing the personality of the characters, giving Mary a central role and minimizing the interactions between John and Sherlock. They made that season the most #NoHomo possible because that was their plan all along: Sherlock and John solving crimes together, Sherlock alone and John marrying and then mourning his beloved wife (who shoots nicely, let’s not forget that).
S4 is the true BBC Sherlock they wanted to do but never could because
they were very aware that they wouldn’t have gotten so much success if they did #NoHomo from the beginnin’.
Honestly, that was such a smart move because now they are famous and rich and the show is successful and they can tell whatever they want because the series is probably over forever (despite what Moffat says), so they won’t have repercussions of any kind. In fact, they just blame the fans because ugh, they were too stupid, too naive, they should have known that John and Sherlock were straight when they didn’t want to share a bedroom after knowing each other for 10 minutes.
When all is said and done and the dust has settled after
series 4, I’m still left scratching my head over the character of Mary Morstan.
She just doesn’t make any sense to me.
If they made her a sniper, why wasn’t she a sniper connected
with Moriarty? That just made so much sense. WHY would a random ex-assassin
have been randomly working as a nurse in some clinic that John happened to be
working at by random coincidence. IF she
were the sniper assigned by Moriarty to
kill John it would have made so much more sense for why she was in John’s life
to begin with.
Why did Mary not recognize Sherlock when he showed up at the
restaurant? If she was a super smart spy type, she would want as much information
on John as possible when he entered her life. Either she was placed there to
watch John, or she stumbled on John but in either case, she would have Googled
what his ex looked like. Being completely surprised by Sherlock and not knowing
who he was would HAVE to be an act, and not a genuine response, and acting
surprised when she wasn’t would NEED to have a reason behind it.
WHY did Mary shoot Sherlock in series 3? It made no sense
and I kept waiting for some explanation – Moriarty was putting the pressure on
her to kill Sherlock, she was using him as leverage against Mycroft … something. In the moment that Sherlock
surprised her, it made NO sense for her to shoot him. He was clearly an ally on
her side. She left Magnussen completely functional with yet MORE dirt on her.
It never made sense & they never explained it.
Why did Sherlock force his heart back to life because his
inner Moriarty told him John was in danger with “that wife” around? If Mary is
an ex-assassin gone good and is protecting John then he’s really not in any more
danger than he would be hanging around Sherlock.
Why was Mary suddenly Sherlock’s best friend in S4 when she
shot him for no reason and then threatened him in the hospital if he told John?
(And then later of course drugged him to run off and do secret spy shit on the sly.)
Why did Sherlock seem to prefer Mary to John in S4 as a working companion? Why
would he ever have reached a level to trust her?
Why would Mary have really jumped in front of a bullet to
kill herself in that dopey aquarium scene? If she could jump like that, she
could have just pushed Sherlock out of the way. It was a senseless sacrifice
that made no sense.
To say that Mary is a sympathetic character that the
audience is supposed to like is a bizarre whiplashy way of covering up all the
inconsistencies and frankly huge gaping holes that seem to make up her
character. They did a bad job of writing Mary and nothing anyone says at
Sherlocked USA is going to change my mind on that.
It seems that Mary is the writers favorite character or something. However, as far as I’m concerned the show I loved finished some time before they even thought of S4. Sorry about that. Agree that nothing they did with the character made sense which was why, since S3, people, most of who seem much more intelligent and inventive than the actual writers, spent so long trying to make it make sense. But I’d like to know why they did it. Why did they invent her to start with? Why? Also, why did they think fans like me would love her? To me they had a good thing and simply ruined it.
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