i mean at this point i think these are real drafts. and for those who think the quality is a strike against that all i’ll say is…..we’re all writers here……..yall know drafts are Bad
This is one thing I will not entertain if determining fake/real:
All the best writers have editors. All. We have them too, we call them betas. And for scripts, they all then change during filming.
The first draft of anything sucks/is OOC/etc/etc/etc. Thats why it’s a first draft.
This is all true, but what I have trouble with is HOW much they changed? Look ast TSOT. It in no way resembles the nuanced, heart breaking ep we saw. That means , to me, if these are legit scripts, then none of this that we are seeing and believe is happening was planned. It is not reflected in any way to what they initially wrote, so what? Johnlockary is endgame? Smith was never supposed to be a DarkJohn mirror?? No thanks. Fake is all I’ll ever believe these to be.
It’s a draft……..
I agree, but would the thread of what we have interpreted not be there from the beginning? That’s all I’m trying to say. If these are real, how does that happen, that what we have seen as the finished project, not have some of its roots in the first draft?
I think the roots are in the draft. They track with what Moffat and Gatiss have said about their own aims with the show.
Tbh, these are very bro™ if anything, not exactly Johnlock-y, and especially the NOT GAY best man speech is pretty obvious imo. So seeing all this script crap really makes me think that that’s what was on their minds initially, aka NO Johnlock. And no matter how Johnlock-y the episodes turned out, that was not what they intended. I feel like they have some serious blind spots re acting and can’t interpret things for shit.
Yep. I’m not judging them for an odd draft. Writing is a work in progress. But what the scripts make very obvious (and what was my main underlying problem with s4) is, that Mofftiss have a completely different understanding of John and Sherlock than the fandom. These drafts – and same in s4 – are mocking John and Sherlock. How they are portrait makes you wonder, if the writers actually hate them and just want to deconstruct and pull them through the mud for entertainment.
I wonder, if there actually was a change in the editing team, so that we got a more raw draft in S4 than in the series before.
Unpopular opinion: They truly intended for Warstan with platonic Johnlockary at the side (in addition pairing Sherlock romantically with a female, be it (most likely) Irene or whoever). It’s het.
Those drafts make this plain to me. It was all to be taken at face value: John getting over Sherlock with Mary (kind of introducing her to him at the grave), Sherlock liking her, Mary liking him. He saw she was a liar but didn’t feel threatend by her (because pals), so he ignored it. John loved her, they teamed up as a trio. Sherlock was happy for John and Mary. Mary shooting him was surgery and should make her BAMF like the boys. Sherlock understood it and wanted to help her because he liked her. John forgave her. Sherlock killed Magnussen to protect her. They were all pals on the tarmac again. He still wanted to help Mary in TST when her past caught up with her. She sacrificed herself for him. John loved and therefore mourned her. Sherlock loved and mourned her in TLD, blamed himself for her death and accepted John’s rage as a kind of self-punishment by proxy. John thought Marywas a lovely, good woman and therefore couldn’t let go in TLD. She got the last word in TFP because both men loved her and missed her and are now living her legacy with her blessing.
It doesn’t even hurt to write this down, it just feels strange and a little ridiculous.
It’s not what I would have chosen. But Mofftiss obviously did. They wanted to do something new with the stories, infuse them with what they perceive as feminism (by introducing female characters like Molly, Janine, Irene, Mary, Eurus). ACD had said people could marry Holmes or murder him – same would go for John Watson I imagine.
ACD had Mary Morstan feature in one story as a vehicle to get Holmes take her case. She was a client. Watson married her because he’s a stand-in for the middle-class reader. We see Holmes through his eyes, he makes his personality and the stories accesible. In relation to Watson, Holmes is Bohemian, but Watson is coming from the middle-class perspective of the readership of The Strand. Those people aspired to get married. I was normal for a middle-class doctor to have a wife and settle down.
What else ACD intended with Mary we’ll never know. But the gay reading isn’t new and was never deterred by Mary. The way ACD wrote her and her role in canon never truly opposed a gay reading.
ACD had problems with her character and the conventions Mary’s introduction called for afterwards (Watson excusing himself from his family home to solve crimes with Holmes), so he got rid of her in most stories or set them before the marriage.
Therefore, I think Holmes/Watson don’t need a Mary Morstan or an Irene Adler to complete them. But that is just my opinion and others may differ. I mean, I saw an adaption featuring a dinosaur…
It’s all fine. I’ve buried my hatchet. I can’t even say it’s bad writing – BBC Sherlock as a narrative featuring Mary Morstan as part of the gang is just a story I’m not interested in. I’d be rather grateful if they’d filmed those scripts, because it would have been obvious much earlier to me then. I would have prefered it if they had stopped being ambiguous much earlier.
I’m a bit angry with myself, and I laugh a bit about me. I hoped. I didn’t want to see. I was still caught up in the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant homoeroticism of S1-2. But that’s me, that was my way of looking at it.
There won’t be johnlock in this BBC version. This chance died in front of Barts at the end of TRF. Afterwards, they really tried to tone the obviously gay down (still queerbaiting a bit for good, though), but we thought up elaborate theories to vindicate them and johnlock. Had we only known their thought process evident in these drafts…
That doesn’t mean johnlock is dead. It’s a ship. It has been a ship for decades. It continues to sail. Some day it might become canon. Until then, I’ll wirte my versions of them in fic.
Well said. BBC is just a version of Holmes/Watson story, one of the many. Not the better. And I’m not interested anymore in what the authors have to say in a (eventual S5), I don’t care and I’ll keep on writing my version of Holmes/Watson ignoring their existence.
I would like to second that less ambiguity in season 3 would have really really helped with the platonic threesome story. Not all that interesting to me but I would have given it a pass. That means that the time to clamp down on the Johnlock subtext was the very beginning of s3 starting with MHR. Also why couldn’t Mary have shot CAM in the chest?! Then Sherlock could have still shot CAM in the head for Mary.
Of course other people liked the Mary story as is, but for some of us it would have taken some adjustments.
we almost had a scene confirming and displaying john walking around 221b with wet hair and only a towel just casually in front of sherlock
please understand…someone wrote that in a script, decided it was too much, and scaled it back to the still amazing john chilling in his bathrobe…but like that scene in the script would mean DAILY john gets out the shower not even fully dry freeballing under a towel while sherlock is living his life. like also there was no narrative reason for john to have been showering conveniently in trf
the thing about my heart will go on is that it’s just so specific and so meaningful in terms of pop culture. everyone knows this song. everyone knows the sense of loss and desperation and passion associated with this song, even if we’re now laughing at it a bit as a pop culture reference. like tell me y’all didn’t know and/or were someone in the 90s who was deadass obsessed with titantic and this song. it was high emotional stuff! and everywhere else they put “music: upbeat and lively” if they mention the music at all, but no. for this one they chose a specific song. they had a specific image of sherlock in their head playing this song. they wanted you to start with a bit of a laugh, wink wink nudge nudge lol titanic right, but if you really remember the huge phenomenon surrounding the movie and this song and how sherlock would’ve been in his very early twenties and how the forbidden love trope of the whole romance is obviously relatable gay culture, and how it’s literally about how they fall in love almost at first sight when jack saves rose from a suicide attempt and they have this incredibly emotional fast connection of love and sex and passion, breaking down rose’s walls and really showing her happiness as it can be truly experienced, all while rose is engaged to someone else and then ultimately jack sacrifices his own life so that rose can live and marry and grow old and have lots of babies with someone else, it really becomes much less funny and much more. hey. what the fuck.
I thought it was safe to look at the TRF script but… I was horrendously wrong…
These two paragraphs are, subtext-wise, the worst two paragraphs I’ve ever laid my eyes upon.
A) John was supposed to be shirtless in this scene… wet… wearing, just a towel and the very next thing that happens? B) Sherlock’s mobile (heart) is beeping madly on the table but Sherlock is ignoring it C) John answers it for him though D) It stops at 57
What stands out to me about those scripts is the progression, over the seasons, of the level of self-indulgence and lazy writing. I mean, there’s a reason all that crap got cut, but none of it should have been in there in the first place.
Mofftiss aren’t geniuses. They’re a couple of hacky TV writers who got lucky and surrounded themselves with people who made them look smarter and more gifted than they really are. And they let success get to them and make them believe their own hype, and then they stopped listening to the people (including us) who pushed them to the very heights of their own limited talent.
There’s no conspiracy here, lovelies. They’re just not who or what we thought they were. The magic was something far greater than the sum of its parts, and it was too fragile to survive their all-too-clumsy handling.
Ah, fuck, this is making me sad.
for the record, this is my opinion re the show and tjlc, and has been pretty much since tfp aired.
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