Casuals: Why are your plots so complicated?
Moftiss: Omg, read a children’s book, we’re not feeding you warm paste.
TJLCers: Here are 7,000 plot inconsistencies found in your recent episode that make literally no sense because you never set them up and are also offensive to various different marginalized communities and your logic was faulty also I alphabetized them for your convenience.
Moftiss: Omg, it’s just a detective show.
Me: Sowhatisthetruth.gif
i feel like they just made a mockery of everything – not just johnlock, but just you know, feelings in general, being a decent person, women’s existence, acd canon, good writing…it was just a fucking farce
I was going through my Torchwood tag because I thought it might be salutary to remind those coping with the disappointment of “The Final Problem” that the BBC has in fact already Gone There. Torchwood was basically Russell T. Davies’s Doctor Who fanfic and there were queer sexual encounters galore on it, including a canon m/m relationship between the protagonist and his second in command. It struggled from the get-go; there were only two ‘regular’ seasons, followed by a miniseries (”Children of Earth”) and a fourth season produced for Starz with a completely different setting and almost completely different cast. Now, there are a lot of reasons why Torchwood might have struggled that have nothing at all to do with the sex, the main one being that the first season was very uneven and included several episodes which were really, REALLY bad. But I digress.
My point was, I found this: “Me and my male showrunners.” It is an in-depth consideration of the question: why, at my advanced age and with my many adult responsibilities, am I still getting so pissed off, all the time, at the men who run my shows?
The bottom line is: it comes down to self-indulgence. What really makes me angry is when the showrunners start treating the show as purely a vehicle for their own fantasies, without taking into consideration not only standards and taste, but the labor of everyone who puts the show together. Sherlock is what it is in large part because of the extraordinary cast and the equally extraordinary production team. When you are surrounded by this much talent, you ought to feel yourself duty bound to give them material that is worthy of it. And I submit that in “The Final Problem” that is definitely not what happened.
This this this! Honestly, not getting Johnlock would have been disappointing, but on some level I was prepared for that. But the writers promised to tell the story they’ve always been telling–and I expected the last episode to confirm what that story WAS. In my mind, it was the story of how Sherlock became a better person, a more human person–but at the end, all that is tossed aside because who he is “doesn’t matter”. Or it could have been about the relationship–in whatever form–between Sherlock and John, but again, this episode skipped over that in favor of action and “suspense,” not to mention giving the last speech of the show to Mary–a character only introduced halfway through the show, and who goes through so many variations of bad guy and good guy that the audience can’t help but feel almost nothing for her by the end, one way or the other.
I just…I don’t know what they wanted us to feel in this episode. I don’t see how it connects to anything outside of series 4 itself.
And their comments are what truly create outrage. Every tv show has bad episodes, lots even have unsatisfying finales. But to then tell the unsatisfied audience they’re just too stupid to get it? To claim there ARE no plot holes, even when they’re pointed out? It’s offensive on so many levels.
I completely get that everyone is bruised and feeling pretty broken right now. I’m not having the best time myself but following this great post from @darlingtonsubstitution yesterday, there’s just such a glaring underlying clash in TFP that I need to write it out (yes, I hear your bitter laughter. Which one, you say). Please ignore this if it’ll just piss you off right now, I get it – I really do.
As darlington said, brilliantly, one of the strangest aspects of The Final Problem is that it
“is a dismissal of everything that came before; and it is a rejection of
the idea that is quintessentially Sherlock Holmes: rationality. Mofftiss
created a character in Eurus that is of the supernatural, an
all-knowing entity that single-handedly destroyed the sense of reality;
not only within the show’s fictional sphere, but it broke through the
fourth wall and took ours down with it.”
Whereas Hope in ASIP seemed to have mysterious powers when he said “I’m gonna talk to yer … and then you’re gonna kill yourself” (x) but it then (disappointingly to Sherlock) turned out that he was just threatening people with a fake gun, Sherlock unquestioningly accepts in TFP that Eurus has the bizarre psychic power to rewrite others’ memories and, simply through talking to them, to control their behaviour utterly from that point forwards.
This is utterly contradictory of both Conan Doyle’s Holmes and the Sherlock we know.
@green-violin-bow thank you so much for including the podcast information!
I agree completely. TFP is not only a transgression of the essence of Sherlock Holmes (both acd and bbc), but an insult to acd’s The Final Problem as well. The hanging Garridebs has been talked about quite a bit the last two days, but what of the letter Holmes left Watson before heading to the Reichenbach Falls to face his death? Didn’t Gatiss just recite every word at Proms 2015? TFP is not only a slap in the face for advocating Johnlock, but a kick in the teeth for recognizing the most cherished and tender moments between Holmes and Watson in acd canon. Even if TFP turns out to be satire, I don’t understand why it has to be at our expense – are we to be the martyrs? But for what cause? How can we be certain that Mofftiss and Co. are on our side? Their silence is deafening, and it’s definitely getting scary.
I’m not really into tinfoilhatting right now, but it’s truly baffling, why would they be so consistently inconsistent? And these aren’t even small things, I refuse to believe nobody noticed that when putting the scene together.
Can you really believe all these little things (and there are tons) are just production errors when, odds are, sOMEBODY HAD TO RUN OVER AND CHANGGE THIS LAMP DURING FILMING as much as it’s back and forth, and like, if not intentional, did they reaaaally just not notice this “production error” you can see FROM SPACE
i mean really
like, as someone who has worked on film sets (even just tiny indie ones, bu still), there are people on set DEDICATED SPECIFICALLY to looking out for exactly these kinds of inconsistencies. Once in a while something will slip by, sure, but for there to be SEVERAL continuity errors in a single episode, in a show that’s usually so meticulous about set details?? Really, really starting to seem intentional, for some reason.
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