It serves to me as a touchstone that the writer has deeply studied his source material, which indicates a love for the narrative.
The characterization of John Watson is the show's real coup as far as I'm concerned—it could have come off as gimmicky and superfluous (everything is edgy now, so let's make Watson just as fucked up as Holmes!) and instead it works beautifully both in context of the source texts and the contemporary resetting. I am also intrigued by the ways in which it raises the stakes for their partnership on both sides. Mycroft frames it in terms of John's effect on Sherlock: "He could be the making of my brother—or make him worse than ever," but the same could be said of Sherlock's effect on John, if he's the siren song of a dangerous life in London. You can't tell if they're going to be a stable chaotic system or a folie à deux. They might complement one another; they might just enable. I suspect this is one of the reasons the fandom has exploded.
One could see either Sherlock as a well-camoflaged "higher-functioning sociopath", but in the early 20th century, the game would have required more affability and pandering to fashion. But nowadays, when you see half the population wired into an iPod and texting on a cellphone, the sociopathology is itself a fashion.
I don't agree: if we assume that Moffat isn't just psychobabbling and that Sherlock really means his self-definition in the clinical rather than colloquial sense (and I'm not sure we can make either of these assumptions, but let's at least give Moffat the benefit of the doubt), sociopathy is several degrees farther out on the personality disorder spectrum than anything in Conan Doyle. You can throw a lot of diagnoses at Holmes as written—almost everybody has—but there is no evidence that he is incapable of seeing other human beings as people, only that his interactions with them are eccentric even by modern standards. "High-functioning sociopath" is a genuine reconceiving of the character and one which has the potential to close out dimensions of the character which exist on the page, not just in accumulated fandom. I'm just waiting to see what it actually means.
Otherwise, I'm certain I could never have captured my own impressions of the show with equal precision.
no subject
The characterization of John Watson is the show's real coup as far as I'm concerned—it could have come off as gimmicky and superfluous (everything is edgy now, so let's make Watson just as fucked up as Holmes!) and instead it works beautifully both in context of the source texts and the contemporary resetting. I am also intrigued by the ways in which it raises the stakes for their partnership on both sides. Mycroft frames it in terms of John's effect on Sherlock: "He could be the making of my brother—or make him worse than ever," but the same could be said of Sherlock's effect on John, if he's the siren song of a dangerous life in London. You can't tell if they're going to be a stable chaotic system or a folie à deux. They might complement one another; they might just enable. I suspect this is one of the reasons the fandom has exploded.
One could see either Sherlock as a well-camoflaged "higher-functioning sociopath", but in the early 20th century, the game would have required more affability and pandering to fashion. But nowadays, when you see half the population wired into an iPod and texting on a cellphone, the sociopathology is itself a fashion.
I don't agree: if we assume that Moffat isn't just psychobabbling and that Sherlock really means his self-definition in the clinical rather than colloquial sense (and I'm not sure we can make either of these assumptions, but let's at least give Moffat the benefit of the doubt), sociopathy is several degrees farther out on the personality disorder spectrum than anything in Conan Doyle. You can throw a lot of diagnoses at Holmes as written—almost everybody has—but there is no evidence that he is incapable of seeing other human beings as people, only that his interactions with them are eccentric even by modern standards. "High-functioning sociopath" is a genuine reconceiving of the character and one which has the potential to close out dimensions of the character which exist on the page, not just in accumulated fandom. I'm just waiting to see what it actually means.
Otherwise, I'm certain I could never have captured my own impressions of the show with equal precision.
Thank you!
(Incidentally, I like your icon.)