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That's not what people normally say
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nineweaving, in which I sketched my initial reactions to Sherlock (2010) and then had the revelatory idea that if I posted them, I might get discussion with people who have also seen the first series (and/or find out that all my ideas about the characters are wrong). Probably I should rewrite it for less run-on, but right now I'm going to sleep. I've noticed a disheartening number of entries recently end this way.
As mentioned previously, I really wasn't sure, both initially and when the reviews started coming out, whether Moffat's characterization of its eponymous consulting detective would work for me, and indeed for ninety percent of the pilot episode, it didn't. By stripping the character down to a monofocused intelligence whose emotional engagement with the world is nonexistent except when it annoys him by not conforming to his deductions, he seemed to have oversimplified Holmes as badly as the Rathbone films did Watson; Benedict Cumberbatch is certainly charismatic in the role, precise, restless, contemptuous, unable to comprehend except intellectually what any other people are doing on this planet when it's not helping him solve a mystery (and visually striking, the dark blue of his eyes and his burnt-red hair skinned down like a pre-Raphaelite painting to those weird Siamese bones of his), but as a person who can reliably predict plot twists from a camera angle and a question, I need more than even a wittily written brain to interest me in a character. I am not awed by genius-fast reasoning. And he seemed especially flat against Martin Freeman's Dr. John Watson, who was equally tweaked from his original in ways I wasn't sure the script was going to pull off and did. The series links two pieces of information: the fact that Conan Doyle contradicts himself on the injury that invalided Watson out of service in Afghanistan (a wounded shoulder in "A Study in Scarlet," a limp which requires a cane in The Sign of the Four) and that while Holmes is a bizarre choice of flatmate under the best of circumstances, he's especially odd for a man with some textually supported combat trauma, considering how often he endangers both their lives or at least has them running around London and related environs, mixed up with the underworld and confused as hell. Freeman's Watson really took a bullet in the shoulder and nearly died of it, but his limp is psychosomatic: it's his safeguard for staying out of action, because he isn't afraid of danger, after years in a war zone he's addicted to it—he's jumpy and depressed all day in his bedsit by himself, but his hands are steady when he's threatened by strangers in a deserted garage and he's grinning, pelting down a street after Sherlock with his cane left blocks behind—and he's a good enough doctor to know he can't go back on active duty, he'll take too many risks and get himself killed, even if he can't admit it to himself in so many words. Following Sherlock on his cases might also get him killed, but at least the man isn't an actual war zone; he's a shot of adrenaline in a scene John can control and if the price is putting up with a roommate who doesn't think to mention that he's keeping a severed head in the refrigerator to study the coagulation times of saliva after death, at least he's not lonely and suicidal. And he's a good doctor, and a good person, and one of the show's rather lovely running jokes is that where you would expect weird, intense Sherlock to be the fanservice, it's greying-young, nebbishy-looking, faintly apologetic John who keeps getting hit on. (Well, he can't get a phone number from Mycroft's gorgeous assistant, but that's just how it goes. The series is also playing explicitly with slash in that John and Sherlock are constantly assumed to be a couple no matter what either of them says. John is probably straight, or straight-ish; mostly he dislikes being automatically taken for someone's boyfriend without having had any say in the matter. Sherlock doesn't seem to be sexually attracted to anyone.) But while it's true that a good Watson is a thing of beauty and a joy etc., that still doesn't fix the other half of the partnership: and so it was with great relief that I watched the last ten minutes of "A Study in Pink," in which a high-stakes conversation between Sherlock and a serial killer reveals several things about the detective that were not apparent from the episode to that point—for starters, his deductive method isn't as infallible as he likes everyone to believe; it's a bit like the proverbial first day in prison, he makes sure his first meeting with a person is as dominant and disorienting as he can and relies on first impressions to keep them impressed, which of course doesn't work with someone who's been observing him from a distance for weeks. He can be utterly wrong about people—he thinks he has John Watson summed up the first moment they meet and the episode turns on his underestimation. And he's as much of an adrenaline junkie as John, only in his case it's intellectual, the thrill of needing to push calculation and conjecture so far, the ground could fall away from under him at any second and if his life is on the line, a real gamble, not just a theoretical exercise, so much the better. He's desperately afraid of being bored. He'll do almost anything not to be safe, surrounded by problems he can figure out by flicking a glance at them. It makes him terribly vulnerable; he hasn't noticed yet. By the climax of "The Great Game," he will.
Mark Gatiss' Mycroft is a seamless civil servant, sardonic, inscrutable, beautifully tailored; he professes to hold a minor position in the British government, which Sherlock clarifies scoffingly, "He is the British government—when he's not too busy being the British secret service. Or the CIA. On a freelance basis. Good evening, Mycroft. Try not to start a war before I get home. You know what it does to the traffic." We are so clearly intended to take him for Moriarty at his first, anonymous appearance, I knew at once who he had to be. True to the stories, he's his brother's intellectual equal or better; unlikely to be any more normal emotionally, just better at passing for something resembling it. Doesn't think twice about repurposing security cameras and public call boxes in order to pull a meeting with Watson, but his brother's infatuation with texting and e-mail gets on his nerves. Sensitive about his weight, despite the fact that he's a beanpole. A bit of a dandy, who stages himself as deliberately as his surroundings; we never hear him raise his voice and he doesn't seem like the kind of man who'd need to. His assistant lives on her cellphone and in her case it doesn't bother him at all. Rupert Graves' Detective Inspector Lestrade is, thank God, being played as a competent policeman, hardworking, harried, never quite comfortable in front of the cameras (and in this day and age, the press is unavoidable) and in the unenviable position of defending Sherlock on a near-daily basis to both his team and his superiors at Scotland Yard while trying to keep his self-respect in the face of the detective's almost absentminded disdain for everything about Lestrade from his rational faculties to his taste in raincoats; he has a resignedly apprehensive look about him, as though he knows that at any second someone is going to get in his face about something and he just doesn't have time for the next little round of games, all right, actual murders to solve here, thank you? (Gestures like casually searching Sherlock's flat in order to retrieve a piece of evidence must be immensely satisfying: "They're not, strictly speaking, on the drug squad, but they're very keen.") He's not a stupid man; he's even a smart one. He's not Sherlock Holmes and that fact is going to show him at a disadvantage forever. He's dealing with it.
It is a very male cast, which is canonical, but it seems there should be something to do about it that feels both in keeping with Conan Doyle and the twenty-first century. Eventually I will get to "A Scandal in Belgravia" and then I can join the Irene Adler argument, I suppose. She still shouldn't be the only one.
nineweaving, in which I sketched my initial reactions to Sherlock (2010) and then had the revelatory idea that if I posted them, I might get discussion with people who have also seen the first series (and/or find out that all my ideas about the characters are wrong). Probably I should rewrite it for less run-on, but right now I'm going to sleep. I've noticed a disheartening number of entries recently end this way.As mentioned previously, I really wasn't sure, both initially and when the reviews started coming out, whether Moffat's characterization of its eponymous consulting detective would work for me, and indeed for ninety percent of the pilot episode, it didn't. By stripping the character down to a monofocused intelligence whose emotional engagement with the world is nonexistent except when it annoys him by not conforming to his deductions, he seemed to have oversimplified Holmes as badly as the Rathbone films did Watson; Benedict Cumberbatch is certainly charismatic in the role, precise, restless, contemptuous, unable to comprehend except intellectually what any other people are doing on this planet when it's not helping him solve a mystery (and visually striking, the dark blue of his eyes and his burnt-red hair skinned down like a pre-Raphaelite painting to those weird Siamese bones of his), but as a person who can reliably predict plot twists from a camera angle and a question, I need more than even a wittily written brain to interest me in a character. I am not awed by genius-fast reasoning. And he seemed especially flat against Martin Freeman's Dr. John Watson, who was equally tweaked from his original in ways I wasn't sure the script was going to pull off and did. The series links two pieces of information: the fact that Conan Doyle contradicts himself on the injury that invalided Watson out of service in Afghanistan (a wounded shoulder in "A Study in Scarlet," a limp which requires a cane in The Sign of the Four) and that while Holmes is a bizarre choice of flatmate under the best of circumstances, he's especially odd for a man with some textually supported combat trauma, considering how often he endangers both their lives or at least has them running around London and related environs, mixed up with the underworld and confused as hell. Freeman's Watson really took a bullet in the shoulder and nearly died of it, but his limp is psychosomatic: it's his safeguard for staying out of action, because he isn't afraid of danger, after years in a war zone he's addicted to it—he's jumpy and depressed all day in his bedsit by himself, but his hands are steady when he's threatened by strangers in a deserted garage and he's grinning, pelting down a street after Sherlock with his cane left blocks behind—and he's a good enough doctor to know he can't go back on active duty, he'll take too many risks and get himself killed, even if he can't admit it to himself in so many words. Following Sherlock on his cases might also get him killed, but at least the man isn't an actual war zone; he's a shot of adrenaline in a scene John can control and if the price is putting up with a roommate who doesn't think to mention that he's keeping a severed head in the refrigerator to study the coagulation times of saliva after death, at least he's not lonely and suicidal. And he's a good doctor, and a good person, and one of the show's rather lovely running jokes is that where you would expect weird, intense Sherlock to be the fanservice, it's greying-young, nebbishy-looking, faintly apologetic John who keeps getting hit on. (Well, he can't get a phone number from Mycroft's gorgeous assistant, but that's just how it goes. The series is also playing explicitly with slash in that John and Sherlock are constantly assumed to be a couple no matter what either of them says. John is probably straight, or straight-ish; mostly he dislikes being automatically taken for someone's boyfriend without having had any say in the matter. Sherlock doesn't seem to be sexually attracted to anyone.) But while it's true that a good Watson is a thing of beauty and a joy etc., that still doesn't fix the other half of the partnership: and so it was with great relief that I watched the last ten minutes of "A Study in Pink," in which a high-stakes conversation between Sherlock and a serial killer reveals several things about the detective that were not apparent from the episode to that point—for starters, his deductive method isn't as infallible as he likes everyone to believe; it's a bit like the proverbial first day in prison, he makes sure his first meeting with a person is as dominant and disorienting as he can and relies on first impressions to keep them impressed, which of course doesn't work with someone who's been observing him from a distance for weeks. He can be utterly wrong about people—he thinks he has John Watson summed up the first moment they meet and the episode turns on his underestimation. And he's as much of an adrenaline junkie as John, only in his case it's intellectual, the thrill of needing to push calculation and conjecture so far, the ground could fall away from under him at any second and if his life is on the line, a real gamble, not just a theoretical exercise, so much the better. He's desperately afraid of being bored. He'll do almost anything not to be safe, surrounded by problems he can figure out by flicking a glance at them. It makes him terribly vulnerable; he hasn't noticed yet. By the climax of "The Great Game," he will.
Mark Gatiss' Mycroft is a seamless civil servant, sardonic, inscrutable, beautifully tailored; he professes to hold a minor position in the British government, which Sherlock clarifies scoffingly, "He is the British government—when he's not too busy being the British secret service. Or the CIA. On a freelance basis. Good evening, Mycroft. Try not to start a war before I get home. You know what it does to the traffic." We are so clearly intended to take him for Moriarty at his first, anonymous appearance, I knew at once who he had to be. True to the stories, he's his brother's intellectual equal or better; unlikely to be any more normal emotionally, just better at passing for something resembling it. Doesn't think twice about repurposing security cameras and public call boxes in order to pull a meeting with Watson, but his brother's infatuation with texting and e-mail gets on his nerves. Sensitive about his weight, despite the fact that he's a beanpole. A bit of a dandy, who stages himself as deliberately as his surroundings; we never hear him raise his voice and he doesn't seem like the kind of man who'd need to. His assistant lives on her cellphone and in her case it doesn't bother him at all. Rupert Graves' Detective Inspector Lestrade is, thank God, being played as a competent policeman, hardworking, harried, never quite comfortable in front of the cameras (and in this day and age, the press is unavoidable) and in the unenviable position of defending Sherlock on a near-daily basis to both his team and his superiors at Scotland Yard while trying to keep his self-respect in the face of the detective's almost absentminded disdain for everything about Lestrade from his rational faculties to his taste in raincoats; he has a resignedly apprehensive look about him, as though he knows that at any second someone is going to get in his face about something and he just doesn't have time for the next little round of games, all right, actual murders to solve here, thank you? (Gestures like casually searching Sherlock's flat in order to retrieve a piece of evidence must be immensely satisfying: "They're not, strictly speaking, on the drug squad, but they're very keen.") He's not a stupid man; he's even a smart one. He's not Sherlock Holmes and that fact is going to show him at a disadvantage forever. He's dealing with it.
It is a very male cast, which is canonical, but it seems there should be something to do about it that feels both in keeping with Conan Doyle and the twenty-first century. Eventually I will get to "A Scandal in Belgravia" and then I can join the Irene Adler argument, I suppose. She still shouldn't be the only one.
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Which is my one quibble with this summary: Sherlock's stripped down character is not an enfeebling of the strength of the original's personality. It's more a statement on the simpler, less adorned manners of Londoners one hundred years on. 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.
Otherwise, I'm certain I could never have captured my own impressions of the show with equal precision.
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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.)
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No, I'm also inclined to vote that it's psychobabble, hence the quotes. But Moffat clearly wants to invoke in the viewer an understanding that Sherlock couldn't be bothered to put himself in yours or anyone else's shoes. I think he wants to focus only on the lack of empathy and stop there.
Which leads to a problem that's been niggling at me throughout both seasons: What I don't see as credible is the modern Sherlock's fumbling attempts to feign empathy when he finds things are not going his way; the original Sherlock was a master of dissembling, which I think supports my assertion that both Sherlocks could be for-lack-of-better-word "sociopathic". But I am making a leap to claim that the manners by which gentlemen such as Sherlock and Watson would have identified each other in the early 20th were more subtle and difficult to emulate. Perhaps there are equally subtle means shared between a similar pairing in the 21st, but I suspect that's not so much the case.
But, sadly, Moffat's version seems to have had that slice of canon surgically removed. Except for (spoiler warning) Sherlock's means of removing John from harm's way in the third episode of the second season, I just don't see much evidence.
But I'm probably reading too much into it. One is episodic short story format. The other is very swank video-editing. There's a degree of futility in this kind of exercise. ;)
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I did notice and find that interesting—Sherlock attempting to pass himself off as a grieving old friend in "The Great Game" is disastrously unconvincing, as opposed to Holmes whom Watson doesn't even recognize in some of his disguises. I assume it's meant to run with the lack of social skills: it's difficult enough to pass for human, never mind other humans. This Sherlock can't be anyone but himself. I'm waiting to see if this alters with further seasons.
One is episodic short story format. The other is very swank video-editing. There's a degree of futility in this kind of exercise.
I don't know; I'm not a very television-oriented person, but when a show is good enough to catch my interest, I think it's only responsible of it not to screw up!
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Oh, hell yeah. Nothing brings the ficcers to the yard like an emotionally charged relationship between two men. (Which actually bothers me sometimes, for a whole host of reasons -- the way it can shut women out of the picture, the way it closes off other options for male emotional intimacy (http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/511384.html), etc -- but it isn't so much that I'm bothered by slash as, I'm bothered by its sheer dominance over other ways of approaching a text.)
But your description of the characters is a thing of beauty: surgically precise, in ways I had subconsciously recognized but not consciously articulated. I think there are also problems in the show; I have sadly misplaced the link, but someone posted a very good screed about how it sanitizes London, how its narrative plays into a current British political trend that says the state can't do anything and should just get out of the way of the exceptional few, and how other characters' needs and concerns are made subordinate to the possibility that Sherlock might actually show some emotion. I cannot, however, deny the impressive power of its characterization -- as most spectacularly demonstrated during the conclusion of the first episode.
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Is this a critique I can read without having seen the second series?
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http://magnetic-pole.dreamwidth.org/10039.html
http://magnetic-pole.livejournal.com/142552.html
And that was long before Sherlock S2 aired, so there are no spoilers for it, excepting perhaps in a few recent additions to the comment threads.
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I haven't studied or even read that much slash, honestly, but I agree with this assessment in general. Not all intimate relationships—male or female or mixed—have to be sexual. I am often most interested by the ones that aren't. I wonder if you would get less slash if it were more common to see a range of close relationships of all genders presented in mainstream fiction, not just heterosexual romance and lots of forever-strung-out sexual tension. The answer seems like it should be yes.
But your description of the characters is a thing of beauty: surgically precise, in ways I had subconsciously recognized but not consciously articulated.
Thank you!
and how other characters' needs and concerns are made subordinate to the possibility that Sherlock might actually show some emotion.
Oh, hell. I might have to punch the second series if that's its greatest point of suspense. I'll watch it first, though.
I cannot, however, deny the impressive power of its characterization -- as most spectacularly demonstrated during the conclusion of the first episode.
Yes: everything is setup for the moment Phil Davis starts talking, and then it's just all there.
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That's my instinct, too -- but I don't really know.
Yes: everything is setup for the moment Phil Davis starts talking, and then it's just all there.
I think the single moment that nailed it for me is when the cabbie is talking, and you're in an extreme close-up on Sherlock's face. The cabbie says something to the effect of "you're just a man, and they're so much more," and there's the most infinitesimal twitch in his lip -- not quite far enough to be a sneer -- that says so much about his character, it just about took my breath away.
I'm a bit disappointed that the later two episodes seemed to back off that characterization of Sherlock, or at least stop pursuing it. While it may not be canonically accurate (I wouldn't know; I've only read two of the books, one of them a very long time ago), I found it interesting in its own right, because of the chance it offered to problematize the notion of the lone genius.