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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.
no subject
Is this a critique I can read without having seen the second series?
no subject