Sherlock 02x03
OH, but before I get to that, I have this message from Irene Adler I need to pass on:
Dear Mr Holmes,
I can't believe you still don't get the pun. You might do better if you did silly things from time to time, yourself.
P.S. I'm in Antarctica. Let's have dinner.
ANYWAY.
MOLLY.
Oh, Molly.
You act like an awkward, desperate, Hello Kitty type, and you let everyone else think that's what you are, but you're not. You never have been, even from the beginning. You are awkward, and from time to time, desperate, but that doesn't change the fact that what you are, what you really are, is friendly with death.
You are. You are morbid. You are a ghoul. Except that you are those things cheerfully and without prurience, so nobody notices. Least of all Sherlock Holmes. As Irene Adler knows, he can be incredibly dense about the screamingly obvious but "silly" (like puns) or "sentimental" (like watching over the dead).
Nothing and nobody will ever convince me that what you were offering Sherlock, that even he didn't get (and kept on not getting until it apparently went on like a lightbulb, though of course by then he had a slightly modified idea in mind), was to look after his corpse. We all die. And you, Molly, are accustomed to inhabiting this liminal space where your workday is hidden away in a basement, where your jokes are inappropriate, where half of everybody takes what you do for granted, where everybody else is grateful for what you do but doesn't want to think about it too hard, and where nobody, absolutely nobody, including the most brilliant and least ordinary, seems to notice how much power you hold until they need to disappear.
And you just keep doing your thing.
…oh, yeah, there was also some stuff about Sherlock and John and Mycroft.
ETA: OH, YEAH, and Moriarty. BEST. MORIARTY. EVER. I'm sorry, but I fucking love this guy (Andrew Scott). He is, to me, exactly the right combination of unhinged and in control, theatrical and calculating, genuinely crazy and genuinely sane. I've heard the complaint that he doesn't appear to have enough self-restraint to be a credible threat, and it's a completely valid one. It comes down to subjective reading, as so many things do; for me, his outbursts ping as being this character deliberately trying to appear unhinged, or even trying to be unhinged, all the while still dangerously in control. Theatrical, in other words. That scene at the beginning, and the final "No rush"? I came, ladies and gentlemen.
And I am pissed that he is dead. About a quarter of the way through the episode, I realized that if they trufax killer Moriarty, I was going to be more distressed about that than if they did in Sherlock. And lo, I was and am. Well, minus the detail about Holmes of course being alive, but you know. I want him to have somehow been faking-yet, I'm not sure that I do, because the thing that I love about this Moriarty has been his sheer commitment.
TL;DR, Andrew Scott, you are the most amazing thing right after Martin Freeman-hell, maybe even that amazing. May much fucking awesome work come your way.