Sherlock or “It’s not as bad as the start of season 2, honest!” (Spoilers)
“Hi! My name is Mark Gatsis and I’d like to throw some shitty writing at you, I’ve gotten people to act it out and everything, no you’ll love it see because Engelbert Humberdink is in it and the Hobbit, we’ve got the hobbit! AND SMAUG…and I’m in it too!!!! And Derren Brown! Because we’re friends and stuff”
There’s a problem that a lot of writers struggle with and after you’ve banged your head against a desk for a few months it makes you want to leave writing to the likes of Umberto Eco or Neal Stephenson. And that’s when you as a writer are nowhere near as smart as your main character. Some writers circumvent this neatly by just dumbing down the main character (see most American TV shows) but when your main character is supposed to be the world’s greatest detective then you have an issue.
The writers of Sherlock have this issue.
Not only that they have to write clever dialogue, clever situations, clever setups for the protagonist to solve but they have to write clever villains too. How boring would it be if there were no challenge for Sherlock?
But they aren’t that clever so instead you get lots and lots of cop-outs. Such as the cliff-hanger ending of season 1 where it looked like Holmes and Watson were in an impossible situation that was resolved when Moriarty decided to take a phone call instead of killing them. Or when the show lies to the audience such as the resolution of Season 2 in this episode. “Oh all that stuff we showed you? That was bullshit, here’s what really happened. We led you to think that Moriarty was one step ahead of me, instead I was one step ahead of him!”
That’s bad writing because there is no way for the audience to guess what has happened and it devalues the character of Moriarty. This episode did it twice, once in the flashback and then again on the train. The train bit was worse because it was basically stalling for time. The “clever” solution was that Sherlock knew how to defuse the bomb all along because all bombs have off switches. (Which unfortunately is a convenient fiction. IRL terrorist organisations don’t value their minion enough to put failsafe’s in weapons and if a bomb goes off early, well at least it went off) and both Watson and the Audience were strung along thinking that there might be a clever solution to what seems to be an impossible situation. But alas there wasn’t.
Now I know that there could be a fair criticism too, that the basis of most of the solutions of Connan Doyle Holmes stories are “Sherlock Holmes knows shit that other people don’t know” but it’s richer than that, he connects things, he is the epitome of a networked knowledge, weaving together disparate facts, observations, deductions and ideas to make connections that no-one else is smart enough or in a position to make. Doyle makes it work because the dressing is good, the setup is smart the stories are well plotted and the solution is not a trick but a logical sequence of events. It is in the end what this series is trying to do but fails, the explanation of a magic trick. (Doyle BTW was a fascinating man in a myriad of ways and well worth reading about.)
Yes the character of Sherlock is intriguing but without the cleverness of the stories backing him up it who would believe the character. And yes I know the original resolution of how Sherlock comes back in the books was a cop out, but necessarily a cop out, Doyle didn’t think he’d be back for another season he was genuinely trying to kill the character off. The team at the BBC KNEW they would. And so the question that is never satisfactorily answered although asked a lot in the episode is WHY did Holmes simply not tell Watson that he was alive. When heaps of other people knew?
And I’m still both baffled and annoyed that Moriarty shot himself.
Having said all that, this epp was better than average for this show (no-one wants to read my review of the Hound of the Baskervills because it’s depressing and angry)
There’s a problem that a lot of writers struggle with and after you’ve banged your head against a desk for a few months it makes you want to leave writing to the likes of Umberto Eco or Neal Stephenson. And that’s when you as a writer are nowhere near as smart as your main character. Some writers circumvent this neatly by just dumbing down the main character (see most American TV shows) but when your main character is supposed to be the world’s greatest detective then you have an issue.
The writers of Sherlock have this issue.
Not only that they have to write clever dialogue, clever situations, clever setups for the protagonist to solve but they have to write clever villains too. How boring would it be if there were no challenge for Sherlock?
But they aren’t that clever so instead you get lots and lots of cop-outs. Such as the cliff-hanger ending of season 1 where it looked like Holmes and Watson were in an impossible situation that was resolved when Moriarty decided to take a phone call instead of killing them. Or when the show lies to the audience such as the resolution of Season 2 in this episode. “Oh all that stuff we showed you? That was bullshit, here’s what really happened. We led you to think that Moriarty was one step ahead of me, instead I was one step ahead of him!”
That’s bad writing because there is no way for the audience to guess what has happened and it devalues the character of Moriarty. This episode did it twice, once in the flashback and then again on the train. The train bit was worse because it was basically stalling for time. The “clever” solution was that Sherlock knew how to defuse the bomb all along because all bombs have off switches. (Which unfortunately is a convenient fiction. IRL terrorist organisations don’t value their minion enough to put failsafe’s in weapons and if a bomb goes off early, well at least it went off) and both Watson and the Audience were strung along thinking that there might be a clever solution to what seems to be an impossible situation. But alas there wasn’t.
Now I know that there could be a fair criticism too, that the basis of most of the solutions of Connan Doyle Holmes stories are “Sherlock Holmes knows shit that other people don’t know” but it’s richer than that, he connects things, he is the epitome of a networked knowledge, weaving together disparate facts, observations, deductions and ideas to make connections that no-one else is smart enough or in a position to make. Doyle makes it work because the dressing is good, the setup is smart the stories are well plotted and the solution is not a trick but a logical sequence of events. It is in the end what this series is trying to do but fails, the explanation of a magic trick. (Doyle BTW was a fascinating man in a myriad of ways and well worth reading about.)
Yes the character of Sherlock is intriguing but without the cleverness of the stories backing him up it who would believe the character. And yes I know the original resolution of how Sherlock comes back in the books was a cop out, but necessarily a cop out, Doyle didn’t think he’d be back for another season he was genuinely trying to kill the character off. The team at the BBC KNEW they would. And so the question that is never satisfactorily answered although asked a lot in the episode is WHY did Holmes simply not tell Watson that he was alive. When heaps of other people knew?
And I’m still both baffled and annoyed that Moriarty shot himself.
Having said all that, this epp was better than average for this show (no-one wants to read my review of the Hound of the Baskervills because it’s depressing and angry)