Comments | innie_darling: Sherlock series three, writing round-up, Sherlock Remix

innie_darling

Sherlock series three, writing round-up, Sherlock Remix

Jan 10, 2014 20:11

Hi, everybody!

I was asked by a friend what I thought of the new series of Sherlock, and it ended up being so long that I thought I might as well post it. ( SPOILERS, obviously, for the series that will end on Sunday (and which begins airing on January 19 in the US on PBS). )

new girl, fic, cold comfort farm, better off ted, sherlock remix, twelfth night, martin freeman, pushing daisies, middleman, goblin market, sherlock holmes, brooklyn nine-nine, elementary, the office, persuasion, james bond

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rachelindeed January 14 2014, 05:29:36 UTC

Just wanted to say I'm also disappointed. Empty Hearse made me think Sherlock was a terrible friend (the lack of reason for his silence plus the train scene were crushing), then Sign of Three was a lot more fun because suddenly he was an inexplicably great friend. But I took it and enjoyed it despite the emotional whiplash. Like you, John has always been my favorite, but I think I like Cumberbatch more than you do as Sherlock.

Then this last episode disappointed and angered me further. I won't say anything specific in case you haven't seen it yet. But in general I felt like the writers this season vastly miscalculated what my emotional responses would be to their scenarios, and had several characters cross over lines that I could not forgive them for. I haven't actually been this angry about a TV show in quite a while :/ Still, silver linings did abound. Each episode had at least a few lovely moments in it.

Sigh. Well, back to the fanfic.

innie_darling January 20 2014, 15:36:54 UTC

I wanted to watch the last ep before responding to you, and now I have, so ( ... )

rachelindeed January 20 2014, 18:45:11 UTC

Very interesting to see your thoughts, thank you! I see what you're saying about wishing they could make more room for subtlety, I agree that would be a big improvement to the series as a whole and Sherlock in particular ( ... )

innie_darling January 20 2014, 19:50:27 UTC

You know what bothers me most about Mary's shooting of Sherlock? That it was so stupid. Why couldn't Mary simply have shot CAM and vanished in as sneaky a way as she entered (she evidently didn't need any Janine-related subterfuge to get into CAM's office)? Even if Sherlock witnessed her killing CAM, that would still have been better all around than shooting Sherlock, allowing CAM to live with her secrets in his brain, and having to escape, not to mention that Sherlock was clearly on his way to believing that CAM needed to be killed. And given the vow he made in "Sign," Sherlock would surely have protected Mary and the fetus ( ... )

rachelindeed January 21 2014, 02:26:02 UTC

Well, as I recall they did provide an explanation as to why she didn't shoot CAM and sneakily vanish: because that would make John the primary murder suspect. She knows he's there with Sherlock, she knows he has his gun with him, they are in the middle of a break-in and did not get in as sneakily as she did, they came through the front door. If Magnussen is dead and the only witness claiming there was a mysterious third party is Sherlock, who everyone knows would lie through his teeth to protect John, then John winds up in a bad position with the police. So cancelling the hit on Magnussen makes some sense. (I think it breaks down a bit if you think about it too long - the ballistics wouldn't match John's gun, for one thing, so I don't think any police case against John would have held up, but that's probably the point at which I've thought too long about this. They provided a basic logic which I can accept ( ... )

innie_darling January 22 2014, 04:11:05 UTC

First off, thank you for writing all of this out. I'm impressed you're so logical even in the face of your frustration ( ... )

rachelindeed January 26 2014, 03:32:05 UTC

Hello! Sorry to be late in saying so, but thanks a lot for the lovely episode discussion and I am REALLY looking forward to reading your take on Mary! Thanks so much for writing!

aelfgyfu_mead January 22 2014, 00:14:19 UTC

Why couldn't Mary simply have shot CAM and vanished in as sneaky a way as she entered (she evidently didn't need any Janine-related subterfuge to get into CAM's office)?
YES! That ticked me off so much!

There are things I liked in the episode, but I'm having trouble getting over what Mary did and that John just accepts it. He says, "Your past is your past"-but as I think I said somewhere else, it's her present too; Sherlock's still recovering from the wound when he says it! That felt forced.

I can believe that John would still love her. I'm glad they haven't killed her or the baby.

not what was it about Sherlock and Mary that made John seek them out, but what was it about John that made them come to him, made them find their rest in him?Yes to that too! I felt like Sherlock was projecting onto John when he said that John chose Mary. Sherlock and Mary also each chose John. Sherlock chose a man who would go with him to a crime scene after having spent a total of maybe five minutes in his presence, and who would shoot a man to death ( ... )

innie_darling January 22 2014, 04:18:16 UTC

High-five for your icon!

I thought it through again, and you can see from my response to rachelindeed that I still can't make any sense of Mary's failure to kill CAM when he's literally on his knees in front of her and completely defenseless.

As for Mary's past vs her present, I think John's in a space where he's accepting her definition of the present: that loving, pregnant wife that she's evidently worked hard to become, leaving behind her deadly past. That baby tips the balance on so many levels.

The thing with Mary being a killer rather than a spy - there's precedent for that. Irene Adler was presented to us as Sherlock's equal, a worthy adversary, and their contest just an intellectual puzzle, but no one seemed to remember that she was a traitor, was working with Moriarty, and had caused the deaths of at least a few people. M&G don't seem to see the line you drew, which is upsetting all on its own without having a killer carrying John's baby.

aelfgyfu_mead January 22 2014, 12:52:34 UTC

Irene Adler was presented to us as Sherlock's equal . . . no one seemed to remember that she was a traitor, was working with Moriarty, and had caused the deaths of at least a few people.
Oh, I remember!-and I'm not the only one. I'm still really annoyed at Moffat about her.

As for Mary's past vs her present, I think John's in a space where he's accepting her definition of the present: that loving, pregnant wife that she's evidently worked hard to become, leaving behind her deadly past. That baby tips the balance on so many levels.
I would find this a lot easier to accept if she hadn't just shot Sherlock. If she had just knocked him out as she did Magnussen, we'd still have loads of drama as Sherlock worried about whether or what to tell John and John still had to struggle with a wife who had lied to him about everything, but it wouldn't demean any of the characters in the way that part of the episode did.

innie_darling January 22 2014, 14:45:10 UTC

Ha! I meant no one on the show or responsible for the show, but yes - we remember.

And yes, I very much agree with your point about what's necessary to get the characters to the point of drama - your suggestion of Mary knocking Sherlock out works, as does rachelindeed's suggestion of Mary asking for a grace period. But then, of course, M&G wouldn't have their big fancy set-piece of Sherlock's mind palace, with Molly and Anderson and Redbeard and Moriarty. All of which was, to me, frankly unnecessary.

alizarin_nyc January 20 2014, 21:51:42 UTC

Wow, RachelIndeed, you are exactly right. I hadn't thought much about Ep 3 because I need to rewatch it and am just not in the proper frame of mind to do so. But that is so terrible to do to Mary, isn't it? They've made her basically a terrible person. And they've made John this person who HAS to be lied to for his own good. I don't like this John-is-a-delicate-flower business. Or John accepting it. I don't think John would accept it. I think he'd be highly suspicious of the two violence-prone, lying people in his life. No matter how much he loves them. At what point does it become abusive?

And innie_darling...
I just read something positing that with only three episodes a season (however long each ep is), there's no room for a day-in-the-life type of episode, where we get to see Sherlock and John in their down time, which would go far toward humanizing Sherlock and giving Cumberbatch's performance some quieter notes and a solid underpinning.YES! And this we did see in the first series, didn't we? Dinners out, spats in the flat, it ( ... )

innie_darling January 21 2014, 00:38:08 UTC

Hey, you! Oh, thank you for supplying such wonderful examples - the chip-and-pin machine is a great one (though even then, Sherlock was battling a Muslim warrior for some reason), and the up-all-night-decoding scene was another. Give us real emotions - show, don't tell! That whole period of time between the revelation of Mary's past and John's speech pulling a veil over it - she says that it's been "months of silence," but what does that mean? Were they living together, or did he go off to 221B or to his sister's or someplace else? Was she trying to win him back? WHAT THE FUCK?

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