A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze
The thing about the latest round of "Is Steven Moffat sexist?" that's currently flapping round the blogosphere, is that if within the same week you can manage to get accused of hating women by a Guardian blogger, and simultaneously accused of championing women and hating men in the Christmas special by the Daily Mail ... you're probably doing
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In my case, I was not 100% happy with Moffatt's Irene, but I knew going into it that I wasn't going to be. Because the Irene Adler who lives in my head is not the Irene from "A Scandal in Bohemia" at all, but rather from Carole Nelson Douglas's rather magnificent series of Irene-centric mystery/adventure novels, which develop the character into someone firmly rooted in but quite different from the brief glimpse we get of her in "A Scandal in Bohemia."
Also, a bit ironically, the thing that bugged me the most about the ending was not that Irene was defeated (I think that was inevitable from the moment the episode extended beyond the time frame of the short story--if the story didn't end with one failure as a cautionary lesson, it certainly wasn't going to end on a hat trick of them or there would be no real resolution) but rather that I found it hard to believe, after having finally outwitted her, that Sherlock would still care enough to enact the elaborate measures that would clearly be required to have saved her life a la that final flashback. I found it unrealistic that, once he'd *found* her weakness, he would retain the respect he'd gained for her while she had the advantage over him.
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Or do you think Moffat's Irene was further from ACD's?
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(Also, just a semantical note but it bears clarifying: by "firmly rooted in but very different from," what I meant is that CND's Adler takes the rough sketch of the character from the ACD short story and gives her much a much more complex personality and motivations, so that Watson's portrait is true to the information he had, but from Irene's perspective, that information is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Hence, the character is different because we are seeing her through the eyes of someone who knows her better. Steven Moffat was transposing the character into a completely different setting, which is an entirely different thing and what he had to adapt/take away from the short story is thus also very different. So I'm not comparing the way the two writers adapted the character at all except in that I like one's choices better than the other's. :-) )
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I read azarsuerte's analysis (in her third para) of Moffat's Adler as being entirely independant of her affection for CND's version. She alerts us (in her 2nd para) - wisely and honestly - to her affiliation with the CND version over the ACD version *just in case* she is being unduly influenced by it... But then goes on (in the 3rd para) to critique Moffat's version quite incisively as "it's own beast".
Rather than tyring to judge Moffat's/"Sherlock"'s (bearing in mind there are more artists at work here than just the scriptwriter) in terms of "distance" from previous versions (either ACD's or CND's), as you seem to be assuming/asking for, azarsuerte has done her best to give us an analysis of *her own* reaction to *this specific version*... With supplementary information (presented first) as to some of the factors that may be, despite her best intentions, colouring her analysis.
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