Sherlock Returns
So Sherlock's third season premiere.
(Can you call a thing that's only three episodes long a "season?")
(Spoilers for "The Empty Hearse" only)
I have very mixed feelings, as Christina Clouse predicted I would.
*IF* we're meant to understand that the show itself deliberately broke the fourth wall to explain to us, the audience, how it was done, because how it was performed - by the actors and crew - in *actual* reality would be the only way for Sherlock Holmes to have done it in *actual* reality, then...okay. I'm delighted.
I don't think it's an unreasonable theory. It's meta, but when it comes to Sherlock Holmes, meta is okay, because meta is about reality, and so is Sherlock Holmes.
There's a notion that magic tricks are "ruined" when the audience discovers the mundane explanations for how they're performed (the floating thing is attached to a string, or the magician spent 2000 hours practicing a particular move). That's probably true for many people, but for skeptics, the mundane reality driving the art *is* beautiful. As the face of and most people's introduction to Occam's Razor, Sherlock Holmes can point that out.
My only problem is that I love meta so much it's possible I'm deliberately excusing another explanation; that the show painted itself into a corner and decided to escape via the trapdoor of artistic ambiguity.
That can work for some stories (did Leonardo DiCaprio's top ever stop spinning?), but artistic ambiguity is a very annoying cop-out when it comes to a Sherlock Holmes story. It's second only to the flat-out enraging impossibly magical explanations of the mysteries in Guy Ritchie's Holmes movies.
Luckily Moffat's Sherlock is driven by the characters and its snappy stylishness, so I can finish the "season" in peace even if my meta theory is thwarted.
...LATER...
I can be delighted after all. Steven Moffat, whatever he is, is not a dick, and he provided the official and canon explanations in an interview. Meta is real.
(Can you call a thing that's only three episodes long a "season?")
(Spoilers for "The Empty Hearse" only)
I have very mixed feelings, as Christina Clouse predicted I would.
*IF* we're meant to understand that the show itself deliberately broke the fourth wall to explain to us, the audience, how it was done, because how it was performed - by the actors and crew - in *actual* reality would be the only way for Sherlock Holmes to have done it in *actual* reality, then...okay. I'm delighted.
I don't think it's an unreasonable theory. It's meta, but when it comes to Sherlock Holmes, meta is okay, because meta is about reality, and so is Sherlock Holmes.
There's a notion that magic tricks are "ruined" when the audience discovers the mundane explanations for how they're performed (the floating thing is attached to a string, or the magician spent 2000 hours practicing a particular move). That's probably true for many people, but for skeptics, the mundane reality driving the art *is* beautiful. As the face of and most people's introduction to Occam's Razor, Sherlock Holmes can point that out.
My only problem is that I love meta so much it's possible I'm deliberately excusing another explanation; that the show painted itself into a corner and decided to escape via the trapdoor of artistic ambiguity.
That can work for some stories (did Leonardo DiCaprio's top ever stop spinning?), but artistic ambiguity is a very annoying cop-out when it comes to a Sherlock Holmes story. It's second only to the flat-out enraging impossibly magical explanations of the mysteries in Guy Ritchie's Holmes movies.
Luckily Moffat's Sherlock is driven by the characters and its snappy stylishness, so I can finish the "season" in peace even if my meta theory is thwarted.
...LATER...
I can be delighted after all. Steven Moffat, whatever he is, is not a dick, and he provided the official and canon explanations in an interview. Meta is real.