honestly it was a red flag when bbc sherlock went “well obviously the word written in blood isn’t the german word for revenge, it’s clearly the beginning of the name ‘rachel’, what absolute idiot would fail to see that” when in the original novel it is, in fact, the german word for revenge, which sherlock points out gleefully to a roomful of policemen who all figure it’s the beginning of the name ‘rachel.’
and by red flag I mean it was a clear sign that the adaptation was trying to one-up the source material, instead of engaging with it with love.
#sherlock holmes#finx rambles#this kinda bugged me even when I first watched it and still thought it was a super cool show#and tbh it WAS super cool in a lot of ways#they had such dynamic and exciting editing#good pacing#cool character introductions#great snappy lines#but this was a small thing that rankled even then
You’re so right. I remember watching 1x01 and thinking “wow! they got the texts to pop up on the screen, that’s super cool!” and thinking it was just like. A super well done show and so amazing. But looking back, what I actually liked about it was the snappy editing and the little bit of development that Martin Freeman was allowed to give to his character.
Apart from that, the show is so full of… contempt? Like even from the beginning, there’s this sense that the show thinks you’re probably too stupid to be watching it, but sure, I guess we’ll let you tag along and see what a clever, amazing person Sherlock is. He’s definitely smarter than you though so don’t even try to engage with the source material, a dummy like you could never get anything right.
And then that just stayed the tone of the show until I got fed up and stopped watching.
That’s just it, that thing with the texts on screen was the first time I’d ever seen phones so smoothly and cleverly integrated into the visuals, it was genuinely brilliant, and the Watson we’re introduced to in ep1 is a compelling character. And frankly even the condescension doesn’t jar yet in ep1, because part of the joy of mystery stories (and especially of sherlock holmes adaptations) is watching the detective be so incredibly clever, so it wasn’t immediately apparent that the writers didn’t want us to be able to follow along. They’re just showing off their mystery-writing skills!
And – I think this part was really important actually – because in ep1, Sherlock responds to John actually being impressed by his deductions with the startled vulnerability of someone who’s never before met someone who doesn’t immediately want to either defeat him in battle or never speak to him again. John is truly impressed with Sherlock, but unthreatened by him, and Sherlock doesn’t really know what to do with that but he really doesn’t want to lose it. So he invites John along on his case, and then shows off for him like a peacock flashing his tail in the nervous hope that John might say more nice things, and he’s clearly floored when John does.
And that’s a really good dynamic on which to build a friendship! Closet thrill-seeker who’s extremely secure in his own abilities befriends arrogant mean girl genius who’s spent so long being envied and disliked by everyone he meets that he imprints like a duckling on the first person who doesn’t do that, but he has no clue how friendships work so he just drags this person to crime scenes and worse in the hopes that somehow this’ll do the trick.
But although John is confident in his own abilities, the writers don’t actually want him to have any. My beef with this show actually started in the very next episode, where John and his date get kidnapped by bad guys. They’re tied up and being interrogated, and John is unable to do literally anything but sit there and yell about it, even when they nearly murder his date. Sherlock has to swoop in and save the day.
In ep1 when John meets Mycroft, Mycroft’s parting shot is “fire your therapist,” because she says John’s psychosomatic tremble is a response to danger but Mycroft has been unsubtly threatening him and his tremble has firmed up and gone. John responds to danger with level-headed courage, we are told this explicitly in the text. And then when his date is about to be murdered by bad guys who believe he knows the location of the hidden whatever, he can’t find the presence of mind to fucking lie about it? String them along a little? Come up with SOME way to buy time, convince the bad guys he’s cooperating so they’ll stop paying so much attention and he can figure out a way to send a message, something. Anything.
That’s when I realized the writers didn’t actually want John to be able to do anything, they didn’t want this to be the partnership they set up in the end of ep1, they wanted Sherlock to be the competent one and John to be his fangirl. And the thing is, John is the viewer insert character. He’s the one we’re supposed to be able to identify with so he can hook us into the story. And it turns out the writers just want John – and us – to do exactly what you said: tag along and see what a clever, amazing person Sherlock is.
#also whatever the fuck they did to hounds of baskerville #the orig book is shocking because there really is a monster - there literally is a dog out there tearing people up #holmes waltzes in thinking he’s so smart and these poor traumatized people are just hallucinating to cope #with their fears and that he’s gonna set them all straight but . no they are straight up in a horror movie #so then holmes has to play by horror movie rules and use humans as bait for a rabid monster which is insane and exciting #and then BBC said ohhhh but what if they were hallucinating?? #LIKE COME ON……..# ‘CIA mind control gas’?????? I could scream . where’s the dog
@cafffine I hope it’s cool that I’m copying your tags onto this longer version of the post, bc on the surface that’s just the rache/rachel thing writ large – what if we took the thing that it wasn’t in the book and did that instead! – but it’s also part of this deep contempt the writers have for just…people. I was going to say ‘regular people’ but actually there are no people as clever as their version of sherlock, he’s the specialest guy in the whole wide world and he can never be wrong.
And first of all, that’s just so much more boring than a full on genre twist. The brilliance of making the shift into horror “our infallible detective was wrong,” thus signifying that the rules of the detective story no longer apply, and that same realization is also “the rules of reason and civilization we were operating by are useless, the superstitious locals are right, there be monsters here.” That’s the opening to Dracula! That’s classic horror! What a seamless genre transition, what a great way to shock your readers, what excellent suspense and what a cool mystery.
But it requires Sherlock to be wrong. It requires him to be completely wrong, and specifically it requires him to be wrong to have dismissed the locals as superstitious peasants whose fears were silly. It requires him to admit that just because he’s smarter than someone doesn’t mean his worldview is more correct.
Which, I suspect, is something the the writers of bbc sherlock don’t really know how to wrap their heads around.
They’re just showing off their mystery-writing skills!
I agree with everything in this post except this one specific sentence, with which I disagree vehemently. They are showing off their contempt for mystery writing as a concept. Mysteries are a dialogue between author and audience, in which the audience is an active participant and collaborator. Crafting an engaging mystery that is difficult but possible for the audience to solve is an artistic feat of incredible skill.
Meanwhile, anyone can hide so much information from the audience that it’s impossible to anticipate what the main character’s solution will be. To the author looking to write a masturbatory Smartest Man power fantasy, the audience is not a collaborator, but a threat.
I think that was part of the point: that they think they’re showing off their mystery writing skills, when they’re, uh, not. And I think the other part of the point was, partway through the first watch of the first episode when it was freshly premiered, viewers had no way to know that. Which is of course the same problem on a different meta layer.
Also, the original series wasn’t that deep. It’s riddled with factual errors (the KKK was named for the sound of a cocking rifle; interracial marriage was legal in 1870s Georgia; Watson’s given dates for various stories mean he’s been married and widowed five times in four years), several of the plots actually get repeated, and a couple of times Conan Doyle does leave us with a “….what the fuck, Arthur” (“The Red Circle” is probably the most obvious example). It was never meant to be deep. It was fluff. That’s what irritated ACD so much about people preferring it to his other, more philosophical work.
But Moffat wanted deep, and his idea of deep is really weird and grim. He wrote himself into a corner with Reichenbach and couldn’t find his way out, all because he wanted shock value. And the originals were never about shock value. I mean some of them are deeply sad (the ending of His Last Bow makes me cry; it’s an elderly Holmes who’s been called into war service for WWI and openly says he’s not sure he’ll live to see the end of it), but they’re not, you know, serious. And I think pretending they are is doing a serious disservice to them.
I’ve seen various takes on why BBC Sherlock was so bad (there’s a YouTube video out there over 2 hours long on the subject). And I think the simplest summary from my perspeective is -
I feel like the show doesn’t treat me, as a viewer, with respect
There just seems to be this underlying mood that I will be impressed and awed by this new Moffating of Holmes. The result perhaps being that the viewer feels left out of the stories.
Anyway - go to YouTube and search “Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes” and clear your brain of Moffat.
