I agree with your review. TFP was disgusting and offensive. Just out of interest, though, how were Moriarty and Eurus queercoded and/or what kind of queer things were they saying? I just didn't see that. Thank you!!
I’m so glad it wasn’t just me who felt this way!! I went back to the episode to find the exact quotes on the queercoding side of things. First we’ve got Eurus, who has this interaction with Sherlock:
Eurus: Oh! Have you had sex?Sherlock: Why do you ask?Eurus: The music. I’ve had sex.Sherlock: How?Eurus: One of the nurses got careless. I liked it. Messy, though. People are so breakable.Sherlock: I take it he didn’t consent?Eurus: “He”?Sherlock: She?Eurus: Afraid I didn’t notice in the heat of the moment. And afterwards, well, you couldn’t really tell.
Here we have Sherlock, the hero, establishing a heteronormative, non-consensual narrative for what happened; Eurus wrongfoots him by queering this narrative. Throughout their conversation, Eurus is scaring him, setting him off balance, being cruel. This has been the pattern of their conversation so far. So when she introduces queerness, it’s implied that she is intending to have that same effect: of scaring, setting off balance, seeming morally wrong to Sherlock’s morally right. She explicitly states that gender doesn’t affect her sexual choices, which would usually be indicative of, perhaps, pansexuality - but it’s done in a way that’s frightening and destabilising both for Sherlock and for the viewer. Queerness is a trump card for her to play, here, another weapon.
Then we have Moriarty. Firstly, he arrives to the tune of I Want to Break Free by Queen - lead singer Freddie Mercury, “self-confessed bi-sexual”/ The joke in the song name is there, it’s funny, but then you pair that reference with what Moriarty says and things become a bit more nasty. There are two snippets for him:
Moriarty [apropos of nothing, speaking out of the blue]: Do you like my boys? This one’s got more stamina, but he’s less caring in the afterglow.
Mycroft: You’re a Christmas present.Moriarty: Oh! How do you want me?
In the first instance, the words are being spoken to the head of the prison; in the second, to Mycroft. Both times, knowing Moriarty as we do, we assume that they are meant to frighten - since that’s kind of his whole thing whenever he talks at all.
Both of these villains use queerness to destabilise the “normal”, to take the good guys’ heteronormative worlds and twist them, add an edge of unexpected danger. Queerness is quite clearly written in TFP as something you shouldn’t do, something that is frightening to do, something you can use as a threat, something you can use as a weapon. This is never challenged. There is no positive queer narrative to counteract it. It’s not a bad thing to have a queer villain - but when both villains are explicitly queer and no one else is, that’s queercoding. It’s hugely damaging. When people react negatively to queerness for no reason they can put their finger on - when people tell you “it just makes them feel weird” or “it grosses them out” or “it makes them nervous” - point fingers at this. It’s this that solidifies the connection between queerness and deviance, queerness and dangerous mental imbalance, queerness and moral wrongness. And it sucks.
