Some Thoughts On Sherlock
because I am annoyed. ((SPOILERS.))
- Moriarty explicitly said things that were queer. Eurus explicitly said things that were queer. No one else did so. This is called queercoding. It is insidious. It should not have happened.
- The plot holes were gaping all over the place. John climbs out of a well, somehow managing to escape his chains with a rope. Sherlock has water-related trauma, but he didn’t even know about the well until John told him he was trapped in one, so he couldn’t have even had repressed traumatic memories about it. John is a doctor but can’t identify a bone beyond “small”, even though it’s human.
- Characterisation was all over the place throughout the episode, most notably and frustratingly with Eurus. Her ‘fear factor’ was amped up by her inability to feel - or rather, demonstrate the emotions she was feeling - and she’s played as a quasi-deity throughout, omnipotent and emotionless. But at the end of the episode she snaps into being an emotional wreck. There was no lead-up or foreshadowing of this moment. It could have worked, but written as it was, it felt jarring and stupid. She felt suddenly stupid. The idea that Sherlock would hug her as anything more than a ploy to get John back is OOC. The idea that she wouldn’t see through any such ploy and despise it is OOC. It was lame and rushed and badly done.
- References were made to Freddie Mercury, to Oscar Wilde - queer icons, both. Given the aforementioned queercoding, this just felt like being laughed at, like a bully taking a favourite book and reading out your favourite lines in a silly mocking voice. Hands off.
- The Three Garridebs, the men dangling outside the window. This is the Holmes story which, in the Doylian canon, contains these lines from Watson, after he’s been shot and Holmes rushes to his side: “It was worth a wound — it was worth many wounds — to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.” This is well-known as one of the most explicitly queer moments in the original literary canon. The show literally dangled the possibility of this story in front of the viewers - dangled it, visible through glass but untouchable, there but not there - and then dropped it into the sea. For queercoded villains, glass disappears. For potential queer stories, the glass stays firmly in place. Three hooks were baited with the potential for queerness, and then the bait fell to a pointless death, not coming to mean anything more than just a little experimentation, a little shock value. Symbolically, for those who would understand the significance, it was just cruel.
- What infuriates me is that all of these slights and digs are in the tiny details; in the subtext. In short, in the places where queer people are used to looking: where the queer viewership finds its hope. The writers knew queer watchers would have their eyes on the references and on the details, and they twisted so many of those details into a decidedly upraised middle finger.
- “P.S. I know you two, and if I’m gone, I know what you could become.” This - this was the moment that could have changed everything. I admit I felt a little shocked leap of hope. I could even possibly have forgotten it all - the queercoding, the mocking references - if this final message from Mary had gone the way that I initially thought it would. But no. The message devolved into some overstated silliness about Holmes and Watson, the bros who solve crimes. I can’t remember a word of it. It was, frankly, some typically Moffat-esque self-insert self-love, and it only seems darkly appropriate that he was using a dead female character as his rhapsodising mouthpiece. “What a good job we’ve done with this story. How excellent these characters are. Look at this set. Look at them running. My god. We are good.” Enough. Give me something real and unpretentious or else leave Mary the hell alone.
Overall, I’m more than a little disgusted.
