Edit from the future, January 19th 2017:
Lolol I don’t write a lot of meta, but I just went through this blog and deleted all my meta posts that somehow excused or explained shitty behaviour and shitty storytelling from mofftiss.
Lately I keep thinking back on earlier years when some POC fans already stopped watching BBC Sherlock because of the way POC characters were treated ...
Now in S4, some brand new examples are that Ajay and David and his wife were killed off, and Moriarty’s Black guard is hypersexualized. As POC often are in stories written by shitty white people, and as POC really suspiciously often are in BBC Sherlock. So I’m still gonna keep this side note from another post:
Considering the awful way the show has treated Black and Asian characters previously*, it would not surprise me if they were in total denial and totally oblivious to anything potentially being problematic about trying to “subvert” the Five Orange Pips story into a society of (white) women targeting (white, thankfully) men who oppress them, and where these women use a code that in the ACD story (but not real life, afaik) was a KKK specific code. Not explaining in TAB where they got the code from, beyond “it’s a code used in America”, and not making it clear (unlike ACD in The Five Orange Pips!) that the show creators are in fact opposed to the KKK and any association with it.
My personal theory is that Eustace himself was involved in the KKK in America, similarly as the murdered uncle in The Five Orange Pips, and that Emelia or Lady Carmichael learned of the orange pips code from him, and used it on him because they knew he would know exactly what it meant.
But it irks me that this is not explicitly explained in TAB, and that somehow they thought it wasn’t necessary to make it clear that only the story’s “bad guys” would be involved in the KKK.
* Sally Donovan especially falls into the awful racist trope "The Black Woman Antagonist”. Another example of that trope in Brit TV is Maxine Martin of In The Flesh - an “outsider” with sinister motives, or Sharon in Broadchurch, who is presented as quite ruthless and immoral, and derided by Jocelyn for “always blaming everything on others”, and then at the end “graciously allowed” to work with Jocelyn in spite of everything.
