Deep dive on The Johnlock Conspiracy
I never really into BBC Sherlock as sleek and stylish a show it was I bounced off it hard after... I think the second episode so I never really got the full extent of how wild things got for fandom and how much Moffat and Gatiss riled and baited their fans.
I got a glimpse of it in HBomberguy’s video but I think this video is more comprehensive.
For instance, I have seen, in the periphery mentions of the Apple Tree Yard conspiracy, which honestly just confused me at that time but with context... oof.
Also, I now get why there is a vast majority of people who really hated Moffat’s guts. I’ve only seen Moffat through the lens of Doctor Who and I think he bought back a lot of goodwill from me with how the Twelfth Doctor was written. But then looking through the timeline of Sherlock season 4 that doesn’t excuse how he and Gatiss treated the fans and how they ended BBC Sherlock. BBC Sherlock ended on 2017 which meant Moffat was already writing for Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor.
I thought how Aaron Sorkin treated internet fans via Josh Lyman in West Wing was bad but Moffat and Gatiss went a step above that in what felt like full contempt for their fans.
To be fair to the showrunners, the video also made clear there were some bad faith actors within the BBC Sherlock fandom that really pushed the so-called conspiracy.
But honestly, the sense I got from this video was Moffat and Gatiss might have liked working on BBC Sherlock but they simply weren’t as passionate with it as they were of Doctor Who and it showed in their work. I think by the time they needed to do so, after having difficult time wrangling schedules and coming off producing and filming Doctor Who series 9 maybe both showrunners have ran out of gas for BBC Sherlock.
Heaven Sent was magnificent but BBC Sherlock clearly suffered for it, and unfortunately Moffat didn’t have the talent for delegation that Russell T Davies had and seemed to have a hard time handing out writing and showrunning duties to other people so BBC Sherlock could have been better produced. In the end, their final series (at this time of writing) served to alienate their fandom.














