In a Way, We're All One Bad Day From Being Harpooned, Right?
Sherlock & Co. Black Peter.
Black Peter was a fun mystery, as well as the first to come out since I stopped resisting and joined the Sherlock & Co. Patreon. (The mailbags got me.) The writer, Joel Emery, even confirmed for me in a recent AMA that he’s writing a queer Sherlock! (He also said there wouldn’t be any Sherlock/John, but I’m not giving up hope!)
This adventure was a gruesome one. Sure, The Veiled Lodger had a character describe a horrible lion mauling, but Black Peter has...uh...a character describing a bloody harpoon murder. But this time the gruesome thing was in the same room as the character describing it!
...Yeah, okay, I guess the nature of audio programs is that it’s always someone describing something.
The mystery was a bit silly in how complicated it was. Sherlock already knew that the tourist, the wife, and the gardener were innocent so they didn’t need so much focus. I know it’s kind of an inherent thing for any Sherlock to be cryptic to a fault before the final solution, but why did we have to spend so much time chasing the Japanese tourist? It felt useless in-story and functioned more as a way to bring in Winnie the Pooh jokes and give Mariana a reason to show off her language skills.
I do want to note that Marta da Silva, Mariana’s actor, did a great job with all her language snippets. She sounded like a capable, confident speaker in all of them. And Sherlock showed off his new language: bad puns! John, you’ve infected him!
But the most impressive part of Black Peter was the arc with Peter himself. At the beginning he was terrifying, clearly deeply paranoid and dangerous. There was no question about why everyone would hate him. He’d spent ten years as a man who was annoying at best and violent at worst. A man whose funeral was only really attended by the person who killed him.
Harry Frost did an excellent job as Patrick. His eulogy for Peter was for a man who died twice, and both times it was because of Patrick. Frost portrays that pain and guilt beautifully. It’s both heartbreaking and poignant.
I know that Sherlock & Co. got a lot of criticism for its portrayal of mental illness in A Case of Identity. Between this adventure and the overt detour to talk to a psychiatrist in Dancing Men, I think they’re really trying to do better there. I think the complex emotions we’re left with at the end of Black Peter really illustrate how hard mental illness can be to navigate in someone you love. It would be nice to see these ailments in more characters who aren’t murderers or abusers (like in The Creeping Man for example), but I do think it’s notable progress.
Now if only we could get an openly trans character. That was my other big criticism about A Case of Identity, the way it played into transphobic stereotypes. Maybe John would even be surprisingly on top of being a trans ally, coming at it from an angle of understanding the issues trans patients face with bigoted doctors. Here’s hoping!
