It was definitely coming from miles off, but I'm Not Happy that such an interesting and badass character was fridged for the sake of creating conflict between John and Sherlock :(
Of course, nobody dies for long on this show (I still think Moriarty is going to turn out to not have died somehow - but that might be my utter love for Andrew Scott thinking LOL) so I question if she's actually dead or if it was somehow faked. The flame screen transition suggests cremation, but I still doubt that she's 100% gone (mostly because I do not believe that the Moff would really do that just to get some cheap drama going on.
I'm Not Happy that such an interesting and badass character was fridged for the sake of creating conflict between John and Sherlock Same here. I guess we have to wait and see what they do with it... I would love for it to be a fake-out, but I'm not optimistic.
I loved everything except the ending, which was really disappointing. I also couldn't believe John having that emotional(?) affair. Well, I could but I was really disappointed in him.
I'm of two minds about whether it fully fits the "fridge" trope that pisses me off. Certainly the original ACD Watson was repeatedly "freed" from his apparently multiple marriages, at least once to death. Even Doyle liked his bromance free of the women he liked Holmes and Watson to protect. So in that sense, Gatiss and Moffat are simply honoring ACD's tradition.
On the other hand, they have changed or abandoned other things from the original canon - they didn't have to keep this one. There are other ways to provide points of conflict between John and Sherlock, which they've used well before - hell, the entire relationship between the two is one of conflicted emotions, none of which needs the death of a smart, tough, lovely woman to generate.
Putting all of that aside, and with the understanding that I consider it a major infrastructural weakness in the plot, I think Gatiss' writing here was far better than some of his previous writing. The direction was good the actors were - as always - superlative.
Little thing that eventually might not be little:
Is the woman John had a perhaps-affair with going to turn out to be a plant for either Moriarty or "the other"?
Really little: Apparently Greg Lestrade has fallen prey to the policeman's personal risk; divorce. (He was married as of the Christmas party they all attended in, what, the last series? And now he's dating. Poor Greg.)
So in that sense, Gatiss and Moffat are simply honoring ACD's tradition. Yeah, it's a complicated one. I'm sort of withholding judgement until I see the rest of the season, because it's one thing to kill someone off, it's something else to see what they do with it...
One thought (that might warrant its own post) - but John became 'the girl'. Mary was smarter and more capable of keeping up with Sherlock in every way, and *she* was the one with the complex background that she was now retiring from. This is usually a man's role. John was (quite literally) left holding the baby. Sherlock and Mary always understood each other, and bonded over their shared love of John. I'm still mulling this over.
Also, as someone on Tumblr pointed out, the fact that there were THREE women in the cast all of whom fitted 'the English Woman' is a very good thing. Plus Mrs Hudson, plus Molly.
Still not happy about Mary being gone, but I am trying to look at the positives.
Putting all of that aside, and with the understanding that I consider it a major infrastructural weakness in the plot, I think Gatiss' writing here was far better than some of his previous writing. The direction was good the actors were - as always - superlative. Yeah, he's done very well. There are flaws that wouldn't be in a Moffat script, but it was pretty solid. I want to watch it again to catch all the stuff I didn't on first round.
Is the woman John had a perhaps-affair with going to turn out to be a plant for either Moriarty or "the other"? If she's not, I'll eat my hat.
Really little: Apparently Greg Lestrade has fallen prey to the policeman's personal risk; divorce. (He was married as of the Christmas party they all attended in, what, the last series? And now he's dating. Poor Greg.) I had forgotten that he was married. (If I ever noticed.) Poor Greg indeed.
I didn't see the Mary-thing happening in the first episode. I expected it would end that way, but not right now. Yeah, this is one of the reasons I'm withholding judgement until I see how it plays out. What do they do with it?
But I love how this show is filmed and how everything is revealed and this episode was no exception. It is just a gorgeous show. <33
"Sherlock" is on hiatus so often it feels weird when it's on air :)
I wonder if Mary's death is real. It looked so fake - one big cliche, aren't Moftiss better than that? - and Moffat played the "fake death" trick multiple times, once with a whole planet. I don't know, maybe after season 9 of Doctor Who I just automatically assume a death in Moffat's series is fake.
Here's my reaction post, if you're interested: http://alumfelga.livejournal.com/24598.html
"Sherlock" is on hiatus so often it feels weird when it's on air :) I know what you mean. :)
I don't know, maybe after season 9 of Doctor Who I just automatically assume a death in Moffat's series is fake. Yeah, it depends what they do with it... As in, why they did it.
Here's my reaction post, if you're interested: Thank you, I'll have a look!
Yeah, it depends what they do with it... As in, why they did it.
Yes, I'm curious how they'll handle John's and Sherlock's conflict. The more I think of it, the more I like the idea of Sherlock being (arguably) guilty of Mary's death. I also finally figured out why Rosie was born - without her, John would just go back to where he was before he met Mary, shut his emotions down and pretend nothing happened. Rosie is a reminder of Mary and the fact that John is still a father makes it harder for him, but allows him to evolve as a character. Without Rosie, we'd have season 2 John again.
Man, I've spent so much time in Sherlock fandom on tumblr that it feels weird discussing it elsewhere, like there's so much missing context.
So, okay, diving right in because I think you like this kind of stuff. I wrote this meta on lies and performances before the new episode came out. A quote from it:
John is not just watching Sherlock on TV. He is watching Sherlock on TV explaining how he lies and performs.
This is not in itself a lie or misinterpretation, but it fits very well with the two previous images we’ve discussed, where Moriarty misinterprets Sherlock and Henry misinterprets himself. The writers are telling us over and over again, through these metafictional mechanisms, that not all stories and not all interpretations can be trusted. Sherlock is not telling the truth about himself, and the writers are not telling the truth about Sherlock. But why?
The Six Thatchers doubles down on this imagery right away. Literally the first thing we see is video footage from His Last Vow being manipulated in front of our eyes. Sherlock says "that's not how it really happened" and they tell him that's the official story. Note that we're not just watching any old footage -- it's metafictional footage, it's a scene from BBC Sherlock, just like the bonfire footage that Magnussen shows John and Sherlock in His Last Vow is, viewed metafictionally, a scene from BBC Sherlock.
They are being incredibly clear here: we cannot trust the narrative, they're lying, Sherlock is lying, and what I think it comes down to is this: they're trying to show that Arthur Conan Doyle and the original Watson were lying, too. That all older literature had to lie about the queerness of its protagonists. They had to hide their emotions, their queerness, the true story, all like Sherlock is trying to do within the text.
Over in the corner of tumblr I hang out in people have torn apart this episode and I'm pretty convinced that chunks of it are not real. There are some pretty implausible things that happen. I have seen speculation about what precisely is going on but I don't want to spoil anything so I won't say more unless you explicitly ask. :)
Ooooh, you are delurkingdetective! I did not know that. I follow you on Tumblr, and am always pleased when your meta shows up on my dash. (Not that I am on Tumblr a great deal.)
I love what you do with all the imagery and the (lying) narrative etc. etc. Gorgeous gorgeous stuff. (I don't know why Sherlock doesn't ping my meta writing. Because goodness knows there a ton there.)
However I'm not sure about what you see as the endgame. I'm not sure what that would *do*? Sherlock and John are already very very good friends and obviously love each other. (Heck, that's the understanding between Mary & Sherlock pretty much from the start - they both love John.)
I just can't see how John/Sherlock would unfold, or why. Should they end up playing house with little Rosie? That would be the most un-Sherlock-y thing to happen, ever.
It's not that I can't see your points (is it the Korean adverts that basically play John/Sherlock as a romance?), but (as one of my friends said) it's pretty plausible that Moffat and Gatiss are basically writing fanfiction of their own friendship.
I also remember seeing - or reading - an interview with Moffat from some years ago, where he was talking about whether Sherlock was gay or not, because he'd tried to work it out, and his arguments for 'not gay & not interested in John in that way' were very compelling. It was a pretty logical deduction, and not a big thing, he'd obviously just puzzled it out for himself. I can go into more detail if you like, because it was a good argument - or you can say that I am totally mistaken and Moffat has always lied through his teeth! Which he has been known to do, oh yes. :)
(And no spoilers please! I love to watch it without knowing anything!)
Anyway, I'm so pleased to have found out who you are on Tumblr. I'm mirrorleaf over there, and never post a single original thing.
I think I pointed people over to tumblr from before, I bet you followed me then and promptly forgot which one I was. I suppose it would be easier if I'd just used the name 'greensword' but I decided I could always link up the two accounts later if I wanted.
However I'm not sure about what you see as the endgame. I'm not sure what that would *do*? Sherlock and John are already very very good friends and obviously love each other. (Heck, that's the understanding between Mary & Sherlock pretty much from the start - they both love John.)
To be clear, I appreciate when stories focus on friendships or other kinds of relationships over romance. Romance isn't the be all end all. I find a lot of romantic plots annoying. That being said. What Sherlock/John would *do* is be an incredibly high profile queer love story. Not only that, because of the way they're telling the story, it recasts the entire history of Holmes & Watson as queer, and shines a light on all the stories that are still in the literary closet.
“We all have a past,” Sherlock tells John in The Abominable Bride. “Ghosts - they are the shadows that define our every sunny day.”
BBC Sherlock forces us to acknowledge our ghosts. If Sherlock and John had been written as gay from the beginning, it would have been lovely, but it would have been simply “the gay Sherlock Holmes”. But Sherlock Holmes has always been gay, and the way it and so many other queer stories have been hidden by queer coding is a shadow defining these sunnier days. The writers push the viewer to actively participate in the process of queer coding. As John comes to reinterpret Sherlock, so too will fans will be forced to reinterpret BBC Sherlock. In doing so, they will learn to recognize queer coding and to confront its harmful legacy.
The Blind Banker, BBC Sherlock’s second episode, revolves around a cipher hidden in a book - a book with significant impact, “a book that everybody would own”. Sherlock is able to break the code and read the hidden message in the book, saving John and his date Sarah from danger, yet the kidnappers get away. John suggests that they can be brought to justice, but Sherlock knows better than that:
SHERLOCK: No. No. I cracked this code; all the smugglers have to do is pick up another book.
As impactful as Arthur Conan Doyle’s works have been, they are not the only queer coded texts out there, the only stories ready to be reclaimed. Nor are queer people the only group that have been marginalized, forced to obscure their truths in order to be published. We cannot stop at the Sherlock Holmes stories, though we can certainly pause to celebrate.
Just as John Watson is learning to tell better stories, so too can we fans -- and we must. As I said at the beginning: fans are part of a community. Fans believe stories matter. And so fans have a collective obligation to tell inclusive and honest stories, to transform the works we’re given into something more, not less. To decode, to transgress, to reclaim, and maybe one day to lay our ghosts to rest.
So yeah, I think it would do a tremendous amount for the LGBTQ community.
See, I adore all the meta. It's gorgeous. And yes, it'd be a wonderful thing for the LGBTQ community...
I'm just not convinced that this is the story they're telling. Why would they make that their endgame? It would take the show and retroactively change the whole thing, and it would become 'The Gay Sherlock Holmes' by default.
If it were RTD writing - maybe I could see it.
Sorry, need to get back to work, so I'll try to get back to you later. But I worry you'll be sorely disappointed. Esp since Sherlock seems to be a- or demi-sexual (Irene Adler being the catalyst for the demi) and I can't see him being attracted to John.
How do you feel about video meta? There's a fan, Rebekah, whose made a bunch of amazing video metas that gather up arguments from around our corner of fandom and it's just -- it's a lot of arguments. There's a relatively short video to start the series, Establishing Context, which explains why Gatiss, Moffat and the BBC specifically would do this. There's an episode on Scandal in Belgravia which explains the queer reading of Irene and Sherlock's relationship (not that it's hard to do a queer reading of Irene given that she explicitly says she's gay). I haven't seen this one, but it covers all the things that don't make sense outside a queer reading: If it's not gay, then why?
I would be very disappointed if I was wrong. But I'll survive. ;)
I'd love to have a look, but as I haven't even re-watched this week's episode (and have SO MUCH ELSE TO DO) I will probably just keep it bookmarked in case of Surprise Time!
Also, at this point, I'm not just thinking this will probably happen. I'm almost certain of it. There's just so much evidence inside and outside of the text. There are many beautiful metas on tumblr that should thoroughly convince you.
I think they're making this show hoping/knowing it will be talked about for years to come, shown in media studies courses and queer theory courses and literature history courses. I hope that some of the work that tumblr fans did over the last few years ends up being included in those courses.
I have been wondering how to reply for the past week. Because it’s complicated. It’s not that I can’t see all the things you pull out, it’s that that sort of writing is not how Moffat works. He is, on the whole, fundamentally honest – he says what he’ll do, and he does it. (Which is what trips people up.) Is River Song the Doctor’s wife? Well she looks like a wife and she sounds like a wife, and yes, she is his wife.
Moffat is also a troll, so he loves playing with expectations, and teasing people, but he named the S6 finale ‘The Wedding of River Song’. Which sort of gives the game away.
However the best example is probably Clara, because it has that same duality built in that Sherlock does. Is Clara something special? Is she more than she appears? She is mirrored with the Doctor from her first appearance, and Eleven spends all of S7b trying to figure out ‘what she is’. The answer is (as is established over and over) ‘a perfectly normal human being’, even if the show merrily toys with the idea of her being other, constantly trolling the viewers, right up to having Clara declare that she is the Doctor.
I think John/Sherlock fits into this. They are friends. This is the baseline of the show, the thing that it’s all resting on. But because Moffat and Gatiss are trolls, they merrily play with all the ‘interpretations’ that a male friendship now often carries (‘People will talk!’), but it doesn’t alter the underlying facts. If John and Sherlock were genuinely attracted to each other, it would not be something buried in subtexts and jokes.
If I'm wrong you are welcome to laugh at me for a century. But I have spent WAY too much time speculating about Clara to be pulled into another situation that's way too similar.
I see what you're saying. And I get your perspective, I totally do. I guess it just seems so endlessly cruel to do that to the LGBTQ community (of which Gatiss is a part) and to do it so extensively. Because it's not just the dozen-ish times a character directly implies that Sherlock or John is gay or they're in a relationship, there's so much additional stuff from acting choices to set design to the many, many queer mirrors, and there's more of it the more the series goes on. It's got to be intentional. Which makes it either wonderful or awful. There isn't an in between here. And I just have faith that they're fundamentally kind.
I just don't think that's the story they're telling.
And kind? Writers aren't kind, they're evil.
I mean - it's not that I don't believe you that you can see all the queer coding (I think that's what it's called), but why would they use it?
I think if they'd wanted to make them gay, they would have done so up-front, more or less.
Possibly introduced it slowly, much like Moffat has carefully built up Doctor Who so the next time the Doctor will presumably be female, and this will not be a major shock, it'll be following norms laid down before. (See Missy, the General etc.)
I think there's a difference between being "evil" like tricking an audience into believing a character has a certain background or that a plot twist is coming, and being "evil" like tricking an oppressed group into believing you're going to provide them with representation. One is a funny term we use for the way creators mess with our expectations and cause angst in order to tell good stories. One is actually, intentionally awful. And I'm going to give the creators the benefit of the doubt that they're only "awful", not awful.
As for why they wouldn't make them gay up front, I think this tweet could summarize their motives pretty well.
tricking an oppressed group into believing you're going to provide them with representation. But is that what they are doing? I mean, if they are deliberately misleading people, that is awful yes, but they have constantly said Sherlock and John are NOT gay and that the show is not going there. There has never been any coy 'Well, let's see' or 'Draw your own conclusions'. I mean, they're happy for the fans to write whatever, but that's different.
As for why they wouldn't make them gay up front, I think this tweet could summarize their motives pretty well. Well, they're not in America. That's not to say that everything is rosy and happy acceptance over here, but British people generally think Americans a bit behind the times wrt all these issues...
Mostly, then I just want to tell you to watch Class, where sexual orientation is not an issue. Some people are just gay. ♥
I don't really have the time or the energy to list out all the different ways in which they've implied queerness in the text. But to choose a bunch of examples at semi random:
- The twelve-ish people who assume Sherlock and John are gay or in a relationship throughout the series, including people who know Sherlock well or are gay themselves. - Sherlock's own statements that women aren't his area. This is sometimes framed as "I abhor all romance" but he never says that men aren't his area or anything similar. - Starting in TSoT there are lots of references to "the elephant in the room" including lots of elephants in the set design. - Also in TSoT there's the stag night where John touches Sherlock's knee and says "I don't mind" to which Sherlock replies "Anytime". - There is so much rather raunchy gay imagery in the scene right after that. I won't detail it because, as I said, raunchy, but it's there and it's clearly intentional and I can link you to details if you'd like. ;) - The existence of James Sholto, who is referred to in the script as John's "ex", and who prompts Mary to say to Sherlock, "Neither of us were the first you know".
Okay, six random things is enough for now but just name an episode or a character and I can come up with six more queer subtextual things related to it. And that's not even getting into some of the more subtle stuff that'd take a while to explain, like the "phone as heart" metaphor and "drink code" which seems pretty intentional, even if it's not all that persuasive on its own.
Well, they're not in America. That's not to say that everything is rosy and happy acceptance over here, but British people generally think Americans a bit behind the times wrt all these issues...
I suppose it might be a cultural difference. It's pretty shitty over here though. Queer folks are still dying regularly in hate crimes and our vice president elect diverted funds for people with AIDs towards "conversion therapy" which has been proven to increase suicidality in the people (usually teens) who are subjected to it. I find it hard to believe that there's no serious homophobia in Britain when it's so bad over here.
Also, I just want to add - I can't tell if my stress and frustration is coming through in these comments. It has been a tough couple of months for me since Trump's election. But that stress and frustration isn't aimed at you at all, I think you're great, we're just touching on things that I'm not exactly equanimous about.
I was just thinking that I hope I'm not upsetting you - I know you have been very stressed and working hard, and I don't want to start criticizing the one thing that makes you happy/gives you hope.
You're not upsetting me. I've got a few different things giving me joy these days, and you're not trying to tell me I'm wrong or anything, you're just offering your own perspective.
Oh good! I just didn't want this to become a draining conversation that made things worse.
And I happened to read some of your meta on Tumblr a few days before Sherlock started and thinking that I'd love to talk to whoever-wrote-that-meta b/c it was so good. :) (But I don't talk to people on Tumblr because it has the stupidest set-up ever.)
Okay, six random things is enough for now but just name an episode or a character and I can come up with six more queer subtextual things related to it. And that's not even getting into some of the more subtle stuff that'd take a while to explain, like the "phone as heart" metaphor and "drink code" which seems pretty intentional, even if it's not all that persuasive on its own. I guess it depends on the glasses you view it with. And like I said, I'm fully versed in Moffat meta, I have just never applied it to Sherlock. However, I don't know that I would come to the same conclusions... (I think it might make sense to continue this part of the conversation in a post on episode 2? Since that does affect things. Although I'm not sure you can convince me.)
I suppose it might be a cultural difference. It's pretty shitty over here though. Queer folks are still dying regularly in hate crimes and our vice president elect diverted funds for people with AIDs towards "conversion therapy" which has been proven to increase suicidality in the people (usually teens) who are subjected to it. I find it hard to believe that there's no serious homophobia in Britain when it's so bad over here. Yeah I follow American politics, I'm sadly familiar. :( Like I said, it's not heaven over here, but you don't have a religious right putting pressure on everything, and people generally are pretty accepting. So I don't think it would occur to Moffat to make a gay Sherlock to support gays because they're not doing so badly? ETA: Wound up in that is of course a lot of unconscious privilege (which I am sure I suffer from too! I am not an expert!) - like how it took someone to point out to Moffat that there were no gay characters in S5 of Doctor Who, which had not been a deliberate omission, just a lack of thought. So he went and added Madam Vastra and Jenny and much awesomeness ensued. (And of course has Madam Vastra be the inspiration for Sherlock...) However it is a bit of a blind spot in that sense? He is quite committed to representation, but I don't think he'd see Sherlock in that light.
The other thing though is that Mark Gatiss is 50 years old. As bad as things were for me coming of age as a queer woman in the US in the 90s and 00s, they were almost certainly worse as a gay man in the UK in the 70s and 80s.
I didn't have to live through the worst of the AIDs crisis, for instance, and I didn't have to see my leaders (Reagan *and* Thatcher) ignoring a disease that was killing people because they found the behavior of those people unseemly.
I *did* see mainstream queer representation. There were sympathetic queer characters, though not as many as there are now (which is still less than there should be). Ellen, Willow, that random brother guy on Dawson's Creek, Velvet Goldmine. That's not something Gatiss would have had, as far as I know. (Fun fact: one of the first mainstream films to portray gay characters as something other than villains or tragic victims, Maurice, stars Rupert Graves, aka Lestrade. Gatiss would have been 30 when it came out.)
I mean, you guys didn't even pardon Alan Turing until a couple years ago. The first two seasons of BBC Sherlock had aired and series three was just about to air when the pardon finally got granted.
And, I'm not saying that just because Gatiss is a certain age and a certain identity he has to feel things certain ways. But he's shown himself to be engaged with the history of queerness in culture. He's talked about the importance of Maurice. He's cited a Sherlock Holmes adaptation where Sherlock is coded as queer as his favorite adaptation (and specifically said that that Sherlock's being gay is part of what he likes about it). And he wrote a book and directed a documentary that talked about queer coding in the work of a writer named MR James. So he's aware of this kind of stuff. If he's trolling fans deliberately it's a really conscious and hurtful decision.
Have you ever seen Pride? It came out a couple years ago and is set in 1984 (the year of my birth!). AFAIK it does a decent job of capturing what it was like to be an urban LGBQ person in the UK at that time. Also it is amazing and powerful and it has Andrew Scott (Moriarty in BBC Sherlock) in it. A+ recommended.
I mean, you guys didn't even pardon Alan Turing until a couple years ago. The first two seasons of BBC Sherlock had aired and series three was just about to air when the pardon finally got granted. True. But I would put that down to bureaucracy rather than homophobia. And a better example would probably be gay marriage which wasn't legalised until 2014 (although of course we had civil partnerships for years beforehand). However it was a conservative government that made the change, and it was celebrated by all the major political parties.
As bad as things were for me coming of age as a queer woman in the US in the 90s and 00s, they were almost certainly worse as a gay man in the UK in the 70s and 80s. Oh definitely.
So he's aware of this kind of stuff. If he's trolling fans deliberately it's a really conscious and hurtful decision. See I'm flashing back to Torchwood: Children of Earth, when RTD killed off Ianto and in the process destroyed one of THE gay ships. The backlash was *vicious*, and fans told him how he was a self-hating homophobe. He has a thick skin, but he did not take kindly to this, and told them they had no clue what they were talking about and he could do whatever the hell he wanted with his own show.
So I guess that's at the back of my mind? A gay writer added to the 'Bury Your Gays' trope. Except - what he was doing was that he was telling the story that he wanted to tell and that's how it went. The story is always king.
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EPIC SADFACE.
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Of course, nobody dies for long on this show (I still think Moriarty is going to turn out to not have died somehow - but that might be my utter love for Andrew Scott thinking LOL) so I question if she's actually dead or if it was somehow faked. The flame screen transition suggests cremation, but I still doubt that she's 100% gone (mostly because I do not believe that the Moff would really do that just to get some cheap drama going on.
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Same here. I guess we have to wait and see what they do with it... I would love for it to be a fake-out, but I'm not optimistic.
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*SOBS*
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Can you watch it if you don't live in the U.K. or USA? Because oh my I am super extremely excited ✨✨
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I'm of two minds about whether it fully fits the "fridge" trope that pisses me off. Certainly the original ACD Watson was repeatedly "freed" from his apparently multiple marriages, at least once to death. Even Doyle liked his bromance free of the women he liked Holmes and Watson to protect. So in that sense, Gatiss and Moffat are simply honoring ACD's tradition.
On the other hand, they have changed or abandoned other things from the original canon - they didn't have to keep this one. There are other ways to provide points of conflict between John and Sherlock, which they've used well before - hell, the entire relationship between the two is one of conflicted emotions, none of which needs the death of a smart, tough, lovely woman to generate.
Putting all of that aside, and with the understanding that I consider it a major infrastructural weakness in the plot, I think Gatiss' writing here was far better than some of his previous writing. The direction was good the actors were - as always - superlative.
Little thing that eventually might not be little:
Is the woman John had a perhaps-affair with going to turn out to be a plant for either Moriarty or "the other"?
Really little: Apparently Greg Lestrade has fallen prey to the policeman's personal risk; divorce. (He was married as of the Christmas party they all attended in, what, the last series? And now he's dating. Poor Greg.)
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Yeah, it's a complicated one. I'm sort of withholding judgement until I see the rest of the season, because it's one thing to kill someone off, it's something else to see what they do with it...
One thought (that might warrant its own post) - but John became 'the girl'. Mary was smarter and more capable of keeping up with Sherlock in every way, and *she* was the one with the complex background that she was now retiring from. This is usually a man's role. John was (quite literally) left holding the baby. Sherlock and Mary always understood each other, and bonded over their shared love of John. I'm still mulling this over.
Also, as someone on Tumblr pointed out, the fact that there were THREE women in the cast all of whom fitted 'the English Woman' is a very good thing. Plus Mrs Hudson, plus Molly.
Still not happy about Mary being gone, but I am trying to look at the positives.
Putting all of that aside, and with the understanding that I consider it a major infrastructural weakness in the plot, I think Gatiss' writing here was far better than some of his previous writing. The direction was good the actors were - as always - superlative.
Yeah, he's done very well. There are flaws that wouldn't be in a Moffat script, but it was pretty solid. I want to watch it again to catch all the stuff I didn't on first round.
Is the woman John had a perhaps-affair with going to turn out to be a plant for either Moriarty or "the other"?
If she's not, I'll eat my hat.
Really little: Apparently Greg Lestrade has fallen prey to the policeman's personal risk; divorce. (He was married as of the Christmas party they all attended in, what, the last series? And now he's dating. Poor Greg.)
I had forgotten that he was married. (If I ever noticed.) Poor Greg indeed.
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But I love how this show is filmed and how everything is revealed and this episode was no exception.
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Yeah, this is one of the reasons I'm withholding judgement until I see how it plays out. What do they do with it?
But I love how this show is filmed and how everything is revealed and this episode was no exception.
It is just a gorgeous show. <33
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I wonder if Mary's death is real. It looked so fake - one big cliche, aren't Moftiss better than that? - and Moffat played the "fake death" trick multiple times, once with a whole planet. I don't know, maybe after season 9 of Doctor Who I just automatically assume a death in Moffat's series is fake.
Here's my reaction post, if you're interested:
http://alumfelga.livejournal.com/24598.html
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I know what you mean. :)
I don't know, maybe after season 9 of Doctor Who I just automatically assume a death in Moffat's series is fake.
Yeah, it depends what they do with it... As in, why they did it.
Here's my reaction post, if you're interested:
Thank you, I'll have a look!
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Yes, I'm curious how they'll handle John's and Sherlock's conflict. The more I think of it, the more I like the idea of Sherlock being (arguably) guilty of Mary's death. I also finally figured out why Rosie was born - without her, John would just go back to where he was before he met Mary, shut his emotions down and pretend nothing happened. Rosie is a reminder of Mary and the fact that John is still a father makes it harder for him, but allows him to evolve as a character. Without Rosie, we'd have season 2 John again.
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Also losing a wife is different to losing a friend.
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So, okay, diving right in because I think you like this kind of stuff. I wrote this meta on lies and performances before the new episode came out. A quote from it:
The Six Thatchers doubles down on this imagery right away. Literally the first thing we see is video footage from His Last Vow being manipulated in front of our eyes. Sherlock says "that's not how it really happened" and they tell him that's the official story. Note that we're not just watching any old footage -- it's metafictional footage, it's a scene from BBC Sherlock, just like the bonfire footage that Magnussen shows John and Sherlock in His Last Vow is, viewed metafictionally, a scene from BBC Sherlock.
They are being incredibly clear here: we cannot trust the narrative, they're lying, Sherlock is lying, and what I think it comes down to is this: they're trying to show that Arthur Conan Doyle and the original Watson were lying, too. That all older literature had to lie about the queerness of its protagonists. They had to hide their emotions, their queerness, the true story, all like Sherlock is trying to do within the text.
Over in the corner of tumblr I hang out in people have torn apart this episode and I'm pretty convinced that chunks of it are not real. There are some pretty implausible things that happen. I have seen speculation about what precisely is going on but I don't want to spoil anything so I won't say more unless you explicitly ask. :)
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I love what you do with all the imagery and the (lying) narrative etc. etc. Gorgeous gorgeous stuff. (I don't know why Sherlock doesn't ping my meta writing. Because goodness knows there a ton there.)
However I'm not sure about what you see as the endgame. I'm not sure what that would *do*? Sherlock and John are already very very good friends and obviously love each other. (Heck, that's the understanding between Mary & Sherlock pretty much from the start - they both love John.)
I just can't see how John/Sherlock would unfold, or why. Should they end up playing house with little Rosie? That would be the most un-Sherlock-y thing to happen, ever.
It's not that I can't see your points (is it the Korean adverts that basically play John/Sherlock as a romance?), but (as one of my friends said) it's pretty plausible that Moffat and Gatiss are basically writing fanfiction of their own friendship.
I also remember seeing - or reading - an interview with Moffat from some years ago, where he was talking about whether Sherlock was gay or not, because he'd tried to work it out, and his arguments for 'not gay & not interested in John in that way' were very compelling. It was a pretty logical deduction, and not a big thing, he'd obviously just puzzled it out for himself. I can go into more detail if you like, because it was a good argument - or you can say that I am totally mistaken and Moffat has always lied through his teeth! Which he has been known to do, oh yes. :)
(And no spoilers please! I love to watch it without knowing anything!)
Anyway, I'm so pleased to have found out who you are on Tumblr. I'm mirrorleaf over there, and never post a single original thing.
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However I'm not sure about what you see as the endgame. I'm not sure what that would *do*? Sherlock and John are already very very good friends and obviously love each other. (Heck, that's the understanding between Mary & Sherlock pretty much from the start - they both love John.)
To be clear, I appreciate when stories focus on friendships or other kinds of relationships over romance. Romance isn't the be all end all. I find a lot of romantic plots annoying. That being said. What Sherlock/John would *do* is be an incredibly high profile queer love story. Not only that, because of the way they're telling the story, it recasts the entire history of Holmes & Watson as queer, and shines a light on all the stories that are still in the literary closet.
I'll quote the ending from my (very long) meta about this:
So yeah, I think it would do a tremendous amount for the LGBTQ community.
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I'm just not convinced that this is the story they're telling. Why would they make that their endgame? It would take the show and retroactively change the whole thing, and it would become 'The Gay Sherlock Holmes' by default.
If it were RTD writing - maybe I could see it.
Sorry, need to get back to work, so I'll try to get back to you later. But I worry you'll be sorely disappointed. Esp since Sherlock seems to be a- or demi-sexual (Irene Adler being the catalyst for the demi) and I can't see him being attracted to John.
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I would be very disappointed if I was wrong. But I'll survive. ;)
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I think they're making this show hoping/knowing it will be talked about for years to come, shown in media studies courses and queer theory courses and literature history courses. I hope that some of the work that tumblr fans did over the last few years ends up being included in those courses.
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Moffat is also a troll, so he loves playing with expectations, and teasing people, but he named the S6 finale ‘The Wedding of River Song’. Which sort of gives the game away.
However the best example is probably Clara, because it has that same duality built in that Sherlock does. Is Clara something special? Is she more than she appears? She is mirrored with the Doctor from her first appearance, and Eleven spends all of S7b trying to figure out ‘what she is’. The answer is (as is established over and over) ‘a perfectly normal human being’, even if the show merrily toys with the idea of her being other, constantly trolling the viewers, right up to having Clara declare that she is the Doctor.
I think John/Sherlock fits into this. They are friends. This is the baseline of the show, the thing that it’s all resting on. But because Moffat and Gatiss are trolls, they merrily play with all the ‘interpretations’ that a male friendship now often carries (‘People will talk!’), but it doesn’t alter the underlying facts. If John and Sherlock were genuinely attracted to each other, it would not be something buried in subtexts and jokes.
If I'm wrong you are welcome to laugh at me for a century. But I have spent WAY too much time speculating about Clara to be pulled into another situation that's way too similar.
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And kind? Writers aren't kind, they're evil.
I mean - it's not that I don't believe you that you can see all the queer coding (I think that's what it's called), but why would they use it?
I think if they'd wanted to make them gay, they would have done so up-front, more or less.
Possibly introduced it slowly, much like Moffat has carefully built up Doctor Who so the next time the Doctor will presumably be female, and this will not be a major shock, it'll be following norms laid down before. (See Missy, the General etc.)
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As for why they wouldn't make them gay up front, I think this tweet could summarize their motives pretty well.
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But is that what they are doing? I mean, if they are deliberately misleading people, that is awful yes, but they have constantly said Sherlock and John are NOT gay and that the show is not going there. There has never been any coy 'Well, let's see' or 'Draw your own conclusions'. I mean, they're happy for the fans to write whatever, but that's different.
As for why they wouldn't make them gay up front, I think this tweet could summarize their motives pretty well.
Well, they're not in America. That's not to say that everything is rosy and happy acceptance over here, but British people generally think Americans a bit behind the times wrt all these issues...
Mostly, then I just want to tell you to watch Class, where sexual orientation is not an issue. Some people are just gay. ♥
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- The twelve-ish people who assume Sherlock and John are gay or in a relationship throughout the series, including people who know Sherlock well or are gay themselves.
- Sherlock's own statements that women aren't his area. This is sometimes framed as "I abhor all romance" but he never says that men aren't his area or anything similar.
- Starting in TSoT there are lots of references to "the elephant in the room" including lots of elephants in the set design.
- Also in TSoT there's the stag night where John touches Sherlock's knee and says "I don't mind" to which Sherlock replies "Anytime".
- There is so much rather raunchy gay imagery in the scene right after that. I won't detail it because, as I said, raunchy, but it's there and it's clearly intentional and I can link you to details if you'd like. ;)
- The existence of James Sholto, who is referred to in the script as John's "ex", and who prompts Mary to say to Sherlock, "Neither of us were the first you know".
Okay, six random things is enough for now but just name an episode or a character and I can come up with six more queer subtextual things related to it. And that's not even getting into some of the more subtle stuff that'd take a while to explain, like the "phone as heart" metaphor and "drink code" which seems pretty intentional, even if it's not all that persuasive on its own.
Well, they're not in America. That's not to say that everything is rosy and happy acceptance over here, but British people generally think Americans a bit behind the times wrt all these issues...
I suppose it might be a cultural difference. It's pretty shitty over here though. Queer folks are still dying regularly in hate crimes and our vice president elect diverted funds for people with AIDs towards "conversion therapy" which has been proven to increase suicidality in the people (usually teens) who are subjected to it. I find it hard to believe that there's no serious homophobia in Britain when it's so bad over here.
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And I happened to read some of your meta on Tumblr a few days before Sherlock started and thinking that I'd love to talk to whoever-wrote-that-meta b/c it was so good. :) (But I don't talk to people on Tumblr because it has the stupidest set-up ever.)
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I guess it depends on the glasses you view it with. And like I said, I'm fully versed in Moffat meta, I have just never applied it to Sherlock. However, I don't know that I would come to the same conclusions... (I think it might make sense to continue this part of the conversation in a post on episode 2? Since that does affect things. Although I'm not sure you can convince me.)
I suppose it might be a cultural difference. It's pretty shitty over here though. Queer folks are still dying regularly in hate crimes and our vice president elect diverted funds for people with AIDs towards "conversion therapy" which has been proven to increase suicidality in the people (usually teens) who are subjected to it. I find it hard to believe that there's no serious homophobia in Britain when it's so bad over here.
Yeah I follow American politics, I'm sadly familiar. :( Like I said, it's not heaven over here, but you don't have a religious right putting pressure on everything, and people generally are pretty accepting. So I don't think it would occur to Moffat to make a gay Sherlock to support gays because they're not doing so badly? ETA: Wound up in that is of course a lot of unconscious privilege (which I am sure I suffer from too! I am not an expert!) - like how it took someone to point out to Moffat that there were no gay characters in S5 of Doctor Who, which had not been a deliberate omission, just a lack of thought. So he went and added Madam Vastra and Jenny and much awesomeness ensued. (And of course has Madam Vastra be the inspiration for Sherlock...) However it is a bit of a blind spot in that sense? He is quite committed to representation, but I don't think he'd see Sherlock in that light.
OK I WILL GO AWAY NOW AND SHUT UP. Plz ignore me.
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I didn't have to live through the worst of the AIDs crisis, for instance, and I didn't have to see my leaders (Reagan *and* Thatcher) ignoring a disease that was killing people because they found the behavior of those people unseemly.
I *did* see mainstream queer representation. There were sympathetic queer characters, though not as many as there are now (which is still less than there should be). Ellen, Willow, that random brother guy on Dawson's Creek, Velvet Goldmine. That's not something Gatiss would have had, as far as I know. (Fun fact: one of the first mainstream films to portray gay characters as something other than villains or tragic victims, Maurice, stars Rupert Graves, aka Lestrade. Gatiss would have been 30 when it came out.)
I mean, you guys didn't even pardon Alan Turing until a couple years ago. The first two seasons of BBC Sherlock had aired and series three was just about to air when the pardon finally got granted.
And, I'm not saying that just because Gatiss is a certain age and a certain identity he has to feel things certain ways. But he's shown himself to be engaged with the history of queerness in culture. He's talked about the importance of Maurice. He's cited a Sherlock Holmes adaptation where Sherlock is coded as queer as his favorite adaptation (and specifically said that that Sherlock's being gay is part of what he likes about it). And he wrote a book and directed a documentary that talked about queer coding in the work of a writer named MR James. So he's aware of this kind of stuff. If he's trolling fans deliberately it's a really conscious and hurtful decision.
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True. But I would put that down to bureaucracy rather than homophobia. And a better example would probably be gay marriage which wasn't legalised until 2014 (although of course we had civil partnerships for years beforehand). However it was a conservative government that made the change, and it was celebrated by all the major political parties.
As bad as things were for me coming of age as a queer woman in the US in the 90s and 00s, they were almost certainly worse as a gay man in the UK in the 70s and 80s.
Oh definitely.
So he's aware of this kind of stuff. If he's trolling fans deliberately it's a really conscious and hurtful decision.
See I'm flashing back to Torchwood: Children of Earth, when RTD killed off Ianto and in the process destroyed one of THE gay ships. The backlash was *vicious*, and fans told him how he was a self-hating homophobe. He has a thick skin, but he did not take kindly to this, and told them they had no clue what they were talking about and he could do whatever the hell he wanted with his own show.
So I guess that's at the back of my mind? A gay writer added to the 'Bury Your Gays' trope. Except - what he was doing was that he was telling the story that he wanted to tell and that's how it went. The story is always king.
So I don't know.