He Knows Ash

Hmm, I’m actually not so sure about that. Because I never got this joke (and no, that’s not a generation thing. I’m round about the same age as the show creators). Honestly, to me, two blokes sharing a flat in central London in the 21st century are just two blokes sharing a flat because it’s fucking expensive. I’d never assume anything else.

Even if one of the man was depicted as obviously gay (Girlfriend? Nor really my area. - Boyfriend? I know it’s fine.) - I wouldn’t assume any kind of romatic interest between them. I can’t see a joke there either.

But when their flat sharing gets laden with innuendo? For example, their landlady asking them if they share a bedroom. Another acquaintance taking them for being on a date. Those two blokes gazing at each other as if they were about to eat each other alive. One of the man killing for the other, who, in return, protects him from being prosecuted… Well, then I’d start to assume something’s going on - because it is shown to me and hammered home.

Only, I can’t see a joke there either…

So, what Gatiss described in the above interview wasn’t what happened. They were not just showing us two blokes living together. Because then no one in the 21st century would think of them as a couple. Moffat and Gatiss had to actively insert innuendo for their viewers to catch up on their ‘joke’ in the first place. They encouraged this on many levels: text, acting choices, casting, costume, music, lighting, cinematography.

They actively implemented homoerotic (sub)text in their show - only to lament at the same time that people cought up on it? That some viewers expected something to come out of it. Because, in the 21st century, no one thought it possible that it could just be a lame joke! Because there just is no joke to it.

The viewers took the positive attitude Gatiis desrcibes a step further and expected positive representation from the writers after playing with the inherent homoeroticism of the original stories. The fandom was far more advanced than the show runners, it seems.

And why play with the  homoeroticism it in the first place? I really can’t see where the fun might be in there, apart from cracking some cheap gay jokes that feed an outdated no-homo attitude?

The Battersea conversation between John and Irene is one example of relationship implications being directly in the writing, despite some posts I’ve seen attributing Johnlock to some manifestation of acting and editing. We all know the scene by heart. John says they’re not a couple; Irene says that they are. John says he’s not infatuated with Sherlock because John is not gay, and Irene counters that she is gay, and “Look at us both [being infatuated?].”

What are we looking at, Moffat? Genuinely, I would like that answered and am confused about Moffat and Gatiss’s hostility towards discussing romantic interpretations of their writing. What was that line supposed to do if not invite us to examine the nature of both John’s and Irene’s feelings towards Sherlock and perhaps the immutability (or lack thereof) of romantic attraction? I know that script page floated around ages ago that said that John then laughs at the absurdity of the situation in response to Irene’s comment, but whether he laughs or gives that rueful huff that we get in the final version, John has no spoken answer to Irene’s comment. Was she right? Was she wrong? What was Moffat trying to convey? Was it only about Irene in that moment? Is she the only one with a bendable sexuality? That’s an ugly implication.

And then someone on their team wrote a scene episodes later where John and Sherlock are the only people at a bachelor party (when there certainly would have been comedic value in Lestrade or Anderson or relatives we’ve never met or Mycroft (like the Ritchie movies, right?) being in on this little celebration). But instead we’ve got no explanation for why there are no guests other than our assumption that Sherlock and John wanted a night alone together, and John saying he doesn’t mind touching Sherlock’s leg. Why is that line there if it doesn’t mean something? That’s 15 seconds of screen real estate that could have been spent elsewhere. I want to hear what Moffat and Gatiss say about this scene, the dialogue, the setup, etc.

These are two examples. We all could pull out at least one bit of written dialogue per episode where something in the writing itself implied “couple” or “attraction” that was not a joke made by a third party. And I really just want to ask them what they were trying to do in any of these types of scenes, because these were not jokes made by third party characters. But no interviewer will ever go beyond asking the question of whether John and Sherlock are a couple with Gatiss pulling out that stock reply about how in the 21st century, it’s cheeky to say that everyone will assume that they are together. Maybe Gatiss’s real answer is that they delighted in the ambiguity, never settling on one thing, raising issues and questions about character motivations without any definitive answers in a way that gives their writing (an illusion of) depth (a show like Mad Men played with raising different questions and not always answering them), and they never thought that anyone would seek to insert answers to these little questions that they toyed with.

Just home from a professional dinner/awards do. I met up with a friend who I only see occasionally and she watches BBC Sherlock but is not in the fandom. She’s a casual and loves talking to me as she is amazed by my obsession with Holmes and Watson. Anyway, tonight she made a bee line for me and asked me WTF had happened to the show. She herself was disgusted with the inconsistencies of the characters, and the about face in the narrative. Her view had been that Sherlock was gay, any viewer who didn’t see it was choosing not too, he was heartbroken over John marrying, and that S4 would have seen Mary turn into a kickass villain. I of course spoke with passion about my opinion of S4 (she was somewhat alarmed at my vehement hatred of the writers) but finally, as if to counsel me she laid her hand on my arm and said; the obvious answer is the writers were stopped from finishing their story, as S4 was so much in opposition to the 3 seasons preceding it, that it was a fuck you to someone. And that the ‘terrible last ep’ was a parting fart as they walked away. This from a 50 year old psychologist, with zero knowledge of all our ideas and viewpoints, does not know Moffat or Gatiss, and who just watched the show as pure escapism.

Yesterday I read a quote by Steven Moffat when discussing a new project that he and Mark are about to embark upon. It was one of those moments when the pieces fall into place and you realise that something has been obvious all along, but you missed it. Steven is a typical INSTIGATOR. Here is the quote:

“My main enthusiasm though is just to be at the beginning of something as opposed to well into it” 

In psychology we look at an ‘instigator’ tendency in people as both a positive trait and a negative, just as their opposite, an ‘inhibitor’ tendency can be both also. Neither is good or bad if in moderation. However if the person is not self aware of the negative effects they can get themselves into big trouble. Let’s look at the clinical signs of being an Instigator:

Becomes bored quickly

Hates being managed, controlled or given rules

Loves the thrill of invention, creation and building

Tend to move on from projects, jobs, and relationships easily

Leaves incomplete projects

If the going gets tough they walk away and start something new

Can motivate and enthral others to join in, embrace a project

Insensitive to their effect on others

Forgets their past mistakes and moves on because failure and rejection have no effect on them

When stressed they think negatively and then unexpectedly lash out inappropriately

Listen selectively with the goal of catching only the pertinent things

Can become lost in their impatience, irritation, and anger 

Are strategic experts who are natural-born problem-solvers

Suffer from excessive self-esteem or the-glass-is-half-full thinking

Think deeply about impacts of their career in order to make life changes

Are too thick-skinned; they don’t take things personally and their feelings don’t get hurt easily 

Regret speaking too much before thinking 

Are prone to displeasing or telling you what you don’t want to hear

Secretly wish to be less aggressive and speak more diplomatically

Are natural-born leaders with strong personalities to use in the game of life

With a view to Steven’s track record with BBC Sherlock you can see several of the above in action. He loves a dramatic build up and the rug pull, but once done he walks away from any consequence or explanation, leaving the viewers perplexed and annoyed, trying to come up with the explanation themselves and waiting for a consequence to occur but it never does. TRF is the most obvious episode where Stephen Thompson beautiful crafted the plan of Sherlock’s ‘fall’ at the hands of Moriarty, but then Moffat [and Gatiss] all but pushed him out for s3 and the follow up plan was to gloss over the event, make the leap off the roof top a joke with several weak solutions and introduce Mary, which was an anticlimax concerning the emotional impact of the events of TRF to put it mildly. There was too little resolution to the events of TRF as to the how and why. Some viewers still expect to be given a good explanation, hell some of us are still waiting to hear Sherlock tell John about his torture and scars. But you see to an instigator the details are not worth picking up and examining. Other examples of this problem are the shooting of CAM and Mary shooting Sherlock. We are left feeling bereft of a resolution. An instigator only seeks the build up and the climax, they are not interested in the fall out, the explanation. 

At Steven’s various appearances at fan events or public forums, he comes across as flippant, gloats about his own abilities and can zing out hurtful comments. He hates the fans wanting to lead the plot direction, the fans asking for a resolution to johnlock, even if he planned and wanted that resolution himself. In order to not be manipulated, guided, pushed or ruled, he sabotaged his own project goal. Johnlock had become predictable to most discerning viewers, and Steven will sacrifice anything to make sure he is unpredictable. [Yeah, just throw in an evil sister, that’ll show them] His humour can save him at times, but he is aware of his own writing style and so justifies it as the excitement we all seek. But that is a double edged sword, without full resolution the impact is just traumatic. And some rug pulls/surprises are just so OTT to be believable or even sane.

I think he’s ‘done’ with Sherlock. It got boring. He had the great success, the awards and the acclaim, he thinks he made megastars out of Benedict and Martin, he had his fun with his time in history overseeing Holmes and Watson [Dr Who] and it’s time to move on. He leaves the field littered with unanswered plot points, incomplete character and plot arcs, intentions unfulfilled, a final mess that will never be resolved. In five or ten years there will be a special, or a series of 3, that will move on as if s4 never occurred. There may be a new Mrs Watson already ensconced in a house in the suburbs with John, or Rosie may never be explained and she is MIA in the new story. We have precedent of the glossing over of things in this show. 

My sister made a comment to me just after TLD aired. She said that there is now proof there is no such thing as an after life. I asked why? She replied that if there were an afterlife my Dads (not hers, she’s a half sister) would have been out of their graves and back to protest the scene where John beats up 

Sherlock. It was disgusting, and unnecessary. It shook my faith in the show. How could they have thought that Watson would ever beat up Holmes? But then a gay friend called it for what it was ‘gay bashing’; the gay guy gets beaten up for being in love and the 'straight’ guy gets to vent his own anger that he desired the gay guy and has bisexual leanings which he’s repressing. It’s part of most queer dramas. My gay friend wasn’t even upset about it just resigned. 

 Yet I needed to fit this into the framework of a show I believe gave us the first out Sherlock Holmes. Even without johnlock, that is a huge big deal. So WTF is going on?

 If everything in S4 is MP/coma etc then having John beat Sherlock is maybe a metaphor for John’s anger after Sherlock 'died’ for 2 years, Sherlock did kill John’s wife by feigning suicide. I get that. Don’t like it, but I can see where they are going with it. I also can see the analogy that John is angry with himself for wanting Sherlock, for the girlfriends and wife not being enough, he wants more and that more is Sherlock. However I do have to consider what my gay friend saw in that scene, the 'traditional’ violence sent the way of a queer character. Not just in film/TV but in real life. Did the writers for some reason need to show this in order to make a point?

 As some of you know, one of my Dads was beaten up by a group of men outside a pub, very similarly to what we saw on screen in TLD. Only a barmaid came out and called the police they would have killed him. The incident changed our lives as a family. However I recall him saying, years after the incident, that it isn’t the level of physical pain or possible death that they inflicted on him that night, after all it was the same anger at his existence that he saw every day in people’s eyes or heard in slurs or jokes or discrimination, no it was the fact that people feel justified to act that way. It was always his fault. 

Gif by @livingthegifs

This thread (which is interesting in its own right, you should read it!) made me reflect for a bit on why I find this scene so damn annoying.

My first instinct is yeah, this is wildly out of character for Mycroft. The man is responsible for many deaths, in the tens of thousands if we’re to believe the jokes about him starting wars. For him to say “I will not have blood on my hands!” is not only hypocritical but silly. And sure, I’ll buy that Mycroft’s a hypocrite – that he avoids legwork precisely because he can’t handle this sort of thing – but I don’t buy that Mycroft’s unaware of his hypocrisy. A truthful response would be “I can’t do it” or, if that’s too vulnerable, “I won’t do it”.  

And this is where the annoyance comes in. Because: why do the writers have him say something so transparently hypocritical? Why do they have him vomit when the Governor ends up killing himself? It seems almost like they’re mocking him. Fucking Mycroft, they want us to think. Willing to order people killed but not willing to kill people himself. They want us to see him as a weak hypocrite.

But where does that leave us? It leaves us rooting for murder, narratively. It leaves us thinking, “If Mycroft were a better man, he’d have killed the Governor.” It leaves us comparing him to John, and esteeming John in comparison, because he comes closer to killing the Governor, because he actually tries to do it, because he doesn’t vomit afterwards. Of course, John can’t do it either. I’m glad of that. Just as I’m glad that Mycroft is being a hypocrite. But I find the whole thing very distasteful.  

The series of moral dilemmas at the heart of TFP is incredibly trite, not just in themselves but also in the context of a show that let’s people kill without consequences or reflection. To be fair, we knew this going in. In the very first episode, John kills a man, the ethical dilemmas resolved with a joke: “He wasn’t a very nice man.” Given that, it’s hard to expect a reckoning for Mary shooting Sherlock, or Sherlock killing Magnussen, or Mycroft starting wars and abusing state power. I mean, we complain about Eurus being forgiven for murdering a bunch of people but at least she ended up back in prison. That’s more consequences than any of the other characters got.

But this second one is the BEST. He doesn’t know much about canon or Holmes/Watson, but James Murgatroyd is just so pissed!! We all need to take this guy out to a bar and have fun with him. He is sooo on our wavelength about Mary. Watch!!!!