Some thoughts on Irene and Molly in BBC Sherlock
[Inspired by this post. Long post, be warned. Tagging @kakatie2 because this is basically my response to her post!]
It’s always been really interesting to see how the Sherlock/Molly ship pairing has dominated most other hetero Sherlock pairings, especially the one that’s pushed by most ACD-derivative works — Sherlock/Irene. I think it’s worth a good look at the role Irene originally plays in ACD’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and the new one she plays in Sherlock, and comparing her role in the TV series to Molly (given that Irene and Molly are both set up to be potential romantic interests).
So Irene in the ACD canon is not supposed to be a romantic interest. She actually gets (happily) married to her own love interest and runs off with him at the end of the story. She’s also not a femme fatale figure or even any kind of criminal; she’s an opera singer who had an affair with a king and then kept a photograph he sent her. That’s the entire premise of the story — Sherlock is hired to go retrieve that photograph, because the king is now engaged to some other royal and doesn’t want the affair getting out.
Irene in the original story is an incredibly compelling character BECAUSE she’s not some criminal mastermind. She is just a really smart woman who just wants to get married. What makes her so interesting is that Sherlock actually plays the antagonist in the story. He’s the one who’s doing the dishonorable thing and going after a woman who arguably has done nothing wrong. Sherlock realizes this at the end after Irene outsmarts him at his own game (he wears a disguise to try to steal her photograph, she wears a disguise to figure out what he’s doing and then outwit him completely), and he calls her “The Woman” in admiration of her character. The entire point of Irene’s story is that it brings attention to Sherlock as a fallible person who can sometimes make a wrong decision and do the wrong thing, and that there are other ordinary, normal people who can see through him and one-up him.
Sherlock’s admiration is thus completely platonic. Which makes sense, because Sherlock Holmes in the original canon is an asexual, aromantic character, but also because Irene herself has no interest in him. (I feel like people often forget to account for Irene Adler’s feelings on top of Sherlock’s; it can sometimes feel like a given that a woman will always be romantically interested in Sherlock, and that it’s only his interest that’s important.)
Before “A Scandal in Bohemia,” ACD had written Sherlock to be scathing towards women. He genuinely saw them as the weaker sex because of their association with being more emotional than men, and Sherlock says numerous times that he thinks emotions get in the way of logic and reasoning (which is also why he says he will never marry). Irene counters most of these thoughts, because she shows him how ingenious an ordinary woman can be all while still maintaining her femininity and emotions. She’s a woman (and an opera singer!) who falls in love and has passionate affairs, and yet she also manages to completely outsmart him.
Moffat and Gatiss failed to recognize these aspects in Irene’s character in their rendition of the story in Sherlock. They sex-ed her up, made her a dominatrix who can hold and shoot a gun if necessary, and basically modeled her against a Strong Woman/Femme Fatale trope who actually does not outsmart Sherlock in the end. She is a much less interesting character than the original version, despite all of the glitz and glamour desperately trying to make you think she is.
In the end, Irene is given less autonomy and less characterization than her ACD counterpart (which is really something, considering ACD wrote Irene in the not-at-all-feminist Victorian era and this was supposed to be the modern update). All of her actions are technically dictated by men (Moriarty advises her on how to use the information on her Blackberry, she manipulates Sherlock into giving her high-security information BECAUSE Moriarty told her to, she is literally rescued at the end by Sherlock) and in the end, we still don’t really know her character very well. Who is Irene Adler? Is she actually that intelligent, or is she just written to seem that way, and she actually doesn’t accomplish anything on her own terms? How does she become so involved in being a criminal? She’s a dominatrix — just because she seems mysterious and cunning doesn’t automatically make her connected to the most elusive criminal mastermind in the world. Is she actually gay? Why does she fall in love with Sherlock, instead of other intelligent men like Moriarty or Mycroft? Why does she desperately want such protection, aside from weird vague dealings with the Taliban?
None of these character-defining moments are explained to us, not because she is mysterious or unfathomable, but because she’s not written like a real person.
Basically, Moffat and Gatiss wrote Irene as a character without her own narrative. In the ACD story, she clearly has her own motivations and agency, all of which become clear despite the story being told from Sherlock and John’s perspectives. She’s loving and brave and intelligent and even compassionate; when Sherlock shows up “injured” (this does also happen in the ACD story), her concern for him is genuine. She doesn’t play mind games until Sherlock begins to play them with her, and she only plays them to protect herself and the person she loves. She is infinitely more admirable than her TV counterpart could ever be.
In Sherlock, Irene exists to give Sherlock momentum in his character journey to being a human being. She exists to give him some moments of sadness and loss, to realize that he does care about people, to actually consider women as potential romantic and even sexual partners (despite also explicitly saying he’s asexual). When she appears naked in his mind palace, she’s not there as herself — she’s there as a representation of his infatuation with her. In short, Irene in Sherlock is not a real character. She’s just an extension of Sherlock.
This is why some viewers might feel completely neutral about her, because as a character, she doesn’t have any depth or agency. You don’t dislike her or like her because we don’t know if she’s actually a good or bad person. When you write a character whose intentions and moral standing aren’t defined because you just didn’t take the time to develop them, you’re not writing an ambiguous or “grey” character — you’re just writing a non-person.
Irene Adler’s original role in ACD’s story was to show how Sherlock could sometimes become an antagonist in someone else’s story, and that he is fallible and capable of making very human mistakes due to his own arrogance and prejudices. It was a new way of looking at Sherlock while also developing our interest in a new character, one who had her own life and love and motivations. The character of Irene Adler works because we the readers, along with Sherlock, slowly realize over the course of the story that she’s actually not a bad person, that she’s actually a very good person, and that WE were the ones who misjudged her and made a mistake. She doesn’t just outsmart Sherlock and “win” because she’s clever; she earns her respect as “The Woman” because she forces Sherlock to realize his own failing as a person and detective.
So basically, we come to Molly Hooper’s character.
Molly plays a very similar role in Sherlock’s life as Irene did in the original ACD story. We’re told explicitly that Molly has a way of viewing Sherlock that no one else does. Arguably, she is the only person in his life who truly sees him as fallible and as human. John and Lestrade see him as almost superhuman, making deductions that no one else can. Mycroft sometimes sees him this way, but he also sees Sherlock as a younger brother (literally, as a child, instead of a grown adult man who might fuck up like everyone else). Moriarty sees him as a potential intellectual equivalent; Irene herself sees him as an interesting game and then a love interest. Mrs. Hudson comes closest to playing Molly’s role, which might explain Sherlock’s overwhelming fondness for her. (It’s also worth noting that in ACD’s canon, a lot of readers actually shipped Sherlock with Mrs. Hudson!)
Originally, it felt like Molly was written as a stand-in for every female fan who might watch the show. Sherlock Holmes is an enormously popular literary and romantic character, especially to female readers who didn’t care if he was technically asexual. I think Moffat and Gatiss were very aware of this and wrote Molly as a subtle joke poking fun at all the “silly women” who might fall in love with their idealized version of a dashing Sherlock Holmes-esque hero, instead of realizing the reality of his arrogance and general ass hat behavior.
I think Louise Brealey deserves no shortage of credit for developing Molly, despite the limited material she had to work with, but I think Moffat/Gatiss using Molly as a plot device to steer Moriarty in Sherlock’s direction was also a fortunate happenstance that allowed Molly to do a lot more in the viewer’s imagination. Moffat and Gatiss had written Molly almost as a second stand-in for audiences, aside from John himself. Because of this, when we find out that Molly actually dates (!!) Moriarty, we come to start developing her in our own imaginations. What kind of woman dates a man like that, who also comes across as very queer and a little creepy (even in his IT Jim iteration)? What kind of woman lets someone like Sherlock walk all over her, despite being a well-credentialed physician in a morgue? Is she stupid or kind? Is she actually as ordinary as she seems, with the cat and the sweaters and the crush? Or is there something just a little off about her, something that would make her an underestimated dark horse?
By the second season, Molly’s trajectory is pretty much set. She’s no longer just an audience stand-in, but very much well suited to becoming her own character. In “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Molly becomes a foil to Irene. Where Irene is coy and manipulative, Molly is heart wrenchingly earnest. Where Irene is beautiful and overtly sexualized, Molly’s one attempt at conventional female attractiveness falls flat (even though Louise Brealey is a very beautiful person, I think the scene is played out so that the viewer feels more embarrassment than attractiveness for Molly, as opposed to the scene where Irene walks into the room naked). In the end, both women love Sherlock, but one of them is revealed for their moral failings and defeated by him, and another tells him explicitly that he can be a horrible person. Irene and her infatuation with Sherlock causes her to lose her dignity by the end, but Molly retains her dignity despite the surface-level silliness of her own crush. In short, Molly is everything Irene is not, because she proves Sherlock is human. Unlike Irene, she doesn’t contribute to Sherlock’s self-image of superhuman intelligence and exceptionalism. She shows him how capable he is of being a terrible person, in a way that no one else (not even John) is able to do.
A side note: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Molly is present in the scene where Sherlock learns about Irene’s fake death, and when Mycroft says his famous line: “Caring is not an advantage.” By the finale of the season, we realize that caring IS very much an advantage, that because of Molly’s caring, Sherlock survives his encounter with Moriarty. Also worth noting that it’s the combination of Molly’s intelligence/work as a pathologist and her caring/love that saves him, which is strongly in line with ACD’s Irene Adler, who is both smart AND emotional. (Also, BBC Sherlock does nothing to update ACD’s association of being logical with being masculine, and being emotional with being feminine. Irene Adler in ACD’s story and Molly Hooper in BBC Sherlock are the only two instances where we can see that a combination of both is not only possible but necessary to be better.)
Sherlock is obviously not an emotionally intelligent person, so even he doesn’t realize this new role that Molly plays in his life until the end of the final episode of season 2. When Molly compares Sherlock to her father, she shows that she is very intuitive and emotionally receptive, and that she is also unfailingly kind. It’s not easy to offer this kind of support to a man who also completely embarrassed you in front of room full of your acquaintances. We could write it off as it coming from her huge crush on him (which Moffat and Gatiss probably did), but it really does seem more like a moment of human-to-human support, rather than a romantic one. She tells him that she knows she doesn’t count, not because she’s putting herself down, but because she’s already written off any potential romantic interaction between them. Her concern really does come from concern for him, rather than from hope that he’ll like her back.
This is clearly the turning point in their relationship, where Sherlock realizes Molly’s importance to him because of her ability to see him clearly as a person. It says a lot about the world of Sherlock that this ability is completely underestimated, by not only Moriarty but even by John. No one expects Molly to be the one to help him except Anderson, of all people. (Which might explain why he and Molly are the two people in Sherlock’s mind palace during the 3rd season).
When Irene shows up in Sherlock’s mind palace in season 3, she shows up as a distraction. It might be a nod to Sherlock’s romantic feelings for her, but she really doesn’t play any other role besides standing there for him to observe. She’s completely passive, whereas Molly’s role in his mind palace is as a literal voice of reason, as the person who saves his life. This tells us clearly how Sherlock differentiates between the two of them, and why we as viewers might feel Molly is a more compelling romantic choice for Sherlock than Irene.
In my opinion, I really don’t think Moffat or Gatiss put this much thought into Molly’s character. Any and all development feels somewhat inadvertent, partially motivated by Louise Brealey’s wonderful performance and her chemistry with Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as literally just plot convenience. But whether it was inadvertent or not, Molly’s development feels much more organic and well-integrated than Irene’s. It feels like it comes from Molly herself, as a person, rather than from her interactions with Sherlock or from the plot. In a sense, when we learn something new about Molly, we’re not learning it because Sherlock/the plot had such a huge impact on her. We learn it because this is who she naturally is, and Sherlock is only discovering it for the first time. That’s an arc we get with only one other character — John.
I think Molly is a version of the Irene Adler we were supposed to have all along. I think her qualities are the fundamental qualities of the character that Moffat and Gatiss divorced from their characterization of Irene Adler. Again, Sherlock Holmes’s original admiration for Irene stems from the strength of character she displayed despite the King’s morally questionable actions against her, and not only from her obvious intelligence. Molly doesn’t get a flashy Irene moment, but Sherlock’s impression of her builds gradually, until it’s fundamentally a similar type of admiration. He not only knows that she’s smart, but that she’s strong and capable and most importantly, kind. I don’t think that’s anywhere close to how he would evaluate Irene, who only seems so much more interesting than she actually is.
It is a failure on Moffat and Gatiss’s part to not portray both of these women as people with their own motivations and agency and narratives. Their failure is exemplified in Moffat’s comment about Molly after the S4 finale, when he was asked how she reacted after the phone call: “She probably had a drink and went and shagged someone, I dunno. Molly was fine.”
This kind of comment tells me that Moffat really had no understanding of Molly’s character despite writing her for four seasons. Which kind of proves my point of how Molly was developed in the first place — in our imaginations. Everything that we know about Molly is partially through inference, because WE as viewers are empathetic people, and we can understand how certain experiences might impact somebody. With the limited amount of information we had, viewers knew Molly for her kindness and strength as well as her love for Sherlock. Molly is essentially as much a creation of Sherlock’s viewers as it is Moffat’s or Gatiss’s. (Also worth noting that Moffat and Gatiss were surprised by how popular she was with viewers, and used that response to enlarge her role in the story as the show progressed.)
Side note: Irene’s portrayal in Sherlock is not really uniquely bad or inaccurate. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film series (with RDJ) also portrays Irene as a femme fatale/criminal figure who’s connected to Moriarty. Film!Irene is also somewhat underdeveloped, but I did always buy the romance between her and Sherlock, because Film!Irene’s moral contemplation and dilemma seemed clear, and I never doubted her caring for Sherlock (nor Sherlock’s care for her). It also helped A LOT that there was no “Molly” character for me to compare her by.
So anyways, Irene’s characterization in BBC Sherlock is a mishap, mostly because Moffat and Gatiss did a bad job in writing her, but also because there is this strange canon-alternative version of her that exists in almost any other Sherlock Holmes-inspired work, which portrays her as a much more important character than she was in ACD’s stories, and within a romantic femme fatale/criminal archetype. In my opinion, Molly Hooper is actually a closer realization of ACD’s version of Irene Adler, while also being a character who can stand all on her own.
Final TL;DR: Molly and Irene both deserve a lot better.
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