Student of BBC Sherlock

She collected boys and girls clothes from 10 of the biggest retailers that were all meant for kids of around the same size and age and measured them. What she found was that the girls’ shirts were one to three inches thinner. The sleeves were shorter. And the girls’ shorts were barely a third of the length.

I know this was true when I was a kid, but it’s gotten a lot worse since then.

When Mycroft comes to 221B to talk about Eurus in The Final Problem, he lies.

This much is not a theory. This is a fact.

have written nearly 30k of new fic since then, managed to read one fic ~to completion~ in that same timeframe

now have just watched an old fave fanvid and jesus the potency of remembering that this was a real show

So it’s been almost a year since Sherlock Series 4 came out. In some ways it feels like a loooong year, and in other ways, I can’t believe it’s already drawing to a close. Do you Sherlock fans remember how excited everyone was last year? Many of us were smarting from some very disappointing elections, and really looking forward to some good news from the Sherlock universe. A number of beloved celebrities had passed on recently, David Bowie, and Alan Rickman, and we didn’t know Carrie Fisher was right behind, but things felt a bit glum.

We were on FIRE here on Tumblr trying to predict what would happen with S4, and so many were banking on an actual relationship between Sherlock and John to be revealed. The time felt ripe with several countries recently voting gay marriage as legal. With all the teaser trailers asking who does Sherlock love, and hints about “making history” and “ground breaking” cinema to come, it felt like time for the first openly-gay Holmes and Watson to step into the spotlight. People were so excited, the fandom was probably creating its own light source glowing gently in the dark night with the collective angst, hope, squee and general nervous energy.

Then Series 4 rolled out, and a collective jaw dropping occurred. This really wasn’t what many of us were expecting. There are still fans out there who enjoyed S4, liked the excellent acting, and camera work, enjoyed the silly fun of it, but many of us were crushed. We had held out so long, hoping for some character development, some plot hole resolution, some satisfying time with our favorite crime-solving duo, and some serious representation for the LGBTQ community as the show has woven queer culture into its fabric since day one. With all these built-up expectations, we all tuned in at the start of January with a collective breath holding …

What we actually got with Series 4 was a mishmash of crazy images, things that can only be read as dream sequences to make any sense, characters that no long seemed like the people we knew and loved, and an homage to the last few decades of horror films all remixed and thrown together with a thin veneer of Sherlock pasted over top. We walked into topsy-turvy world so incomprehensible that many shifted over to a “tin hat” club deciding that S4 had to be a joke, or a trick, a ruse for the casual fans before the REAL series 4 was revealed. How could all the people who collectively make Sherlock have agreed to this shambling mess of a show?

I can’t answer how everyone agreed to make series 4, all I know is that they did. They not only completely ditched any story they’d been telling with the first three series, but then proceeded to deconstruct the very nature of the Holmes and Watson world. They took the ultimate “buddy story,” the detective and his faithful doctor, two of them against the world, to wrench Sherlock and John apart - mocking and destroying the character of John repeatedly while Sherlock and Mary cozied up as new buddies-in-sleuthing. Suddenly a baby was part of the mix, then a ghost, then a mad sister running the whole show behind the scenes.  It was crazy-making trying to keep up with it all, and ultimately rather boring. A series of behavioral experiments in a cage on an island facility held none of the clever detective work, none of the fun storytelling, and none of the relationship building that have pulled people into the Sherlock Holmes stories for over a hundred years.

Moffat and Gatiss, two privileged men who had control of the BBC Sherlock franchise, decided to have fun, insane wish fulfillment, adding in helicopter chase scenes, explosions, Mycroft in silly costumes, bleeding portraits, and Shutter Island sequences because they were bored with what made Sherlock Holmes a household name. How could they though? I still ask myself this. Did they hate Sherlock Holmes and all that he stood for so much that they needed to leach their version of anything that made it beloved and iconic? They turned Sherlock into a maudlin junkie who could barely solve his way out of a paper bag. They morphed John into a rage-filled alcoholic who abandons his child to nameless friends and beats his best friend as he lies bleeding on a morgue floor. They made sure to code all their villains as queer, a ghastly repeat of a wrong that has been wounding the LGBTQ community since film was invented. They made ex-assassin Mary into some angelic visitor who now owned the spirit of the Holmes and Watson mythos, narrating the last gasp of the series, a montage of cases and moments that LOOKED like the show we wanted to be watching all along. It was like seeing a window to the mirror universe where everything is going well while you’re trapped in the shadowy evil version of the space-time continuum.

The worst of season 4 wasn’t just  bad writing, it was horrifically, bafflingly, crazy-making bad in a way I’ve never encountered before. It was inconceivable to me that the same people who’d crafted this beautiful universe and characters that meant so much to me could turn around and destroy their work in such a stupid, careless, self-indulgent way. I wasn’t just disappointed and angry, I was grief-stricken in a way I’m still trying to understand. I’d lost my primary coping mechanism/obsessive interest/happy place forever.

John and Sherlock and happy fluff at the park  ❤

dude he’s doctor strange, about to appear in 2018′s biggest movie (whose trailer has just broken the most viewed record :-), will film with jake gyllenhaal in a film directed by luca guadagnino - the darling of hollywood right now, has just been nominated by his peers for a SAG and is putting together what looks like a bravura performance for patrick melrose for sky atlantic .

Time for a bit of a rehash. But at least it’s been nearly a year? (Yes, I am absolutely framing my slow posting speed as a positive. Thanks for noticing.)

See, I need a post (for reasons) I can link to that explains how I think Mary faked her death in The Six Thatchers. But last time I wrote this up, The Lying Detective hadn’t even aired yet. It seems needlessly confusing to link back to that old version with all of its didn’t-know-what-would-happen-next baggage. 

Plus I wanted a version that focused more on the basic mechanics of the hoax. So I’m leaving out some chunks of explanation about how I reached certain conclusions and about canon parallels. You can dig back a year if you care about that.

Here goes. (Again.)

If you had to choose a single moment from Sherlock s4 that was the most cringe/eyeroll/lol/enraging, which one would it be and why?  Ready, go.  Let the saltiness begin!

On a macro level, it’s the way the entire series had the feel of being thrown together at the last minute. I was put in mind of a couple of frat boys who had all semester to write a paper and waited until the night before to put fingers to keyboard and hoped that their “charm” and “talent” would carry through and their professor wouldn’t notice it was crap.

It was a failure at multiple levels. From makeup to sets to cameras being on screen and actors looking into the camera. To the insulting writing and plot holes large enough to drive a lorry through.

And I have to comment on the lack of any check and balance on Moftiss. There is clearly no one who can tell them when their writing sucks before it airs. There are certainly plenty of us willing to tell them after. But it’s important to have someone in your life who can tell you when you’ve gotten too big for your britches, as we say in the south. They clearly don’t have that, at least not anyone they will listen to.

For now, I’ll go with Mary jumping in front of the bullet.

+ Sherlock and Mary joke about how useless John is in front of him in TST

+ doggo is cute, but adds nothing and means nothing in story

+ Who wears a car seat as a costume and then dies in a fiery crash  I mean what are the odds????

+ Mary jumps in front of bullet to die & John a trained army doctor does nothing to save her and instead just moooos. Like WOT???

+ Who are these people who are suddenly raising Rosie? If we never see Rosie on screen, why does she exist in the narrative exactly?

+ Who is sending all these post-humous DVDs from Mary? Who even uses DVDs anymore???

+ Every time GHOST Mary speaks, I want to stick a fork in my ear, I mean WHAT whaat???

+ The whole plot of TLD is Sherlock fucks himself up so John will notice him? REALLY? SO much clever, so very brilllianT, soo Sherlock Holmes worthy

+ John beats Sherlock half to death because you know  …  besties, bros, two of them against the world, together they’re the last resort for the scared and needy and misfits and  … reasons

+ Memory drug … Faith . . not Faith … John shot in the face but not . .

+ I’VE WAITED FIVE DAMN YEARS TO MEET HARRY WATSON BUT NOOOooo WE NEED TO SEE SHERLOCK’S SUDDEN SISTER instead

+ If you want to escape an explosion on an upper floor just jump STRAIGHT thru a solid wood window and BOOP you’re fine. You will land on a fishing boat in the fog apparently

+ Soooo Sherlock had a childhood friend who ate out of dog bowl and would lick Sherlock’s face in greeting???

+ They shot TFP in cardboard box painted red

+ The Three Garridebs - a beloved moment in ACD canon is now a cheap crappy joke  just like the whole of Sherlock and John’s slowburn romance is now a cheap gay joke - yay, LOL, so funny

+ I am so sad John had to leave his feet in that well … Ol’ John Stumpy Watson

+ The rug in 221b, a chair and the cow horns survive an explosion that destroyed the flat - special exceptions bomb

There is not one thing about it that makes sense, not even in a “this is TV so just roll with it” kind of sense. 

Euros sent it, or arranged for it to be sent. But why? She has no motivation to do that. She has this whole Murder Island game she’s working on; why would she choose the risk of blowing up her brothers and spoiling her own plans? What if they died or were too injured to visit her at Murder Island? From her own point of view – and she is supposed to be a Newton-level genius – it’s plain stupid.  

Mycroft recognizes the patience grenade on sight, even before it flies into the front room. We know he realizes the danger because he tells them to KEEP BACK and KEEP STILL as soon as he sees the drone in the kitchen. Why in god’s name does he tell them to keep still instead of telling them RUN GO NOW – while they still have a chance to escape before it settles to the ground and activates the “motion sensor” ?? 

For that matter, how does Mycroft even recognize it as a patience grenade to begin with? He gives the throwaway explanation that he has

authorised the purchase of quite a number of these

but a) authorizing something does not mean you’ve actually seen one – and remember Mycroft is not written to be like Bond’s M who is hands-on with all the gadgets which Q is inventing for Bond. 

b) even if he had seen one before, why would he recognize it out of context in his brother’s home? Even an iceman like Mycroft can’t be expected to identify it in such a surprising moment. The writers actually make that point for me, by having soldier John NOT recognize it. (Actually John might see what it is, but  simultaneously think that he must be seeing it wrong, because there cannot possibly be a drone-delivered grenade in their home. )

John’s reaction is as close to real as we get, if this scene is meant to occur in reality (instead of, say, in a dream). Mycroft’s reaction is unreal. 

Enough about stupid Eurus and Mycroft. 

The bigger question is: what the fuck is this scene doing in the show at all? How does it advance the story? If you think Mycroft and Sherlock need a motivation to invade Murder Island – which they do, or how else would Mofftiss get to show off the rest of their bag of tricks – why a fake-y explosion in 221B? Why take a chance on all the plot-holes of your bizarre drone thingy, when motivation could have been provided by a simple email from Eurus? Why set up your audience to be horrified at the destruction of 221B, and then have it turn out that all those cinematic flames didn’t scorch the bison skull or the earphones? It’s pathetic, it’s beyond pathetic, that Mofftiss blew up 221B in order to be able to indulge in that one moment of emotion when John and Sherlock re-do the yellow smiley face. What’s the point? 

I think I would have been able to accept the problems with the drone-explosion sequence if it were necessary to the plot, or if it did anything for their character development … I keep reminding myself it’s TV; it’s not meant to be reality. But it’s tacky that they staged so much ado for nothing except their own egos. The only explanation I can think of for why they wrote it into the episode is to prove that Mark can have explosions in his show just like Bond. Yes, it’s a tiny budget show compared to Bond, but look, mom, we’ve got big explosions!  

I’m incensed that we, the audience, were manipulated for nothing.  

Everything else that everyone has already said - or is going to add - is true too. The morgue beating; Mary’s stupid death scene; whatever else; all of it. So many of the scenes this season are aggravating it’s difficult to list them all.

Everything about S4 – okay, well, the writing – reframed my opinion of the entire show. Not only was S4 nonsensical, pointless, and offensively self-indulgent, it made me feel as if I had been duped into believing the entire show was great. 

I loved Sherlock more than I have ever loved a show, and S4 showed me that they had built it all on empty promises and dramatic shit that ultimately had no meaning. The characters in S4 had no emotional truth. They didn’t behave in ways that made sense. It made me feel as if I was an idiot for investing so much time and love and energy into thinking about their future, and their relationships, when really I could have made up some shit about racecars and superhuman sisters and called it a day.

So much of the Sherlock fic and meta produced in this fandom is higher quality than the writing in S4. It’s not even close. 

For me, S4 is basically unwatchable, apart from the two minutes where Benedict delivered a Shakespearean monologue as Sherlock on drugs. S4 is remarkable only in that the writing is so bad that it retroactively made me reject something I deeply loved for years.

So it really didn’t matter what makes sense any longer, by s4, because that goal of destruction was the thing. Moriarty: gutted as an agent; Molly: the stand-in for audience love of Sherlock given the final turn of the screw of humiliation and pain; John Watson turned against Sherlock by moving up from emotional abuse to physical; Mycroft made more than just an ineffective protector, no an active agent of Sherlock’s downfall; the parents: neglectful at the very least and abusive in effect; Mrs. H: erased as the motherly landlady and rewritten as the bamf agent who captures Sherlock to forward him to the next step in his destruction; 221B: his refuge wiped out; and finally the crowning achievement: making Mary the star of the whole shitstorm by taking away even the role of protagonist from Sherlock Holmes. That is quite a bold achievement and they were right: if they had pulled it off it would have been a daring and historical AU. 

Ultimately, I think this was a true apples/oranges situation where we watched something that they were not making. We carried that off in s1-2, some of us managed to torture our understanding of s3 into fitting the show we wanted, but then when s4 made it inescapable, we responded with anguished realization. In the end, I think Moffat’s love of surprise was what truly killed the show: by not ever admitting to the nature of the show they were trying to make, they let us languish in our delusions past the point where we could have shifted gears. In fact, had they been at all frank about their intent at the beginning, I would never have bothered to watch it, no matter how much I enjoyed this embodiment of the two (canon) main characters. 

My eye-rolling started before S4 but it was forgivable in the context of so much wonderful character play. And even before I knew of a thing called “Johnlock” I just loved the intense relationship between our main characters. But here are some pre-S4 eye-rolls to add to the list:

+ Mary is pregnant. Well, that’s cheap! How does that fit into this?

+ Mary is an assassin? Really?!?! Agent, maybe, or more believably just trying to clear her name of some other normal thing.

+ Oh - Sherlock saves Irene single-handedly?

+ I’m jumping around here but, pressure pads at the moor? Seems like a lot of work when you could just kill him.

+ Off switch on that pretty bomb. And the bomb being so pretty.

+ Tense moment at the pool broken by a phone call.

But, you see, I will still forgive S1 and S2 silliness because I love so much about the character development and production. And TAB. Love TAB. It just started falling apart the more shows they had to make. I guess that what happens when you don’t have a plan and you also don’t have to explain your reasoning. You end up with messing things up.