Worth many wounds

“I think what’s amazing about fans is that they get a bit of a bad rap; people always say ‘have you got weird fans’ and stuff like that, and I often think that when it’s a soccer team or a rugby team, and people dressing up in their thousands and going and crying in the stands and all that kind of stuff, and everybody accepts that as a perfectly normal thing to do; but if you do that for a TV series or a movie you’re somehow a little bit weird. To me it’s no weirder than sports fans.”

step 1: have to do something

step 2: dont

step 3: feel guilty you havent done it

step 4: conclude you are not allowed to do anything until you do the thing

step 5: dont

this gif of Jeremy Brett

At least it’s not TFP.

So, very belatedly, I just finally watched the Granada Holmes “The Empty House,” with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke. As followers of the Granada rewatch will know, I quit watching the first time around after they changed Watsons following “The Final Problem.” I will do a separate post that’s just about that episode soon. But first: I could not help but watch “Empty House” with “The Empty Hearse” in mind. Gatiss at least must have been a Granada Holmes fan, so I know he had “Empty House” in mind when he was writing “Empty Hearse.” (Indeed, there are specific things in “Empty House” that I think show up in TRF/TEH, such as the framed print of the Reichenbach Falls hanging above the mantel in 221b ( –>the oil painting of same that Sherlock is supposed to have helped recover in TRF), the champagne celebration with Mrs. Hudson at the end (–>champagne celebration in 221B with Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, and Molly and her new boyfriend). And yet, I think when you put “Empty Hearse” up against “Empty House,” it reveals some interesting things about why Sherlock went off the rails after the hiatus. (If you don’t think it went off the rails, you might not enjoy what’s coming up very much.)

The short story is: there’s good and bad in both adaptations. But in “Empty House,” most of what’s bad was more or less unavoidable. In “Empty Hearse,” the bad–or at least what I consider the bad–is deliberate. “Empty House,” like the canon story it adapts, basically resumes Holmes and Watson’s pre-”Final Problem” relationship. “Empty Hearse” inaugurates a completely new one–one which, even within the context of that episode, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

To be fair, though, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to compare the two in this regard. Granada was explicitly trying to do canon and honestly, Holmes’ fall in canon was.. well, anticlimactic. We didn’t get much of the details to begin with. I think it shows very clearly that we’re dealing with two extremely different kinds of adaptations here. Of course that doesn’t mean we can’t compare them at all, I agree with the overall analysis of how the characters/emotions/relationship between Holmes and Watson were dealt with in this post.

TRF is proof that Moffat and Gatiss’s methods, which involved pretty radical departures from canon, can still capture the essence of the original story and even refine it into something more powerful.

It was just a fun show that toyed with homoeroticism and had no intention of canonizing the ship.

But then when season three happened suddenly it seemed like maybe they were building towards something. It seemed like the cases didn’t matter like we thought they did. It seemed like they were more interested in the disastrous effect Sherlock’s death had on John’s life; it seemed like they were more interested in Sherlock’s heartfelt and heartbreaking best man’s speech at John’s wedding; more interested in Watching Sherlock and john collapse on themselves after spending a month apart…

And in retrospect I see now that what was really happening is that the writers were losing control of their story.

So much of what we thought was a shift in focus from the mysteries onto the romance turned out to be a combination of lazily written puzzles, queer-baiting, and convoluted plots with ever unresolved story threads.

This reminds me of when I was in college and my neighbor, who was getting his masters in philosophy, was telling me a bit about some of the concepts he was writing about – he told us he was fascinated by the human brain’s ability to create meaning out of nonsense. “I could say to you ‘pink, wire, chicken’ which doesn’t mean anything, but your brain is already filling in the blanks to instinctively create sense out of that.”

I think this is what began to happened in season 3, and why it, and tab, created such ample fodder for meta and interpretation.

They said “queerbait, meat dagger, gun surgery” and we built worlds out of steven moffat and Mark Gatiss’ lazy, badly written trash.

They had already lied so much that nothing they said was taken serious anymore. Them denying johnlock was seen as proof for it by some (many?) fans, because TPTB had so often lied about stuff or kept secrets (even from their cast), told one thing and then did the opposite… like, for example:

The other one is unimportant / just a red herring Gatiss wrote in

Redbeard is just a dog

TAB is a stand alone, wholy set in 1895

Moriarty is dead (well, he was, but kept reappearing anyway)

the whole Fall Scenario with encouraging fan theories, then never explaining, even retconning what happened

Why all this secrecy in the first place? Why all the lies? Would it really have spoiled anything if we’d known that parts of TAB were (presumably) set in the present day? Or that Rebeard was connected to something that happened in Sherlock’s childhood? Or that there was another Holmes sibling? Why lead your audience on by filming fake scenes? Why encourage speculations, only to criticise the direction some of those were heading, based on your own writing?

A sibling / TAB being a dream of Sherlock on the plane / a childhood trauma etc. were speculated about anyway. A bit more honesty from the writers / producers, respect and trust in their audience could have dried up the quagmire of lies, red herrings and surprising plot twists that encouraged conspiracy theories to blossom. The smoke would have lifted and fans might have seen the story for what it was - a story about a detective, his blogger, and, from S3 onwards, that bloggers wife. That was apparently the story they wanted to tell - why hide it behind a smokescreen of homoeroticism, lies, insinuations, games and jokes?

If your show can only attract an audience because of encouraging false assumptions, you are running headlong into harm (aka backlash). If the writers had abandoned the ‘will they, won’t they?’ between John and Sherlock after S2, why not openly (and on the show itself) say so? Why keep up the gay ‘jokes’ in S3 (they actually bookend that series, with Mrs Hudson’s ‘live and let live’ in TEH up to the aborted love confession trope applied on the tarmac)? Why not tell your audience ‘We love Mary Watson, they will now be a trio, solving crimes, until all goes to hell, but then Sherlock finds out what happened during his childhood, what made him, so he can heal.’? Why not show this in your show, like, film a real wedding, show John and Mary kissing, show Sherlock coping well, accepting Mary as a friend, put the cases more centre stage, don’t have Mary kill Sherlock etc.?

Then I could have stepped away or at least tuned down my expectations.

“film a real wedding, show John and Mary kissing, show Sherlock coping well, accepting Mary as a friend, put the cases more centre stage, don’t have Mary kill Sherlock etc.?”

Show the wedding, show us that John and Mary LIKE each other, don’t have John chomping at the bit to get away from Mary and his wedding planning, don’t have him sitting there looking devastated the night he’s planning to propose to her, Hell, don’t let Sherlock ruin that night for him if she’s so much more important to John than Sherlock is! Don’t show John pacing around his living room like a caged animal because he hasn’t seen Sherlock for a month. Don’t don’t don’t show sherlock being a miserable sad sack because his friend is getting married!!!!!! It just makes him look like a spoiled man-baby without Johnlock!

Don’t write stupid and implausible mysteries that make no sense and call it a day! Jesus Christ???? Don’t give us a missing train car that just can’t be in a secret tunnel but then actually is; don’t give us a murderer who just can’t be working his way up a specific employers pecking order but then actually is; Don’t give us delay action stabbings, and secretaries that give people conflicting information. Focus on writing good mysteries if you want people to take them seriously, for god’s sake.

And, perhaps most importantly, Don’t have Mary kill Sherlock! What the hell was Moffat thinking we would think after including something like that???

After watching S2 I thought there was somethin’ between John and Sherlock but honestly, I wasn’t expecting Johnlock to become canon anytime soon. But jeez.. I vividly remember jumping on my seat while watching TSOT and HLV. Like, what the hell? John willing to get drunk on his stag night, the way Sherlock and John looked at each other when he told him and Mary that they were gonna have a real baby and they didn’t need him around, Sherlock leaving the wedding early.. I mean,what? I understand that they wanted to show a bittersweet episode, to make everyone realize that was the end of an era, but c'mon. At least show us that Mary and John at least LIKE each other. Show us that they’re in love. Show us WHY they’re in love. They skipped it all, they were like: he’s a man, she’s a woman, they’re getting married. End of the story. Whatever. They didn’t want to us to get invested in their story. Why?

I was so alone, and I owe you so much.

practicing on drawing backgrounds.