Sherlock

[melannen]

Oh, did I mention that I was forced to watch all of BBC Sherlock this week? It was not bad, as Holmes adaptations go, and the acting/production values were pretty good, and the characters are great, but somehow I am no more enthralled by it than I was just by way of the fic.

Basically, I think, if you want to sell me on a series that is supposed to be about the solving of puzzles, you need to be better than that at writing puzzles... (I am told that thinking about the cases is missing the point and I should be looking at the pretty people, but, dammit, the cases would be interesting! If they weren't shot through with massive plotholes and total impossibilities.)

aSiB reactions:

1. Molly Hooper and Daisy Wick really need to be girlfriends. (In the "gossip over men on the telephone" sense or in the other one, you pick, preferably both.)

2. Where is the fic where Mrs. Hudson is an immortal goddess who has dwelt upon the site of Baker Street since London began, the primordial personification without whom the city would fall? (you could make her a shapeshifting raven if you wanted.)

3. So Jim Moriarty can see through the fourth wall! :D Suddenly I actually give a damn about him for the first time.

4. Okay, so the whole point of the thing was that Mycroft wanted to make sure that nobody knew he knew about the bomb, right? And Irene and Moriarty wanted... Sherlock to decode the MoD email? Except that anybody who's, oh, read a Wikipedia article on cryptanalysis knows that there are lots of ciphers now which are provably impossible to solve without massive amounts of calculation time (hundreds of computer-hours, not to mention man-hours) and there are lots of ciphers, even some pretty simple ones, which can't be solved at all with a ciphertext that short (if nothing else, Irene's client would have mentioned this). Which means that Irene and Moriarty, to expect Sherlock to be able to solve it like that, knew that it wasn't a cipher. And if you are working on the assumption that it's not a cipher, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out that it was seat numbers (certainly Irene and Moriarty, the only two people in England who are smarter than Sherlock, would've been able to figure it out.) In fact, the only way to know for certain that it wasn't a perfect cipher, and that therefore it could be solvable without breaking basic laws of the universe, would be if you'd already figured it out yourself. Which means that Irene and Moriarty already knew that the government knew about the plane.

Which means that the only reason for the elaborate game was to screw with Mycroft and Sherlock.

And Mycroft, who knew that the email wasn't encrypted, surely would have assumed that Moriarty and Irene had figured it out (again: as smart as Sherlock. Not that hard to solve. Their behavior makes no sense otherwise.) Plus the whole thing with the dead people on the plane and sending the related cases to Sherlock was ridiculous anyway. Which means the only reason he had for continuing to string Sherlock along about the whole thing was to screw with Sherlock.

In sum, then: Mycroft/Irene OTP. (But I knew that already.)

5. Epilogue? What epilogue?

As for the 2010 series, this is all I have to say:

Sherlock stared down at the screen of his mobile, where a text from Lestrade read "Why so anxious about the lab results? Do you think we should reopen the murder investigation?"

He tapped his fingers on the desk, then replied "No. Just curious. And bored."

Lestrade texted back, "Drop by the Yard. Fascinating case. Mysterious cardboard box."

Sherlock ground his teeth. "John," he called, "Have the police been in touch with you about the lab results from the taxi driver case?"

"No," he said, and put down his book. "But I don't know why they would be. You're pretty thoroughly off the case, aren't you? Isn't it closed?"

"Which would mean he has no need to withhold the information from me."

"This is really bothering you, isn't it?"

"He's keeping his little secret just because he knows it provokes me," Sherlock said, then slipped his phone in his pocket and stood up. "Come on. We're going down to the station. Lestrade requested help with a case."

John glanced up at him, a long look that Sherlock couldn't read. Not entirely. He was coming to a decision, something about Sherlock, the fond/exasperated emotion that coloured a lot of his thoughts about Sherlock, something he'd been thinking about for awhile, but Sherlock could not, despite rumour, actually read thoughts. Finally John said simply, "As you wish," and pulled on his coat.

Sherlock blinked and followed him out the door.

The case with the cardboard box was slightly more interesting than Lestrade had implied in his text, as it involved human body parts being shipped through the Royal Mail, but it wasn't exactly going to stretch his intellect, being the result of the usual sort of domestic jealousy: Sherlock could read nearly the whole sordid, tragic, boring story almost as soon as he saw the box and its contents spread out on Anderson's table. Still, it would give him an opportunity to press for an advantage regarding the lab results on those damned pills, so he directed John to examine the contents.

"As you wish," John said mildly in reply. Anderson did a double take, then raised his eyebrows at John. John shrugged sheepishly and started examining one of the ears.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. Something was going on that he didn't quite understand. Yet.

But the rest of the case went as smoothly as any case with the police ever did. The only off note was that John, instead of making his usual pro-forma protests or complaints or backchat with the police, when Sherlock told him what he needed to do, would only say, "As you wish."

This was... good. Yes. The complaints had been a waste of time, when they both knew that John would do what Sherlock said anyway, and that Sherlock would never change. He had simply decided to be rational and acknowledge that fact.

No, Sherlock had no problem with John's newfound compliance. It was the reactions of the police that were bothering him. Whenever John said his new favorite phrase, at least one of the officers or witnesses would react unpredictably, with surprise or humor or exasperation or a sort of conspiratorial protectiveness, or, once, disgust. Surely they didn't feel so strongly about his having an obedient assistant? And not all of them did - a significant proportion of the hearers reacted exactly as Sherlock would have predicted. But a significant proportion did not. There seemed to be some hidden meaning to the phrase known only to a subset of the population, a subset which included John but not Sherlock, a subset with some commonality he had not yet deduced.

Most of the day the exigencies of the case, pedestrian as it was, distracted Sherlock enough to leave the puzzle of John's behavior in the background, but at the end of the day, as they were wrapping up the last details back at New Scotland Yard, he couldn't ignore it any more. "John, give that evidence bag to Lestrade."

"As you wish."

And Lestrade repressed something that might have been laughter, and Sherlock said, "I know you have a bigger vocabulary than that, John. Try something else."

"I feel so rejected now, Sherlock," John replied, face scrunched in a parody of sadness.

"He has no idea, does he?" Lestrade asked John, with a wave of one arm at Sherlock.

"Evidence points to no," John replied with a sunny smile.

"That explains a lot."

"What?" Sherlock said. "I am still standing here, you know. What is so significant about 'As you wish'?"

"John keeps using that phrase," Lestrade replied. "I don't think it means what you think it means."

Sherlock stared at him blankly. John, beside him, very quietly cracked up. Lestrade glanced over him assessingly. "I'd say that clinches it. You're right. He really has no idea. No wonder he's been so persistent about those lab results."

"He doesn't bother learning things unless he thinks they'll be directly relevant to detecting," John answered as he caught his breath. "You wouldn't believe the telly he's never heard of. No, it was predictable that Sherlock wouldn't recognize anything, but how did he guess with his other victims? The odds surely aren't that good with the average person on the street."

"He probably brought the topic up before he decided on victims. 'Seen any good films lately?' - that sort of thing. It would be easy enough to do a test, just like you did today."

"And it would pass as normal taxi driver chat, nobody would be suspicious," John answered thoughtfully. "Same way he made sure they weren't familiar with real guns, I suppose?"

"That's what we've been figuring," Lestrade nodded. "Film chat could lead right into that."

"You're discussing the murderous taxi driver," Sherlock said, frustrated. "How is that related to John's new favorite phrase?"

Lestrade gave John a manly clap on the shoulder. "I think we're about done here, John. Why don't you take your man home for takeout and a movie? As it is he's a danger to us all."

"I already have the DVD and the menu sitting out on the table. C'mon, Sherlock, we're just in the way here."

Sherlock considered delaying, as he seemed to be making progress with Lestrade for once regarding the lab results on the taxi driver's pills, but he thought twice. After all, if John could run an experiment, he could certainly do the same. "As you wish," he said meekly, and followed after.

This time it was Lestrade who cracked up.

"'The Princess Bride'? Really?" Sherlock said a Tube ride later, when John handed him the case and went to slip it into his laptop's DVD drive. "I'm no expert in cinema, but this doesn't really seem like your genre."

"I considered getting Strong Poison instead, but I decided this would be less painful all around," he answered. "Now shut up and watch the film."

Sherlock considered replying with "as you wish," but noted the glint in John's eye and thought better of it. Besides, he was pretty sure he would be unable to resist pointing out all of the things that were blatantly wrong in the film, even if he wanted to try to.

And in fact, about forty-five minutes after they got back to Baker Street, the peace of the block, and the soft murmur of a classic film playing, were interrupted by his sudden shout of, "They were both poisoned?!"

And by John's amused reply: "No shit, Sherlock."

Putting Belgravia together in context with the earlier episodes (I kind of watched them in backwards order) brings up these additional notes:

1. If the four episodes I've seen so far have any kind of theme that unifies all the casefiles, it's "The dead woman is smarter than you."

This is depressing on several levels.

2. If Sherlock wanted to be a pirate as a kid, then somebody would have subjected him to The Princess Bride. It just... they would have. Unless the erasure from history of the Victorian Holmes means that there was no scene in Study in Scarlet for Princess Bride to subvert with the iocane powder, and I guess there was also no Lord Peter and the poisoned Turkish Delight either, because Lord Peter was directly inspired by Holmes. Or any of the other fictional detectives who have played out variations on that theme. But if you go there, then you have to take into account all of the other, myriad, innumerable things about modern culture that would be unrecognizable if there were no Doyle Holmes stories, and you can't believe in Sherlock's London at all, and I come full circle right back to where I started in July 2010, when I first heard about the BBC doing an updated Holmes.

...or wash up on verity's Madelyn Mack AU.

And on that note, I think I'm done being in BBC Sherlock fandom now.* Three days was long enough! :P Off to read the other Madelyn story from Yuletide. Or maybe some Phryne Fisher.

*except for the rest of those werewolf AUs that lindentreeisle linked me, of course. I do need to do research for my Night in the Lonesome October fic, after all.

Comments

[brigid]

I totally agree with you about the mysteries/puzzles not being that interesting. I also strongly suspect (but am far too lazy to check) that no women at all were involved in the writing of the pilot because I'm pretty sure that most women (especially those who live in/near London) are VERY much aware that some predators (sexual and otherwise) specifically take jobs as cab drivers so as to better prey on their targets. As soon as the line about who moves in public and people trust them even though they're strangers popped up, I thought cab drivers. And let me tell you, I am far from Sherlock Holmes' intelligence.

That fic was hilarious, thanks for sharing it. My husband and I cracked Princess Bride/Iocaine Powder jokes throughout those scenes.

[melannen]

Yeah, the plots are mostly either a) blatantly obvious to anyone with any survival skills/street knowledge/genre awareness, or b) completely impossible or nonsensical as stated (with a side order of "ludicrously overcomplicated and way too unlikely to actually work in RL conditions. Which is really disappointing. The 'cab driver as killer' thing was in the original Doyle story, so I wasn't surprised either way, but the original Doyle story actually had some complexity to it other than "serial killer preying on random victims", so there, it worked. Actually I think a point-by-point modernization of the Doyle stories would've been a lot more interesting than what Moffat and Gatiss are doing, even if it lacked surprise for the Doyle fans, because you can really tell where the Doyle leaves off and the inferior Moff plots take over. And to the extent they are adapting Doyle, they're doing it by taking all the interesting and clever out and leaving in the cliches...

I am absolutely sure I was not the first person to do the Princess Bride post-ep! Because it was just so blatant, OMG. Did they actually expect us to not immediately assume there was no right answer? And of course in the Doyle story it actually was a random chance left up to God, but see again with Doyle putting complexity and motivation in...

[brigid]

There's a lot I enjoy about the show, but I think there's also a huge amount that could be criticized. Gender roles and sexism is a big part, not-very-intelligent writing is another big part. Eh.

[marginaliana]

Okay, I was loving your fic snippet, and then "No shit, Sherlock" made me actually cackle.

I am enjoying Sherlock because it's pretty and it has good dialogue, but I totally agree with you on the plot holes. I also think that the modernization could have been done more - I liked how aSiB had John out on the scene with his laptop, but in general I think there could be more technology, and that the lack of technology use ends up as a plot hole.

[melannen]

They use a fair amount of technology, like the laptops and the phone - it was kind of amusing that the ring in the original SIS got transmuted into a ringing phone, and at least they don't go to great length to avoid it, like some crime shows do, but yeah. The use of tech seems to be mostly limited to phones and the internet. Where Holmes the original was out past the bleeding edge of forensic science, Sherlock seems to be several years behind. Several years behind the original Holmes. (The number of times I yelled at the screen about contaminating the crime scene or being careful about fingerprints...)

[seekingferret]

Yeah, the conclusion I drew was that the point was for them to implicate Mycroft's brother as the one who revealed the secret. And that the point was that Irene wanted to mess with Mycroft and Sherlock- I continue to think Moriarty is a nonentity in this. The whole episode that introduced him had a ventriloquism theme, so he obviously has to be someone's puppet.

In any case, the mystery was not so much for the sensemaking. I told mllesays that it seemed like this was a story much more about the mysteries of love and sexuality than it was a puzzle story. But the biological determinism of the pulse thing annoyed me if that was, as mllesays suggests, intended to be the 'solution' to the mystery of love.

[melannen]

Yeah, I loved the fact that the hand-holding turned out to be Sherlock deducing things instead of ~romantic feelings~, but there's no way in hell that Irene - who among other things is a professional sex worker, more or less - only exhibits symptoms of arousal when she cares about someone. But Irene Adler is always about twelve steps ahead of Holmes when it comes to working with human emotion (especially Holmes's.)

I love the idea that Moriarty himself is a puppet (Irene's?) but I have difficulty trusting the canon writers to think that far ahead...

[seekingferret]

I was convinced that Moriarty was Irene's puppet after the S1 finale, where Sherlock went around saying things like "This whole case has a Bohemian feel," but am less convinced now after "Scandal in Belgravia". Though I did read her mention of Moriarty in the airplane scene as implying that yes, she was the one who'd hired Moriarty to harass Holmes in the finale, I'm not sure that this interpretation is actually what they wanted us to extract from that mention.

[mllesays]

But Irene Adler is always about twelve steps ahead of Holmes when it comes to working with human emotion (especially Holmes's.)

Just popping in here to say, I really like this reading of things in particular. I had suggested that Sherlock thinks he has the solution at the end there, but I agree that Irene is always 12 steps ahead of him. Having rewatched that scene (um, a lot), I tend to think now that it calls back to the confrontation scene in "A Study in Pink": is it a bluff? A double bluff? A triple bluff? And that's the fun of it, because there are basically endless layers to try to get underneath, in terms of what games Irene is playing there.

[verity]

Ahahahaha, your fic is AMAZING. <3 I love your John.

The new episode is really making me want to work on my wacky Sherlock/Madelyn Mack epic crossover. We'll see...

[melannen]

I didn't say anything because I know it's annoying when people bug you about old wips, but I think you know how I would feel about there being more of that. :D

[verity]

but I totally want Irene to be banging someone on the main cast now! Irene/[Modern! Nora]? That could be AMAZING. (The main holdup on this, honestly, is the RPF involved. I don't normally write RPF, don't follow celebrity gossip anymore, and I have to do, like, research. If I wrote OCs who are thinly veiled Actual People, my life might be way easier... *contemplates* Especially as I don't think I've named the actors anywhere but footnotes and maybe one image that could be easily fixed)

But on the other hand, there's my ~romance~ with this wacky SGA AU... *clings to it*

[melannen]

Oooh, yes, Irene needs to be in that... The "thinly veiled real people" sounds doable to me! You didn't name the actors in the one bit that's up on AO3, anyway, except in that footnote. Or you could use Ariel and Jacqueline

[petronia]

I am sure I have already read 2) - before this season of the show, even! - but finding a story in BBC Sherlock fandom from more than two weeks ago is a travail in and of itself. XD;

[melannen]

I had noticed that this fandom seems even more disorganized than usual... do you remember if it was on AO3? I might actually be able to find it in that case. (anyway now that I know it might exist I am way more motivated to got looking!)

[petronia]

It was almost certainly on sherlockbbc (LJ). Which is actually well-tagged, it's just that the turnover is so high.

[mllesays]

So Jim Moriarty can see through the fourth wall! :D Suddenly I actually give a damn about him for the first time.


Wow, I hadn't thought about that shot in that way — I thought he was just blowing a raspberry at Big Ben — but that reading is kind of totally amazing.

[melannen]

I am sure it could either, but this Moriarty is a character for whom Deadpool-style fourth-wall-breaking apparent insanity would totally work, and I think I am going to continue to believe that he can see the captions and the cameras. It explains how he's so good at outthinking Sherlock if he sees the deducting-captions floating away!

[kittydesade]

Re: 2.
Mrs. Hudson is also Boudicca. *types faster* *on that and the Supernatural thing*

Also, now I want to see Deadpool and Moriarty have shenanigans. Or possibly Deadpool/Moriarty shenanigans. Someone needs to make this happen. Someone not me, who already has 23,164 WIPs.

[melannen]

I'm currently pondering the idea that she is Mabel the kidnapped Tower raven, whose feather-cloak was stolen by her murderous husband, and who hangs around Baker Street in human form out of gratitude to Sherlock for getting it back. Clearly there are room for many, many stories about Mrs. Hudson's vast supernatural powers and mythical past!

...and Moriarty and Deadpool would have the bestest shenanigans (I had been wondering exactly what the story was with his superhumanly good, supremely trusted sniper...)

[kittydesade]

Clearly it's Deadpool. With one sniper rifle. And many laser pointers. Some of them held in his toes.

[melannen]

Yes!

...I am really wishing I had enough knowledge of Deadpool canon to write him. The Magic Adventures of Moriarty and Deadpool (and their little yellow boxes and floating white words) would be worth staying in Sherlock fandom for!

ETA: having actually given it some thought, it will probably turn out to be Moran (I hope they bring Moran in, anyway) but Deadpool would be infinitely more fun.

[kittydesade]

I'm betting on it being Col. Moran, yes. But I still want Deadpool and Moriarty shenanigans. It might make me not be annoyed at the most annoying Moriarty on stage or screen ever!

(And did I mention he annoys me? Because he does. Mostly his Bobcat Goldthwaite impression.)

[melannen]

He is annoying. I agree. And not really very Moriartyish. Like I said, I only started finding him vaguely worthwhile when he saw through the fourth wall and I started thinking about him in Deadpoolish terms.

[lireavue]

*slightly sheepish* This is my fault again. I've decided we really need to stop meeting this way, so I'm just going to subscribe so I can keep giving kittydesade all the plot bunnies ever.

[kittydesade]

I already have all the plotbunnies ever, woman, have you seen my fandom to-do list? In addition to my original to-do list?

[lireavue]

I'm keeping you out of trouble. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[melannen]

Hey, I am always happy with help in spreading the plotbunnies around. ^_^

[lindentreeisle]

ha!

Well I knew it was a hard sell with you, but I hope you at least eked some enjoyment out of the eps. ;) It seems like you did. And you got to rant at us about cryptography!

:D

[melannen]

They were fun! And the fandom is amusing! And ranting about cryptography is fun! I'm glad I finally watched them.

[lindentreeisle]

Yay!