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shotfromguns · 9 years

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queenphoria replied to your post “Is anybody still watching Elementary? Is it worth picking up again?...”

i stopped towards the end of s2 but recently picked it up again and i'm glad i did. joan is great this season. maybe tell me why you were disappointed and i can tell you if it's worth watching for you?

Three big issues for me. Sorry if this is a little vague; I haven’t watched for a few months. The last episode I saw was, I think, "The Adventure of the Nutmeg Concoction.”

S3 spoilers for Elementary ahoy.

1. Basically everything about the new character

“Rape as backstory” is shitty and overplayed, in general. “Kidnapped and raped by a stranger” is also unbelievably over-common, given that most people are raped by people they know. Moreover, Kitty doesn’t seem to behave as someone who actually has PTSD, but rather only showing symptoms when it’s convenient as a plot device. She flinches away from exactly one dude, which is our Secret Clue that she was raped. She is 100% fine living with a male semi-stranger. She has zero negative reactions when they are pursuing a case that seems to mirror her own (woman may have been kidnapped).

Worst, in an episode where Sherlock abuses her in a way that I would expect to be especially triggering for someone who’d been kidnapped and held captive—by attempting to prevent her from making other friends—Kitty thanks him for it. Thanks him for his gross, misogynist, abusive actions. And make no mistake: what he did was abuse. Keeping people cut off from any other social support is a classic abuser tactic, regardless of whether the abuser thinks they’re doing it “for the person’s own good.”

2. The way Sherlock treats Joan

Sherlock has been gone. Joan is an investigator in her own right. She is now the primary consultant for the police. And yet, when she graciously includes Sherlock on her cases, he is still acting like the one in charge. He’s the one asking questions and taking the lead when they interact with witnesses and suspects. And everybody acts like this is natural and right and normal.

3. The heroin cliffhanger-that-wasn’t

Sherlock grabbing the heroin at the end of S2 was a huge deal, as it should have been. Then we get to S3, expecting to see where that goes... and discover, in the biggest fucking anticlimax of all time, that it was all resolved off-screen, ages ago, and he just got rid of it without relapsing. Given how well the show had handled addiction up to that point, it’s baffling to me how they could toss off such an important moment so casually, just to hype up end-of-season melodrama.

In summary

#3 I could give a pass as a rare writing misstep. But #1 and #2 are things I find really unpalatable, and they’re thematically central to the show at this point. Which is what’s so shocking to me, because up until the end of S2, one of the show’s strengths was how well it avoided or subverted the typical sexist tropes of the genre.

#Rape culture #Misogyny #Reply #queenphoria

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