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shaolingrrl · 7 years

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It’s fine and dandy to up the stakes, Mofftiss, but you’ve got to honor your bets

And other S4 critiques

I am disgruntled. I discovered Sherlock with TAB, and I had a year of setlock, cast and crew sightings, “insane wish fulfillment,” and anticipation before S4. I was so thrilled to finally get to share in this wonderful show as it happened.

Then--it didn’t happen.

(Note that the discussion below is should include all kinds of “I felt”s and “To me”s and “In my opinion”s. And spoilers. There. That’s out of the way.)

I wasn’t particularly moved by T6T, though I believed that John was miserable; his behavior belied the “happy happy joy joy” vibes of the Three Crime-solving Amigos and his dissatisfaction obviously extended beyond Mary to Sherlock, and I could understand why. But the “affair” felt off. Several of the roles felt -- off. Lestrade bumbled more than usual, Mary was Saint Suburbia. It was like everyone (except Martin, I think) had lost a layer in their portrayals. Ben recovered, but no one else did. Keep that “lost layers” idea in mind.

Also, the Mary in T6T was not a Mary we’d been prepared for, and her death was cartoonishly overdone. The actress who played Norbury was *excellent* in her final scene, though--wonderfully underplayed it. As for the rest of the episode... I was glad to check back here and see that my misgivings weren’t unique.

On to TLD. That seemed a little more like what I’d been hoping to see. RageMonster!John was a dubious choice, but Martin and Ben gave it their all. and their final scene in Baker Street was truly touching. Still didn’t cry, though other episodes have wrecked me completely.

Then, at the end of the ep, the Eurus reveal, the gun, the gun goes off... Ohh, a cliff hanger! Thank god there’s only a week! If this had been the cliff hanger ending to the whole season, I would have died!

TFP starts with the little girl. Oh, okay. Mofftiss is setting some kind of scene that will be important later. Then there’s Mycroft watching the moving. Yeah, yeah, Holmes movies, but what about John? Then scary clown and evil little girl, and Mycroft is running, good, BUT WHAT ABOUT JOHN? That was a cliff hanger last week and any author worth her salt who truly respects her audience will have found a really clever, exciting way to get the hero out of his dire straights, thus kicking the episode (scene, chapter) off with a bang.

Oh, says Sherlock when he appears. Eurus shot John with a tranquilizer. Three weeks ago.

Ba-dump-THUD.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, Mofftiss, you don’t get to do that. Raising the stakes is great! It’s wonderful, it ratchets up suspense, helps us care about the characters and their fight, make the final reward more satisfying or the final failure more heartbreaking, but you have to follow through. You wanna raise the stakes by having John seemingly shot at point-blank range so we’ll all be, “Omigod! Did you see that? Yeah, I know he was in the preview, but--HOW? Oh, I can’t wait!” and then just have a one-sentence throw-away reference to a tranquilizer three weeks after it happened--nope. You don’t disrespect me like that. A writer has a contract with the audience to deliver a certain minimum level of verisimilitude, a certain internal sense of logic, a certain integrity of plot, character, and world-building, and if the writer doesn’t deliver, the book gets thrown across the room. (Or, in this case, the 42-inch T--well, maybe not.)

What’s even worse--I realized *all* of S4 does that with the tension built up by S3, as made explicit in HLV. S3 stretched credulity at times, but if they’d committed to their own damned plot and just put in the effort, S4 could have worked.

Instead we have the following:

In HLV, Mary shoots Sherlock. In T6T, they’re BFFs.

In HLV, Mary is described by Magnussen as wicked, a bad girl, all those wet jobs, gone a bit freelance. (No mention of A, G, or A, btw. And when was all this “freelance” work done? While Mary was a nurse?) In T6T, we learn she decided to give up the biz after AGRA was “betrayed” (thus engendering sympathy) while trying to “rescue hostages” (how noble). Funny how AGRA wasn’t betrayed while trying to take out a hit on a journalist in Russia or something. Oh, and she had decided she “deserved” a normal life. Way to make John nothing but an accessory to her well-deserved normal life.

In HLV, John wants to know why he deserved Mary, why everything was always his fault and Sherlock says because John chose her. It was heartbreaking. Way to gaslight John, Sherlock. Then John (without any motivation that’s revealed to us) says he forgives her. In S4, that’s apparently the explanation they’re going with--John *just happened* to pick Mary. He has psycho-dar or something. He must have figured he did deserve her. It *was* his fault. Did I mention heartbreaking?

In HLV Sherlock shoots Magnussen. He’s sent into a exile that will end in his death in six months. At the end of the episode he’s brought back because England needs him. In T6T, the footage showing Sherlock killing Magnussen is doctored to let him off essentially scott-free, and “England” is never in danger. He does uncover a mole in MI6, but Norbury was certainly no threat to the country.

Everything used to raise the stakes in HLV is just dropped. Written out, forgotten, glossed over. Like Mofftiss didn’t like where S3 left them or couldn’t figure out how to write themselves out of it or Amanda Abbington has blackmail material on Sue and Steven or something. (Her voiceover at the end of TFP was just vile.) It also felt to me like S4 was sickeningly close to a hetero reboot of S3 in some respects, but that’s actually another discussion, as is the loss of all the lovely subtext. Everything in S4 is all flash and dazzle and very, very surface-reading shallow.

This is beyond poor storytelling. I’ve angered myself just thinking about it. But I am not going to use this to rant that Steven and Mark are poor writers. I’m not going to put my tinfoil hat on. But I will say I refuse to believe they think their story is still a cohesive whole. They’re pros. They know.

*Something happened* between S3 and S4. For some reason they changed direction and just said to hell with HLV, and a lot of John’s and Mary’s character arcs. This has badly damaged their adaptation of Sherlock. Whatever the reason, I don’t really trust them with it anymore.

#Sherlock #writing wank #S3 to S4 #makes me sad

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