More about Sherlock

[grav_ity]

Well, I still have conflicted feelings, but here are two things.

1. MarkDoesStuff basically reads my mind and translates it for the rest of you.

2. rj_anderson tells me that Original!Irene did everything for love anyway? So at the end when Sherlock shows up, it's because Irene has MADE HIM FEEL FOR HER which...okay? But still. You can't not blow up a swimming pool after making me wait for EIGHTEEN MONTHS and then expect me to be okay with that kind of passive winning. I'M JUST SAYING.

On the bright side, I do like that it shows me everything I need to know in the first ten minutes. It's what I liked most about "A Study In Pink", and my brain was all rusty so it wasn't until Sherlock actually got on to the plane, that I figured it out.

*sighs*

Why must TV be so ENGAGING?

+++

In related news, the How to be a fan of problematic things thing is circulating again. Thank goodness.

Comments

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Hm. I didn't mean that Irene's success in making Sherlock so attached to her that he would come to her defense when she needed him, even if it meant traveling halfway across the world, was a parallel to Canon Irene's love of Godfrey Norton in the original SCAN. They're Point One and Point Two, but not Point One therefore Point Two, if you know what I mean. I brought up the bit about Canon!Irene doing everything For The Love of Godfrey simply because I think a lot of people have forgotten just how sentimental "The Woman"'s behaviour in SCAN really is.

But I do think Sherlock showing up to rescue Irene at the end means that Moffat's Irene ultimately wins. She has power over him, and always will have, now. And he hasn't even changed the sound her texts make on his phone.

I think the episode could have been done differently and even done better, and I think Irene herself could have been done better. But I'm everlastingly tired of the THAT EVIL MOFFAT IS BEING SEXIST AGAIN school of thought, so I am stubbornly looking on the bright side. :)

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

But I do think Sherlock showing up to rescue Irene at the end means that Moffat's Irene ultimately wins. She has power over him, and always will have, now.

That is what I meant. I JUST WANTED AN EXPLOSION, OKAY? *mopes*

entitled Kate is entitled.

[dbalthasar.livejournal.com]

I've been enjoying your posts about the recent Sherlock - I'm not a fan of the show, and haven't seen but a couple of episodes, not including this latest one, but what I've liked about your posts is that you're being fair to both sides, I think?

Original!Irene did everything for love anyway

That.... Yes, sort of, but also to ensure that her life with Geoffrey would not be disrupted by the King of Bohemia. What she says - and what Holmes accepts - is that she is keeping the picture in order to protect herself, and the clear implication in the story is that the King of Bohemia is more than a bit of a rotter and might well have tried to cause her trouble for rejecting him. She is securing her marriage and future life with a man whom she loves and who loves her for who/what she is - she says that Geoffrey knows her past - and making a clean break with her past to get what she wants. Which happens to be marriage to Geoffrey. I don't think the fact that her goal was a happy marriage makes her actions any less admirable.

I think the thing that I liked most about the story was that, for Irene Adler, Sherlock Holmes was ultimately a minor inconvenience, useful as a witness for her hasty wedding, but not necessarily more memorable than that. Whereas for Holmes, she remained The Woman....

(Yes, I am That Kind of Holmesian. I would have been a Baker Street Irregular, of the Arkansas Valley Investors, if they'd let girls or 11-year-olds join, or an Irene Adler if there had been a chapter. I will stop now. :-)

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely with your comments about the original SCAN and the canonical Irene. Actually the first Sherlockian essay I ever wrote was In Defense of Mr. Godfrey Norton, Esq. (apologies for the eyeball-frying HTML on that page, but it was the only existing version on the web I could find) because I was tired of nearly all the Irene-related pastiches dismissing him as a cad unworthy of The Woman so they could knock him off and pair her up with Sherlock Holmes.

I actually spent half of Moffat's ASiB expecting Irene to sneak off with the cameraphone before Sherlock could break the code to marry her assistant in a civil ceremony, but I suppose that would have been far too bald and direct a parallel to the original.

[dbalthasar.livejournal.com]

Yes, that! I always assumed that they lived happily ever after, with an occasional grin over the circumstances of the wedding.

I didn't see the BBC version, and am unlikely to - I saw a couple of last season's episodes and the show's just not my cup of tea - but one of my problems has been that the writers can't seem to decide how much of the original stories to use and update.