You already know who Sherlock Holmes is, he's one of the most famous characters in all of Western Canon he was in dozens and dozens and dozens of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from 1891 to 1927 he's a Pop culturally important icon and a foundational figure in the Crime and Mystery genres of fiction that have continued all the way to the present day the character has been adapted and re-imagined and referenced more than any other fictional character except, of course, for Jesus Christ the characters so instantly recognisable that if you strap a hat and coat and pipe to a teddy bear and put it in the window of your shop people will come in asking how many thousands of pounds they can give you for the Sherlock bear? Three. Three thousands of pounds. There's many direct film adaptations, including two fun rumps made by Guy Ritchie of all people? There's a bunch of old film serials, and there's a whole bunch of famous actors who've had a turn playing him. There's multiple different television versions, an animated series set in the 22nd century where he got frozen for hundreds of years. And also Watson is a robot for some reason and the Canadian children's TV series starring Sherlock's great-grandniece Shirley Holmes Those last two are canon, I can prove it and there's perhaps an Uncountable amount of books shows films and other properties directly inspired by or based on the stories and characters One of the most obvious invest in recent history being House M.D. A show I've seen all the way through multiple times starring 'Huge Lorry' as Dr.. House and Robert Sean Leonard as Dr. James Wilson you get it and my goodness We haven't even talked about the anime adaptations- you- Let's not do that. Then there are the [two] recent and still active television adaptations Elementary plays out like a police procedural in tone which is fitting because that type of story is arguably a natural descendant of the original Genre, and it's set in the U.S. This time with Dr.. Joan Watson played by Lucy Liu, and it's pretty good It's not as good as House but it's a well put together show and it's very comfy and Then there's Sherlock.
Sherlock is an over produced, over written over pissed pile of garbage and the greatest reason ever made to dodge paying your TV licence. But what's so wrong about it? And why do so many people like it? Or rather Why did so many people think they liked it until season four came out and everyone collectively realized it was bad and always had been [and] why did that happen [all] these questions and more are going to be answered over the course of this primal hallucinatory nightmare? [I] mean video essay And I hope I can properly impart why the show is such a horrible travesty and just to make it clear in advance [I'm] going to do it without ever getting Benedict Cumberbatch's name wrong on purpose for a lazy overused joke not even once [ok] I'm gonna do it once Benedict Cumber-BAD Okay, now it's out of my system. This isn't just the story of one bad show really it's the story of the life and times of its lead writer Stephen William Moffat. Moffat got spat out of a hole in the ground in Paisley in 1961 with the straightforward mission of systematically destroying all of English pop culture and no one stopped him yet, okay? That's not fair Moffat is himself a staple of modern English pop culture having written or been involved with a couple of really good shows in his life including 'Coupling', one of the more experimental Creative and genuinely funny romantic sitcoms ever made it's loosely based on how he met his wife who by the way produced the show which is probably why he had so much creative freedom. Although it does raise some questions about how insular the higher level production staff at the BBC have become. I'm sure that won't come up later after that during the reboot of Doctor Who, perhaps the only other British Pop Cultural staple as iconic as Sherlock Holmes, Moffat came on and wrote numerous really good episodes that are loved by the [fanbase] Giving him massive critical acclaim and winning him among other things a Hugo award and a Bafta If you don't know what those awards are or what they mean, it's okay. No one does He's been a fan of Doctor Who all his life and in 1999 he even wrote the doctor who parody episode 'The Curse of Fatal Death.'
"Why do you have chairs on a Dalek spaceship anyway?" "We will explain later.." [this] special is one of the best contributions to the series ever and Somehow still more progressive than the real Doctor Who ever managed to be it ends with the doctor regenerating into a woman Scandalous. Now there's a guy who should be running Doctor Who the [fanbase] collectively said aloud. His writing is scary, dramatic He has genuine established comedic chops both within and without the science fiction Genre. He might even, you know, Make there be a doctor That's not played by man You know maybe and in a television miracle the likes of which hasn't been seen before or since in science fiction When Rusty Davies stood down a showrunner the fans got what they wanted Oops. Some of the good aspects of Moffat's writing remain But overall the show is somewhat lacking something with him in the driver's seat [there's] a lot of problems but the main one alongside him not doing the one thing it would have been really [cool] for him to do the two times and Soon to be three the doctor has regenerated under his watch Is that the show is now totally dedicated to the persona of the Doctor. Previously the Doctor was the main character [yes], and he was very important in the story of the canon he'd been around for a long time And he knows the [history] of the universe almost offhand He's dabbled in events, so often that writers have played this both for drama and for comedy "Sonic Blaster, 51st Century. Weapon factories of Villengard."
"You've been to the factories?"
"Once." "Well they're gone now, destroyed. Main reactor went critical, vaporized the lot."
"Like I said, once." That one's from the first episode Moffat did by the way But ultimately he was just a guy with his own personality and problems who liked having adventures and was a single piece of the puzzle of every episode's story. Moffat's version of the show positions the doctor as the central puzzle piece to complete the universe with an army of secret societies out to personally destroy the Doctor because he's the most important person of all time and special and wow. "He has walked this universe for centuries untold. He has seen stars fall to dust." The first episode written by Moffat with himself as showrunner ends with the doctor winning by telling the villains how cool and important and special he is and the speech scares them off. It's all about the Doctor. Instead of the stories the Doctor interacts with, the lesson here is that Moffat is a decent writer Capable of being a great one at times, but a terrible Showrunner because he believes his own hype He's very good at implying there's something smart or deep happening and throwing nice tidbits about the Doctor's history into the mix like the thing about the gun factory But he's not very good at actually doing these things that are referred to and a story that consists entirely of a man running around implying he used to do cool shit is a bad story. Moffat simply doesn't write in the way that's required to pace and execute a full series of television. Which leads us to the problem of him getting to do that with Sherlock. What made the original story so popular was the fact they were self-contained. Apart from a few scant references to other events or the year the story takes place Nothing connects the Sherlock Holmes stories to each other as a singular narrative. On top of that , Holmes and Watson don't change all that much as people over the course of all those stories. This was hugely beneficial to the impact of the work because it meant that even though there were tons of stories a person could get a complete narrative without the idea that they were missing too much if they read one of them. It also meant that since there wasn't a larger overarching plot that needed to be served by each individual story they all had their own room to breathe. If all the dozens of stories had tied into each other people would have got confused and bored And it won't have been as punchy as getting a series of short complete stories that were all satisfying on their own This format survives in many adaptations the [forties] serials, for example, don't tie into each other at all even though there's 14 of them. You can watch Sherlock Holmes and 'The Pearl of Death.', a personal favourite, and never need to see any of the others to know what's going on or feel satisfied and even in 'Elementary' or 'House' While there's narratives that run throughout the series most episodes deal with their own particular one-off mystery and don't have to be [all] interlinked So even tuning in to a random episode you feel like you've got a complete story I think it's fair to say the episodic nature of Sherlock Holmes is key to its appeal and should remain in any adaptation. Sherlock takes the core concept of the storytelling of Sherlock Holmes and why it works crumples it up, hides it in one of six busts of Napoleon and then uses them as clubs to kill baby seals. It opens on Watson's experiences scarring him and the murders that set up that episode's killer. See, it opens on Watson because historically, Watson is the point of view from which the audience experiences Holmes. Watson is the one we actually relate to. We must first understand Watson to understand Holmes. Remember that because this is the last time it ever happens on Sherlock. Then, Watson meets Holmes. he comes with him on a case, and they begin to bond and Almost the entire episode is focused on actually solving the crime You know the- the fun mystery story? Well... [Sigh] Sort of, about 30 minutes in Watson is taken out of the story to meet Sherlock's, brother, Mycroft. Played by Mark Gatiss, one of the other two writers of the show from Moffat. They take time attention and focus away from the plot of the episode at hand just to let you know as early as possible that Sherlock has a brother who's around and he does stuff. He keeps popping up just to sort of let you know he exists, and he's keeping tabs on what's going on. But apart from that, almost a full hour is dedicated to trying to solve the crime the first two episodes are probably the closest the show ever gets to being good Because you get a lot of long stretches where the characters try to use deductive reasoning to solve a mystery. It's still bullshit for reasons we'll get into later, but it's the least bullshit we're going to get and that makes it worthy of a fucking prize. But then this happens the killer, the cab driver, shows up at Sherlock's place for unknown reasons, and then he just sort of Gets into the cab..? Then he takes him to an abandoned building and they play mind games while he explains that he knows about Sherlock because Moriarty pays him Whenever he kills someone and also told him about Sherlock because Moriarty knows about Sherlock and is a fan of his. " How did you find me?"
"I was warned about you." "Who warned you about me?"
"There's someone out there who's noticed." "Who would notice me?" "Got yourself a fan." "I want a name." "MORIARTY" Wait, wha- wha- w-what? [Tapping noise] This. (I'm tapping my table.) This is where the problems begin. Right here. Everything in the entire universe of the show exists to set up the inevitable confrontation between Sherlock and Moriarty. Who already knows about Sherlock, and is playing games with him for fun from day one. It wasn't enough to have a one-off murder mystery where Sherlock figures out who the killer is and Set a good tone and then maybe have him come up in the future to deal with. The same thing happens again with the second episode. It starts out on the right foot with the opening setting up the characters of that episode but then at the end we get this scene where it turns out the villain also works for Moriarty and he has her killed. Once again, this is completely unnecessary. Not everyone bad in the world has to turn out to be working for Moriarty. This to me relates two things. One: Lack of understanding of what makes the source material work. And Two: The creator's lack of faith in their own material. The creators have taken a series of stories made famous in the first place by the fundamental fact you can read them in any order and made it into a continuous slog, depicting a pitched grand battle in which most of the playing pieces you see don't actually have any influence on this wider thing. None of these people matter, this guy doesn't matter. It's all about Sherlock and Moriarty fucking with each other. Sometimes in the books Sherlock just helped a couple of people out of a jam and that was enough. Adding in this big, important grand plan undermines the investment in the actual stories. 'A Scandal in Bohemia.' wasn't going to be made any better by being part of some long-running intellectual magic mind battle between Sherlock and a gay supervillain. So Arthur Conan Doyle didn't bother and instead focused on telling one of the most popular and compelling mystery stories in the entire Western fucking Canon. Moffat however seemed to have other plans. The worst part is that at some point Moffat understood this. The unaired pilot of Sherlock is a version of the first episode where Mycroft isn't shoehorned in and the villain doesn't turn out to be funded and informed by a Moriarty who already knows about Sherlock. The resulting story is much stronger because you get the entire episode dedicated to setting up Sherlock and Watson's dynamic far better than you can when you're too busy with everything else and the actual crime they're solving isn't undercut by already being all about Moriarty and whatever the hell he's up to. It gives the motivations and intentions of the episode's villain more of a wait. In the pilot, Sherlock fucking around trying to be clever gets him captured by the cab driver, who figures out that he's been found out and drugs him. You even get a cool exchange setting up Sherlock's previous drug problems.
"You do a lot of drugs, Sherlock Holmes?" "Not in a while."
"I ask because you're very resilient... Most people would've passed out by now." This is far better at setting up Sherlock's drug stuff Than having the cops be at this place looking for drugs and mentioning he used to have a problem and then he walks out and gets into the cab? It's like a fucking- mad libs Chinese telephone version of the plot of the pilot. It's so dumb. A thing to keep in mind about the pilot is that it's only an hour long. I have this theory that almost any story could be improved if, once the creator came to you and said they thought it was done, You forced them to take out maybe 10, 15 percent. It forces them to reassess the importance of what's on the screen and remove indulgences that don't really add anything. For example this section in the script begins with like a 10-minute ramble about the importance of the original stories But then I decided to rewrite that bit to be a tenth of the length and that turned out to be way better. The pilot seems to demonstrate this happening in reverse. Where the full show was given an extra half an hour so they thought 'Oh great, that gives us time to insert the co-writer of the shows character early and have intrigue that doesn't go anywhere because he turns out to be, like, just a normal guy who's worried about his brother and also connect a nice, and simple first story to Moriarty, for no reason. I'll here restate my previous point that Moffat is a decent writer who would be best utilized in one-off episodes with strong direction and oversight by others. And not directly in charge of running an entire show based on one of the most well known properties in British history. Like in Doctor who or in Sh--...Jekyll! Oh, you thought I'd forgotten about Jekyll didn't you, Steve? [Huffed laugh] Well, I can't blame you, most people have. 'Jekyll' is an adaptation of/sequel thing to 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.' made in 2007 with Moffat writing all of it and executive produced by Moffat, Catherine Mitchell, and Moffat's Mother-in-law. Dr.Jekyll, Mr.Hyde is behind Doctor who and Sherlock Holmes. Maybe the one other really big English Pop cultural character we have.. Can we-- Can we stop giving these to him, please? It's six episodes, and it's quite bad It's very bad in some places and surprisingly okay in others but it exhibits all the same problems as Moffat's work on Doctor who and Sherlock so it's worth bringing up as an example of the wider problems of Moffat's writing. The most noticeable and informative thing about the show is it's pacing. The show opens very strongly with Dr. Jackman aware that he has a condition where he manifests a very strong and dangerous personality and working to manage it. We open 'in media res' with someone else being introduced to his techniques. When I first saw the show I couldn't be happier that Moffat didn't write the three previous episodes worth of plot he could have written leading into this room showing Jackman getting his condition and becoming aware of it and working to try and find a way around it. Finding out exactly how the transformation works and the state of his life and the people in it over the course of the first episode is mostly great? Excluding the bad writing and editing in some places. But it ends super strong with the viewer interested in what's going to happen next with Hyde learning that Jackman has a family he's been keeping secret from him and Jackman getting pretty pissed about that. "Come to my family again, and you and I are at war." It's a good pilot, and it sells you on the story and the conceit of the transformation very well. The first episode is clever in places, like with Hyde initially not having a name and deciding the call himself Billy after kicking a guy's ass and deciding to literally take his name. Then he gets more intriguing with him meeting someone who addresses him as Mr. Hyde and referring openly to the actual story the show's based on. It's a clever twist. You started out thinking the show's a modern reimagining of the story, but then it turns out no the original book still exists It's genuinely entertaining watching the cogs turn the narrative do unexpected things like that But after the first episode the show immediately begins to fall apart it turns out that the Jekyll in the original stories was a real person who also existed and had the same condition as Jackman and also they exactly resemble each other. There's also a secret organization bent on making Super Soldiers out of Hyde's advanced physiology. A mystery regarding how Jackman came to exist, because Jekyll died a virgin. Henry Jekyll died a vir- Henry Jekyll didn't have any heirs- do you get it? An unrelated mystery about human cloning that sort of comes in out of nowhere and, by the way, isn't the resolution of the why Jackman exists and looks exactly like Jekyll plot because Moffat felt like being clever. Hyde starts screaming 'Why am I not a Superman.' like a tiny baby and Jackman and Hyde merged their personalities and all the electricity turns off and he has mind powers and..Oh, for some reason a bunch of characters and lines that could have been ripped whole cloth from coupling start turning up in this horror drama four episodes in. But the show even commits, in my opinion, based on what I liked about it the cardinal sin it shows the backstory. The fourth episode is almost entirely long flashbacks showing Jackman gaining the condition and starting to discover it and figure out how to manage it. That's right, Moffat starts, in media res, smartly skipping explaining an origin story, that's not necessary for getting to the interesting bits that take place in the first episode And then goes back to explain it. The show ends with Jackman's mother, who has appeared intermittently, suddenly transforming into the lady who runs the organization, that's trying to study Hyde. It's a twist intended to set up a second series and its own deeper mysteries or whatever but the show was cancelled so we'll never find out what happens next. Why Jackman's mother's alter ego was trying to study Hyde in the first place, given she could have just studied herself. Why Jekyll is so goddamn important or how the company got so big and rich and powerful over the course of 100 years when it's run by a woman who couldn't have been around for more than 60 of them and all their money was revealed to have come from studying imperfect clones of Jekyll and their cloning was only achieved in the 50s so how did they get the riches required to learn to fucking clone humans before then, and it turns out that love is what made Jekyll become Hyde in the first place because there is no potion. So they've even ruined the premise of the original fucking book! Most importantly the keyword I would associate with Jekyll is promise. Jekyll has for all its faults a very strong pilot episode and honestly Moffat should just write pilot episodes for the rest of his life and then hand the rest of the series off to other writers to play on the interesting ideas he brings up and then abandons while trying to be smart or outsmart the source material. Moffat desperately needs people Slapping his wrists away from the keyboard when he decides to write an episode of backstory to a show that started strong specifically by not having any. So we're left with two pilots penned by Moffat which both promise really interesting and good shows and work, basically all the way through on their own level. But then the actual shows in question fail to live up to any of those ideas. Also, I kind of have to bring this up. The editing of the show is pretty bad. But it's clear the editors were given very little to work with. Most of the fights happen off screen. Here's the scene where Hyde throws a guy out a window. "Cheers." [WINDOW SMASHING] They play a glass smashing sound effect, before cutting, and then it cuts to him getting off the ground. They simply didn't shoot the money shot of this scene, of the guy actually getting thrown through the window. The editor had to really stretch the shots they had to make the scene have any continuity whatsoever and you can almost feel the editor's anger at whoever decided not to shoot most of the interesting events called for in the script. By far the funniest part of the show is this outtake an editor left in that nobody seemed to notice where Hyde uses his superpowers to pull out a book of matches and light one out of nowhere But, Nesbitt accidentally flings the entire pack directly into his face and eyes. They try and cut away but all they can cut to is this other angle of him doing the same thing. It's like wow Do you have a take where he doesn't [Laughing] throw the matches into his face? No?..Oh, well-- Oh well, have to go with this then! Actually, considering the way a lot of the show plays out and the lack of coverage everywhere else, I'm willing to bet they didn't even shoot a second take at all. I've spent so long laboring on Jekyll Well, partially because I watched 6 hours of it preparing for this video and wanted to justify the wasted time. But also because it's very much a blueprint for a lot of the mistakes in Sherlock's writing. What Moffat's really good at is telling single stories that have to start and then end conclusively. because you're never going to see most of these characters or even this planet again. You can't just set up the next season with a hackneyed cliffhanger or whatever you have to end the story satisfyingly. "It needs a big strong idea every week." "I think you know you've got a good idea for a Doctor who story if you think well, I've just blown that feature-film idea forever, haven't I?" [Tennant] "Right." "That's the size of story that you gets you through 45 minutes of Doctor who." Compare and contrast the writing of this scene from 'The Empty Child' in Season one. The Doctor follows a mysterious mauve object through time as it crashes on Earth and assuming it would have made an impression, decides to ask the locals if they've seen something fall from the sky. "Might seem like a stupid question, but has anything fallen from the sky recently?" [Laughter from the crowd] That's a weird response. He doesn't get it and neither to you. What's going on? And then an air-raid siren goes off and he sees the wartime posters and you go 'Ahhh...' 'So it's the war..' This is a clever and simple setup and reveal. Over the course of the episode and the second part we learn what the ship was, what it does What's happened in London and by the end of these two episodes you have a complete picture of what happened and why. Also a guy's face gets turned into a gas mask by Nano machines, and it's the scariest thing anyone my age has ever seen in their entire lives. There's good writing and a good story here with a conclusion that feels earned. Moffat's supposedly famous for writing the more dark episodes but at the end of this one everyone who has died comes back to life. "Everybody lives, Rose." "Just this once." "Everybody lives!" Like, he unkills people and yet the tone carries it. Makes it feel dark even then. That's just how good he is when he's given a single story to tell. "Right, you lot, lots to do. Beat the Germans, save the world- Don't forget the welfare state." But when Moffat has to write the whole series and manage the wider progression you start to see holes. Things start being implied, that sound deep, seem like they might be going somewhere, but actually don't. His first season starts with the Doctor finding a crack in space and time on the bedroom wall of a girl he happens to run into. And then the cracks keep turning up and a piece of the Tardis comes through one. Where did the cracks come from? Keep watching and maybe you'll find out. Then it turns out they come from the Tardis exploding at the end of the season. But why did the Tardis explode? Keep watching and maybe you'll find out. Oh, the Silence.. Did it? Maybe? I-I'm still not clear Why did they do it? Well keep watching and maybe you'll find out. Oh,
they did it because there's a prophecy that silence must fall when the question is asked. Who made this prophecy of what the hell does it mean? Keep watching for yet another fucking season and maybe yo--.. [Exasperated noise] It also feels like Moffat really did use up all his feature film ideas because he brings back the Weeping Angels for a two-part episode and then they come back again later, even more. In the first series, which is still my favourite, they would have the Doctor do something shitty. Like, torture a Dalek and he would have to confront himself that episode and get better as a person. Say what you want about Russell T Davies, but under his watch almost every episode would feel involving because characters would change or grow or have to actually confront and deal with something about themselves. "Why don't you finish the job and make the Daleks extinct? Rid the Universe of your filth." "Why don't you just die!?" "You would make a good Dalek" This episode explores the Doctor's anger at the Daleks and shows it's an expression of seeing his entire race die in a war with them. Over the course of this episode he has to confront these feelings in Ways he hasn't let himself and grow as a person. It's a really small change, but we get to see it happen, and it's good. In contrast, here's a superficially similar scene in a Moffat run season in an episode co-written by Moffat. "You are a good Dalek." This happens at the end of an episode. The purpose of this scene is to tell you that the Doctor is full of hatred. Not so we can deal with that hatred being there in the actual story of the episode or explore these emotions in more detail but to make you watch the next episode to see if maybe they'll eventually deal with the interesting thing they brought up and did nothing with. "I see into your soul, Doctor." "I see hatred." [Deadpan] 'Oh, I've looked into your soul, I see hatred Doctor.' Hatred, that a future episode might eventually fucking deal with and be interesting... "Do you have it in you to murder me?" "Did he push you out of that thing?.." "Or did you fall?...Couldn't really tell." "He can be very mean sometimes." We get it, the Doctor's an ambiguous character now Are you going to explore that in more detail or you're just going to keep telling us that? For all his flaws, Davies tried to make each episode have a satisfying complete story and arc for it's characters. "I'm the only one left." "I win." "How about that?" Moffat as a Showrunner tries to make each episode imply something satisfying is maybe gonna happen eventually. You can have all the fantastic premises you like: Shrinking yourself down to go inside a Dalek to do surgery, having a sword fight with Robin Hood with a spoon, having to go on a space bank heist with strangers- whatever. But if most of the time the conclusion is 'Wow you've got some anger, Doctor, I bet a future episode might bother to deal with it.' Those episodes are wasting a lot of their potential. Again, this is something Moffat grasped excellently when he was writing one-off episodes. 'Blink' starred characters that were never seen before and haven't been seen since But it has a complete emotional arc for its main characters over the course of one episode. It doesn't end with someone saying 'Wow you have problems you probably ought to deal with at some point. Tune in next week [to] see if we do....' The problem is when you come down to it Doctor who is about visiting other worlds and going on fun adventures. Moffat made it all about 'The Doctor.' In much the same way, the Sherlock Holmes stories are about solving crimes and fun mysteries and figuring things out using deductive reasoning. Moffat made his show all about Sherlock. Sherlock is too important, too special, too powerful, and this ruins the tension of the show and our ability to empathise with the character. The entire show is dedicated to telling you about Sherlock instead of showing you Sherlock by way of his interaction with the actual plot. Season 1 was the only season that came close to getting this right. Where you learned what sort of person he was and his abilities based on how he used them in the episode. As the show progresses the actual mystery- You know the crimes we're supposed to have fun watching Sherlock solve? Take a back seat to the show telling us how cool and wacky Sherlock is, and his mind battle with Moriarty. In this episode in Season three there's a huge set up just for Sherlock being weird. They spend a pretty sizeable portion of the run-time and budget for a quick joke about how rude and thoughtless Sherlock is, while Lestrade is gearing up to capture someone who's clearly been a problem with him for a long time. "I-I-I..I have to go." "Do you know any funny stories about John?" They could have just made him rude and thoughtless over the course of the plot of the actual fucking episode. The punchline of these jokes is supposed to set up something regarding the principal characters. But they do it so poorly and in such a roundabout way that they're neither funny nor really tell us anything new. We should already know Sherlock is a big, inconsiderate piece of shit because Moffat has been writing him as one for three seasons at this point. This kind of overindulgent nonsense is antithetical to actually telling an interesting story. Nothing remotely like this would have happened in the short stories because they actually had a story worth telling and wanted to get to it. Cumulatively stuff like this reduces the entire show to Sherlock prancing around showing off how smart and or rude he is and very occasionally pausing to do something. "I'll get hung for this." "No, no..Not at all." "Hanged..Yes." Sherlock corrects a guy's grammar a bunch for the first two minutes of this episode and then walks away This doesn't serve the story at all except to tell us that Sherlock doesn't like when you say words wrong. Which is you know an admirable character trait. Obviously, fuck that guy he deserves to die even if he didn't do the murder But it's really not something so pivotal as to be the start of an episode, It's a show about solving crimes the episode should be starting with a...Crime. A thing happens that piques your interest like the first two episodes did, but by the time of the third episode we open on Sherlock being shitty, dramatically walking out and the credits go and then we cut to Sherlock being shitty in his house for another three minutes "There's a head.." Ooh, there's a head in the fridge.. How wacky! The actual start of the episode's fucking plot is at around 6 minutes 20 seconds when someone suddenly attacks the house out of nowhere with a bomb. Everything leading up to that is Sherlock being bored and smarmy and literally waiting around for the plot to come and get him now this characterisation isn't utterly terrible. We do have a strong sense that Sherlock is a dick. But the problem with this is that in effect the entire show is bent towards providing characterisation for Sherlock and making the story he's interacting with take a back seat until it becomes convenient. In the actual books and many of the adaptations Sherlock Holmes was not the real focal point, the mystery at hand and the other characters were equally as important and the point was the way Sherlock interacted with them to help solve the case. Let's take the very first story 'A Study in Scarlet.' Sherlock, while examining the body, refers to pre-existing events he's clearly studied and actively recommends others do the same. Instead of simply telling everyone how smart he is, he makes a tangible reference to a piece of information that could be relevant, we're seeing his reasoning in action We're also getting strong characterisation while the plot moves forward of Sherlock checking the body and making comments. That teaches about Sherlock and about the case. Characterisation and story are happening at the same time and not in separate segments for the first six minutes before the story decides to start Lestrade assumes R-A-C-H-E written in blood on a wall are meant to say Rachel and the killer was disturbed before they could finish writing and that someone called Rachel therefore has something to do with the case. That's all he gets from this scene the assumption that these words might say Rachel. Which it turns out They don't Sherlock looks at this scene and deduces, for example, the approximate height of the person who wrote the message based on where it had made sense for them to write the letter. Something no one else in the room thought to observe or consider but something that you can absolutely arrive at yourself. This is a tangible piece of information that you yourself could apply to real-life. Sherlock just taught you how to figure out how tall someone is based on how they would naturally write on a wall or the length of the stride of their footprints. This characterisation is very strong because it gets across that Sherlock is smart but also why he's smart- what he did to learn the things he learned and got across the point of the scene which is to demonstrate the use of his analytical techniques. For comparison, there's a scene in the first Sherlock episode, 'A Study in Pink.' Ooh, do you get it? How clever.
Where Sherlock goes to a crime scene clearly based on the one from 'Scarlet.' Rache here is written by the victim and it actually turns out that she really is trying to write the name Rachel, because knowing German I guess is too much to expect of an audience. This isn't necessarily a bad change What is a bad change is what information Sherlock learns and how he learns it. We''re shown Sherlock inspecting the body and instead making the conclusion, based on the inside of a dirty Wedding ring being clean that the woman is a serial adulterer. This actually doesn't have very much impact on the story whatsoever It's just the writers finding a way to be clever by having Sherlock derive an entire sexual history from a ring. He then realises something no-one else notices and dramatically runs off screaming. "Pink!" This is tonally, utterly wrong. Instead of being given tangible explanations and the intrigue coming from deciding what to do next with the information in order to catch the killer you're told to assume someone's marriage is failing because their ring is dirty and that Sherlock knows something you don't and has just run off to deal with it himself. The tone here is utter confusion. Sherlock's smart because he figured something out but we're not going to say what or how or why. Just for contrast, the first time we see CBS's 'Elementary's' Sherlock on a crime scene he discovers a hidden room by feeling the incline of the floor with his feet. "The extra weight of a safe room steel reinforcements can cause the floor around it to decline slightly, creating... a slope between 1 and 5 degrees." This thing with the marble is clever and based on quite simple available information like that big armored panic rooms are heavy It's not rocket science, but it's a believable deduction And it did just teach you an actual real-life way of finding hidden panic rooms this show might not be perfect, but at least they Solve crimes using information they detected. Like Detectives would? This early scene is the best analysis in the show you're going to get too. you are shown pieces of information that lead to a conclusion For example, he recognises that she would have had to have a suitcase with her, because of splash marks which the viewer's even shown and has a chance to figure out for themselves before Sherlock explains it but in most investigations after this one Sherlock starts either making wild assumptions that don't have any basis in reality Or straight-up learns key information the viewer isn't even told about. In episode two, Sherlock assumes a man found with a gunshot on the right side of his head, couldn't be self-inflicted because he was left-handed. "The wound's on the right side of his head."
"And?"
"Van Coon was left-handed.." "Requires quite a bit of contortion.." This isn't even a solid assumption, in practice plenty of left-handed people use their other hand for firearms So that the kickback of the weapon doesn't potentially injure the hand you use for writing with including say for example, John Watson [GUNSHOT] Bing. In episode 3 Sherlock has to figure out how a TV personality lady was poisoned He sends Watson to the Lady's house and we get scenes of him checking stuff out and Sherlock starting to watch a few episodes and check the internet for theories. The characters meet up and Sherlock just sort of throws out there the house boy, who is in a relationship with the lady's brother, probably poisoned her in revenge from mistreatment of the brother on TV based on all the research He did off screen. All we see of this research is her patting him a little bit too hard on the back Sherlock proves this theory by having a toxicology report come in and show it was botulinum toxin and that the house boy's job was to give her botox and that he knows he's been bulk ordering it. "My contact at the Home Office. Gave me the complete records of Raul's internet purchases." "He's been bulk ordering botox for months, bided his time. Then upped the strength to a fatal dose." That's right in a show about solving crimes and giving the viewer a sense of unfolding mystery and maybe giving them some information So they can try and figure it out themselves as they go, so you know that brain is engaged Sherlock solves the crime off screen using information the viewer's never shown or even has a chance to deduce for themselves. He just comes out of nowhere and reveals It was botox and that he has a friend with the power to find out people's internet purchases and shared them with him. The ability to be intelligent in finding and interpreting available information is replaced with a superpower Where he holds all the cards and knows more than the viewer possibly could rendering the experience of trying to follow the story Roughly similar to trying to figure out where a car is driving while there's a bag over your head and Steven Moffat is punching you And insisting he's being clever. In this same episode based on a guard being found dead who works in a gallery? He immediately then arrives at the conclusion that a recent painting unveiled there has to be fake because why else would anyone ever be killed? And then concludes based on... circumstantial evidence that a well-known legendary hitman we've never heard of before must have done it. "One of the deadliest assassins in the world. That it is trademark style." And then someone off-screen finds out where he is and then they go to where he is. "Anytime you wanna explain?"
"Homeless network, really is indispensable." Like all the deduction and thinking isn't done in a way that is actually interesting or fun for the viewer to see. How would a person track this hitman? How would you find out where he is? That's an interesting story. They skip over it. Sherlock literally hires someone else to do it. And they do all of this so that Sherlock and Watson have an excuse to run around Chasing a really tall guy And then having a wrestle with him you know yeah the original stories were fantastic and groundbreaking pieces of literature about solving mysteries But what they really could have done with was a bit where the main characters wrestle a tall guy for a while. I'll say again that the show does start out better and Lots of season one does feature some genuine deduction based on information the viewer's also shown but you can see the slip starting to happen here. The deductive reasoning a superior show would be centrally about is replaced with a conjuring trick where you're told later How clever Sherlock was and then he tells you about all the other stuff you didn't even know about that led him to it. In 'The Hounds of Baskerville' Sherlock intentionally tries to drug Watson with what he thinks is sugar that's had a hallucinogen added to it. Based on how he thinks he's been drugged and it's the only thing they didn't both consume. the fact it's the one thing they haven't both eaten or drunk isn't established until after Watson has been given the sugar and started hallucinating The purpose of this part appears to be to make Sherlock look clever for knowing something we didn't even have the chance to think about for ourselves. Also, he could have just tested the sugar instead of trying to drug his friend with an unknown chemical to see what would happen and then testing it later only to discover the sugar is clean. You can even imagine a better, smarter show having a section where the two stop and think about everything they've eaten maybe even cutting back to scenes of everything they ate that we already saw because they could have had scenes of them doing that as other stuff happened and eliminating everything except the sugar then testing it in the lab and discovering that it's normal. Instead, all this information is excised on purpose so you can have the mystery. Ooh! Of Sherlock maybe drugging his only friend and fill some precious time as Watson hides in the lab from an imaginary dog for five whole minutes. The story it would have made sense to tell is just too normal for Moffat and Gatiss. The real focus is what wacky or cool things Sherlock will personally do and then how he'll justify it later using bullshit Instead of being on the piece of evidence or information and the proper approach to finding it and acting on it. This conveniently let's the writers off the hook for ever having to deal with things like character traits or motivation or choices. When you read a chapter of a Sherlock Holmes story you feel like you've gotten a little bit smarter it feels weird to say out loud but often it's like you've personally seen the benefit of a certain way of looking at the world. Sherlock has the strongest characterisation in the show but, in effect, it's too strong, pulling the focus away from things that actually make watching him do stuff interesting. Like the other characters and their lives and the mysteries he's solving. This is a gigantic problem in both storytelling and characterisation. A lot of the original stories were only a few pages long, there wasn't enough time to mythologise what a badass Sherlock was, because there was crime to solve. The 90 minute format of the show seemingly gives the creator's too much time. Hell, the pilot was better because they didn't have that extra 30 minutes to shoehorn in the Mycroft stuff and then tie it all in to Moriarty. Because why not make it all about him too? Speaking of which... If you thought the show's obsession with Sherlock was too much wait until you get a load of Moriarty. The entire Sherlock world has been almost completely absorbed into the all-encompassing plans of some guy who was in two of the many dozens of original stories. After being suddenly being inserted into the first two episodes to let you know he's coming so you have something to keep watching for, because the writing and mystery solving certainly can't be doing that for you. Episode three's all weird mind games explicitly for Sherlock by Moriarty. It's all about a big smart Baddie messing with Sherlock but in a really boring way where he holds all the cards and Sherlock never actually outsmarts him, just solves his puzzles, but he solves them off screen or using magic mind powers, so it's a struggle We don't even get to see. There's also the problem of him being relentlessly queer coded. "Gay." "But the flirting's over Sherlock. Daddy's had enough now.." Seriously, this guy is just the fucking most. "You like my boys? This one's got more stamina but he's less caring in the afterglow." What are you doing, Andrew? Oh boy, do you get it? He's a queen. Ahh, fuck you, Steve. Like I get it, he's really into Sherlock and the writers imply this means he wants to do the fuck on him, but like... Why? What does this add to the narrative? 'Moriarty is usually a rather dull, rather posh villain so we thought someone who was genuinely properly frightening, someone who's an absolute psycho,' Moffat sai- Okay. [Exasperated sigh] Number one, absolute psycho? Make him act like a gay? Great. That's that's really fucking comforting of you. Thank you. Uh, number, two Moriarty - Dull and posh? One of the most memorable fucking characters in like the history of Literature? Oh, yeah. He needs to be fixed. We need to make him into the fucking loudest, shouting-ist, prancing-ist Weirdest most over-the-top guy ever. Just, you know, because we really needed to fucking fix Moriar- You [Noises of sheer disgust].. Jesus Christ. "Moriarty is self-consciously a villain, he knows what he's doing. He's a nutcase." He knows what he's doing, and he's a nut case? Uh. Mark, those... Those things don't.. See? He's an absolute psycho, which means the creators can have him do anything, even contradictory things like threaten Sherlock to try and keep him away and do everything he can to protect his identity and needlessly play with Sherlock up to an including fucking just killing himself just to mess with his head and they don't have to justify any of it because 'he's a complete psycho.' He doesn't have to make any sense 'We don't have to write a cohesive character. He's mad, and that's it That's all you're going to get. Fuck you..' At the end of season one slash beginning of two he threatens them, leaves realises he should probably kill them, comes back in to do it, then changes his mind again once the cliffhanger's over in season two starts What's the lesson here? Also, why does he come back in? He could have just said 'Hey snipers, just kill him.' The villain is practically all-powerful doesn't kill Sherlock for the sake of the fun of messing with him and Sherlock never ever gets the upper hand or surprises him because he's so ridiculously smart.This makes the conflict have no real weight for the viewer and thereby render it pointless Moriarty always holds all the cards and knows more than Sherlock does "Boring..." "I coulda got them anywhere." In the books when he's tracking down other criminals And, of course, Moriarty, Sherlock has to try very hard not to get murdered and in the original novel literally does, because Moriarty and himself end up shuffling off the Reichenbach Falls together. In this version, Moriarty literally doesn't want Sherlock dead, And he doesn't really care about his crime empire because he shoots himself in the head simply as a ploy to mess with him He's just fucking around with an impossibly genius-level intellect to seemingly no end except literally his own sometimes he's a pragmatic mastermind who'll do anything to protect even the vaguest sliver of his identity like have this lady murdered or Detonate the bombs on the old woman when she tries to tell Sherlock he sounded nice "If you don't stop prying.." "I'll burn you." "I will burn..The heart out of you." Why not just burn him anyway? Why make this allowance for the one man who actually stands a chance of ever catching you? Ohh.. Oh, because he's crazy, so we don't have to justify it He's crazy The original Moriarty shows up in two stories is formidable and once Sherlock's dead for fucking with him and the two die in mortal combat trying to kill each other, although Sherlock is eventually revealed to have survived after a full decade of readers being convinced he was dead. This Moriarty runs seemingly all crime everywhere, will go to great lengths to protect his identity but is also so fascinated by Sherlock he'll literally kill himself to see what he does, while gay baiting the fuck out of him so Tumblr will give it some shipping attention. Then when Sherlock dies to stop his plans, ten minutes later it turns out Sherlock isn't dead because the writers can't even trust you to wait for the next season, because they're rightfully worried you'd lose interest in this garbage if the story felt too conclusive. He kills himself because I guess they wanted him to do something surprising? "The most essential thing about Moriarty for me. Is that you don't know what you're going to get, on the day." "That he has to be completely surprising." So they had him do the stupidest fucking thing possible? The only way this could be stupider is if, right before he shot himself in the head for no reason, he told Sherlock He was going to come back for every season finale afterwards as an increasingly stupid and bullshit fake-out. Or that Sherlock has a secret sister, he magically forgot about and also a mega super double secret old best friend who he remembers as a dog for some reason and who the sister killed. That would be really stupid wouldn't it? But Moriarty's shitty characterisation doesn't end there. After the big twist in season 2 that there is no secret, all powerful hacking technology. "No, no, no, no, no...This is too easy...This is too easy." "There is no key, you don't really think a couple of lines of computer code are going to crash the world around, do you? I'm disappointed... ..I'm disappointed in you." It turns out that it does exist, because this happens. They were worried people would stop watching if there was no Moriarty to fight and they just killed the other quite well-known villain, so they had to make sure they implied he was coming back because if everything doesn't tie into Moriarty there's basically no story here. He doesn't actually come back either this turns out to just be like, I think this turns out to be a plot hole. Like who did this in the end? Did someone who works for Moriarty do it? Did he set this up to happen long after his death? Did Eurus do it? After teasing everyone into thinking he's going to come back, and having an entire special dedicated to figuring out that yes, he's dead, But he must just have some other plans going. It just keeps turning out to not have anything to do with him and the plot continues on as if Moriarty wasn't around. Then, in the worst episode of all time it turns out before he died Moriarty met Sherlock's secret sister and provided video recordings to use in some bullshit things she pulls for him for no reason other than 'she's crazy.' [Unenthused] Woo! Nice one, Steve, you got out of having to characterise yet another villain. At least he didn't make this one gay Oh and at the very end of the show this happens [Moriarty's voice] "Surprise." "You didn't think I'd just disappear did you?" Now, provided the show actually get's another season., baiting people with the return of Moriarty yet again, after all this time, establishing he's definitely dead is absolutely taking the piss. And I don't even want to know about a prospective season 5, or what that would look like. Because I have no idea how the show could possibly get any worse, so instead. I'm going to just move on. Another thing Sherlock has, is a style problem It's clear the production crew were given a vastly higher budget than the majority of British television normally gets and you can see why. Except for Doctor who ,QI, British Bake Off, Come Dine with me and the legacy of Colonialism. Britain has virtually no remaining cultural exports So it makes sense for the BBC to invest heavily in the TV adaptation of one of our most important cultural icons, so people think we're still relevant as a nation. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anyone really knew what to do with that money so... Consequently, the show is over produced to the point where it only gets in the way. The show is trying at every moment to be the coolest most, important thing in the entire world. And it has the time and money to execute on this which isn't necessarily a good thing The most obvious way that's features is the text that comes up whenever Sherlock's doing his magic mind powers Or whenever someone gets a message on their phone it appears on-screen in a cool, visual way. This makes sense and so do things like having images be wiped by people moving through them or doors closing and stuff That's just nice editing, and it does help scenes flow together easier This is a vast improvement on Jekyll which appears to have been rushed and had no budget So you get stuff like Hyde's super-strength being shown off by having them just fast forward footage of James Nesbitt walking normally or this shot You can see the bones of the style Moffat and the production team of Sherlock finally get the budget to actually make But it just doesn't work, this is meant to be Hyde drinking a lot of alcohol very quickly because of his advanced metabolism and unexplained 'superpowers.' But it just looks like a guy drinking in fast forward and the sound effects just make it silly. A lot of the special effects in the scenes that are meant to be scary are just dutch angles and shaky cam with under crank and weird filters Sherlock's enhanced budget and scope of production allows it to pull off versions of this without looking as terrible when Sherlock's using his mind powers because, let's be honest, that's basically what they are. The soundtrack swells and all kinds of cool sound effects are used to get across his sheer attentiveness Here for example because she was scraping the ground with her nails as the text appears. You hear a nail scraping sound Giving the text a sound effect as it writes itself in helps draw your attention to it, make it pop. "Writing the numbers. You've been over the last four digits yourself in another pen, so you wanted to keep the number." "Just now though, you used the napkin to blow your nose. Maybe you're not that into her after all." They use pen drawing and nose sniffling noises when he talks about those and you can even see they animate the images as it happens They do this because they think you're an idiot and don't understand what writing with a pen means, so you need both visual and audio cues. This use of images and sound effects is very effective It helps trick the viewer into thinking they're doing more than watching Benedict Cumberbatch sit in a chair and tell you about things he's noticed. In a way, I wouldn't really recommend analysing this show too much I must mention that paying attention to sound and visuals causes the show's trick to start to wear thin very quickly "Like?"
"The wound was on the right side of his head." "The left" "She used the ones on the left" "Picked it up with his right and took down messages with his left." "With butter on the right" "Just the shirt..and the trousers." At it's best you get intense scenes where the level of thinking being done by Sherlock is highlighted and you're put into his mind with these extreme close-ups and pauses, seeing the world how this mega genius sees it for brief spurts. And it's all very stylish. At its worst this style is a stupid nonsense mess that ends up being needless, or just straight-up, silly [Mimicking the ridiculous wooshing noises] Bing! [CLOCK BELL CHIME] [OLD MUSIC PLAYS] I swear to God, I didn't edit that in. This tonally dissonant nightmare doesn't put us in Sherlock's mind and doesn't even show us his trail of thought. It's just text and images flying past the screen with weird sound effects. This is the sort of thing I would do for a quick joke, not the dramatic investigation scene. [DOG HOWL] ['YOU AIN'T NOTHING BUT A HOUND DOG' PLAYS] The show is so dedicated to this amped-up over-the-top style that it applies it to places that are incredibly poorly served by it. My favourite examples are in the wedding episode. Firstly you have this bizarre montage of Sherlock and Watson getting drunk. Set to a fucking atrocious dubstep remix of the show's theme, with a blurry vignette over it because that what alcohol does. Intersected with ultra fast graphs of their night out. You're like, 'whoa, wait I didn't even see that.' What? What? This is the most overproduced pub crawl in the history of television. But the bestest example ever is earlier in the episode when you have the wedding photographer taking the gangs pictures "Okay. Three...Two..One. Cheese!" The music swells, you get this cool time frozen effect and all that. This shot was quite difficult to pull off, I know someone who worked on this episode. They had to build a giant rig with dozens of DsLRs all at precise positions and angles and focal distances. This is a cool technique. Two of my favourite directors, the Wachowskis, pioneered for the Matrix. In theory, this is a nice set of shots, right? But there's a difference between theory and practice What is happening in these shots? How is the story being furthered? What action is being exacerbated by executing the scene with this technique? It's a few brief, elaborate, expensive shots of people getting their picture taken at a wedding. The Wachowskis only used this technique in the most intense moments of some of the most dramatic and well edited action scenes in film history. Where, a single second decompressed, during a life-or-death moment, has maximum payoff I don't know which burk saw this scene and thought oh, let's do that but for the scene where everyone's standing still. But whoever they were they should have been fired. But I guess since the writers accidentally wrote an episode mostly consisting of Sherlock farting about at a wedding I guess they decided they had to blow the budget on something. By golly, I wonder who produced this sho-- Oh... Is this a purposeful reference to the Matrix? Like, it wouldn't be the first time they did that. They did that thing at the beginning with the two pills? What's the deal with these references? [In a questionable cockney accent]
'Alright if you take this pill, you'll wake up in your bed and the Sherlock TV series was never made, it was all a bad dream.. If you take this pill, you have to watch all of it. Again.' Oh cool. What do you want in return? Do I need to, like, suck your dick, or something? [In the accent again]
'What? No, no, I'm going to shoot you if you don't take either pill, but you've got to take one. That's all.' Really? [Soft laugh] Wow, you just talked yourself out of a sweet deal, mister. Sign me the fuck up, sailor. [Strange noises of enjoyment] ...I forgot where I was going with this bit... I'm sorry. This kind of attitude to production can be bad for creativity Throwing all the money ever at every scene means you get shots like this getting in the way of the story and supposedly tense moments of Sherlock trying to figure something out, are ruined by flinging random images and sound effects at the audience in the name of production value. This is the one lesson I'd have expected Moffat to have learned by now. You see, one thing Doctor who was quite famous for, was shooting for expensive ideas and concepts so often with such tight schedules, that it becomes necessary for there to be episodes where the main characters don't make too much of an appearance and there aren't too many effects or expensive props. within these constraints, Moffat himself wrote 'Blink', one of the most universally loved episodes of the show where the Doctor and Martha barely show up and the monsters literally don't even move. Creating some incredibly tense moments out of almost no budget whatsoever. Such as this, sphincter-tightening scene of a light starting to flicker and perhaps the most incredibly engaging piece of drama in the entire show Where a character's arguing with a pre-recorded message of the Doctor that knows what they're about to say "How can you have a copy of the finished transcript, it's still being written." "I told you, I'm a Time Traveller. I got it in the future." 'Blink' won a ton of awards and I feel proves that sufficient execution on time and budget constraints that sometimes limitations can be good for creativity I didn't really believe that old aphorism until I saw Sherlock and realised that if you give people too much money They do shit like this instead of tell engaging story. This production style leads to characters being underused, because they have so little to do, because the focus is on over producing the scenes where Sherlock does stuff and other random bullshit instead of making them a decent addition to the story. This problem even extends to the second principal character John Watson. Watson sucks and has no purpose in this version of the story. Mary Watson. No, seriously after shooting the baddie at the end of episode 1, Watson has nothing to do, and spends most of his time getting treated like shit by his friend for no reason and running around next to him while he solves everything Watson is the point-of-view character the literal narrator, for most of the Holmes stories and he barely even gets to see plenty of the events of the plot. Uh, what else does he do? Oh, one time. He gets kidnapped and Sherlock has to save him. Oh, another time he- uh- he gets mysteriously kidnapped and Sherlock has to- Uh, one time, uhm, he starts a fire? Oh, and technically he's there sometimes while Sherlock figures stuff out. He's also here for this fight, I guess? And also there's the time when, uh, he gets kidnapped and Sherlock has to save-- One time, he get's held at gunpoint and Sherlo..-- [Noises of frustration] One time he gets held at gunpoint and Shheer..... [SLAPPING NOISES] Awh, I just made my ears ring, slapping my face. Jesus Christ. Fuck you, Steve. And, oh my God. Did you see Watson in the background for this exciting scene? Literally the most important thing Watson does in all of season 2 is watch Sherlock die. The wedding episode has a bit where Sherlock tells us Watson is a good doctor and a really helpful ally and provides anecdotes of times he did stuff useful to a case Wouldn't it have been great if Watson's skills had come in handy in the episodes of the show that were actually made? And not the ones there was backstory for this wedding The guy's a doctor and a war survivor and the POV character for most of the books and he's barely even a presence at his own fucking wedding dedicated to Sherlock's hour long speech supposedly about him but really about how smart Sherlock is for figuring out a crime during a speech. Fuck off. Mary, Watson John's wife is a minor character in some of the books and not super important but his relationship with his wife does come up in interesting ways usually in order to make points about the limited roles of women in British Society in the time the story was set. In the show, she just sort of appears between seasons two and three. The episode after that is their wedding. Although, don't worry, all know who that episode's really about. And then the next episode after that she turns out to be a secret Ninja Assassin. Then, in the next episode, not counting the special, because the bulk of it takes place in Sherlock's imagination, and she's not really in it, She dies. Mary lived a hugely interesting life and it would have made for a pretty cool addition to the story Unfortunately, most of it happens in the same place most of the interesting stuff in the show happens. Off screen Then for some reason John sees her as a ghost for a bit and then she gives the dumbest speech of all time about how mega special Holmes and Watson are even though Watson doesn't do anything and even she had more input on the events of the four episodes she had the privilege of being alive for. You've got a hand it to Moffat, he finally created a strong, smart interesting female character and then just when she was getting a chance to really interact with the story he fucking kills her, to create tension for the 'real' main characters Sherlock and- whoever this guy is, what does he do? I think he got kidnapped a few times -- Nice going, Steve. You fleshed out an actually clever addition to the main story Just to kill her. Although I can see why that would be necessary There's only so many important women in the original stories to ruin, aren't there? Speaking of which [Heavy sigh] Okay, this is going to be kind of a tough one to get into. You see in the Pantheon of Sherlock Holmes there are some characters who stick out so well because they're so unique or different or well written or special for the time period in which the stories were first made. That future adaptations can't help but lavish them with even more attention. You know you would expect Moriarty to be made into this giant Super villain because you know, even though he was only in two stories one of them was the one that killed Sherlock Holmes for ten years That's a really good reason to stand out Irene Adler makes it into almost every single adaptation there is, of Sherlock Holmes, and she was in one story. The third one ever. 'A Scandal in Bohemia." Sherlock is approached by the King of Bohemia who is about to get married to a princess and consolidate a shit ton of land and power, but five years ago he had a love affair with controversial opera singer called Irene Adler and sent her love letters and a compromising photo- the original dick pic and since the background of the picture clearly shows his my little pony collection he's worried Adler will email it to his in-laws and the wedding will be called off and he'll lose out on a sweet deal [Tutting] "Your Majesty has certainly committed an indiscretion" The King offers Sherlock basically infinite money if he can get that stuff back because none of his people have any idea where it's hidden. So you have a story in which Sherlock is covering up for a King's actions by stealing from an innocent woman. Who, basically did nothing wrong. Sherlock and the King aren't the good guys here. Sherlock is dismissive about Adler sure he can outsmart a woman He knows what they're like. In disguise Sherlock tricks Adler into revealing its location. But when he comes back later to get it he discovers instead a letter telling him 'Nah, Nah, nice try, idiot.' and finds she's married out of love for someone and left the country and just wants to move on with her life. Adler outsmarts Sherlock and gets away with it, which is more than can ever be said for almost anyone else in the entire series and moreover, she disproves his reductive view of women while she does it. Sherlock loses and has to learn a lesson from it and the viewer is shown that even the great Detective is not immune to the biases of the culture he lives in. It's not a feminist story by modern standards, but for a story published by a man in the 1890s it makes careful strides in showing that not only are woman capable of being as smart as men but if we don't get over the preconception that they can't be. They will win every time. Sherlock gains a grudging respect for her, not in a romantic way But because he appreciates that he's been outsmarted. "What a Queen she would have made.." "Is it not a pity she was not on my level?" "From what I have seen of the lady. Yes indeed, she is on a very different level to Your Majesty." In 2012's 'Scandal in Belgravia' Sherlock beats Irene who, by the way, is sexually attracted to him now and also then later He saves her life because she gets captured when she goes on the run. Oh, and also she's a fucking bisexual kung fu dominatrix now. That's-- That's one way of adapting the story! This episodes already been criticised to hell and back I'm going to defend a couple of small things about it. Like how Adler defeats Sherlock's over the top special effects text-o-vision by simply not wearing anything and I like that the show leaves it somewhat ambiguous Whether this is because it leaves Sherlock with nothing to easily detect Or if it's because he just reacted that badly to seeing a naked woman. Those were the pros. Did you miss them? You might have blinked. The cons include: everything else. Firstly, She doesn't beat Sherlock. She loses and then losing puts her in a bad situation, which, don't worry, Sherlock saves her from- how heroic. But secondly, Sherlock's heroic now. This is a big deal. Scandal was impactful because Sherlock worked for the bad guy. A rich and powerful king trying to tie up loose ends so his convenient marriage to someone he clearly didn't really care about could go off as smoothly as possible Now Adler is directly blackmailing people and also is stealing really important intelligence from the British government. Sherlock is arguably doing the right thing by getting involved here. The moral ambiguity that the original stories had is being erased in the name of Making him always the good guy, then it turns out she's working directly with Moriarty, the real bad guy because of course everything has to tie in to Moriarty now. And basically she's acting on his orders and advice. "I can't take all the credit.. Had a bit of help Oh, Jim Moriarty sends his love." "Yes, he's been in touch." And of course she loses because of those pesky emotions. She couldn't help but have feelings for Shirley because he's so dreamy and nice and not at all a constant piece of shit in the actual show. In an adaptation of a story where the character wins using her own wits- she's told what to do by others, And then is beaten and then has to be saved. If the creators of the show were really this disinterested in telling a story using the original traits of Irene Adler, why even put her in here? Why not come up with a new female character to ruin? Oh, no wait, they do that in season 4, don't they. Despite, as you can tell, not really liking the show that much I was looking forward to this story being adapted because I was hoping for this Sherlock to finally learn he wasn't always right about people and be a little bit humbled But Moffat was too busy being clever tying everything into the now all-powerful Moriarty and hashtag modernising the story by making a woman marrying for love in the 1890s into a dominatrix that he forgot to put in the fun core of the story and we're left with a Sherlock who finishes exactly as he began, bored, smart and the bestest guy ever. Well, I guess he kind of has a semi-girlfriend now That's kind of like character development? 'Scandal in Belgravia' doesn't just fuck up the most important non-protagonist character in the entire Canon behind maybe Moriarty- it also contains 'The Scene.' To me it is always 'The Scene.' You will seldom hear me mention it under any other name. In my eyes, it eclipses and predominates the whole of the series it's the crown in the crown jewels of the whole sordid affair. 'The Scene' combines all the worst aspects of this fucking show and compresses it down into a solid diamond of shit The mystery Sherlock is called in to solve, before the Adler thing starts, is about a guy who's found dead with seemingly no apparent cause. We're shown nothing, no clues that could possibly leave a keen-eyed viewer with the chance to figure it out. He solves it, but doesn't explain what happened or how he figured it out or why and just stops bothering with it. Then, in an extravagant and fucking ridiculous scene. Him and Adler Sci-Fi imagine-ate their way through a scene neither of them have actually been to. And Irene discovers that... A fucking boomerang did it. "A boomerang." "Boomerang.." [Repeated] "Boomerang.." [Joined by Hbomberguy's anguished screams] [ECHOED CRYING] "Elementary, my dear, Watson." We've talked before about times where the show has pulled something out of its ass But this fucking scene puts them all to rest. Based on nothing, based on no clues we've been given whatsoever, Sherlock leads Irene to the conclusion that a boomerang did it and the show presents this as Sherlock being a massive super mega genius. We get shots of Adler making googly eyes at him because she's so attracted him now that she knows he successfully solved the stupidest written scene in television history. The epic soundtrack swells and everyone wishes they were being killed by a fucking boomerang. The key to mystery stories the, white-hot burning core of the genre that makes it what it is, is being given information. Just enough that you could maybe figure out what was happening and then having a character show you something about the information you managed to miss or put the pieces together in a way, you wouldn't expect. But to make sure you can't possibly solve it before Sherlock does because he's supposed to be the most amazing, special boy in the world. They can't risk giving you too much information. So they craft a story in which you're shown basically nothing and then told 'bing!' it's a legendary serial killer I just made up, 'bing!' someone else told me the answer off-screen, 'Bing!', it was a fucking boomerang. The audience will never really accept Sherlock as smart because they're never given the pieces for themselves and then presented with a solution they wouldn't have thought of instead. They're told next to nothing and then Sherlock walks in with the information you didn't have or just something unbelievably unrealistic "You got that from one look? "Definitely the new sexy." The show is edited as if you 're supposed to, like Adler, be completely in awe of this genius, but that's never going to happen Contrast is required. This is precisely why puzzles are fascinating in the first place. There's a tangible, emotional reaction to figuring out how to solve something and putting something together similarly for a mystery story to work you have to be shown the problem and the clues before it's solved so you have a chance to do it yourself and then marvel at seeing someone else find a solution. You're entertained by seeing someone else solve a puzzle you can't because you recognize they've seen something you haven't Sherlock gives you a meaningless glimpse of a trivial piece of the puzzle then produces the finished puzzle and tells you 'it was very hard I promise.' In this show, the viewer's never given a chance to observe So there's nothing for Sherlock to reveal he observed so you're left with an incredibly expensive sequence of elaborate camera tricks shot on an Arri Alexa. Featuring a man telling you he's very smart because he observed events you never got the chance to observe better than you. Look at all these hard-working people dragging their camera rigs all the way out here so they can film a smooth transition, laying all their dolly tracks and lugging a couch all the way out there and carefully planning and timing dozens of shots, doing excellent professional work, and it's all in service to a mystery story where you're not told anything, so you're not engaged with it at all, and then at the end, you're told a fucking bullshit explanation that you could not have seen coming. 'And he was really smart you just have to trust me.' Why is the camera spinning so much? Is it to make this revelation feel more dramatic? Or is it to simulate the spinning of a boomerang? Do boomerangs even spin? Is that why they did this? Fittingly this scene keeps 'coming back' in my nightmares to taunt me with how stupid it is. [Director] "Let's have a look at that guys, cut it." This scene is so bad it almost makes you forget that the final scene of this episode is Sherlock single-handedly fighting Al-Qaeda with a machete. I half expected the boomerang to come back and take a couple of guys out for him. Credit where credit is due, There's still a lot to like about the Sherlock show, at least to begin, with for all its massive flaws. It's still very good at making you think it's going to get better and there are plenty of decent moments and fun bits that make you keep watching just to see- just to see, if it can start having more of them and maybe go somewhere with all the plots it has going. Season 4 destroyed that illusion. Let me explain in a roundabout way first, when I was doing research for this video I stumbled upon a bunch of theories about season 4, the usual Sherlock stuff explaining how secretly gay the main characters are, but the one that really caught my eye was the 'lost special' theory. You see, for some Sherlock fans the fact the show is bad, is just a minor hitch in the grand scheme of the amazing meta-narrative of Moffat's mythic re-imagining of Sherlock as a magical pretty boy. Thus, the horrific badness and plot holes of season 4 are just more data to incorporate into a running theory about what's really going on. The conclusion quite a lot of people reached was that the last episodes of Sherlock couldn't possibly be as bad as they were. Instead, it's a fake-out, a build-up to a secret unannounced fourth episode of Season 4, in which everything is really explained. The garbage from the previous 8, sorry 3, episodes is revealed to be a hallucination or a play or a dream sequence and the show finally turns out to have always been good. The main focal point of the theory was a show supposedly starting just after the end of Sherlock called 'Appletree Yard .' The theory is that 'Appletree Yard' is a code name and in reality, It's when the fourth Sherlock airs and all is revealed. The proof? The show's website's German language version or something is a 404 page. 4-0-4. Get it? Season 4, episode 4. Oh my God, even the inventor of http's error messages is in on it. And if that wasn't enough to prove it the lead actresses name is Emily Watson Watson...Watson. And if that's not enough to convince you and I certainly hope it isn't. There's plenty more evidence coming your way. At one point in the show Sherlock says, "We found three potential recording devices in the pockets of your coat and all your possessions were searched." "Must be something comforting about the number three, people always give up after three.." See? The apple tree. Clowns, magpies and fish- none of which go together whatsoever aesthetically, but all of which has intricate symbolic meaning. And in this promotional image for the series, Mark Gatiss is holding up four fingers. See? Oh, wait, that might have just been because it's the fourth season But you can see how the crushing weight of all this evidence caused me to hold off on working on this video for a while Just in case it turned out that there really was going to be another one. Just in case 'Appletree Yard' was fake and Moffat was really a secret genius. Only pretending to be a bad showrunner this entire time. and then 'Appletree Yard' aired, and guess what? You'll never believe it, but it turns out it was an adaptation of 'Appletree Yard' starring, Emily Watson Which is just her name, because some people are called Watson. The hashtag on Twitter for 'Appletree Yard ' when it aired was, mm, 5% people interested in this new show or an adaptation of a book they quite liked, and 95% pissed Sherlock fans waiting to see when Sherlock would show up and retro actively justify the bad show he was in. It didn't happen and the fan theory people were mostly apologetic about getting everyone's hopes up or annoyed that it turned out their show had always been bad and had just tricked them into thinking it would be with flashy overproduced bullet-time wedding photos. I wouldn't write this if I wouldn't be utterly convinced that this is going to happen JohnLock is endgame, the series isn't finished yet And I'm going to tell you why- because it doesn't make sense I want to remind you that these people have been producing Sherlock for seven years now Seven years they put hard work into it, told us again and again that every little detail matters Do you truly believe anyone on the show, including the producers, the cast, etc... Would all suddenly lose their minds overnight? Overnight? I mean it's possible. I can even tell you which night it was. The one right before Moffat decided to adapt Sherlock Holmes. I never actually thought 'Appletree Yard' was a completely fake show, so literally all this does is defer my questions Why was 'The Final Problem.' badly written on purpose? Uh- Ah... [Laughter] No, no, no no, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry to tell you this, but it wasn't bad on purpose. They were trying to make a good show and failed and even if it's bad on purpose that Still just means the show's bad, a secret fourth episode Still wouldn't be a get out of jail free card for wasting your God damn time and more importantly, mine. But since the secret lost episode never came to fruition, because it doesn't exist, I can finally conclude that I have, in fact, seen all of season four of Sherlock and can therefore weigh in on it. It's really bad. So bad that people who wanted to like the show had to invent a secret good episode, that would, if it existed, somehow fix it. It's orders of magnitude worse than the rest of the show And I'm pretty sure I've established that's already pretty bad, but what's bad about it goes fairly deep It's not just that it's worse written, the characters are facsimiles of themselves and the driving thrust of the story's utterly fallen apart. It's that ultimately it trips on the curtain and tears away all the flaws of the entire show from front to back revealing it to have always been the worst, like a car that looks like a shambles, but at least convincingly seems to be headed in the right direction. Until it collides with a brick wall and turns out to have been a doomed journey from the very start. So after the special in which Sherlock Imaginary solves the crime He knows very little about and he figures out that Moriarty is definitely dead, So the game-changing twist of two years ago was once again faked fucking bullshit nonsense designed to trick you into thinking the show was going to get interesting. The implication was that Moriarty had some kind of plan designed to be executed after his death in order to, what? Taunt Sherlock, gain power he doesn't need because he's dead? Destroy the world or just mess with people for the fun of it? Who knows? I don't, because Moriarty doesn't figure at all into the actual plot of season four. The special also ends by implying something interesting is going to happen with Sherlock striding off saying that he knows what Moriarty's people are going to do next. "I know exactly what he's going to do next." The episode begins with Sherlock revealing he has no idea and he's just going to wait and see what happens next and react to it. "We brought you back to deal with this. What are you going to do?"
"Wait." So, it's a setup for nothing. This is something the series has always done by ending implying something interesting is about to happen next and then it doesn't. But this series is especially fucking egregious about this. Instead, Sherlock happens to notice a Thatcher statue broken. And becomes fixated upon it and somehow becomes certain the remains of Moriarty's network want a pearl that might be hidden in the last Thatcher statue. "What's so important about a broken bust of Margaret Thatcher?"
"Can't stand it, never can." "Noticed the strangest feeling..."
"Miss me?" But then it turns out no, it's a completely unrelated series of events revolving around Watson's wife again. By the way, this is the exact bullshit twist they pulled in the previous episode, where it turns out, it's about Mary. It's hard to explain just how much whiplash there is in this season. The case in point with this one is that we spend the whole time waiting on a reveal that Sherlock really was on to something and then actually he's on to something completely different we also had no way of seeing coming. So then Mary goes undercover to try and hide so she can't be found by the other cool Assassin guy and basically chooses random numbers so she's untraceable with this long montage showing just how hiding-y she's being and wow she's incredibly, super off the grid, we get it and then bam Sherlock's there. "Oh, hi, Mary." "How did you find me?"
"I'm Sherlock Holmes."
"No, really though, how?" "Every movement I made was entirely random, every new personality just on the roll of a dice." Once again, here's one of the key sorts of question begged by Sherlock Holmes stories. How did he solve the puzzle and figure it out? What sort of genius application of reason will make you go, 'Ah!' and feel like an idiot and marvel before the simplicity of it. The show recognises that these questions are the point of Sherlock. "Mary, no human action is ever truly random." "I myself know of at least 58 techniques to refine the seemingly infinite array of randomly generated possibilities down to the smallest number of feasible variables. But they're really difficult, so instead I just stuck a tracer on the inside of the memory stick." But instead of giving a useful answer, we get this bullshit fake explanation that turns out to be fake and actually he just put a tracking device in the USB pen that she took from him. This is played for a joke, but it's not a comedy fun time jokey-joke to laugh at for comedy, hijinks. It's a joke at the expense of the audience for even wanting to know how Sherlock did something. Sherlock finds Mary and fuck you if you hoped for or expected something clever. Then the assassin she's hiding from turns up because of course he was tracking Sherlock who knew he would track Mary So we have this mega-genius who knew to plant a tracking device before Mary could drug him and take the device but somehow isn't smart enough to A. Detect Mary was going to drug him and maybe stop her, or talk her into working with him. B. React at all in a productive manner the way he did when he had a 10 minute sequence dedicated to how he reacted in the 5 seconds of consciousness he had as he passed out from being shot. By Mary! Who at this point, he maybe should be capable of anticipating attacks from. Or C. Notice was being tracked himself or even think to consider he might be tracked by the assassin he'd met before and who knew who he was. So, if everyone successfully tracks everyone to the same place and they fight anyway What was the point in writing it so that this happens? Like this adds nothing to the actual story, it's all a set up for this big fucking joke about how cool Sherlock is. Which we've been told enough by now. This is yet more time that could have been spent telling a story It's a farce. But it's rendered tragic by just how good Sherlock Holmes stories and adaptations can be. 'Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death.' adapted the same story fairly excellently by having clearly delineable themes about the power of money and greed and fear and having the Macguffin actually just be a nice pearl lots of people wanted. The pearl has been unobtainable across history because no group endeavour to find it has ever gone without internal tensions all vying to take it for themselves. They always end up all killing each other and dying and leaving it lost again. It stands for a deeper problem with the human soul, all Sherlock's moves are understandable or explained in retrospect when the time comes with a nice reveal or Justified by reasoning that you could have noticed at the time And then maybe Sherlock reveals and then you go, 'Ah! Of course'. It's a delightful romp, where the story makes goddamn sense and real themes are explored. "No more than a symbol of the greed and cruelty and lusts of power that have set men at each other's throats down through the centuries." "And the struggle will go on, Watson, for a pearl..." "A kingdom.." "Perhaps even world dominion, til the greed and cruelty has burned out of every last one of us." "And when that time comes..." "Perhaps even the pearl..." "Will be washed clean again." [MUSIC SWELLS] It's a good adaptation because it understands what was good about the original story and plays off it It doesn't do it for the first, like, maybe 30 minutes and then it actually becomes a fucking stupid spy thing that once again is all about Mary. In this story, the killer is trying to kill Mary because he misunderstood a conversation some torturers were having and assumed they were talking about Mary and therefore sought revenge for years and years and years. The entire plot of this episode revolves around mishearing someone. It's, literally the plot of the second half of 'Shrek,' but with some superficial aspects of the basic plot of the six Napoleon's draped across it, for the simple reason of resembling a real Sherlock Holmes story. What are the themes? What's the story about? How does Sherlock happen to stumble upon the one crime being committed right that moment that happens to directly concern Mary Watson? Presumably because of magic? Sherlock's so smart that he saw something and figured it out without even knowing he'd done it because at this point that how fucking bullshit the show is, and yes sometimes that is the justification for things he notices. "...attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable." I figured it out because I'm attuned to every data point. [Annoyed sigh] Well, that's really fucking convenient isn't it? It saves you having to write a story that people have to follow. Oh, no, it doesn't! Because those are the people who watch it. This has to be entertaining for us to watch, Steve. Did you-- Did you forget that? The closest this episode has to a theme is this was a mistake, this never should have gotten this far. Thank God, it's the last season. The show is so self-aware that killing off Mary Watson is a bad idea that she's actually still in the other two episodes Like she's a ghost for some of the second one and she appears on DVDS and then in the third one she-- she's in another one that she knew to send? Afterwards, the second DVD. By the way, who uses DVDS anymore? She of all people should know that USB pens are the way forward. Hey, remember the plot of Sherlock? The story's twists undercut itself by trying to have, you know, an interesting story that ties together well But then having Moriarty turned out to have nothing to do with it all. Or, having Sherlock successfully track Mary, only it's just a tracking device or having the assassin be trying to kill Mary for something from her dark past except it turns out she did nothing wrong. This endless twisting and untwisting runs through season four to such a degree that you can never be certain of anything and this makes you unable to give a shit about any of it. Also, this is the second time now in two seasons or 2/3 episodes depending how you count it, that Sherlock completely coincidentally stumbled into a story that directly concerns Mary while trying to do something else. Would it really have been that hard to tie things together? Case in point with the twisting and untwisting, you have Mary have this dark past, right like, her whole thing is she used to do some bad stuff, so then when someone from her dark past is looking for a seeking revenge. You're like Oh, this is the comeuppance for that. This is an interesting thing to explore, but then it's like 'Nah, she didn't do anything wrong, She was fine. She was actually friend. She was good all the time and..Uh.. He's mistaken.' So, I guess, that's fucked! The villain of episode 2 is Culverton Smith There is no evidence that he's a criminal, but you begin the episode knowing he's a bad guy because his daughter says to Sherlock that she remembers him saying he's a murderer. So we already have his confession. Then it twists and says ah she was fake, but then within about five minutes it untwists because he did do it so again what was the fucking point? And then it turns out that he didn't hallucinate that woman. She was actually his secret sister in disguise. Oh fuck, they actually wrote that. That wasn't--[Laughter] Jesus fucking Christ.. One thing they could've immediately done to improve this season is have the untwist, not happen. Like, have the guy who's trying to get revenge on Mary actually have justifiable reasons for trying to kill her like maybe she did betray him or maybe have Sherlock actually hallucinate a confession and Culverton Smith is innocent. Have an episode dedicated to Sherlock's actual breakdown, instead of him obviously faking it. Which, it's obvious because you already know he's bad Because even after it turns out that he hasn't actually met his daughter before within like a couple of minutes there he is saying, 'Nah, nah, you're right. I'm the bad guy.' But no, instead, they always make sure that the characters are a hundred percent right. Mary never betrayed anyone and was very reliable and Sherlock did not hallucinate and it was all pretend and he was right all along even though a couple things turn out to be, not what he thought they were, and it's just-- Oh well fuck off then, the characters aren't really being challenged we were told that Sherlock was right in the first five minutes, and it turned out to be right, so was the point of the last hour and 25 minute? They never explained, of course, how Sherlock's sister figured out the Culverton Smith was the villain because You just have to assume. She's a super genius who figured it out with magic. Why did any of this happen? Why did his sister pretend to be Culverton Smith's daughter in order to make Sherlock catch him? Why did she pretend to be Watson's therapist? Why did she flirt with Watson in Disguise? "He's making a funny face." "I think I'll put a hole in it." [GUNSHOT] Why does she say 'I'll put a hole in his head' and then it turns out she just tranquilised him? Why does she do anything? Well because like Moriarty she wants to test Sherlock or play with him or just Uh, you know mess with his head or something just because. Why is she doing it now? Pffttttt.. But everything is compounded in the final episode. An episode so bad that even the show's greatest fans wish it was fake. Just to set up how fucking bullshit this episode is, let me explain the opening in detail. A girl wakes up on a plane, everyone else on it is out cold or dead She looks around her there's no one to help. She's in trouble. A phone rings and she hears Moriarty. "Hello.." my name's Jim Moriarty." "Welcome to the final problem.." [INTRO MUSIC] This is a fairly, okay setup isn't it? By the end of this episode Moriarty is still dead, it turns out that's just a recording, but also It isn't even a recording and isn't playing to anyone because none of this is happening because it's all just a fantasy story by Sherlock's sister that she's making up and telling Sherlock. Perhaps the only thing sadder than the 'lost special' theorists are the people who are like 'Oh, no, there's loads of really deep stuff going on in the background, let me explain to you how it's secretly very smart.' "So like a plane full of dead people? Except one girl with zero clues suggesting that the adults maybe inhaled or ingested something that the girl didn't or any explanations for how this plane could stay airborne for several hours of no-one flying it, I don't think we were ever meant to interpret this literally- the show wanted us to doubt the authenticity of all this." See? They certainly imply this is a fake story by having there be hints in the form of the story being so ridiculous, it's impossible to believe Listen, I hate to burst your bubble, but those aren't really hints at all. This is the sort of crazy stupid bullshit we've been expected to believe over the course of this entire fucking show. In one episode, it turned out a boomerang did it! And in that same episode Mycroft's plan literally involved making an entire plane full of dead people! This literally fucking happened in the fucking show and suddenly we're supposed to cotton on to how unrealistic it is...Now?! Fuck off! Fuck off! Stop it! Please, stop trying to trick people into thinking this bullshit was smart. Please! The show opens with a relatively interesting setup and it concludes by telling you it made all of it up and it's a lie, and that's the running theme of this episode Nay, this season, nay this entire show. Relatively clever setups that imply something cool is going to happen and then it fucking undoes itself Mycroft is chased around by a fucking clown and his pictures start to bleed out of the eyes, and you're like 'Oh fuck, what the hell is happening?' Oh, it's just Sherlock messing with him..Oh, okay..' 'Oh well.' Sherlock's on the trail of Moriarty's secret gang trying to find-- Oh, no it's not. Oh my god a DVD with a message on it this might be the final message from Moriarty-- Nah, it's not. Oh my God Sherlock actually hallucinated a confession, and he actually has a problem-- Nah, no.. Holy shit, did Mary betray her oldest friends and comrades? No, don't worry, she didn't. Nope, it's fine. [Gasp] How are Holmes and Watson gonna get out of th- He walks out. He walks out. Holy shit, who's this fucking shady guy? Who just abducted Wats-- Oh, it's his brother, and everything's fine. Doesn't matter, who cares? Holy shit, they just fucking killed off Sherlock. How are they goin-- Oh? He's fine. Oh, all right? Oh my God, Moriarty is back, and he's got some cool plan and he can hack all the things in London. No he can't! He's not even in this story. [Irritated sigh] What makes season four in particular, so disliked by fans, isn't that it's that much worse than the rest of the show, although it is, it's that at this point people are starting to realise that all these setups will have no payoff. Anyway back to the episode at hand Sherlock, Mycroft and Eurus Holmes are all super geniuses, right? Eurus is set up to be so amazingly mega smart even as a kid that she got too smart and became a psycho murderer that Sherlock forgot about because it was too traumatic. The final episode is, guess what? Season 1 episode 3 again, with Eurus taking the place of Moriarty, who it turns out she learned about ...somehow and asked to meet five years ago and got recordings of for this test that she'd planned years in advance and also possibly programmed Moriarty to want to play with Sherlock herself all those years ago, but you'll never really know because the writers seemingly neither know nor care. There are plenty of plot holes in this episode for how a character knew something or how they knew something could possibly have happened years in advance, or any of the choices that they made. But at this point the writers can run it off with, well they're geniuses and they're attuned to every data point and they know everything and there's so much smarter than you, the viewer, making the characters this amazingly intelligent gives the writers a get out of jail free card from having to justify or explain anything in a tangible way that a normal person could follow and the answer is 'Fuck you, they're smart.' The episode ends with the revelation that Sherlock has yet another blocked person in his memory. A double secret person he extra forgot. A childhood friend who he remembers as a dog. "One of the things that characterises the Holmes stories, is that we know virtually nothing about Sherlock Holmes, and I'm curious if Benedict and Steven and Mark Gatiss spent any time on the backstory of Sherlock and Mycroft and their antecedents." "No, not really. I don't think you know a character by creating a backstory for them." "We sometimes speculate because we're interested and we chat about it what his parents were like, what he did. But, d'you know what? We're not-- It's--it's sacred turf. You don't-- You don't mess that up. You don't--you don't bring that into the show. It's not right. There are some things we don't know about Sherlock Holmes, just as there are some things we don't know about our friends, and we don't ever know them, and then that's right and proper. I think if we went and did something like that, in a way, the audience wouldn't believe it. They'd say, 'Nah, you've made that bit up.' " Okay, I'm gonna be honest here. I was just looking through, uh, old interview footage to find B-roll to use for a later section where I talk more about Moffat and accidentally stumbled upon... This smoking gun, where Moffat's like, if we decide to stop and get into Sherlock's backstory, maybe we're doing something wrong. This interview did not age well. And also Eurus made up the girl on the plane, he was trying to save the whole episode, and then Sherlock hugs her, because at this point it's easier than figuring out what she actually wants or why she did it. And plays the violin until she's happy. The end. it's actually pretty believable that fans who stuck with this episode all the way through would assume this episode was some kind of fake trick. This season is so bad, killing off the most interesting addition to the story so far. Adding in not one, but two, secret forgotten people. Constantly parading Moriarty around as if he's just on the fringes, about to come back, but actually he's basically not in it at all, that basically everyone thinks it's utter shite. The saddest thing is, even though I could talk the longest about the problems of season four, nobody needs me to tell them that season four is bad. You know the first three seasons they're only really bad if you care about the Sherlock mythos or paying attention or want a compelling story or like to think about things. You know, you can turn your brain off and have a pretty fun time watching Benedict Cumberbatch and, uh, Martin Mcbacon- uh, talk about- the stuff they're doing and... ...Watch the camera spin. Season 4 is so bad that you don't need to perform any analysis whatsoever to recognise how shite it is. Ah, so I'm basically out of a job. Like I said, the backlash isn't just a reaction to this season though. It's more than that. It's a reaction to the deeper realisation this season brings about the entire show. If there's one thing this show was always good at, one thing Moffat as a writer always did, Its keep you thinking an explanation was coming, that the show was going to get good. The main way he does this is with cliffhangers and endings that suddenly imply more is going on. The show's bread and butter is revealed to have always been implying the show is about to turn out to be deep. Implying characterisation and backstory that's way more interesting than what ends up on the screen. After four seasons and a special of implying People started to realise they were being played. The drug of this manipulative writing style started to wear off. Fans of the series have been pretty rough on season 4 and while it deserves all of it, the preceding show deserved a lot of it too. But because they hadn't yet realised they were being played, people thought those ones were better. Well, sorry go back and check. This is why I brought up the secret good fourth Sherlock episode theory Because the show has wrung a dozen hours of content out of telling you, the audience, all about future good episodes that you don't actually get to see, instead of giving you any. The fans who want that new episode simply take more seriously than anyone else the promise they were made by the show. Which, by the way, is increasingly difficult to do because of the show's very clear attitude to the people who want to think about it. If you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes stories Stephen Moffat and his co writers hate you. If you're a fan of Sherlock the show, Moffat wants you dead. If you actually want to understand what is happening in the story, Stephen Moffat calls you a stupid piece of shit, repeatedly in the show. This hatred doesn't just manifest in insulting wankery, like having it turn out to be a fucking boomerang. Or in deliberately rewriting one of the first protofeminist icons in Crime fiction to be a sexy kung fu dominatrix in love with the main character. But in how the show directly tells you that if you're a fan, you should personally go and fuck yourself. When they reveal a couple of minutes after killing him that Sherlock's still alive, they purposely don't explain how he survived, so that people could speculate about it for the years leading into season 3. But guess what? They never explain it. In fact, season 3 features several characters whose sole job is to portray fan theories and theorists and make fun of them, and call them stupid for bothering to try and figure out what happened based on the information given to them by the show. Now, I just want to be clear on something, a lot of the theories about how Sherlock survived were dumb. Not as dumb as the 'secret good extra season 4 episode' theory, but dumb. However, the people coming up with these elaborate theories are the true fans of the show they're the real audience, the people who care enough to push through the stupid plotting and lack of real mysteries because Sherlock solves them with magic, to actually try and piece things together people trying to figure out the mystery of the mystery story are presented as a little club of weirdos being weird together. The creator of the story appears to be so fundamentally incapable of recognising how to tell a mystery that he's perceived people treating it like one as insane. They even have one of the prospective theories be that Holmes and Moriarty were gay lovers who faked it together and even the other theorists make fun of her for that. Even though the same people writing this scene to make fun of that, are also the people who Purposefully queer baited the fuck out of the relationships between Holmes and Watson and Holmes and Moriarty. They spend a huge chunk of this episode literally calling people stupid for reading into the story's clear, intentional subtext instead of -You know, writing better text! "First off, I want to say give a shout out to all of my UK Tumblr friends who are staying up very late to watch this right now.." [CHEERING FROM AUDIENCE] The episode resolves with the main theorist, played by a Lindybeige impersonator, being told by Sherlock what he actually did But then maybe it turns out Sherlock isn't there and he's losing his mind and the last we see of this character is him laughing maniacally with his conspiracy theory wall- like a loser. Did you want to know how Sherlock did the thing? Did you expect the story to actually tell you? This is you. Fuck you. The actual correct answer that's positioned by John Watson. Is that you're not supposed to care. "I don't care, how you faked it, Sherlock. I want to know why." It doesn't matter how he did it. You should only care about why. You're not supposed to care how a thing happened in a fucking, fucking crime mystery story. Literally, a fucking series of books about figuring out how things happen [Unintelligible noises of pure disbelief] This shit- This shit, like with the boomerang scene or the 'I did a bunch of stuff you don't know about' scene is a blatant disregard for the core appeal of crime mystery stories. Heck, stories! It's so disgustingly wrong on almost every level and so hateful towards people for expecting things to make sense and trying to form a theory out of what they were shown that it's almost Avant-garde. Instead of bothering to use the couple of hours they get every two years they get to tell a compelling story. They're basically calling people who like the show stupid for thinking about it. That takes balls. Moffat and Gatiss are seemingly above the idea of people wanting to solve the mystery they're being presented with. Because they're so far up their own arses writing about clever people who just know and you're supposed to accept that as a story They solve it because they're smart and that's not even getting into the sheer contempt for the source material rewriting all of the most interesting characters in the mythos and one of the few people ever beat Sherlock so that she's not interesting 'cause she's just the villain and then doesn't beat him is apocalyptically bad, but it's just a tip of a gigantic iceberg made of frozen wee. In 'The Hounds of Baskerville.' they're too special to simply have a big dog people are scared of and a local legend being abused so someone can claim an inheritance by offing their relatives. No, that world famous story on the UK's best loved novel list, the best Holmes novel ever written as rated by Sherlock fans, was too dumb and simple and understandable What it really needed was a drug that makes you hallucinate and a secret government research facility and pointless intrigue with Sherlock sneaking into a facility he could easily have asked his fucking brother to let him into, which he does later anyway, and the only reason there's a hound in the story at all is because the word 'HOUND' happened to be written on the killer's shirt when he killed a kid's father. So the kid hallucinated a giant dog and yet while they're trying to gussy up this famous story to make it more cleverer with this bullshit, they don't even bother explaining why the killer didn't just kill the only witness to his fucking crime. There's this core mismatch in the sensibility of the story's authors. They don't just hate you for wanting to solve a mystery They seemingly hate mystery stories themselves, for being too understandable, having too many simple pleasures like watching a story unfold. Moffat and Gatiss decided that shit wouldn't fly anymore and it had to be fixed by overcomplicating it and adding in a secret facility. I wonder if Moffat made this fucking mistake in an adaptation before? "'Rache'- It's German for revenge, she could be trying to tell us some--"
"Yes, thank you for your input." [DOOR SLAMS] "..Find out who Rachel is.."
"She was writing Rachel?" "No, she was leaving an angry note in German--Of course she was writing Rachel!" Oh, wow! They straight up have have Sherlock dismiss the twist from the original story as being stupid and for idiots, great! Thanks! Listen, Steve, I know you're listening because What else you going to be doing with your fucking time now that you're not running Doctor who and probably not going to get another season of this. If you think you're too smart for the simple pulpy crime stories that make up a famous property you're adapting and you think they need to be fixed. Why are you adapting them in the first place? The Sherlock Fandom, the people who make gifs of all the romantic moments between Sherlock and Watson With the saturation slightly raised to make the image pop and also fix the show's own shit wank color-grading The people who actually believe enough pieces of the puzzle are there to explain how Sherlock survived The people who actually liked the show enough to not believe Season four was as bad as it was and there had to be an episode that explained why it was pretending to be shit. The only people who will stick with Sherlock all the way through and actually profess to enjoying it are these people these people fully believe the promise of the show, that it really will one day be good and smart and pull back the curtain to reveal an amazing true narrative kept hidden all this time that had always been there. It's so easy to make fun of people for coming up with that silly theory. In fact, I've done that and you should too It's stupid, but it's honest. It's the truest expression of being told over and over that something was coming It's going to get good There's a real secret thing going on in the background. All these people did was take that seriously, but in reality they were simply lied to. The reality is a show that keeps telling you I know it's bad, but I promise eventually it'll get good or turn out to have always been smart. After four seasons It's just a bad show. The old books and serials were designed to keep you reading or watching and coming back for more When Sherlock went over the Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty and the final problem threatened to live up to its name There was a public outcry. People wanted more, their appetite fed by the format of the story and love for the character. A full decade later, still 'hounded', pardon the pun, by fans of his greatest work who still didn't care that much for his historical novels, Doyle had no choice but to have Holmes return. The new show kills Sherlock and within a few minutes of mourning him tells you it's okay He's fine. No one would clamor for this Sherlock's resurrection a decade later They had to make sure You knew he wasn't really dead Because otherwise you wouldn't have given a shit about a next series and would have moved on with your life. They needed you to be speculating for years about how he did it even though later they planned on telling you, you were a fucking idiot for doing it. It's been ten years since Jekyll came out and ended on a cliffhanger Is anyone hounding Moffat to bring back that beloved story? No. It's not beloved. Moffat is handing off the running of Doctor who to someone else and he said in interviews that he wants to simply leave the show better than he found it for someone else to take over. Well, guess what, Steve? We'dve all liked if you'd done that too. Doctor who was a silly, weird and fantastic show, That went off the air in 1989 and people remembered it, wanted more of it, for so long to the point that almost 20 years later, people wanted the show to return. Cared about seeing what happened next, like Sherlock Holmes before it, the creators of Doctor who crafted a character and series so good, so iconic that not even a long absence could kill the love for what they had made. After a few short years of running Doctor who? Even Moffat can't wait to be gone. Moffat will be remembered forever for his contributions to the show when someone else ran it when he was just on the edge making the best bits. Forced to tell a complete story and deliver on the promises he was making instead of endlessly delaying the time things get good until people realise it isn't and never will and no one can tell him what to do, because the executive producers are him, his co-writer and his mother-in-law. Many of the previous Holmes adaptations are straight forwardly written and shot There's a whole lot of flat shots of people talking the camera never turns and reveals they actually built a set in the middle of London, and it's a dream sequence. But I would rather watch Sherlock figure things out by sitting and looking at things we also see and deriving a better explanation than I could with the same information any day of the week. Than sit through another second of self-indulgent, 'look at me, I'm so clever,' spinny camera, nonsense that reveals it was probably just a fucking boomerang. The new Sherlock thinks it's so much better, more important and smarter than the mystery stories it's based on that it cuts out everything that defines them, leaving only shameless queer baiting, pretentious overarching stories that never arrive anywhere and the false assurance that somehow, someday all of this will make sense and arrive at an entertaining conclusion that ties everything together and proves you weren't wasting all this fucking time watching it. But the sad truth is, you were. I'm honestly disappointed by this work and in a writer who I had a lot of respect for and honestly, I... I just think that's a shame. I really do. Also, Benedict Cumberbatch is a terrible actor and his face is stupid. Hey, thanks for watching this video all the way through to the end. I really appreciate it, another thing I really appreciate is being able to afford to take the time to make stuff like this and for that I really have to thank in addition to the names going past the screen right now; Rebecca Harold, Acelin, Get Dunked On, Commissar Taco, Joseph Greco, Evan Richy, Yacucha Boris, Eugene Butler, Silas Pumpkins, Zigfried slayer of the Immortal Dragon, Mr. Clonem, Alex Lemcovitch, Cha boy Cammy Kemsay, Klil H. Niori Olivia Mellow, Brennan Arts, Malarkey Bingo, Daniel Vincent Chiltern, Paul Yoen Ewmerthweel, Kelly M.Knipy, Emily O, Fora, Owen Piper, Andrew Gilly, Parker Anderson, Eight in Goldstrum, Caleb McMurphy, Cal Ashton, Amy Ledge, AhhQbGeeVaneskaborptoplessworflegalsteinhousenbegerdorftuleefranskash, Spilt coffee, Jenny Angel, Renee Larshowg, Thomas Kissner, Jack Harvey, David De Marzalou, Gar Internet, David the Benevolent malevolence, John Cantwell, Procor, A huge pair of googly eyes on a flacid penis, open brackets 2006 video game closed brackets, Matthew Harris, Papa's thick meaty arms, Corwin Light Williams, Shawn Kemp, Shadow Bag, Findley bowick Copley, Mon s'il vous plait's tunesrom, Kay plays Dota, Jeffrey Theobald, Tom Martel Nathan H, Scott Girton, Sean Lampall, Recammy, Edin Jankovic Sumar, George sirach Lisi Roberts, Minty Freakin Fresh Three-fifths of a brain, Lauren, Mackenzie cockerel, I'm daddy's little bitch give me money sugar Daddy, Ah, I see what you did there, you changed the name so I had to-- Ream and sell, Clawsue Daniel Stewart, Anna S, Top purp Iranian, Macarthur, Casey explosion, Young Kaori, Cheeseoid, Saul, The almighty quackosaurus, Mome, the ampersand symbol Daniel Sullivan, a human being who is not a hundred and seventy two salamanders in a trench coat, Eric Hunter, Marco Shard, Jan Anders Breamer, Garry Marshall, Aidan Bradley, Graphon Blackpor, Alexander Corbett, Sammy J Luke Swanson, Fully automated Luxury space, Post-Scarcity, Commulism, Zachary Clarke Benjamin Davidson, Hero of time 88, Bob Mackie, Hero R war Jason Walter, a few slices of slightly peppered French soft cheese on a bun Kieran, recovering Zombie, Thad Wasalouski, Bill Mock, Mike Stanley, Theral Kimchi, Kaden Putine, Elliott Soudan, Jordan Telus, Kanika, a pileous bulge, Gerry Terry, David Rose, Snow fire, Sean Higgins, Davis Remmy , Naathan Hore, the spector of Commulism, Cafsile, Poggington Jones, Richard Pearson, Rebecca Washem, Soraka Vulcan, Ricard Heathersma ,Samael Brendon Mitri, LERV, Besotten Jenny, Garrett Mitchell, Justin Conquer Beard, Alicia Parker Martel Femininja, skeptical frog, Cav P, Robert Phillips and Sled. I swear to God when I start doing Several shorter videos a month, I will split the credits up. {Please do Hbomb, that was brutal} But honestly the fact these credits are super long is probably a good sign. I'd like to thank all of you for giving me the time and money required to watch and analyze Many hours of television and also to buy a small bear dressed up to look like Sherlock Holmes which I, Now keep by my bed at all times, It's actually incredible.
I agree on what the Video says to a certain degree. But season 1 and 2 were simply well done IMO. It was fresh and New, some people like flashy shots and tech. I also agree on the part where the audience never is included in completing a case. No hints no nothing, thats a solid complaint
Wow...it is kinda hitting all the points I've developed about Moffat over the years as showrunner of Doctor Who and Sherlock. I still like S1 and S2, but...this has kinda made me step back and realise
Darn, Hbomb goes in!!
I agree, as a fan who loved seasons 1 and 2, and even argued that 3 was underrated. I think he's spot on in his main argument, that S4 was so bad that it pulled the veil in front of our faces that hides how bad Sherlock really is.
S1 and S2 are awesome, but other than the stellar acting and production, the biggest reason they were awesome was the suspense in wanting to know what happens next. The end of S2 was a massive talking point for YEARS, and in the end it wasn't even resolved! We're led to believe that Sherlock is about solving big intricate mysteries, but there are never any mysteries to solve. A lot of it is a character study that never goes anywhere. In S1 and S2, the character development had some mysteries behind it, and always promised a conclusion or just a clear road ahead, but S3 and especially S4 proved that these never came and probably won't ever come if S5 is made.
That was interesting. I don't agree with all the points that he makes, but some of them are pretty compelling. In particular, I agree that the writers become progressively more dismissive about the actual cases, which reaches an apotheosis in series 4 when they are summarily waved aside as mere distractions from what they really want to explore. Imo, there could easily be character development and cases. In fact, I thought that was basically the original premise.
It is also very astute to point out that the audience is never truly engaged with Sherlock's deductive reasoning. Initially, that was not a major problem for me as at least some kind of explanation was provided & the graphics & visuals aided this in an original manner. But by series 4 his 'deduction' has for the most part attained cartoonish heights which disallow any reasonable suspension of disbelief, explanations are verbose gobbledegook, & the visuals have become a distracting spectacle quite possibly designed to deflect attention away from plot holes & protagonists behaving inexplicably out of character.
I'm enormously proud of this subreddit for posting this and it not being down-voted to oblivion immediately.
I don't know many other subreddits comfortable enough with criticism to do that.
I liked the video. Watched all two hours during work. Good points were made.
The last 10 minutes, about how the writers hated the "mystery" part of the mystery story of which Sherlock is part of, was very prescient and reminded me why i hated how episode 1 of season 3 started
Sherlock Fan spends 110 minutes eviscerating Sherlock and the writers, its immensely satisfying to watch
Interesting video. I agree with many things and disagree with some others. I don’t agree with his opinion that it was bad for having Mary die. I think it’s quite the opposite. They gave her too much screen time and importance in 4x1 and turned that episode into a stupid wanna-be-James-Bond movie. It’s not that I didn’t think that she was an interesting character. Actually, when I saw her introduction in season 3, I was surprised how much I liked her. Then she turned out to be an assassin and well…. I guess that could have been fine as well if they had handled it differently - either give her some other objectives besides falling in love with John or maybe don’t have her shoot Sherlock and actually kill him (because he did die first, but I guess, the show forgot about that in the very same episode it happened, because it was only for excitement and style) and then having the characters claim that she actually didn’t want to kill him. While I preferred the episodes that were mostly about the cases, I never had a problem with hints of an over arching storyline. For me, it really did raise the excitement and suspension and the feeling of wanting to know, how all of it would unfold. The problem is, that – as he said in the video – the show never delivered what it had promised and been building up to. The way they dealt with the fans who were invested and believed in the shows potential makes it even far worse and leaves a bitter taste. If I should ever watch a new show of them again, I will only regard it as superficial and cheap entertainment, but I certainly won’t be invested. That said, I still like the first two seasons. I like the shows unique and flashy style and I enjoy the humorous dialogues. I wished, there was more to it, but well… season 4 made it clear that this is not the case and that the show isn’t nearly as clever as the writers seem to think it is and tried to make us believe this whole time.
Im not hbomberguy btw.