petronia

Random thoughts:

* While driving to Jean-Talon Market yesterday I was griping at

dipping_sauce re: how "The Final Game" was the most egregious piece of out-of-nowhere tell-not-show in the history of, like, ever, that our sophisticated age wouldn't stand for in a shounen manga for 8-year-olds etc. etc. etc. "What is nice," I said, "about doing a modern-day AU is that they can show Moriarty's involvement, yanno? Actually come up with some of these cases Doyle couldn't be bothered to write out."

* The return of massive canon geekery! Weird thing is, I actually don't tend to like it much when analogous works deploy flotillas of canon in-jokes - I find it precious. Overwrought. Twee. Not sure what it is about the MoffatGatiss take that makes it dynamic instead, but the evidence isn't currently on the side of anyone else being able to strike the right balance.

* Speaking of which, not that I'm not frothing like the next fan, but IMO the series is this good in part because the writers were given the space of three episodes with no promise of more - every scene was worked up to two, three, five levels, in order to cram all their ideas in. If they'd had six 90-minute episodes they would have leavened this last one out to two (Bruce-Partington could easily have been standalone), and it wouldn't have been as effective. Or as attention-compelling, anyway.

* Acting! In some ways Benwhatsisridiculousname comes closer to my persistent mental image of Holmes than anyone else - the problem with having a visual imagination is that adaptations are never quite right. The eyes, mostly; aspects of body language. The canon!Holmes who has "full-body wriggles of excitement" and "faints out of sheer inanition"...

* The direction - just a lot of the framing, the way shots are set up. The whole bit with the Golem. Peter Davison going on about planets chopped up to eerieness, and the lighting.

* The only time ordinary ppl engage in Holmesian analysis as they go about their lives is when they engage their gaydars: DISCUSS (some critic in writings I can't find posits that Doyle or was it other creators of early detectives were interested by the signs homosexuals use to find each other; reading clues in plain sight but ignored by the crowd)

* TBH at this level of slash "subtext" MoffatGatiss must perforce issue denials or have humourless ppl breathing down their necks; I mean dudes have to deal with Doctor Who fandom? XD; There's only so much.

* I am waffling on Moriarty settling on "like" but not "full potential". Can see how you get there from canon, sure.

* It is kind of weird how I "feel" this modern-day AU more than other adaptations? Maybe because the stories were never inextricably "period" in my mind - I'm 75% sure I was exposed to the Paget illustrations when I first read them, which must have given me some idea as to the characters' dress and so on, but I had no real sense of where and when Victorian England existed in relation to myself. XD;; For that matter, I read most of Agatha Christie thinking they were contemporary.

EDIT -- Okay okay so like, if they do another season the first episode should be WEREWOLF OF THE BASKERVILLES, set between S102 and S103 with (of course) no mention made of the cliffhanger, but conversely about 100x Team Jacob jokes.

And then S202 will be Sherlock kicking it with the Dalai Lama.

Gah there must be more points - later...