Not gonna lie, this gave me an image of Col. Moran packing two-handed heat like Chow Yun Fat

[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...

Comments

[incandescens]

It made me very happy too.

And incidentally, we're not even sure how much of the Moriarty we saw was the "real" Moriarty. We've already seen that he's a good enough actor and can lay enough visual/verbal misdirection to fool Holmes in the earlier appearance. I see him as something of a chameleon, both social and acting. Unlike Holmes, who most of the time is "take me as you find me and hard luck", I can see this Moriarty as always false on the surface. "He has such a soft voice..."

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I can see that - perhaps this Moriarty strikes unease and gives off the sense of not having an inner life precisely because he doesn't. Proper sociopaths are internally fractured... The odd thing about this Holmes, given his internet self-diagnosis, is that he doesn't give off that book-canon sense of being able to disappear into an acted role for great lengths of time; that he's internally plastic enough to fully inhabit some other life. He can turn on a dime - well, the actor is acting, duh XD;; - without any theatrical trappings, but they're very targeted initiatives fishing for access or information. 15 seconds, then he drops it.

To get back to Moriarty, though, I think John Simm's Master may have cornered the market for me on a certain type of psychotic scene-chomping? XD; Something like that.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I watched the series last night - well, except for parts of episode 2, which really didn't need to be 90 minutes long.

I was really feeling Holmes and Watson in the finale "that thing you did was great" - and the Holmes actor's "I will stare at you with my beautiful eyes until you become uncomfortable and do what I want" approach to interpersonal relations - but couldn't stop missing the things I really liked about Holmes in the books, which were that he 1) treats women as people, 2) has an addictive personality, and 3) doesn't have any trouble admitting that there are things he doesn't care about and can't do.

1) Totally absent - or maybe there, but the producers didn't write anything that focused on it.

2) Self-proclaimed sociopath Holmes doesn't have an addictive personality, as much as doesn't see why the rules should apply to him. XD Nicotine patches, mind-altering substances that aren't legal, what's the difference? I think I remember the Holmes in the book making a lot of excuses and rationalizations, which this Holmes doesn't bother to do, of course.

3) They put in that part about the solar system, but he was kind of defensive about it. XD They also threw in the part about needing Watson to give a second, commoner's opinion, which just like in the book sounds incredibly arrogant even though it's not meant to be. But it's kind of an exception to a general trend... the charming thing about Holmes' arrogance in the books was that he was only arrogant about the things he was actually good at. Contrast sociopath-Holmes' competition with Mycroft here, to "I'm not a genius - my brother is much smarter than me" in the books.

I guess in this case, you are supposed to think his arrogance is charming because it's a psychological compensation for the missing empathy and he can't help being that way. XD; Speaking of sociopathy, I'm not willing to call him on that bluff, since from what I saw he was perfectly capable of not being an asshole when it would get the best result. (Though, as you point out, only for 15 minutes at a time.) House is an asshole even when it causes problems for him, which is how you know that he is not a sociopath, he's just a jerk.

Modern day Holmes does seem to have some kind of special relationship with the police force, his brother, and Watson which causes him to be rude even when being polite might work better, but you know, even sociopaths make exceptions for family.

More later, have to run! The first and third episodes, overall, were very enjoyable, because for once they put an entire movie's worth of plot in a 90 minute episode, instead of stretching out a 40 minute (without commercials) long-form TV plot to cover 90 minutes. And all of modern day updating was brilliantly done - blogs, central London rent, smartphones, websites, on-screen texting, the Afghanistan war, etc etc. (I really like Watson in this version.) It's probably not a coincidence that the 2nd episode didn't have much of that, either.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I forgot the most important part of my comment! Which was that making Holmes a sociopath neatly solves the problem of short detective fiction, that it "neatly goes around solving it's own problems wirhout regard for anythng or anyone else." (From that essay on mystery novels by Raymond Chandler, who even says that only sociopaths can really get behind the true form of the genre). If you were going to write Holmes as manic depressive, you'd need a longer format, with more time to care about the people involved n the cases, not "five short stories with mechanical solutons strung together into a 90 minute episode."

So, basically, you can directly address this problem with the genre. In that sense, it's a great move. (The writers of Dexter probably agree too.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I rewatched the third ep last night XD; This was the "lens flare" rewatch, in that I ended up paying a lot of attention to the direction. The cinematography is incredibly hipster! I don't even know how to explain it, other than that every shot seemed to be set up with the purpose of generating highly rebloggable stills on Tumblr. XD;; Truckloads of tilt shift. This appears to be the dude who directed Push, that movie with Dakota Fanning as a psychic? Which I haven't actually seen ahaha.

1) Inorite this was bad - I can see him being a total bitch in other ways but not casting sexual aspersions like he did with Donovan.

2) It's not really touched on, more than anything. I get the impression they're trying to keep it safe for kids, despite the prime time-ish slot; like people will start to swear but not actually say the words. XD But actually it makes sense to me that Holmes would have gotten clean sooner in the modern day, because nowadays everyone knows that cokehead = addiction issue requiring intervention.

3) I always thought this was one of Doyle's wobblies? Like he starts Holmes off with a list of subjects he knows and subjects he doesn't know, but very rapidly he turns into this dude who speaks fifteen languages and knows everything about everything. The Mycroft thing is very true, though (you get a mild sense of snippiness in canon, no more - and who wouldn't with a sib who is forever making you do the legwork), and I am kind of forgiving this interpretation because it is hilarious. XD And for that matter, the whole Alan Moore-sque retcon of Mycroft being MI6. (Gawd I have just realized why Mark Vorkosigan becomes a government analyst. XD;;)

Really Mycroft and Sherlock are not fully sociopaths, or narcissists, or Aspergers or what have you - it's more like, they're an example of the reason those genes still persist in the pool, yanno?

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

You know what would be really funny, if kids "doing" nicotine patches caught on after this. XD;

Like he starts Holmes off with a list of subjects he knows and subjects he doesn't know, but very rapidly he turns into this dude who speaks fifteen languages and knows everything about everything.

LOL, so true! Can Arthur Conan Doyle be blamed for all of the bad detective television that shows "geniuses" effortlessly solving crimes by having Wikipedia permanently installed in their heads? (I was going to say "error-free Wikipedia" but it's more like reality has errors to match.) I hate that stuff, especially when it creeps in over time. (The pilot episode of White Collar showed Neal reading a book on hot-wiring cars before he busts out of prison by hot-wiring a car... by episode three, he knows everything about everything.)

The highlight of his relationship with Mycroft was in the first episode, when it was revealed that there is such a thing as arch-rivals for normal people, too. XD That was an awesome fake-out. But you know what I mean, the writers were angling for sociopath-but-yet-he-bleeds when they wrote that dynamic.

If only Sherlock had also gone into government service, he'd have been surrounded by people who think similarly to him, and he wouldn't have had to self-medicate or self-diagnose! XD

[incandescens]

Ah, the problem with the Master is that I am still and always will be a Delgado fangirl. Original is best!

but can you imagine him sitting in an office all day

[petronia.livejournal.com]

He absolutely can be blamed, but that can be said of so much XD (actually, I think it's more like ACD was the first to encounter certain writing temptations/pitfalls, and was uninterested in avoiding them, and/or they weren't cliche enough yet to be a problem).

Yeah, I too thought the writers were lampshading that problematic aspect of short detective fiction - that the reader engagement it promotes is sociopathic. Like, the viewer reaction (my reaction XD) to a lot of episode 3 was a twitchy irrepressible delight, because it was happening so fast and cleverly, and Sherlock's on-screen reaction completely mirrors that - he tamps down on it without success, even! - but it's disturbing in him, because he's in the story.

In a way it's a bit weird that Watson calls him on dissociating from his emotions in order to do his job - rather than just not experiencing any emotions - as surely dude has had to do a lot of that himself over the years?

Anyway as per my previous post they are angling for sociopathic-except-he-obviously-cares-for-one-person XD; (Moffat writes gay jokes, Gatiss writes full-blown gay agenda).

Re: but can you imagine him sitting in an office all day

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

If you don't want to sit in an office, you can't complain about being made to do legwork!

Actually the weird thing about Holmes, in the modern day version of the story, is that he's operating out of London. A real sociopathic entrepreneurial crime-solver would have gone to Afghanistran or Iraq. But maybe the crimes in those places are too straightforward for him, XD. (Because when there's no effective law enforcement, why be subtle?)

Yeah, Watson doing that was weird, especially when it was so easy to flip around. On the other hand, if he'd accused the dude of not having emotions, but admitted that even if he did have emotions he'd be well within his rights to pretend that he didn't, than to someone who is obsessed with scientifically observable facts, what's the difference?

Holmes can ALWAYS justify himself to Watson by saying "I warned you it was going to be like this".

Haha, yes! I'm so glad that Gatiss got to go second.

Re: but can you imagine him sitting in an office all day

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Maybe he just enjoys London? XD; It is a really big city, and it's more like the law enforcement puts up with him (he'd get hauled up on charges, realistically speaking)... He does fly to Minsk to check out a case, and book!Holmes goes a bunch of places - solves crime for the French via correspondence - after faking his death he does for real go to Tibet to kick it with the Dalai Lama because Doyle enjoyed trolling his readers with Noodle Incidents.

(I was actually discussing this with G today, we decided we would watch the shit out of a Sherlock Holmes adaptation in which he climbs the Himalayas and trains with aged kung fu mystics upon mountaintops. Ultimately I think my instincts are very Hammer Film. XD;)

Yeah I mean, someone else could accuse Watson of having insufficient emotional reaction to things, like shooting that dude. He was also not remotely as upset as a normal person would have been at finding a head in the fridge. XD;; I mean, he was, but it was a "oh my God this lasagna is COVERED in green mold" level of upset. ("I'm conducting an experiment on penicillin production at low temperatures!")