XistentialAngst's Blog, page 3
July 7, 2017
atikiology:
time has passed since BBC Sh*rlock S4 aired. i am now old, wise and weathered and i’m...
time has passed since BBC Sh*rlock S4 aired. i am now old, wise and weathered and i’m convinced i have seen hell itself but the i love you trailer is still the cruelest thing that’s ever happened to me and i know this is coming out of nowhere on a random tuesday in july but i hereby proclaim that i am bitter
So true. Baited to the end.
June 22, 2017
June 14, 2017
June 13, 2017
Looking for S4 post morgen master posts
I haven’t been on tumblr much since S4:TFP because it was so depressing. Does anyone have a master post with links to analysis/rants about S4? To be clear, I’m not in the camp that believes there is a secret episode or that the writers will somehow pull the show out of their asses in a hypothetical S5. No, I’m in the “they ruined it for good and wow, does that suck” camp. I’m more interested in hearing thoughts on how we tjlcers got it all so wrong and how and why the writers fucked it up so horrendously (though of course I have my own ideas about that). Conspiracy theories, gossip on what Martin and Ben think, etc.
Thanks in advance!
The Final Problem is bad and boring and here is why
I had to rewatch TFP yesterday (IN GERMAN!) with a bunch of friends. I hadn’t watched it after it aired in January, and it had developed into some kind of uber-evil episode for me. Because it ruined the whole show for me. Because it didn’t make any sense. I remembered it as tense and brutal. But, you know what - it isn’t. It’s just really, really boring and very badly done.
Because:
Do yourself a favour and watch the Why Sherlock is Garbage video. Watch the whole of it, especially the first hour. Because there he explains why Mofftiss are really bad writers for television. One point in their favour I see over and over again is that Mofftiss couldn’t suddenly have forgotten how to write good telly, therefore Sherlock, especially S4, and especially TFP, must have a deeper meaning, are fake, a social experiment, whatever. Just: NO! This argument crashes - because they are really bad writers. They are very good at coming over as clever for a while - but in the end it’s revealed that there is nothing behind all the suspense they are building, that all their arcs lead nowhere, that nothing means anything or has any consequences. The guy explains this by analysing DW and Jekyll - and you find all of this in Sherlock as well. Like, they constantly up the ante - but with no plan or goal in mind, just for the sake of it. Or that the most important moments of the stories happen off screen. Or that they don’t follow the basic rule of show, don’t tell. Or that they never explore their characters’ motivations. We never learn why people do anything on this show. I will talk about this later. Those are basic writing skills! And they just throw them overboard. Which is not a very good idea.
Me, spewing an angry rant, below the cut.
Yes to all this. The writing and plotting are just appalling. They set up so many things and then didn’t follow through, created a villain in Mary only to suddenly let her off the hook with no real justification, went back on their own rules, Left so many key scenes OFF SCREEN, and basically just did everything they could possible do to fuck it up. I’m still completely angry and disappointed.
One thing I noticed is that they do a lot of things for sheer dramatic effect *in the moment* but then are willing to just toss the logic or real meaning of those events later. For example, Mary shooting Sherlock, Sherlock literally dying, and then crawling his way back up from death because “John Watson is in danger.” That was soooo dramatic. But then they didn’t follow through with what that meant for Sherlock, John, or Mary. That scene was just for max dramatic effect, apparently, and we were just supposed to dismiss it and watch the story turn 180 degrees and accept it without a second thought. No wonder we all expected there was a secret plan, etc. We e petted the show to actually make sense. Silly us. Same with many things in S4. They build scenes for drama and tension but then don’t logically follow through with the logic/char growth they themselves set up in those scenes.
Bah. Moftiss sucks.
May 31, 2017
yorkiepug:
Think what you want, but my personal takeaway from Sherlocked
-They were so fucking...
Think what you want, but my personal takeaway from Sherlocked
-They were so fucking lucky to get Ben & Martin
-Mofftiss don’t plan stories for shit & seem to have lucked into their best moments on the show
-The gaslighting continues, no shock there
-You can do & say awful things to fans as long as you’re nice in person
-They really don’t care about their fans. At all. Not even a little
-Mofftiss have no grip on what fans, johnlocker, non shippers & casuals alike feel about the show or why people are upset/didn’t like S4
-I’ll never understand their obsession with Mary. I will never be over the “shot Sherlock nicely” quote
-My god they really are terrible writers
-I hope a S5 never happens, I don’t want these hacks touching Sherlock or John ever again
I wasn’t there, but this is just how I feel.
May 14, 2017
isitandwonder:
laconiclurker:
thanangst:
byebyefrost:
welovethebeekeeper:
isitandwonder:
“The...
“The obsession, particularly online, with the homoerotic tension between
Sherlock and Doctor Watson… The template for us was the Billy Wilder
film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which deliberately
plays with the idea that Holmes might be gay. We’ve done the same
thing, deliberately played with it although it’s absolutely clearly not
the case. He’s only a brain, ‘everything else is transport’ to him and John clearly says, “I’m not gay, we’re not together” but the joke is that everyone assumes that in the 21st century
that these two blokes living together are a couple– what they wouldn’t’
have assumed in the 19th century. They’d have assumed they were bachelor
best friends and now they assume they’re lovers. That’s
obviously such fun to play with and the fact that people now assume, in a
very positive way, that they’re together is a different joke to it
being a negative connotation.” Mark Gatiss in The Gay Times, February 2012Hmm, I’m actually not so sure about that. Because I never got this joke (and no, that’s not a generation thing. I’m round about the same age as the show creators). Honestly, to me, two blokes sharing a flat in central London in the 21st century are just two blokes sharing a flat because it’s fucking expensive. I’d never assume anything else.
Even if one of the man was depicted as obviously gay (Girlfriend? Nor really my area. - Boyfriend? I know it’s fine.) - I wouldn’t assume any kind of romatic interest between them. I can’t see a joke there either.
But when their flat sharing gets laden with innuendo? For example, their landlady asking them if they share a bedroom. Another acquaintance taking them for being on a date. Those two blokes gazing at each other as if they were about to eat each other alive. One of the man killing for the other, who, in return, protects him from being prosecuted… Well, then I’d start to assume something’s going on - because it is shown to me and hammered home.
Only, I can’t see a joke there either…
So, what Gatiss described in the above interview wasn’t what happened. They were not just showing us two blokes living together. Because then no one in the 21st century would think of them as a couple. Moffat and Gatiss had to actively insert innuendo for their viewers to catch up on their ‘joke’ in the first place. They encouraged this on many levels: text, acting choices, casting, costume, music, lighting, cinematography.
They actively implemented homoerotic (sub)text in their show - only to lament at the same time that people cought up on it? That some viewers expected something to come out of it. Because, in the 21st century, no one thought it possible that it could just be a lame joke! Because there just is no joke to it.
The viewers took the positive attitude Gatiis desrcibes a step further and expected positive representation from the writers after playing with the inherent homoeroticism of the original stories. The fandom was far more advanced than the show runners, it seems.
And why play with the
homoeroticism
it in the first place? I really can’t see where the fun might be in there, apart from cracking some cheap gay jokes that feed an outdated no-homo attitude?What is there to play with when it’s not an issue anymore? And if it’s still an issue, I’m not sure that making fun of it ist the appropriate approach to it.
We’ve done the same thing, deliberately played with it although it’s absolutely clearly not the case.
Clearly not the case??? How can a gay man, an LGBTQ advocate be so obtuse? They have used every gay trope in the book. The result is a desperately broken gay man who is in love with his repressed flatmate. Can Mark and Steven be this stupid, this unobservant, this deep into their own form of homophobia, that they cannot see what their own creation has become? Sorry Mark, but it was never clearly not gay. It was clearly the opposite.
I agree. Sorry Gatiss but that’s bs. In Friends Joey and Chandler shared a flat and nobody expected them to get together.
You know, for a brilliant man, Gatiss can be remarkably thick. Total BS, in my book.
Here’s the thing from my perspective: there were enough tent poles in the writing (not even the acting or the direction or the cinematography, but just the writing) for people to come up with a reading that Sherlock and John had unusual, deep, possessive feelings for each other that many would not categorize as simple friendship. It’s not even the multiple lines of dialogue where others assume that Sherlock and John are a couple (including everyone cited above, together with the gay innkeepers and Dr. Frankland and Henry’s psychologist and Kitty and arguably Magnussen and ….) I find it morbidly fascinating that despite evidence in the writing itself that was more than third party characters making joking assumptions about John and Sherlock, the creators in their public statements basically chalk it all up to the “delusional fangirl” stereotype and say “play online but don’t talk about it with us, the writers.”
The Battersea conversation between John and Irene is one example of relationship implications being directly in the writing, despite some posts I’ve seen attributing Johnlock to some manifestation of acting and editing. We all know the scene by heart. John says they’re not a couple; Irene says that they are. John says he’s not infatuated with Sherlock because John is not gay, and Irene counters that she is gay, and “Look at us both [being infatuated?].”
What are we looking at, Moffat? Genuinely, I would like that answered and am confused about Moffat and Gatiss’s hostility towards discussing romantic interpretations of their writing. What was that line supposed to do if not invite us to examine the nature of both John’s and Irene’s feelings towards Sherlock and perhaps the immutability (or lack thereof) of romantic attraction? I know that script page floated around ages ago that said that John then laughs at the absurdity of the situation in response to Irene’s comment, but whether he laughs or gives that rueful huff that we get in the final version, John has no spoken answer to Irene’s comment. Was she right? Was she wrong? What was Moffat trying to convey? Was it only about Irene in that moment? Is she the only one with a bendable sexuality? That’s an ugly implication.
And then someone on their team wrote a scene episodes later where John and Sherlock are the only people at a bachelor party (when there certainly would have been comedic value in Lestrade or Anderson or relatives we’ve never met or Mycroft (like the Ritchie movies, right?) being in on this little celebration). But instead we’ve got no explanation for why there are no guests other than our assumption that Sherlock and John wanted a night alone together, and John saying he doesn’t mind touching Sherlock’s leg. Why is that line there if it doesn’t mean something? That’s 15 seconds of screen real estate that could have been spent elsewhere. I want to hear what Moffat and Gatiss say about this scene, the dialogue, the setup, etc.
These are two examples. We all could pull out at least one bit of written dialogue per episode where something in the writing itself implied “couple” or “attraction” that was not a joke made by a third party. And I really just want to ask them what they were trying to do in any of these types of scenes, because these were not jokes made by third party characters. But no interviewer will ever go beyond asking the question of whether John and Sherlock are a couple with Gatiss pulling out that stock reply about how in the 21st century, it’s cheeky to say that everyone will assume that they are together. Maybe Gatiss’s real answer is that they delighted in the ambiguity, never settling on one thing, raising issues and questions about character motivations without any definitive answers in a way that gives their writing (an illusion of) depth (a show like Mad Men played with raising different questions and not always answering them), and they never thought that anyone would seek to insert answers to these little questions that they toyed with.
I also think from my vantage point of reading and watching some of their interviews that Mark especially is not a fan of ardent fans. I know some interpreted TEH as an affectionate homage to the fandom, but I saw then and still see now his discomfort with fans reading anything into this show beyond the emotional context that they are trying to generate in any individual scene. It doesn’t matter how Sherlock survived or what John went through: what matters is that we have a little laugh at John’s successive losses of temper that send them to progressively seedier establishments in TEH: it’s a joke, it’s a show, it’s not serious beyond taking an emotional journey contained to 90 minutes. I can only see S4 as a massive repudiation of quite a lot of what ardent fans liked about the show, and I think part of it does stem from discomfort with fan expectations (and part of it from writing the season in too short a time period at the last minute).
Very Well said @laconiclurker. Thank you for this!
A view from a casual perspective
Just home from a professional dinner/awards do. I met up with a friend who I only see occasionally and she watches BBC Sherlock but is not in the fandom. She’s a casual and loves talking to me as she is amazed by my obsession with Holmes and Watson. Anyway, tonight she made a bee line for me and asked me WTF had happened to the show. She herself was disgusted with the inconsistencies of the characters, and the about face in the narrative. Her view had been that Sherlock was gay, any viewer who didn’t see it was choosing not too, he was heartbroken over John marrying, and that S4 would have seen Mary turn into a kickass villain. I of course spoke with passion about my opinion of S4 (she was somewhat alarmed at my vehement hatred of the writers) but finally, as if to counsel me she laid her hand on my arm and said; the obvious answer is the writers were stopped from finishing their story, as S4 was so much in opposition to the 3 seasons preceding it, that it was a fuck you to someone. And that the ‘terrible last ep’ was a parting fart as they walked away. This from a 50 year old psychologist, with zero knowledge of all our ideas and viewpoints, does not know Moffat or Gatiss, and who just watched the show as pure escapism.
Sigh!! Just wanted to share.
Parting fart. So that explains it then.
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