The Final Problem is bad and boring and here is why

isitandwonder:

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. 

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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.