Let me know if you’re sick of this topic by now, but I saw a post about Sherlock and Irene and it reminded me how confused I still am about ASIB. What was the point of making Irene a lesbian if they were going to make her fall in some way for Sherlock? It

Hey! Sorry this took me a second (lol) to answer! I’m not at all sick of discussing any of this, ha!

So first, we have to consider that Steven Moffat, who wrote this episode, is a misogynist. I could write you a whole entire essay about that, but to summarize, he writes women *very* differently from the way he writes men. Every “strong woman” character he’s written (to the extent that I’ve experienced, at least) tends to exert her strength through violence. Irene literally hurts men to extort them for information for her terrorist boss. Being on the “side of the angels” doesn’t matter if you’re sexy or cute or female in general. Irene was fully down to sell out her entire country to save her own skin and was working directly for the man Sherlock and John spend several series actively opposing. But Irene is a woman, so it doesn’t count. There are dozens of other examples - Molly slapping Sherlock in a moment of “strength”, in some misguided sense of entitlement that told her she had the right to demand an explanation for Sherlock’s drug usage, and while I don’t even want to wade into the steaming heap which is Moffat’s writing on Doctor Who, I’ll just point out that their darlings, River Song and Mary Moffat, are both assassins. I never did understand the complicated reasoning behind River Song’s “need” to kill the Doctor, and Mary never once even offers a reason for choosing a career path in murder for personal gain. She also never exhibits any sort of remorse for any of it, including all the parts that affected her “beloved” John, like lying to him endlessly, abandoning their infant to protect herself, comparing him to a dog, denying him permission to go somewhere without her, and also trying to murder his best friend. It only makes sense that a canonical lesbian would be powerless to retain her sexuality in the face of an attractive, intelligent man. Because that’s how sexuality works!

So that’s reason #1. Reason #2 is that Sherlock shows his “humanity” in weakness: by making mistakes. His “mistake” in this one was, apparently, slightly falling for Irene, despite knowing that she worked for Moriarty, despite knowing that she was a lesbian, despite knowing that she absolutely betrayed him, and despite not actually being interested in her in a sexual way at all. John literally left the house (in a jealous snit) to let them be alone together, and Irene was all over the notion of them having sex, yet Sherlock spent the entire time lost in case reflections, and only snapped out of it when he realized that John had left. I don’t know if they were trying to underscore his eccentricity or something, but that’s partly where the weakness (or laziness, but same difference) in their writing comes in, that it’s not abundantly clear to us after all this time. Series 2 aired in 2014, and here we are, eight years later and still going, “so yeah, wtf??” They use Sherlock’s “weakness” again in failing to deduce Mary’s past, along with his miscalculation about Magnussen, etc. Every time something bad happens from series 3 onward, it’s definitely Sherlock’s fault, and everyone else in the world is smarter than he is, all of a sudden.

Better writers would have made it much clearer that Sherlock was intrigued by the intellectual puzzle that Irene posed, that he’d kept her phone as a bit of a trophy for having outwitted her (which again is misogyny; Irene Adler outwitted Sherlock in the original ACD), and not had him “mourning” after her supposed death. I mean, Sherlock was visibly upset when the woman in TGG was killed as he listened over the phone. There’s reason to think he might have been upset to learn of another person’s death, someone he had met and sparred with. But it was always ONLY Irene who made things sexual or implied intent, never Sherlock. It’s bad writing, honestly. I think they really like the idea of making Sherlock some sort of Bond who can woo every woman within 900 meters, but also that he’s a dork with no social skills, and the mix sometimes works well and sometimes really doesn’t.

I don’t know if that was coherent at all, but that’s the five cents my brain rummaged around and found. :P What do you think?