And now, I shall state the obvious: Mycroft Holmes is cool.
I feel inclined to state that these days because the American television branch of his P.R. seems to be doing an especially weak job of relaying that fact to the citizenry of the U.S. So let's review the facts.
What's the number one reason Mycroft Holmes is cool?
Not the hazy, yet important government job. Not the club of silent men where he recreates. Not his enormous girth and flipper-like hands, so oft-ignored by the media.
Why is Mycroft Holmes cool?
Because he's smarter than Sherlock Holmes.
Here's how it works: Dr. Watson introduces you to this guy named Sherlock Holmes. And Sherlock Holmes is a frickin' genius. Not like an Einstein genius, like a genius who can be Harry Potter amazing with no magic in the world. And just about the time you're going, "Wow, this is like the smartest guy on Earth!" Sherlock Holmes pulls the rug out. How?
By introducing his brother Mycroft, who can do what Sherlock Holmes does, only better. Watson tries to put the thought down to modesty at first, only to have Sherlock basically say, "No lie, he really is better!" And Mycroft doesn't even care to use his better-than-Sherlock skills to be a detective!
How cool is that? Just sitting around his club of silent men, patting his big ol' belly, going, "Yeah, I could help individual people with their problems, but I'm going to do it on a global scale instead." You could actually see the decline of the British empire coming, based upon its eventual overdependence upon a guy who was probably going to die of heart disease not long after the Victorian era was done.
One could probably construct a formula upon the declining rate of Mycroft's coolness based upon his presence in a given story-set. Original Canon had 6.666666666 (etc.) percent Mycroft. If you want to round that down it's 6.67 by the way, so he's not the Revelations Beast . . . besides Revelations didn't happen when the Victorian period was done. It's more interesting to note that if you round it to a single digit, the Sherlockian Canon is a seven percent solution of Mycroft.
Adding more Mycroft seems like a swell idea, but the next thing you know, he's jogging on a treadmill wearing a funny track suit or trying to date Dr. Watson. Lord only knows what a Mycroft who appeared in three or four Basil Rathbone films would have turned out like, given Rathbone's eventual hair styles and Bruce's . . . well, everything.
A little Mycroft goes a long way. He can still be an interesting fellow with more usage, though, if you stick with what brought him to the party: He's the one guy who is smarter than Sherlock, and Sherlock knows it.
Because that is what makes Mycroft Holmes cool. Now and evermore.
The ongoing investigation of Sherlock Holmes, reported from the Peoria, Illinois outpost of Baker Street's dirtiest half a dozen.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Shipping quietly goes mainstream.
When the BBC's Sherlock took Holmes fandom to a whole new level, there were suddenly a lot of new concepts that some of the elder Sherlockians among us found a little much at first. A few of those were seen by the more conservative as traits of "the hysterical fangirl," a category some even tried to use to minimize the enthusiasms of fellow Holmes buffs, to their own detriment.
One of those new little fandom features that was not as popular in the olden days of Sherlock fandom was "shipping," exploring romantic relationships between various characters in the Canon of Holmes. Since a lot of shipping involves males in love with males, conservative-conservative Sherlockians were definitely not going "Yippee!" and jumping on that bus, despite the fact that Holmes-Adler shipping has roots that run deep. Still, inroads began to be made.
But this week, shipping reached an entirely new level as a certain television program with millions of viewers in mainstream America moved ahead with its own little fanfic plotline.
Yes, Watson has moved out of the rooms he shared with Sherlock Holmes many times for many reasons, but did he ever consider doing it before so he could have a relationship with Mycroft?
That's what came up on CBS's Elementary this week. Of course, to do it in front of ten million viewers in middle America, it had to be with a female Watson and a male Mycroft . . . were they a couple of boys, instead of a failed surgeon and a shady restauranteur of opposite sexes, they might have upset a few viewers.
As it was the whole relationship has been spoken of in such hushed tones and never actually shown, it's been very easy not to even notice in any moment when the show's wacky Sherlock isn't slut-shaming Watson for having sex with his brother. It doesn't fit the show's procedural format, so it has to sidelined to subplot conversations, so it's definitely not having the impact it could, even with Sherlock Holmes fans . . . I mean, c'mon! Mycroft and Watson getting together? That's huge!
Had BBC Sherlock put Mycroft and Watson together, creating a love triangle with Sherlock, it might have been huge. And controversial. And . . . well . . . hard to ignore.
But Elementary's quiet plunge into shipping seems to be fairly unremarked upon. Perhaps it's because the show has already taken so many liberties with Canonical Holmes that it's practically unrecognizable anyway. Perhaps it's because the show hasn't featured any scenes of Mycroft and Watson in bed together, or showed much emotion directed toward each other. The show doesn't seem to get people as excited as Sherlock does.
But it still seemed worth a note as the ever-changing face of Sherlockian culture moves forward. Fifty years from now, when John H. Watson and Mycroft Holmes are sharing rooms in Pall Mall, some neophyte Sherlockian will be researching just when it was that John and Mycroft pairings first attained prominence, and Elementary will be remembered as the day when it went beyond the borders of fanfic media and on to a major network.
What a world, what a world, as a certain other cranky old person used to say.
One of those new little fandom features that was not as popular in the olden days of Sherlock fandom was "shipping," exploring romantic relationships between various characters in the Canon of Holmes. Since a lot of shipping involves males in love with males, conservative-conservative Sherlockians were definitely not going "Yippee!" and jumping on that bus, despite the fact that Holmes-Adler shipping has roots that run deep. Still, inroads began to be made.
But this week, shipping reached an entirely new level as a certain television program with millions of viewers in mainstream America moved ahead with its own little fanfic plotline.
Yes, Watson has moved out of the rooms he shared with Sherlock Holmes many times for many reasons, but did he ever consider doing it before so he could have a relationship with Mycroft?
That's what came up on CBS's Elementary this week. Of course, to do it in front of ten million viewers in middle America, it had to be with a female Watson and a male Mycroft . . . were they a couple of boys, instead of a failed surgeon and a shady restauranteur of opposite sexes, they might have upset a few viewers.
As it was the whole relationship has been spoken of in such hushed tones and never actually shown, it's been very easy not to even notice in any moment when the show's wacky Sherlock isn't slut-shaming Watson for having sex with his brother. It doesn't fit the show's procedural format, so it has to sidelined to subplot conversations, so it's definitely not having the impact it could, even with Sherlock Holmes fans . . . I mean, c'mon! Mycroft and Watson getting together? That's huge!
Had BBC Sherlock put Mycroft and Watson together, creating a love triangle with Sherlock, it might have been huge. And controversial. And . . . well . . . hard to ignore.
But Elementary's quiet plunge into shipping seems to be fairly unremarked upon. Perhaps it's because the show has already taken so many liberties with Canonical Holmes that it's practically unrecognizable anyway. Perhaps it's because the show hasn't featured any scenes of Mycroft and Watson in bed together, or showed much emotion directed toward each other. The show doesn't seem to get people as excited as Sherlock does.
But it still seemed worth a note as the ever-changing face of Sherlockian culture moves forward. Fifty years from now, when John H. Watson and Mycroft Holmes are sharing rooms in Pall Mall, some neophyte Sherlockian will be researching just when it was that John and Mycroft pairings first attained prominence, and Elementary will be remembered as the day when it went beyond the borders of fanfic media and on to a major network.
What a world, what a world, as a certain other cranky old person used to say.
Friday, April 25, 2014
The KRM. Worth a re-watch?
It has long been suggested that I judge things too quickly, and maybe that's the case with this week's Elementary. In my earlier report on "The Man With The Twisted Lip" (CBS version), I proclaimed that the Killer Robot Mosquito (or KRM, as I have come to affectionately call it), was the shark-jump for the show. But after a day of that cyber-insect buzzing about my imagination, I realized what it truly was.
It's the robot dinosaur that elevates Elementary to the level of the Baker-Street-Babe-beloved Asylum Sherlock Holmes: the moment where Elementary finally goes from "just bad" to "so bad it's good."
So I had to watch it again.
The girl over Mr. Elementary's left shoulder looks severely creeped out by his "I am without peer" speech at the start of the episode. Or maybe she's thinking of Philip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, a goofy team-up pastiche of aged Sherlock Holmes meeting either Tarzan or Mowgli, depending upon which edition you managed to get your hands on. I think I made a face like that, too, when I read it.
The dinner party with Mr. Elementary, Brother Elementary, Joan, and Miss Hudson that follows the credits features the great line "Have you come back here to sleep with Watson again?" -- a question the Sherlockian Canon somehow never got enough of. How Miss Hudson sits through the entire conversation between the Elementary brothers and poor abused Joan without breaking out laughing is a mystery one of these detectives should solve . . . though her lack of a single post-credit line makes one wonder if the reason wasn't some paid-by-the-line budget issue.
Captain Gregson also seems to be getting out of the episode as soon as possible after Mr. Elementary does an amazing off-camera job of riding a bicycle to trail a drug dealer back to his hideout and orchestrate an arrest. (Hey, filming bicycle chases through New York costs money!)
Brother Elementary luring Joan Watson to his Diogenes restaurant by waving desserts under her nose, then hitting on her, is about as creepy as his monotone "romantic" propositions. If this were a WWE wrestling show, an entire arena full of fans would have been chanting "BOR-RING! BOR-RING!" at the top of their lungs, but hey, they're used to better acting. Watson's stuttering "I'm so flattered . . ." sounds like every kindly cheerleader who ever got asked out by the head of the local Star Trek re-enactors guild. And somehow, Mycroft still keeps Joan at his empty restaurant so late she comes home and goes straight to bed.
But Joan has to get her beauty sleep, because Mr. Elementary is going to be standing by her bedside at some moment just after dawn as usual. This time, he's holding breakfast on a tray instead of a turtle, though, because we can't have Miss Hudson and Clyde in the same episode. And then Harriet Tubman enters the picture. (Random trivia element! DRINK!)
The missing person for their missing person's case has a Harriet Tubman plaque as her song-writing companion. One would hope for at least a statue to qualify as a "companion," but apparently the missing Page had as low budget for her life's supporting cast as the rest of the show.
The invisible Killer Robot Mosquito makes its first non-appearance just after the sixteen minute mark of the episode, and only Mr. Elementary can see him. Detective Bell just supplies the "It's too early in the year for mosquitos," so Mr. Elementary can respond with an almost Canonical "That's why I mentioned it." Except he throws the line away in his newfound quiet tones. After a season and a half of noisily squawking when he didn't have good Sherlock-Holmes-like responses, Mr. E. throws away his "That is the curious incident!" moment with a near-mumble.
But poor Mr. Elementary has to deal with his brother trying to date his pal Joan . . . a brother who has mysterious Frenchmen in his restaurant receiving packages at the same table. The brothers Elementary have a long whisper-conversation in which the one supposedly dating Joan calls her a "sow." Of course, if one "try some desserts at my restaurant" is "dating," then Killer Robot Mosquitos follow Mr. Elementary around . . . oh, wait, here's our friend the KRM!
At this point we also learn about another robot that carries a shotgun. "Drone" may be the word all the cool kids are using these days, but you know Mr. Elementary is talking about another flying robot. Especially after he finds some paintball-shooting flying robots on YouTube or it's Elementary-world counterpart. Since we don't actually ever see the shotgun-wielding flying robot, I'm going to deduce that it was KRM and a group of his friends hauling the shotgun around. Makes as much sense as anything else going on here.
"I've had a wonderful time with you on multiple occasions," says Joan Watson to her potential beau, Brother Elementary, just before she announces that she wants to move out of Mr. Elementary's house so she can date his brother. I suspect Joan's dialogue was written by robots, too. "I've had a wonderful time with you on multiple occasions." Of course, maybe she's a Conehead from "France," as France seems to be coming up a lot this episode.
If you ever need to interrogate a psychiatrist, here's a tip: Make sure he hides banned Italian candy eggs with an illegal choking hazard toy inside in his community garden plot. Threatening to arrest a guy for illegal candy is always the best way to get a doctor to violate doctor- patient privilege, isn't it? I mean, it's not that unusual, right? Not like the odds of him getting attacked by a Killer Robot Mosquito . . . oh. Whoops.
Ah, KRM, how can I ever hate you? You are the best thing to come out of Elementary in two years!
Mr. Elementary likes holding messages in front of cameras to communicate with people. And this time he's doing it to talk to C.O.O. Kenneth Carlson, KRM's "daddy." Perhaps Carlson will pay to get KRM his own sober companion so he can have his own spin-off series. Well, one can hope, can't one?
If Joan's horrible dating skills put one off of her this episode, her ability to break into a safe using a car-jacking tool, sliding a piece of metal in the crack at the top of the safe door, should make up for that fact. I have never seen that technique employed in any TV show or movie before, so it must be cutting edge. Or safes have gotten really cheap, unbeknownst to me.
Of course, the way Joan gets chloroformed and thrown in a van faster than B.A. Baracus being sent off on an A-team mission make one wonder about her other detective skills. Seems a very Nigel Bruce move.
And . . . finis.
"The Man with the Twisted Lip" is, perhaps, one of the most re-watchable episodes of Elementary ever, thanks to KRM. But I'm still a bit baffled as to why they entitled it after the Conan Doyle story of that same name. Comparing Mr. Elementary's A.A. meeting to the rascally Lascar's opium den is a bit of a stretch, and, unfortunately, we get no Mrs. Neville St. Clair in a flimsy nightie.
The whole Mycroft-Joan relationship subplot is so tortured that Dick Cheney will probably claim it as an effective counter-terrorism measure. And are we going to finally find out that this version of the elder Holmes brother is the French government, instead of the British one? (Hey, they can't copy Sherlock, even if Sherlock is just using the original source material . . . which is soooo unoriginal, isn't it?)
I really shouldn't re-watch these things. Curse you and your cute metallic hide, KRM!
It's the robot dinosaur that elevates Elementary to the level of the Baker-Street-Babe-beloved Asylum Sherlock Holmes: the moment where Elementary finally goes from "just bad" to "so bad it's good."
So I had to watch it again.
The girl over Mr. Elementary's left shoulder looks severely creeped out by his "I am without peer" speech at the start of the episode. Or maybe she's thinking of Philip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, a goofy team-up pastiche of aged Sherlock Holmes meeting either Tarzan or Mowgli, depending upon which edition you managed to get your hands on. I think I made a face like that, too, when I read it.
The dinner party with Mr. Elementary, Brother Elementary, Joan, and Miss Hudson that follows the credits features the great line "Have you come back here to sleep with Watson again?" -- a question the Sherlockian Canon somehow never got enough of. How Miss Hudson sits through the entire conversation between the Elementary brothers and poor abused Joan without breaking out laughing is a mystery one of these detectives should solve . . . though her lack of a single post-credit line makes one wonder if the reason wasn't some paid-by-the-line budget issue.
Captain Gregson also seems to be getting out of the episode as soon as possible after Mr. Elementary does an amazing off-camera job of riding a bicycle to trail a drug dealer back to his hideout and orchestrate an arrest. (Hey, filming bicycle chases through New York costs money!)
Brother Elementary luring Joan Watson to his Diogenes restaurant by waving desserts under her nose, then hitting on her, is about as creepy as his monotone "romantic" propositions. If this were a WWE wrestling show, an entire arena full of fans would have been chanting "BOR-RING! BOR-RING!" at the top of their lungs, but hey, they're used to better acting. Watson's stuttering "I'm so flattered . . ." sounds like every kindly cheerleader who ever got asked out by the head of the local Star Trek re-enactors guild. And somehow, Mycroft still keeps Joan at his empty restaurant so late she comes home and goes straight to bed.
But Joan has to get her beauty sleep, because Mr. Elementary is going to be standing by her bedside at some moment just after dawn as usual. This time, he's holding breakfast on a tray instead of a turtle, though, because we can't have Miss Hudson and Clyde in the same episode. And then Harriet Tubman enters the picture. (Random trivia element! DRINK!)
The missing person for their missing person's case has a Harriet Tubman plaque as her song-writing companion. One would hope for at least a statue to qualify as a "companion," but apparently the missing Page had as low budget for her life's supporting cast as the rest of the show.
The invisible Killer Robot Mosquito makes its first non-appearance just after the sixteen minute mark of the episode, and only Mr. Elementary can see him. Detective Bell just supplies the "It's too early in the year for mosquitos," so Mr. Elementary can respond with an almost Canonical "That's why I mentioned it." Except he throws the line away in his newfound quiet tones. After a season and a half of noisily squawking when he didn't have good Sherlock-Holmes-like responses, Mr. E. throws away his "That is the curious incident!" moment with a near-mumble.
But poor Mr. Elementary has to deal with his brother trying to date his pal Joan . . . a brother who has mysterious Frenchmen in his restaurant receiving packages at the same table. The brothers Elementary have a long whisper-conversation in which the one supposedly dating Joan calls her a "sow." Of course, if one "try some desserts at my restaurant" is "dating," then Killer Robot Mosquitos follow Mr. Elementary around . . . oh, wait, here's our friend the KRM!
At this point we also learn about another robot that carries a shotgun. "Drone" may be the word all the cool kids are using these days, but you know Mr. Elementary is talking about another flying robot. Especially after he finds some paintball-shooting flying robots on YouTube or it's Elementary-world counterpart. Since we don't actually ever see the shotgun-wielding flying robot, I'm going to deduce that it was KRM and a group of his friends hauling the shotgun around. Makes as much sense as anything else going on here.
"I've had a wonderful time with you on multiple occasions," says Joan Watson to her potential beau, Brother Elementary, just before she announces that she wants to move out of Mr. Elementary's house so she can date his brother. I suspect Joan's dialogue was written by robots, too. "I've had a wonderful time with you on multiple occasions." Of course, maybe she's a Conehead from "France," as France seems to be coming up a lot this episode.
If you ever need to interrogate a psychiatrist, here's a tip: Make sure he hides banned Italian candy eggs with an illegal choking hazard toy inside in his community garden plot. Threatening to arrest a guy for illegal candy is always the best way to get a doctor to violate doctor- patient privilege, isn't it? I mean, it's not that unusual, right? Not like the odds of him getting attacked by a Killer Robot Mosquito . . . oh. Whoops.
Ah, KRM, how can I ever hate you? You are the best thing to come out of Elementary in two years!
Mr. Elementary likes holding messages in front of cameras to communicate with people. And this time he's doing it to talk to C.O.O. Kenneth Carlson, KRM's "daddy." Perhaps Carlson will pay to get KRM his own sober companion so he can have his own spin-off series. Well, one can hope, can't one?
If Joan's horrible dating skills put one off of her this episode, her ability to break into a safe using a car-jacking tool, sliding a piece of metal in the crack at the top of the safe door, should make up for that fact. I have never seen that technique employed in any TV show or movie before, so it must be cutting edge. Or safes have gotten really cheap, unbeknownst to me.
Of course, the way Joan gets chloroformed and thrown in a van faster than B.A. Baracus being sent off on an A-team mission make one wonder about her other detective skills. Seems a very Nigel Bruce move.
And . . . finis.
"The Man with the Twisted Lip" is, perhaps, one of the most re-watchable episodes of Elementary ever, thanks to KRM. But I'm still a bit baffled as to why they entitled it after the Conan Doyle story of that same name. Comparing Mr. Elementary's A.A. meeting to the rascally Lascar's opium den is a bit of a stretch, and, unfortunately, we get no Mrs. Neville St. Clair in a flimsy nightie.
The whole Mycroft-Joan relationship subplot is so tortured that Dick Cheney will probably claim it as an effective counter-terrorism measure. And are we going to finally find out that this version of the elder Holmes brother is the French government, instead of the British one? (Hey, they can't copy Sherlock, even if Sherlock is just using the original source material . . . which is soooo unoriginal, isn't it?)
I really shouldn't re-watch these things. Curse you and your cute metallic hide, KRM!
You should see him with his shotgun!
Episode 221 of the show that didn't go with 221.
The online listings for this week's Elementary held much promise: "Episode title: (#221) "The Man With The Twisted Lip."
Sure, it wasn't the two-hundred and twenty-first episode, but the twenty-first episode of the second season. But how could that magical number 221 be lost on the show's creators? And the title is pure Canon! (Though after the waste of a title in "The Hound of the Cancer Cells," we've learned not to expect Canon from Canon-title.) And brother Mycroft, who runs restaurants and somehow had an unremarkable one-night-stand with Joan Watson, is coming back! Surely, something exciting was due to come out of Elementary this week!
"I am without peer," Mr. Elementary states during the show's opening. "And that is the greatest threat to my sobriety."
Poor Mr. Elementary. Not a single person on Earth is as smart as he is, except for Jamie Moriarty whom he considers insane, and that's going to cause him to go back to the heroin, or whatever his often vague addiction issue is. Of course, the minute he returns home, two possibly smart people are already inside his home: the long-absent Miss Hudson and Joan Watson's former lover Mycroft. (That's not me emphasizing the Mycroft/Watson tryst, it was featured in the "previously on Elementary recap.)
Mr. Elementary and Watson actually discuss the two Holmes brothers having "shared custody" of Joan. When Mr. Elementary said he was without a sane peer, I think he may have over-rated his own sanity. Perhaps he and Jamie Moriarty do need to be together in a padded cell somewhere.
Mycroft gets Watson to his Diogenes Restaurant and reveals he has an interest in Joan . . . characterization and relationships on this show have always been ridiculously forced and ham-handed, and the scene is just painful to watch. I once wrote that the creators of Elementary didn't know how to write smart people, but I've decided to expand that statement: they don't know how to write relationships, addiction, or humans. Other than using the words that indicate such things exist, of course.
Joan and Mycroft apparently became e-mail buddies after their one-night stand, which is what real people do, right? Unless Mycroft is simply manipulating Joan for some future use and we're actually supposed to believe she's foolish enough to believe such a thing after being supposedly bright enough to be an apprentice consulting detective.
And let's cut to the chase: this season's finale has to be a crisis in the addiction, right? And something in Mr. Elementary and Joan's "relationship," though that thing is so badly constructed it's hard to line it up with anything in reality after all this time.
And then we get the robot mosquito surveillance drone. Seriously. Seriously! A robot mosquito drone that can inject toxins. We have entered Elementary's "serum of langur" phase, and if that makes it more Canonical to have come up with an idea as silly as one of the silliest moments Conan Doyle came up with, well, enjoy the Canonicity, Elementary fans.
Seriously, a killer robot mosquito. Wow.
I'm usually a big fan of TV show continuity, but when Elementary revisits its own continuity, we start getting a compilation of really stupid things that were probably best forgotten. And there is so much good material in the Sherlockian Canon that they're ignoring in favor of this teetering Jenga-stack of crap that the creators' crime becomes even worse.
And then, instead of jumping the shark, Elementary jumps the killer robot mosquito.
Only a month or two ago, it seemed like I might be adapting to Elementary, that I might even be becoming fond of the ugly little mutt. Episode 221 pretty much put those hopes to rest. I thought I'd enjoy Miss Hudson's unexpected return, if it ever happened. That hope was killed tonight by the rest of the episode. Oh, this show sucks.
At the end of this episode, Joan Watson is grabbed and hauled away in a van. One can only hope she's being driven somewhere off this show, for her own good. Maybe they can find a way to drive her on to the fourth season of Sherlock, as John's adopted sister or something. And then let Sherlock sort her entire messy New York past out.
Killer robot mosquito. Sigh.
Sure, it wasn't the two-hundred and twenty-first episode, but the twenty-first episode of the second season. But how could that magical number 221 be lost on the show's creators? And the title is pure Canon! (Though after the waste of a title in "The Hound of the Cancer Cells," we've learned not to expect Canon from Canon-title.) And brother Mycroft, who runs restaurants and somehow had an unremarkable one-night-stand with Joan Watson, is coming back! Surely, something exciting was due to come out of Elementary this week!
"I am without peer," Mr. Elementary states during the show's opening. "And that is the greatest threat to my sobriety."
Poor Mr. Elementary. Not a single person on Earth is as smart as he is, except for Jamie Moriarty whom he considers insane, and that's going to cause him to go back to the heroin, or whatever his often vague addiction issue is. Of course, the minute he returns home, two possibly smart people are already inside his home: the long-absent Miss Hudson and Joan Watson's former lover Mycroft. (That's not me emphasizing the Mycroft/Watson tryst, it was featured in the "previously on Elementary recap.)
Mr. Elementary and Watson actually discuss the two Holmes brothers having "shared custody" of Joan. When Mr. Elementary said he was without a sane peer, I think he may have over-rated his own sanity. Perhaps he and Jamie Moriarty do need to be together in a padded cell somewhere.
Mycroft gets Watson to his Diogenes Restaurant and reveals he has an interest in Joan . . . characterization and relationships on this show have always been ridiculously forced and ham-handed, and the scene is just painful to watch. I once wrote that the creators of Elementary didn't know how to write smart people, but I've decided to expand that statement: they don't know how to write relationships, addiction, or humans. Other than using the words that indicate such things exist, of course.
Joan and Mycroft apparently became e-mail buddies after their one-night stand, which is what real people do, right? Unless Mycroft is simply manipulating Joan for some future use and we're actually supposed to believe she's foolish enough to believe such a thing after being supposedly bright enough to be an apprentice consulting detective.
And let's cut to the chase: this season's finale has to be a crisis in the addiction, right? And something in Mr. Elementary and Joan's "relationship," though that thing is so badly constructed it's hard to line it up with anything in reality after all this time.
And then we get the robot mosquito surveillance drone. Seriously. Seriously! A robot mosquito drone that can inject toxins. We have entered Elementary's "serum of langur" phase, and if that makes it more Canonical to have come up with an idea as silly as one of the silliest moments Conan Doyle came up with, well, enjoy the Canonicity, Elementary fans.
Seriously, a killer robot mosquito. Wow.
I'm usually a big fan of TV show continuity, but when Elementary revisits its own continuity, we start getting a compilation of really stupid things that were probably best forgotten. And there is so much good material in the Sherlockian Canon that they're ignoring in favor of this teetering Jenga-stack of crap that the creators' crime becomes even worse.
And then, instead of jumping the shark, Elementary jumps the killer robot mosquito.
Only a month or two ago, it seemed like I might be adapting to Elementary, that I might even be becoming fond of the ugly little mutt. Episode 221 pretty much put those hopes to rest. I thought I'd enjoy Miss Hudson's unexpected return, if it ever happened. That hope was killed tonight by the rest of the episode. Oh, this show sucks.
At the end of this episode, Joan Watson is grabbed and hauled away in a van. One can only hope she's being driven somewhere off this show, for her own good. Maybe they can find a way to drive her on to the fourth season of Sherlock, as John's adopted sister or something. And then let Sherlock sort her entire messy New York past out.
Killer robot mosquito. Sigh.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Could Conan Doyle sell his Sherlock Holmes today?
Sherlock Holmes. Very popular right now, upon that we can probably all agree.
So it almost seems silly to pose this question, but let it simmer in your brain-pot for a bit and see if it cooks:
Could Conan Doyle sell his Sherlock Holmes today and attain the popularity he did in the 1890s?
There is, of course, the obvious bit: no great market for short stories these days, and short stories were where Sherlock Holmes shined brightest. Sure, episodic TV has a certain similarity, but Conan Doyle's scripts were never his strong suit. Still, Doyle, could, and did, write many a novel, so he could probably get over that little hurdle.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was neither the slam-bang action Holmes that Guy Ritchie sold movie audiences, nor the more relationship-oriented Holmes that Moffat and Gatiss sold TV audiences. His continuity was definitely not up to modern standards, and one has to wonder how he would have handled fan interaction on Twitter. His less-than-loving attitude toward Holmes definitely wouldn't have endeared him to the fans, nor the fans to him.
Once one starts considering Conan Doyle's personality in the equation, it almost seems like a Conan Doyle born into the modern era would head more toward military fiction to start with, and come out with a Sherlock Holmes who had more of a British Jack Reacher vibe. He would probably not have tried aiming toward the more female end of the market, where Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey live, but historical novels, perhaps with a touch of the supernatural, could have been his turf.
But Sherlock Holmes? That unique and complex product of the Victorian era? Could anything like him have been produced in our current climate? As much fun as some of our current adaptations can be, I don't know if Sherlock Holmes would exist as a popular character today if he wasn't a popular character before.
While Moffat and Gatiss managed to move Sherlock Holmes to the modern day with great success, it's harder to imagine Conan Doyle coming forward into this day and time with equal ease. And to have him, once here, pull off Sherlock Holmes all over again, if said fellow had never existed?
Now that is a mental puzzle worthy of a Holmes-level intellect, and we would have to create such a fellow to ponder it anyway. If we had a Conan Doyle. And a chicken or an egg.
Blogger tip of the day: Don't write when you're falling asleep, no matter how good the idea seemed this afternoon!
So it almost seems silly to pose this question, but let it simmer in your brain-pot for a bit and see if it cooks:
Could Conan Doyle sell his Sherlock Holmes today and attain the popularity he did in the 1890s?
There is, of course, the obvious bit: no great market for short stories these days, and short stories were where Sherlock Holmes shined brightest. Sure, episodic TV has a certain similarity, but Conan Doyle's scripts were never his strong suit. Still, Doyle, could, and did, write many a novel, so he could probably get over that little hurdle.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was neither the slam-bang action Holmes that Guy Ritchie sold movie audiences, nor the more relationship-oriented Holmes that Moffat and Gatiss sold TV audiences. His continuity was definitely not up to modern standards, and one has to wonder how he would have handled fan interaction on Twitter. His less-than-loving attitude toward Holmes definitely wouldn't have endeared him to the fans, nor the fans to him.
Once one starts considering Conan Doyle's personality in the equation, it almost seems like a Conan Doyle born into the modern era would head more toward military fiction to start with, and come out with a Sherlock Holmes who had more of a British Jack Reacher vibe. He would probably not have tried aiming toward the more female end of the market, where Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey live, but historical novels, perhaps with a touch of the supernatural, could have been his turf.
But Sherlock Holmes? That unique and complex product of the Victorian era? Could anything like him have been produced in our current climate? As much fun as some of our current adaptations can be, I don't know if Sherlock Holmes would exist as a popular character today if he wasn't a popular character before.
While Moffat and Gatiss managed to move Sherlock Holmes to the modern day with great success, it's harder to imagine Conan Doyle coming forward into this day and time with equal ease. And to have him, once here, pull off Sherlock Holmes all over again, if said fellow had never existed?
Now that is a mental puzzle worthy of a Holmes-level intellect, and we would have to create such a fellow to ponder it anyway. If we had a Conan Doyle. And a chicken or an egg.
Blogger tip of the day: Don't write when you're falling asleep, no matter how good the idea seemed this afternoon!
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Thoughts toward an alternate history of Sherlockiana.
Christopher Morley was 44 years old when he founded The Baker Street Irregulars of New York.
Forty-four is an interesting age, old to a young person, young to an old person. Seasoned, yet still holding on to the drives of youth for a while longer.
About twenty years later, when Evelyn Herzog and some fellow college girls started The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, needless to say, they were much younger. Follow that statement up with a glance at the Baker Street Babes of our modern era and one starts to wonder . . . do female Sherlockians tend to organize earlier than their male counterparts?
And to take it a step further -- if women had not been held back by the sort of culture that didn't give them the right to vote until 1920, would we have had a Sherlock Holmes society in the Roaring Twenties, instead of the war-torn 1940s?
A goodly chunk of any sci-fi/fantasy section of major bookstores can be found holding novels of alternate versions of history, where one takes a "What if?" premise and rolls out a story from there. T'were I not such a lazy soul (or otherwise occupied with work, take your pick) it might be fun to play with the concept of the first Sherlock Holmes society being spearheaded by a flapper-era female dynamo, and how that might have played out, especially with Morley and crew coming to the party second.
As I'm very short on time this morning, I can't even play with that concept on this page as much as I'd like, but it seemed interesting enough to let you think about it as well.
Forty-four is an interesting age, old to a young person, young to an old person. Seasoned, yet still holding on to the drives of youth for a while longer.
About twenty years later, when Evelyn Herzog and some fellow college girls started The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, needless to say, they were much younger. Follow that statement up with a glance at the Baker Street Babes of our modern era and one starts to wonder . . . do female Sherlockians tend to organize earlier than their male counterparts?
And to take it a step further -- if women had not been held back by the sort of culture that didn't give them the right to vote until 1920, would we have had a Sherlock Holmes society in the Roaring Twenties, instead of the war-torn 1940s?
A goodly chunk of any sci-fi/fantasy section of major bookstores can be found holding novels of alternate versions of history, where one takes a "What if?" premise and rolls out a story from there. T'were I not such a lazy soul (or otherwise occupied with work, take your pick) it might be fun to play with the concept of the first Sherlock Holmes society being spearheaded by a flapper-era female dynamo, and how that might have played out, especially with Morley and crew coming to the party second.
As I'm very short on time this morning, I can't even play with that concept on this page as much as I'd like, but it seemed interesting enough to let you think about it as well.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Mary Morstan gets one more feather in her cap.
There are some things in the Sherlockian universe that I've never been a fan of.
Well, perhaps "never" too strong a word, being the absolute, so let's go with "rarely."
And very rarely at that, in the case of one particular topic: mysteries starring characters from Sherlock Holmes's world other than Sherlock Holmes.
I mean, seriously, it's a bit like a hamburger without the hamburger, isn't it? We read Sherlock Holmes stories because we love Sherlock Holmes, not because Billy the page boy just might appear in the story. And yet, for many, many decades, writers have tried to skirt the challenge of writing Sherlock Holmes or tried to find their own special niche market by focussing on minor characters.
So when Howard Ostrom posted the latest link to a Ross K. Foad production on YouTube on the WelcomeHolmes list and the title was "The Mary Morstan Mysteries 'Rings of Change' Part 1/2," I was not jamming my finger on the mouse with excitement trying to click the link. But its a dull Sunday morning, and Mary Morstan has gotten a lot more interesting since the latest run of Sherlock, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
The result? Well, here is my current ranking for current English-speaking Holmes video:
1. BBC Sherlock.
2. "The Mary Morstan Mysteries."
3. "The Diogenes Documentaries"
4-99. A bunch of other things on YouTube.
100. CBS Elementary.
When I first ran across Ross K. Foad's productions "No Place Like Holmes" back in 2010, I have to admit that, while being delighted to see the enthusiasm behind creating such the series and going "Oh, that's cute," I wasn't really seeing the series as a major development in Sherlockian fanworks. (What can I say? I'm old school and slow to adapt to new ideas . . . though like the Flash compared to the glacial pace of some others.) The latest Mary Morstan Mystery, however, shows an ever-growing talent and level of skill, as well as a great love of the Sherlockian Canon, and I will definitely be following all of the good Mr. Foad's productions from here on out.
It may have even changed my bias against Sherlock Holmes stories without a character named "Sherlock Holmes." After all, in its mere nine minutes of running time, the first part of "The Mary Morstan Mysteries: 'Rings of Change'" showed more Sherlock Holmes goodness than an entire season of CBS's Elementary. Which is really quite a shame, when one considers the comparative resources of the two production companies involved.
Sherlockiana will always have it's lovely little surprises, and this latest Mary Morstan Mystery is certainly one of them.
Well, perhaps "never" too strong a word, being the absolute, so let's go with "rarely."
And very rarely at that, in the case of one particular topic: mysteries starring characters from Sherlock Holmes's world other than Sherlock Holmes.
I mean, seriously, it's a bit like a hamburger without the hamburger, isn't it? We read Sherlock Holmes stories because we love Sherlock Holmes, not because Billy the page boy just might appear in the story. And yet, for many, many decades, writers have tried to skirt the challenge of writing Sherlock Holmes or tried to find their own special niche market by focussing on minor characters.
So when Howard Ostrom posted the latest link to a Ross K. Foad production on YouTube on the WelcomeHolmes list and the title was "The Mary Morstan Mysteries 'Rings of Change' Part 1/2," I was not jamming my finger on the mouse with excitement trying to click the link. But its a dull Sunday morning, and Mary Morstan has gotten a lot more interesting since the latest run of Sherlock, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
The result? Well, here is my current ranking for current English-speaking Holmes video:
1. BBC Sherlock.
2. "The Mary Morstan Mysteries."
3. "The Diogenes Documentaries"
4-99. A bunch of other things on YouTube.
100. CBS Elementary.
When I first ran across Ross K. Foad's productions "No Place Like Holmes" back in 2010, I have to admit that, while being delighted to see the enthusiasm behind creating such the series and going "Oh, that's cute," I wasn't really seeing the series as a major development in Sherlockian fanworks. (What can I say? I'm old school and slow to adapt to new ideas . . . though like the Flash compared to the glacial pace of some others.) The latest Mary Morstan Mystery, however, shows an ever-growing talent and level of skill, as well as a great love of the Sherlockian Canon, and I will definitely be following all of the good Mr. Foad's productions from here on out.
It may have even changed my bias against Sherlock Holmes stories without a character named "Sherlock Holmes." After all, in its mere nine minutes of running time, the first part of "The Mary Morstan Mysteries: 'Rings of Change'" showed more Sherlock Holmes goodness than an entire season of CBS's Elementary. Which is really quite a shame, when one considers the comparative resources of the two production companies involved.
Sherlockiana will always have it's lovely little surprises, and this latest Mary Morstan Mystery is certainly one of them.
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