Sherlock (spoilers)

[mme_hardy]

Why, yes. Kill off the major continuing female character, leaving a loose-end baby. I know! We'll hand over the baby to the minor continuing female character. Yes, I know they lampshaded it by making her a godparent, but Molly has a demanding day job. It's just too neat. John doesn't have a day job, but clearly he needs Molly to take care of him and the baby because ...?

I laughed at a lot of the clever plot elements. I don't think I'd have minded their killing Mary if it hadn't been in bathetic ponderous slo-mo. It was too on the nose, too obvious.

I also didn't particularly want to know John as a cheater.

E: I originally gave this my "she's not there" tag, which I use for narratives, both fictional and real-world, that erase the woman's agency. I decided it was too spoilery to leave as a tag, but boy do I mean it.


Grr.

Comments

[moetushie]

Bah. I'm about a season behind Sherlock (and not really intending to catch up) so I haven't even met Mary, but I'm not excited by these developments.

Bah humbug.

[mme_hardy]

She threw herself in front of a shot aimed at Sherlock. A shot from a villain whom Sherlock had been taunting for what seemed like the previous hour but was probably only a few minutes.

Word. Tip of my tongue. Starts with something like "F..." Gail. Gail S-thingamabobbie.

[moetushie]

Ah, that cold box, meant to give men pain.

[movingfinger]

Ew.

[mme_hardy]

So. Much. Ew. And it was a textbook episode where repeated threats to the female lead were All About The Men, how her danger made them suffer, how guilty they felt. A classic fridging.

[muccamukk]

I'm glad I stopped hate watching after TAB.

[loligo]

ARE YOU @#$%& SERIOUS

I usually stay away from spoilers, but "rage" is a pretty useful clue that this is something I will want to know ahead of time. And now I'm really glad I clicked, because it will keep from having to pause the show to have a high-speed come-apart tomorrow when Andy watches it. I mean, I will probably sit there and watch with half my attention while I knit or something. But it is good to be forewarned.

Hey, you know what the world of fiction needs? MORE DEAD MOMS, don't you think?

[mme_hardy]

Women get in the way of the deep male romances. (And indeed there was a deliberate hint, in the plot, that Watson resented Mary's being closer to Sherlock than he was.)

Unpopular opinion

[legionseagle]

I don't share this assessment. I don't think that was a fridging; Mary had too much involvement in her own story for that. It's lampshaded that people in Mary's line (assassination for hire and general wetwork, in case we're overlooking it) don't get to retire. In a sense, they don't deserve to retire. She's playing out a Victorian storyline OK, but not the one ACD gave her (angel in the house, dies presumably in childbirth, never mentioned again.) In fact, she takes on the role originally taken by her own father in ACD's Sign of the Four, and has a classic Victorian atonement death.

I enjoyed it.

Re: Unpopular opinion

[mme_hardy]

It's a perfectly popular opinion! Feel free to disagree with me any time.

I felt the focus of the story was off. There were too many things in slo-mo (Sherlock walking over the bridge), and too many hammer-handed "I MADE A VOW" statements from Sherlock. I didn't feel the script was allowing me to figure things out for myself; for instance, there was an explicit "Thatcher now is like Napoleon then" aside that spoiled the fun of having said "Oh, this is 'The Six Napoleons'!" early on. Bullet Time was clumsily handled, because the bullet was a quarter of the way to Sherlock before Mary started moving, making it obvious she wouldn't have gotten there in time. Mary took too long dying -- again, very Victorian, but IMHO her dying words weren't well-written or moving.

Good Sherlock episodes, I'm laughing at delight at how clever it is, and how clever I am for realizing how clever it is. This one was, to me, painfully on-the-nose. If it had been more adroit, I think I'd have been moved by Mary's sacrifice; instead, I felt that the script was pulling on strings that are long worn-out for me. (Block that metaphor.)

Re: Unpopular opinion

[legionseagle]

I don't disagree about the bullet, but I didn't find the rest irritating. I think I am absolutely the target audience for this, though, because what we've got from my perspective is something that pretends it's going to be the Six Napoleons and in fact turns into a version of The Sign of the Four which explores the moral complexity behind the Agra treasure -- and the theme of betrayal, specifically the betrayals rooted in an imperial/colonialist mentality (hence the brilliance of casting Sacha Dhawan as Ajay) while still keeping a lot of the essential elements of the plot (including the dog, Toby, being baffled by too much blood, which does happen in the book, and Holmes goes to great lengths to explain that it isn't Toby's fault.)

But I do think you're being horribly unfair to Molly. There is absolutely no canonical evidence that she's given up her day full-time* job to look after the baby (and John does have a job; it's where he's commuting to and from on the bus) rather than simply helping out as a godparent with a recently bereaved parent. It shows that no female character should ever be shown holding a baby, because no matter what she's been up to over the previous three series (which included twice holding Sherlock publicly to account over his deplorable behaviour, splitting up with Moriarty and surviving, and faking Sherlock's death, as well as the absolutely wonderful "What could possibly go wrong?" scene with the brain in His Last Vow) if a woman's once seen holding a baby, no-one will see her in any other light.

*Actually, I've recalled that at least some of the time Molly works nights. Which may make it an imposition for her to look after a very young baby during the day, but was as a matter of fact the way my parents managed childcare. Let us hope it's not a long term arrangement, and/or she's taken some of her annual leave to help out while something more permanent can be arranged.

Re: Unpopular opinion

[mme_hardy]

But Molly isn't just holding the baby. Watson has moved in with her. As far as I remember, *Watson* has never been particularly close to her; it's Sherlock who had the conflicting and interesting relationship. Yes, again, she was a godparent, but that move-in came out of the blue relative to Watson's and Molly's previous relationship. Again, to me, she's been shoehorned into the "taking care of baby [with bonus dad]" role when there's no previous evidence to support it.

Re the whole refrigerator thing, I think where we differ is that I don't think Mary's death made any sense as an extension of her previous profession. Yes, multiple people including Mary said that her past would eventually catch up with her. It would have made perfect sense in that light if Ajay had killed her. It makes no thematic sense that she dies because Sherlock spends forever grandstanding. She didn't die because of her past; she died because Sherlock was a moron and she chose to save him from the consequences of that moronitude. Yes, she was there because the nonentity was trying to kill her, but the entire confrontation with the nonentity is Sherlock's, not hers.

The plot thread of "Sherlock's cockiness catches up with him" is organic; the plot thread of "Mary's past catches up with her" was not consistent.

I talked to my husband this morning, and he said "I'd have liked it a lot better if there were a lot less of it", which is a pretty good summary of what annoyed me overall. There were too many plot beats that felt stretched, as opposed to the usual feeling of "I need to rewatch this to pick up what I missed."

[lilysea]

Oh, for fuck's sake. :(

I have enjoyed past episodes of Sherlock (not the episode you're describing, I haven't seen that), but reading your summary makes me feel that no thank you, I don't want to watch any *more* Sherlock...

[mme_hardy]

There will very probably be good Sherlock episodes in the future, but this sure wasn't one of them.

[jayblanc.livejournal.com]

I'm basically done with Moffat "Event Television" because this isn't the first time he's pulled this. And there's already entertainment news articles giving the reason why "they *had* to do this".

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Of course there are. It's not as if they *wrote in* a character who distorts the focus, thus requiring them to kill that character.

[sabotabby]

I just watched it last night and grr. The boy and I started it and we were like, "what are people complaining about, this is a cool case." Then he fell asleep and I had to watch the stupid sexist fridging CGI overdose all by my lonesome, with no one to complain about it to.

I'm actually fine with them killing Mary because canon, but they could have done it in about a million other ways that were less stupid. And giving the plot tumour to Molly at the end because she's oh-so-maternal and then Sherlock walks right into a swirly CGI with a voiceover and it was everything I hate.

Now I get to hatewatch the rest of the season.