Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here's Why

You already know who Sherlock Holmes is, he is one of the most famous characters in the entire Western Canon. He appeared in dozens and dozens and dozens of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories from 1891 to 1927. He is a major pop cultural icon and a pivotal figure in the crime and mystery fiction genres that have continued to this day, the character has been adapted, reimagined and referenced more than any other fictional character, except, of course, Jesus Christ, the characters are so instantly recognizable that if you tie a hat, a coat and a pipe to a teddy bear and place it in the shop window your store.

People will come in asking how many thousands of pounds they can give you for Sherlock Bear. Three. Three thousand pounds. T

here

are many direct film adaptations, including two funny butts made by Guy Ritchie precisely. T

here

are a lot of old movie series and there are a lot of famous actors who have had the opportunity to play him. There are multiple different television versions, an animated series set in the 22nd century where it was frozen for hundreds of years. And also Watson is a robot for some reason and the Canadian children's television series starring Sherlock's great-granddaughter Shirley Holmes.

Those last two are canon, I can prove it, and there are perhaps countless books that feature movies and other properties directly inspired or based on the stories and characters. One of the most obvious investments in recent history is House M.D. A show I've seen several times starring 'Huge Lorry' as Dr. House and Robert Sean Leonard as Dr. James Wilson. That and my God. We haven't even talked about the anime adaptations. You. Let's not do that. Then there are the recent and still active television adaptations. Elementary has a police procedural tone which is appropriate because that type of story is arguably a natural descendant of the original genre, and is set in the US this time with Dr.

Joan. Watson played by Lucy Liu, and he's pretty good. It's not as good as House but it's a well put together and very comfortable show, and then there's Sherlock. Sherlock is a pile of overproduced, overwritten, angry

garbage

and the biggest reason ever invented to avoid paying a TV license fee. But what's wrong with it? And why do so many people like it? Or rather, why did so many people think they liked it until the fourth season came out and everyone collectively realized it was bad and always had been why did that happen? These questions and more will be answered over the course of this primal hallucinatory nightmare. bad video essay And I hope I can adequately explain why the show is such a horrible travesty and just to make it clear in advance that I will do so without purposely messing up Benedict Cumberbatch's name for a lazy, overused joke, not even a time.

I'll do it once Benedict Cumber-BAD Okay, now it's out of my system. This is not just the story of a bad show, but the story of the life and times of its head writer, Stephen William Moffat. Moffat was spat out of a hole in the ground in Paisley in 1961 with the simple mission of systematically destroying all of English pop culture and no one's stopped him yet, okay? That is not fair. Moffat is a staple of modern English pop culture and has written or been involved in a couple of really good shows in his lifetime, including 'Coupling', one of the most experimental, creative and genuinely funny romantic comedies ever made.

It's loosely based on how he met his wife, who incidentally produced the show, which is probably why he had so much creative freedom. Although it does raise some questions about how isolated the BBC's senior production staff have become. I'm sure that won't come up again later, after that, during the reboot of Doctor Who, perhaps the only other staple of British pop culture as iconic as Sherlock Holmes, Moffat appeared and wrote numerous really good episodes that are loved Giving him. massive critical acclaim and earned him, among other things, a Hugo Award and a Bafta. If you don't know what those awards are or what they mean, that's okay.

Nobody does it. He has been a lifelong Doctor Who fan and in 1999 he even wrote the Doctor Who parody episode 'The Curse of the Fatal Death'. "Why do you have chairs on a Dalek spaceship?" "We'll explain later..." special is one of the best contributions to the series and in some ways even more progressive than the real Doctor Who managed to be. It ends with the doctor regenerating into a Scandalous woman. Now there's a guy who should direct Doctor Who, they collectively said out loud. His writing is terrifying and dramatic. He has real comedic chops established both inside and outside of the science fiction genre.

I could even, you know, have there be a doctor who isn't played by a man. You know, maybe and in a television miracle the likes of which have not been seen before or since in science fiction. When Rusty Davies quit a showrunner, what fans wanted was Oops. Some of the good aspects of Moffat's writing remain. But overall, the show is missing something with him in the driver's seat, a lot of problems, but the main guy next to him doesn't do the one thing he really should have done both times. and Soon they will be three years old, the doctor has regenerated under his supervision.

The thing is that the program is now totally dedicated to the Doctor's personality. Previously, the Doctor was the main character, and he was very important to the story of the canon that he had existed with for a long time. And he knows the universe almost unexpectedly. He has dabbled in events so often that writers have played this into both of them. for drama and comedy "Sonic Blaster, 51st Century. Villengard Weapons Factories." "Have you been to the factories?" "Once." "Well, they're gone, they're destroyed. The main reactor went critical and vaporized everything." "Like I said, once." By the way, that's from the first episode Moffat did.

But ultimately he was just a guy with his own personality and problems who liked to have adventures and he was one piece of the puzzle of each episode's story. Moffat's version of the show positions the Doctor as the centerpiece of the puzzle to complete the universe with an army of secret societies willing to personally destroy the Doctor because he is the most important person of all time, special and amazing. "He has walked this universe for countless centuries. He has seen stars turn to dust." The first episode written by Moffat with himself as showrunner ends with the doctor winning by telling the villains how great, important and special he is and the speech scares them.

It's about the Doctor. Rather than the stories the Doctor interacts with, the lesson here is that Moffat is a decent writer. He's capable of being great at times, but a terrible showrunner because he believes his own hype. He's very good at hinting that something clever or profound is happening and throwing good details about the Doctor's history into the mix, like the weapons factory thing, but he's not actually very good at doing these things that are referenced and a A story that consists entirely of a man running around implying that he used to do interesting things is a bad story.

Moffat simply doesn't write in the way necessary for the pacing and execution of an entire television series. Which brings us to the problem of him being able to do that with Sherlock. What made the original story so popular was the fact that they were independent. Aside from a few scant references to other events or the year in which the story takes place, nothing connects the Sherlock Holmes stories to each other as a singular narrative. Besides that, Holmes and Watson don't change much as people over the course of all those stories. This was enormously beneficial to the impact of the work because it meant that, although there were tons of stories, a person could get a complete narrative without the idea that he was missing out on too many if he read one of them.

It also meant that since there was no larger overarching plot that had to be served by each individual story, everyone had their own space to breathe. If all the dozens of stories had been intertwined with each other, people would have been confused and bored. And it wouldn't have been as impactful as getting a series of complete short stories that were satisfying on their own. This format survives in many adaptations of the series. , for example, do not join together even if there are 14 of them. You can watch Sherlock Holmes and 'The Pearl of Death', a personal favorite, and you will never need to see any of the others to know what is happening or to feel satisfied and even in ' Elementary' or 'House' while there are narratives running.

Throughout the series, most episodes deal with their own particular mystery and do not have to be interconnected. So even when you tune in to a random episode you feel like you have a complete story. I think it's fair to say the episodic nature of Sherlock Holmes is key to his appeal and should remain in any adaptation. Sherlock takes the central concept of the Sherlock Holmes narrative and why it works, crumples it up, hides it in one of the six busts of Napoleon, and then uses them as clubs to kill baby seals. It opens with Watson's experiences that left him scarred and the murders that groomed that episode's killer.

Look, it starts with Watson because historically, Watson is the point of view from which the audience experiences Holmes. Watson is who we really identify with. We must first understand Watson to understand Holmes. Remember that because this is the last time it happens on Sherlock. So, Watson meets Holmes. he comes with him on a case, they start bonding and almost the entire episode focuses on solving the crime. Do you know the fun mystery story? Well... More or less, about 30 minutes in Watson are taken out of the story to meet Sherlock's brother, Mycroft. Played by Mark Gatiss, one of the other two writers on Moffat's show.

They take time to pay attention and stray away from the plot of the episode in question just to let you know as quickly as possible that Sherlock has a brother who is around and who does things. He keeps showing up just to let you know that he exists, and he's aware of what's going on. But other than that, he spends almost a full hour trying to solve the crime. The first two episodes are probably the closest the show gets to being good because there are so many long stretches where the characters try to use deductive reasoning to figure it out. a mystery.

It's still bullshit for reasons we'll see later, but it's the least bullshit we're going to get and that makes it worthy of a fucking award. But then this happens: the killer, the taxi driver, shows up at Sherlock's house for unknown reasons, and then he just gets in the taxi... She then takes him to an abandoned building and they play mind games while he explains that he knows about Sherlock because Moriarty pays him every time he kills someone and also tells him about Sherlock because Moriarty knows about Sherlock and is a fan of his. " How did you find me?" "I was warned about you." "Who warned you about me?" "There is someone out there who has noticed." "Who would notice me?" "Get yourself a fan." "I want a name." "MORIARTY" Wait, what- what- what- what?

This. (I'm banging on my table.) This is where the problems begin. Right here. Everything in the show's universe exists to set up the inevitable confrontation between Sherlock and Moriarty. Who already knows Sherlock and is playing with him for fun from day one. It wasn't enough to have a one-off murder mystery where Sherlock figures out who the killer is and sets a good tone and then maybe have him show up in the future to deal with him. The same thing happens again with the second episode. It starts off on the right foot with the opening setting up the characters of that episode, but then at the end we get this scene where it turns out the villain is also working for Moriarty and gets her killed.

Again, this is completely unnecessary. Not all the bad guys in the world have to work for Moriarty. This for me relates two things. One: lack of understanding of what makes the source material work. And two: the creator's lack of faith in his own material. The creators have taken a series of stories made famous in the first place by the fundamental fact that you can read them in any order and turned them into a continuous work, representing a grand battle royale in which most of the pieces that you see they don't appear. they really have some influence on this broader issue.

None of these people matter, this guy doesn't matter. It's about Sherlock and Moriarty fucking each other. Sometimes in the books, Sherlock would just help a couple of people out of a jam and that was enough. Adding this big, important plan undermines investment in the real stories. 'A scandal in Bohemia.' He wasn't going to get any better by being part of a long, magical, mental intellectual battle between Sherlock and a gay supervillain. So Arthur Conan Doyle didn't bother and focused on telling one of the most popular and compelling mystery stories in the entire fucking Western Canon.

However, Moffat seemed to have other plans. The worst thing is that at some point Moffat understood this. The pilot does notSherlock's broadcast is a version of the first episode in which Mycroft is not shoehorned in and the villain is not financed or informed by a Moriarty who already knows about Sherlock. The resulting story is much stronger because you get the entire episode dedicated to setting up Sherlock and Watson's dynamic much better than when you're too busy with everything else, and the actual crime they're solving isn't undermined by it already being all about Moriarty and whatever he's doing.

It gives the motivations and intentions of the episode's villain had to wait longer. In the pilot, Sherlock jokingly trying to be clever manages to get caught by the taxi driver, who realizes he's been caught and drugs him. You even get an interesting exchange that sets up Sherlock's previous drug problems. "Do you do a lot of drugs, Sherlock Holmes?" "Not for a while." "I'm asking because you're so resilient... Most people would have fainted by now." This is much better for setting up Sherlock's drug stuff than having the cops in this place looking for drugs and mentioning that he used to have a problem and then walking out and getting in the taxi?

It's like a fucking crazy Chinese phone-in version of the pilot's plot. It's so stupid. One thing to note about the pilot is that it's only an hour long. I have a theory that almost any story could be improved if, once the creator comes to you and tells you that he thinks it's done, you force him to cut out maybe 10 or 15 percent. He forces them to reevaluate the importance of what's on the screen and eliminate indulgences that don't really add anything. For example, this section of the script begins with a 10-minute ramble on the importance of original stories.

But then I decided to rewrite that part to be a tenth the length and it turned out to be much better. The pilot seems to demonstrate that this happens the other way around. Where the entire show was given an extra half hour, so they thought, 'Oh, cool, that gives us time to insert the show's character co-writer early and have an intrigue that goes nowhere because it turns out to be, like, just a normal guy who is worried about his brother and also connects a nice, simple first story to Moriarty, for no reason. I'll restate my earlier point here that Moffat is a decent writer who would be best used in one-off episodes with strong direction and oversight from others.

And not directly in charge of directing an entire show based on one of the best-known properties in British history. Like in Doctor Who or Sh--...Jekyll! Oh, you thought I'd forgotten about Jekyll, didn't you, Steve? Well, I can't blame you, most people have. 'Jekyll' is an adaptation/sequel to 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'. made in 2007 with Moffat writing everything and executive produced by Moffat, Catherine Mitchell and Moffat's mother-in-law. Dr.Jekyll, Mr.Hyde is behind Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes. Maybe the other really important English pop cultural figure we have... Can we... can we stop giving him this, please?

It's six episodes and it's pretty bad. It's very bad in some places and surprisingly good in others, but it suffers from the same problems as Moffat's work on Doctor Who and Sherlock, so it's worth mentioning as an example of the broader problems with Moffat's writing. The most notable and informative thing about the program is its pacing. The show starts off strong with Dr. Jackman aware that he has a condition in which he manifests a very strong and dangerous personality and working to control it. We opened 'in media res' with someone else knowing his techniques. When I first watched the show, I couldn't be happier that Moffat hadn't written the previous three episodes of the plot he could have written leading up to this room, showing Jackman getting his condition, becoming aware of it, and working to try to find a solution. way to avoid it.

Finding out exactly how the transformation works and the state of his and the people in it's life over the course of the first episode is great? Excluding the poor writing and editing in some places. But it ends super strong with the viewer interested in what happens next, when Hyde finds out that Jackman has a family that he's been hiding from him and Jackman gets pretty angry about it. "Go back to my family and you and I will be at war." He is a good pilot and sells you very well on the story and the conceit of the transformation.

The first episode is clever in places, like when Hyde initially didn't have a name and decided to call himself Billy after kicking a guy's ass and deciding to literally take his name. He then becomes more intriguing when he meets someone who addresses him as Mr. Hyde and openly refers to the true story the show is based on. It's a clever twist. You started out thinking the show was a modern reimagining of the story, but then it turns out that no, the original book still exists. It's really entertaining to watch the gears turn the narrative and do unexpected things like that.

But after the first episode, the show immediately starts to fall apart. It turns out that the Jekyll of the original stories was a real person who also existed and had the same condition as Jackman and they also look exactly like each other. There is also a secret organization bent on converting Super Soldiers from Hyde's advanced physiology. A mystery about how Jackman came to be, because Jekyll died a virgin. Henry Jekyll died vir- Henry Jekyll had no heirs- do you understand? An unrelated mystery about human cloning that comes out of nowhere and, by the way, is not the resolution of why Jackman exists and it looks exactly like the Jekyll plot because Moffat felt like being clever.

Hyde starts yelling "Why am I not a Superman?" like a little baby and Jackman and Hyde merged their personalities and all the electricity goes out and he has mental powers and... Oh, for some reason, a bunch of characters and lines that could have been completely ripped out of coupling start appearing in this. Horror drama in four episodes. But the show even commits, in my opinion, based on what I liked about it, the cardinal sin of showing backstory. The fourth episode is almost entirely long flashbacks showing Jackman acquiring the condition and beginning to figure it out and figuring out how to manage it.

That's right, Moffat begins, in medias res, cleverly skipping over explaining an origin story, which isn't necessary to get to the interesting parts that take place in the first episode, and then explaining it again. The show ends with Jackman's mother, who has appeared intermittently, suddenly transforming into the lady who runs the organization, who is trying to study Hyde. It's a twist meant to set up a second series and its own deeper mysteries or whatever, but the show was canceled so we'll never know what happens next. Why Jackman's mother's alter ego was trying to study Hyde in the first place, given that she could have studied herself.

Why Jekyll is so important or how the company became so big, rich and powerful over the course of 100 years when it is run by a woman who couldn't have existed for more than 60 of them and it was revealed that all of her money had come from from the study of imperfect Jekyll clones and their cloning was only achieved in the 1950s, so how did they obtain the riches necessary to learn how to clone humans before then? And it turns out that love is what made Jekyll become Hyde in the first place because there's no potion. So they even ruined the premise of the original fucking book!

Most importantly, the keyword you would associate with Jekyll is promise. Jekyll has, for all its flaws, a very solid pilot episode, and honestly, Moffat should just write pilots for the rest of his life and then hand the rest of the series over to other writers to play with the interesting ideas he has. poses and then abandons while trying to be clever or mock the source material. Moffat desperately needs people to take his wrists off the keyboard when he decides to write a backstory episode for a show he started strong specifically by not having any. So we are left with two pilots written by Moffat that promise some really interesting and good shows and work, basically on their own level.

But the actual programs in question don't live up to any of those ideas. Also, I have to mention this. The editing of the program is quite bad. But it's clear that the editors were given very little to work with. Most of the fights happen off screen. Here's the scene where Hyde throws a guy out the window. "Health." They play a sound effect of glass breaking, before cutting, and then he is seen getting up from the ground. They just didn't film the profitable take of this scene, in which the guy gets thrown out the window. The editor had to stretch the shots he had a lot for the scene to have any continuity and you can almost feel the editor's anger toward the fact that he decided not to film most of the interesting events called for in the script.

By far the funniest part of the show is this outtake left by an editor where no one seemed to notice where Hyde uses his superpower to pull out a book of matches and light one out of nowhere. But, Nesbitt accidentally throws the entire package directly into his face. and his eyes. They try to cut, but the only thing they can cut is this other angle where he does the same thing. It's like wow. Do you have any ideas where he doesn't throw the matches in his face? No?...Oh, well... Oh, well, then I have to get on with this!

Actually, considering the way much of the show plays out and the lack of coverage everywhere else, I'm willing to bet they didn't even film a second take. I've spent so much time working on Jekyll Well, partly because I watched 6 hours preparing for this video and wanted to justify the lost time. But also because it's very much a model for many of the mistakes in Sherlock's writing. What Moffat really does well is telling unique stories that have to begin and then end conclusively. because you will never see most of these characters or even this planet again. You can't just set up the next season with a trite cliffhanger or whatever you have to end the story satisfactorily. "It takes a big strong idea every week." "I think you know you have a good idea for a Doctor Who story, if you think about it, I've wasted that feature film idea forever, haven't I?" "Good." "That's the size of the story that gets you through 45 minutes of Doctor Who." Compare and contrast the writing of this scene from 'The Empty Child' in the first season.

The Doctor follows a mysterious mauve object through time as it crashes on Earth and, assuming it would have made an impression, decides to ask the locals if they have seen anything fall from the sky. "It may seem like a stupid question, but has anything fallen from the sky recently?" That's a strange answer. He doesn't understand it and neither do you. What is happening? And then an air raid siren goes off and you see the war signs and you go 'Ahhh...' 'So it's war...' This is a clever and simple setup and reveal. Throughout the episode and the second part, we learn what the ship was, what it does, what happened in London and at the end of these two episodes you have a complete picture of what happened and why.

Plus, the nanomachines turn a guy's face into a gas mask, and it's the scariest thing anyone my age has ever seen in his entire life. There's good writing here and a good story with a conclusion that feels earned. Moffat is supposedly famous for writing the darkest episodes, but at the end of this one, everyone who has died comes back to life. "Everyone lives, Rose." "Just this time." "Everyone lives!" For example, it disheartens people and yet the tone conveys it. It makes it feel dark even then. That's how good he is when he's given just one story to tell. "Very well, there is much to do.

Defeat the Germans, save the world. Don't forget the welfare state." But when Moffat has to write the entire series and manage the broader progression, you start to see holes. Things begin to be hinted at that sound profound, that seem to be going somewhere, but in reality they are not. His first season begins when the Doctor finds a crack in space and time in the bedroom wall of a girl he meets. And then the cracks keep appearing and a piece of Tardis comes out through one. Where did the cracks come from? He keeps looking and maybe you'll find out.

Then it turns out that they come from the explosion of the Tardis at the end of the season. But why did the Tardis explode? Keep looking and maybe you'll find out. Oh, the silence... Did it? Maybe? I'm still not sure why they did it? Well, keep looking and maybe you'll find out. Oh, they did it because there is a prophecy that silence must fall when the question is asked. Who made this prophecy what the hell does it mean? Keep watching another fucking season and maybe I... It also looks like Moffat really used all the cinematic ideas of his because he brings back the Weeping Angels for atwo-part episode and then they come back later, even longer.

In the first series, which is still my favorite, they made the Doctor do some shit. For example, torturing a Dalek would have to face that episode and improve as a person. Say what you want about Russell T Davies, but under his watch almost every episode would feel complicated because the characters would change or grow or have to confront and deal with something about themselves. "Why don't you finish the job and extinguish the Daleks? Rid the Universe of your filth." "Why do not you die!?" "You'd Make a Good Dalek" This episode explores the Doctor's anger towards the Daleks and shows that it is an expression of seeing his entire race die in a war with them.

Over the course of this episode, he has to face these feelings in ways he hasn't allowed himself to and grow as a person. It's a really small change, but we can see it happening and it's good. In contrast, here's a superficially similar scene in a Moffat season in an episode co-written by Moffat. "You're a good Dalek." This happens at the end of an episode. The purpose of this scene is to tell you that the Doctor is full of hate. Not so we can deal with that hate that's there in the actual story of the episode or explore these emotions in more detail, but so you watch the next episode to see if they'll eventually deal with the interesting thing they mentioned and did nothing about . "I see into his soul, doctor." "I see hate." 'Oh, I've looked into his soul, I see hatred Doctor.' I hate, that a future episode could eventually deal with and be interesting... "Do you have it in you to murder me?" "Did he push you off that thing?..." "Or did you fall?...

I can't really tell." "Sometimes it can be very bad." We get it, the Doctor is an ambiguous character now. Are you going to explore that in more detail or just keep telling us about it? Despite all of his flaws, Davies attempted to make each episode have a complete and satisfying story and arc for his characters. "I'm the only one left." "I win." "What about that?" Moffat, as Showrunner, tries to make each episode imply that something satisfying will eventually happen. You can have all the fantasy premises you want: shrinking into a Dalek to perform surgery, sword fighting Robin Hood with a spoon, having to go to a space bank with strangers, whatever.

But if most of the time the conclusion is, "Wow, you've got some anger going on, Doc, I bet in a future episode you could bother to deal with that." Those episodes are wasting a lot of their potential. Again, this is something Moffat captured excellently when he was writing one-off episodes. 'Blink' starred characters that had never been seen before and haven't been seen since, but has a full emotional arc for its main characters over the course of one episode. It doesn't end with someone saying, "Wow, you have problems that you should probably deal with at some point." Tune in next week to see if we make it...' The problem is when you get to the Doctor, it's all about visiting other worlds and having fun adventures.

Moffat did everything on 'The Doctor'. In the same way, Sherlock Holmes stories are about solving fun crimes and mysteries and discovering things through deductive reasoning. Moffat made his show focus exclusively on Sherlock. Sherlock is too important, too special, too powerful, and this ruins the tension of the show and our ability to empathize with the character. The entire show is dedicated to telling you about Sherlock rather than showing you Sherlock through his interaction with the actual plot. Season 1 was the only season that came close to getting it right. Where you learned what kind of person he was and his abilities based on how he used them in the episode.

As the show progresses, the real mystery: You know the crimes we're supposed to have fun watching Sherlock solve? He takes a backseat to the show and tells us how cool and crazy Sherlock is and his mental battle with Moriarty. In this season three episode there's a great setup just for Sherlock to be weird. They spend a pretty sizable chunk of the runtime and budget on a quick joke about how rude and thoughtless Sherlock is, while Lestrade prepares to capture someone who's clearly been a problem with him for a long time. "I-I-I... I have to go." "Do you know any funny stories about John?" They could have made him rude and thoughtless during the course of the damn episode's plot.

The punchline of these jokes is supposed to establish something about the main characters. But they do it so badly and in such an indirect way that they are neither funny nor tell us anything new. We should already know that Sherlock is a big, inconsiderate piece of shit because Moffat has been writing him as such for three seasons at this point. This kind of overindulgent nonsense is the antithesis of telling an interesting story. Nothing remotely like that would have happened in the stories because they actually had a story worth telling and they wanted to get to it.

Taken together, things like this reduce the entire show to Sherlock cavorting around showing how smart or rude he is and very occasionally pausing to do something. "I will be hanged for this." "No no not at all." "Hanged... Yes." Sherlock corrects a guy's grammar a lot during the first two minutes of this episode and then walks away. This serves no purpose to the story except to tell us that Sherlock doesn't like it when you say the wrong words. Do you know an admirable character trait? Obviously, screw that guy, he deserves to die even if he didn't commit the murder.

But it's not really something important enough to be the beginning of an episode. It's a show about solving crimes, the episode should start with a... Crime. Something happens to pique your interest like the first two episodes did, but by the time of the third episode we open with Sherlock being a shit, walking out dramatically and the credits roll and then we cut to Sherlock being a shit in his house for another three. minutes "There's a head..." Ooh, there's a head in the refrigerator... Crazy! The actual beginning of the fucking plot of the episode is around the 6 minute and 20 second mark, when suddenly someone attacks the house out of nowhere with a bomb.

All it leads to is Sherlock being bored and smarmy and literally waiting for the plot to come looking for him, now that this characterization isn't entirely terrible. We get a strong feeling that Sherlock is an idiot. But the problem with this is that, in effect, the entire show is geared towards providing characterization for Sherlock and making the story he interacts with take a back seat until it's convenient. In the real books and in many of the adaptations, Sherlock Holmes was not the true focal point, the mystery at hand and the other characters were equally important and the point was the way Sherlock interacted with them to help solve the case.

Take the first story, 'A Study in Scarlet'. Sherlock, while examining the body, refers to pre-existing events that he has clearly studied and actively recommends that others do the same. Instead of simply telling everyone how smart he is, he makes a tangible reference to a piece of information that might be relevant; we're seeing his reasoning in action. We're also getting some strong characterization as the plot progresses with Sherlock checking the body. and make comments. That teaches you about Sherlock and about the case. Characterization and story happen at the same time and not in separate segments for the first six minutes before the story decides to begin.

Lestrade assumes that R-A-C-H-E written in blood on a wall means that Rachel and the killer were disturbed before they could finish writing and therefore someone named Rachel has something to do with the case. That's all you get out of this scene, the assumption that these words could be Rachel saying. What it turns out is that Sherlock doesn't watch this scene and deduce, for example, the approximate height of the person who wrote the message based on where it made sense for him to write the letter. Something no one else in the room thought to observe or consider, but something you can absolutely come to on your own.

This is tangible information that you yourself could apply to real life. Sherlock just taught you how to calculate how tall someone is based on how they would naturally write on a wall or the stride length of their footprints. This characterization is very strong because it conveys that Sherlock is intelligent but also why he is intelligent: what he did to learn the things he learned and managed to convey the objective of the scene which is to demonstrate his use of analytical techniques. For comparison, there is a scene in the first episode of Sherlock, 'A Study in Pink'.

Oh, do you understand? Very clever. Where Sherlock goes to a crime scene clearly based on 'Scarlet'. Rache here is written by the victim and it actually turns out that she is actually trying to spell the name Rachel, because I guess knowing German is too much to expect from an audience. This is not necessarily a bad change. What is a bad change is what information Sherlock learns and how he learns it. We are shown Sherlock inspecting the body and instead concludes, based on the inside of a dirty wedding ring being clean, that the woman is a serial adulteress.

This doesn't really have much impact on the story. It's just the writers finding a way to be clever by having Sherlock get a full sexual story out of a ring. He then notices something that no one else notices and runs away screaming dramatically. "Pink!" This is tonally incorrect. Instead of getting tangible explanations and the intrigue that comes with deciding what to do next with the information to catch the killer, you're told to assume that someone's marriage is failing because their ring is dirty and that Sherlock knows something you don't. and he just ran off to take care of it himself.

The tone here is one of utter confusion. Sherlock is smart because he discovered something, but we're not going to say what, how or why. By contrast, the first time we see Sherlock from CBS' 'Elementary' at a crime scene, he discovers a hidden room by feeling the slope of the floor with his feet. "The extra weight of a safe room's steel reinforcements can cause the ground around it to tilt slightly, creating... a slope of between 1 and 5 degrees." This with the marble is clever and based on fairly simple available information, such as that large armored panic rooms are heavy.

It's not rocket science, but it's a credible deduction. And it taught you a real way to find hidden panic rooms. The show may not be perfect, but at least they solve crimes using the information they detected. How would detectives do it? This opening scene is the best analysis of the show you'll get, too. You are shown pieces of information that lead you to a conclusion. For example, he recognizes that she would have had to carry a suitcase with her, due to the splatter marks that the viewer even shows and is given a chance to discover for themselves before Sherlock explains it. but in most of the investigations after this, Sherlock starts making wild assumptions that have no basis in reality or directly learns key information that isn't even told to the viewer.

In episode two, Sherlock assumes that a man found with a gunshot wound to the right side of his head could not have self-inflicted because he was left-handed. "The wound is on the right side of his head." "AND?" "Van Coon was left-handed..." "It requires a bit of contortion..." This is not even a solid assumption, in practice many left-handers use their other hand to fire weapons so that the recoil of the weapon does not potentially damage the hand you use to write, including, for example, John Watson Bing. In episode 3, Sherlock has to discover how a television personality was poisoned.

He sends Watson to the lady's house and we get scenes of him checking things out and Sherlock starts watching some episodes and looking up theories on the internet. The characters meet and Sherlock simply throws the boy out of the house, who is in a relationship with the lady's brother, probably poisoning her in revenge for her mistreatment of the brother on TV based on all the research he did off screen. . All we see from this investigation is her patting him on the back too hard. Sherlock tests this theory by receiving a toxicology report showing that it was botulinum toxin and that the house boy's job was to give him botox and that he knows. he has been ordering it in bulk. "My contact at the Ministry of the Interior.

He gave me the complete records of Raúl's Internet purchases." "He has been ordering Botox in large quantities for months, biding his time and then increasing the potency to a fatal dose." That's right on a show about solving crimes and giving the viewer a sense of a developing mystery and maybe giving them some information so they can try to solve it for themselves as they go, so you know the brain is busy. Sherlock solves the crime off-screen using information that the viewer has never been shown or even has the knowledge of.opportunity to deduce for yourself.

He just comes out of nowhere and reveals that it was botox and that he has a friend with the power to discover people's purchases on the internet and share them with him. The ability to be clever at finding and interpreting the information available is replaced with a superpower where he holds all the cards and knows more than the viewer could offer, providing the experience of trying to follow the story. Pretty much similar to trying to figure out where a car is. Driving while you have a bag over your head and Steven Moffat hits you and insists that he's being clever.

In this same episode based on the discovery of a guard working in a gallery dead? He immediately jumps to the conclusion that a recent painting discovered there has to be fake because otherwise why would anyone be murdered? And then he concludes based on... circumstantial evidence that a well-known legendary hitman we've never heard of before must have done it. "One of the deadliest killers in the world. That's his signature style." And then someone off screen finds out where he is and then they go to where he is. "Do you ever want to explain to me?" "The homeless network is really indispensable." Like everything, deduction and thinking are not done in a way that is truly interesting or fun for the viewer.

How could a person track down this hitman? How would you know where he is? That's an interesting story. They skip it. Sherlock literally hires someone else to do it. And they do all this so that Sherlock and Watson have an excuse to run around chasing a really tall guy and then fight him, you know, yes, the original stories were fantastic, innovative pieces of literature about solving mysteries, but what really they could do. What I finished was a part where the main characters fight a tall guy for a while. I will say again, the show starts off better and much of the first season features some genuine deductions based on information the viewer was also shown, but you can see the slippage starting to happen here.

The deductive reasoning that would be central to a superior show is replaced with a magic trick where they then tell you how smart Sherlock was and then tell you all the other things you didn't even know that led to that. In 'The Hounds of Baskervilles', Sherlock intentionally tries to drug Watson with what he believes is sugar to which a hallucinogen has been added. Based on the fact that he believes they drugged him and it is the only thing they both did not consume. the fact that it is the only thing they have not eaten or drunk is not established until Watson is given the sugar and begins to hallucinate.

The purpose of this part seems to be to make Sherlock look smart for knowing something we didn't even know. we have the opportunity to think for ourselves. Also, he could have tested the sugar instead of trying to drug his friend with an unknown chemical to see what would happen and then testing it later only to find out that the sugar was clean. You can even imagine a better, smarter show having a section where the two stop and think about everything they ate, maybe even cutting out scenes of everything they ate that we already saw because they could have had scenes of them doing it like others.

Things happened and I eliminated everything except sugar, then I tested it in the lab and found out that it is normal. Instead, all this information is purposely removed so that you can understand the mystery. Oh! Of Sherlock perhaps drugging his only friend and taking up precious time while Watson hides in an imaginary dog's lab for a full five minutes. The story that would have made sense to tell is too normal for Moffat and Gatiss. The real focus is what wacky or cool things Sherlock will personally do and then how he will justify them later using nonsense rather than focusing on the evidence or information and the proper approach to finding it and acting on it.

This conveniently frees writers from having to deal with things like character traits, motivation, or choices. When you read a chapter of a Sherlock Holmes story you feel like you've gotten a little smarter; It's strange to say it out loud, but it's often as if you've personally seen the benefits of a certain way of seeing the world. Sherlock has the strongest characterization on the show, but it's effectively too strong, diverting attention from the things that actually make watching him do interesting things. Like the other characters and their lives and the mysteries he's solving. This is a gigantic problem in both storytelling and characterization.

Many of the original stories were only a few pages long, there wasn't enough time to mythologize what a badass Sherlock was, because there was a crime to solve. The show's 90-minute format apparently gives the creator too much time. Hell, the pilot was better because they didn't have those extra 30 minutes to shoehorn in Mycroft's stuff and then tie it all to Moriarty. Because why not make it all about him too? Speaking of which... If you thought the show's obsession with Sherlock was too much, wait until you meet Moriarty. Sherlock's entire world has been almost completely absorbed by the comprehensive plans of some guy who was in two of the many dozen original stories.

After being suddenly inserted into the first two episodes to let you know he's coming, then you have something to keep an eye on, because the writing and mystery solving certainly can't do that for you. Episode three has all the weird mind games explicitly for Moriarty's Sherlock. It's about a big smart Baddie who messes with Sherlock, but in a really boring way where he holds all the cards and Sherlock never outsmarts him, he just solves his puzzles, but he solves them off screen or using powers. mental magic, so it's a struggle. We didn't even get to see.

There's also the problem of him being relentlessly coded as queer. "Gay." "But the flirting's over, Sherlock. Dad's had enough..." Seriously, this guy is as fucking as it gets. "Do you like my boys? This one has more stamina but he's less affectionate after the glow." What are you doing, Andrés? Oh boy, do you get it? He is a queen. Oh, fuck you, Steve. From what I understand, he really likes Sherlock and the writers imply that this means he wants to screw him over, but like... Why? What does this add to the narrative? "Moriarty is usually a pretty boring and stylish villain, so we thought of someone who was genuinely terrifying, someone who was an absolute psychopath," Moffat said.

Alright. Number one, absolute psychopath? Make him act gay? Excellent. That's really comforting of you. Thank you. Hey, number two Moriarty: boring and fancy? One of the most memorable fucking characters in the history of literature? Oh yeah. He needs to be fixed. We need to turn him into the loudest, shoutiest, prancing, weirdest, most over-the-top guy ever. Just, you know, because we really needed to fix Moriar-You... Jesus Christ. "Moriarty is consciously a villain, he knows what he's doing. He's a madman." He knows what he's doing and he's crazy? Oh. Mark, those... Those things don't... See? He is an absolute psychopath, which means the creators can make him do anything, even contradictory things like threatening Sherlock to try to keep him away and doing everything they can to protect his identity and unnecessarily toying with Sherlock to the point of commit suicide. to mess with his head and they don't have to justify any of it because he 'he's a complete psychopath.' He doesn't have to make any sense.

We don't have to write a cohesive character. He's angry and that's it. That's all you'll get. Screw you...' At the end of the first season, at the beginning of the second, he threatens them, leaves and realizes he should probably kill them, comes back to do it, and then changes his mind again once the cliffhanger is over. at the beginning of the second season. What is the lesson? here? Also, why does he come back in? He could have just said, 'Hey snipers, kill him.' The villain is practically all-powerful, he doesn't kill Sherlock for the fun of messing with him, and Sherlock never takes advantage or surprises him because he's ridiculously smart.

This makes the conflict have no real weight for the viewer. and therefore renders him useless Moriarty always holds all the cards and knows more than Sherlock. "Boring..." "he could have gotten them anywhere." In the books, when searching for other criminals and of course Moriarty, Sherlock has to try very hard not to get killed, and in the original novel he literally does, because he and Moriarty end up shuffling over the Reichenbach Falls together. In this version, Moriarty literally doesn't want Sherlock to die, and doesn't really care about his criminal empire because he shoots himself in the head simply as a ploy to mess with him.

He's just fucking around with an incredibly cool intellect. Seemingly endless except literally his own, sometimes he's a pragmatic brain that will do anything to protect even the vaguest portion of his identity, like murder this lady or detonate the bombs on the old lady when she tries to tell Sherlock that it sounded good. "If you don't stop meddling..." "I'll burn you." "I will burn... until I take out your heart." Why not just burn it anyway? Why make this concession for the only man who really has a chance of ever getting you? Ohh.. Oh, because he's crazy, so we don't have to justify it.

He is crazy. The original Moriarty appears in two stories he is formidable and once Sherlock is dead for screwing him over and the two die in mortal combat trying to kill each other. , although it is eventually revealed that Sherlock survived after an entire decade in which readers were convinced he was dead. This Moriarty apparently runs all crimes everywhere, will do everything he can to protect Sherlock's identity, but is also so fascinated by Sherlock that he will literally kill himself to see what he will do, while the gays provoke him so that Tumblr will tell him give a little.

Shipping attention. Then, when Sherlock dies to stop his plans, ten minutes later it turns out that Sherlock isn't dead because the writers can't even trust you to wait until next season, because they're legitimately worried that you'll lose interest in this

garbage

. if the story seemed too conclusive. He commits suicide because I guess they wanted him to do something surprising? "For me, the most essential thing about Moriarty is that you don't know what you're going to find that day." "That he has to be completely amazing." So they made him do the stupidest thing possible? The only way this could be stupider is if, right before shooting himself in the head for no reason, he told Sherlock that he would come back for each subsequent season finale as an increasingly stupid, shitty phony.

Or that Sherlock has a secret sister, who he magically forgot about and also a secret old mega super double best friend who he remembers as a dog for some reason and who the sister killed. That would be really stupid wouldn't it? But Moriarty's poor characterization doesn't end there. After the big twist in season 2 that there is no secret, an all-powerful hacking technology. "No, no, no, no, no... This is too easy... This is too easy." "There's no key, you don't really think a couple lines of computer code are going to crash the world, do you? I'm disappointed...

I'm disappointed in you." Turns out it does exist, because this happens. They were worried that people would stop watching if there was no Moriarty to fight and they just killed off the other fairly well-known villain, so they had to make sure to imply that he would return because if everything doesn't tie back to Moriarty, there's basically nothing. story here. Actually, he doesn't come back either. This turns out to be just, I think this turns out to be a plot hole. Who did this in the end? Did someone who works for Moriarty do it? Did He arrange for this to happen long after his death?

Did Euro do it? After making everyone believe that he's coming back, and having an entire special dedicated to finding out that yes, he is dead, but he must have other plans in motion. It still turns out that it has nothing to do with him and the plot continues as if Moriarty were not present. Then, in the worst episode ever, it turns out that before he died, Moriarty met Sherlock's secret sister and provided her with video recordings to use in some dumb shit she does for him for no reason other than "she's crazy." Court! Very good, Steve, you got rid of having to characterize yet another villain.

At least it didn't make this one gay. Oh, and at the end of the show this happens, "Surprise." "You didn't think he'd just disappear, did you?" Now, whenever the show actually gets another season, teasing people with Moriarty's return once again, after all this time, establishing that he's definitely dead is an absolute pain in the ass. And I don't even want to know about a possible season 5, or what it would be like. Because I have no idea how the show could get any worse, so better. I'm going to move on. Another thing that Sherlock has is astyle problem.

It's clear that the production team were given a much higher budget than most British television usually receives and you can see why. Except Doctor Who, QI, British Bake Off, Come Dine with me and the legacy of colonialism. Britain has virtually no cultural exports left. So it makes sense that the BBC would invest heavily in the television adaptation of one of our most important cultural icons, so that people think we are still relevant as a nation. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anyone really knew what to do with that money, so... Consequently, the show is overproduced to the point that it's just in the way.

The show tries at all times to be the coolest and most important thing in the entire world. And you have the time and money to execute this, which is not necessarily a good thing. The most obvious way to do this is the text that appears every time Sherlock is doing magical mental powers on him or every time someone receives a message on his phone, appearing on-screen in a visual and engaging way. This makes sense and so do things like people moving through them erasing the images or doors closing and stuff. It's a nice edit and helps the scenes flow together more easily.

This is a big improvement over Jekyll, which seems to have been rushed and had. no budget So you get things like Hyde's super strength shown by having fast forward footage of James Nesbitt walking normally or this shot. You can see the bones of the style. Moffat and the Sherlock production team finally get the budget to actually make it. But it just doesn't work, Hyde is supposed to drink a lot of alcohol very quickly due to his advanced metabolism and his unexplained 'superpowers'. But he looks like a guy drinking quickly and the sound effects make him goofy.

A lot of the special effects in the scenes that are supposed to be scary are just dutch angles and shaky cam with low crank and weird filters. Sherlock's improved budget and production scope allows him to make versions of this without looking quite as terrible when Sherlock wears them. his mental powers because, let's be honest, that's basically what they are. The soundtrack swells and all sorts of cool sound effects are used to convey his raw attention. Here, for example, because he was scraping the floor with his nails when the text appears. You hear a nail scraping sound.

It gives the text a sound effect while being typed. It helps draw your attention to it, make it stand out. "Writing down the numbers. You yourself went over the last four digits with another pen, so you wanted to keep the number." "However, just now you used the napkin to blow your nose. Maybe you don't like it so much after all." They use pen drawings and snorting noises when talking about it and you can even see them animate the images as they happen. They do this because they think you are an idiot and don't understand what it means to write with a pen, so you need both visual and auditory cues.

This use of images and sound effects is very effective. It helps fool the viewer into believing that he is doing something more than watching Benedict Cumberbatch sitting in a chair and telling him things that he has noticed. In some ways, I wouldn't recommend analyzing this show too much. I should mention that paying attention to the sound and visuals makes the show's gimmick start to wear thin very quickly. "Do you like it?" "The wound was on the right side of his head." "The left one" "She used the ones on the left" "she picked it up with her right and wrote down messages with her left." "With butter on the right" "Only the shirt...and the pants." At its best, you get intense scenes that highlight Sherlock's level of thinking and you are drawn into his mind with these extreme close-ups and pauses, seeing the world as this mega genius sees it for brief moments.

And everything is very elegant. At worst, this style is either a stupid, pointless mess that ends up being unnecessary, or just a dumb, straight-up Bing! I swear to God, I didn't edit that. This tonally dissonant nightmare doesn't put us in Sherlock's mind or even show us a trace of thought from him. It's just text and images flying across the screen with strange sound effects. This is the kind of thing he would do for a quick joke, not for the dramatic investigation scene. The show is so dedicated to this over-the-top, amplified style that it applies it to places that are incredibly underserved by it.

My favorite examples are in the wedding episode. Firstly, you have this strange montage of Sherlock and Watson getting drunk. Featuring a fucking atrocious dubstep remix of the show's theme, with a blurry vignette over it because that's what alcohol does. Intersected with lightning-fast graphics of your night out. You're like, 'wait, I didn't even see that.' That? That? This is the most overproduced pub crawl in television history. But the best example is at the beginning of the episode, when the wedding photographer takes pictures of the gang. "Okay. Three... Two... One. Cheese!" The music swells, you get that frozen time effect and all that.

This shot was quite difficult to pull off. I know someone who worked on this episode. They had to build a giant rig with dozens of DSLRs, all in precise positions, angles and focal lengths. This is a great technique. Two of my favorite directors, the Wachowskis, pioneered The Matrix. In theory, this is a good set of shots, right? But there is a difference between theory and practice. What happens in these shots? How does the story progress? What action is exacerbated when executing the scene with this technique? They're some short, elaborate, expensive shots of people having their photo taken at a wedding.

The Wachowskis only used this technique in the most intense moments of some of the most dramatic and best-edited action scenes in film history. Where a single second decompressed, during a moment of life or death, has the maximum reward. I don't know which burk saw this scene and he thought, oh, let's do it, but in the scene where everyone is still. But whoever they were, they should have been fired. But I guess since the writers accidentally wrote an episode that consisted mostly of Sherlock farting at a wedding, I guess they decided they had to spend the budget on something.

Geez, I wonder who produced this sho-- Oh... Is this an intentional reference to The Matrix? It wouldn't be the first time they did that. Did they do that at the beginning with the two pills? What is the problem with these references? 'Okay, if you take this pill, you'll wake up in your bed and the TV series Sherlock was never made, it was all a bad dream... If you take this pill, you'll have to watch the whole thing. Again.' Oh great. What do you want in return? Do I need to suck your cock or something? 'That?

No, no, I'm going to shoot you if you don't take any of the pills, but you have to take one. That's all.' Actually? Wow, you just talked yourself out of a good deal, sir. Sign up, dammit, sailor. ...I forgot where I was going with this part... Sorry. This kind of attitude toward production can be bad for creativity. Throwing all the money in every scene means shots like this get in the way of the story, and supposedly tense moments where Sherlock is trying to figure something out are ruined by throwing in random images. and sound effects to the audience in the name of production value.

This is the only lesson I hoped Moffat would have learned by now. You see, one thing that Doctor, who was quite famous for, was filming expensive ideas and concepts so frequently and on such tight schedules, that it becomes necessary for there to be episodes in which the main characters don't appear too much and there aren't too many effects. nor expensive accessories. Within these limitations, Moffat himself wrote 'Blink', one of the most universally loved episodes of the show where the Doctor and Martha barely appear and the monsters literally don't even move. Creating some incredibly tense moments with almost no budget.

Like this one, a sphincter-tension scene in which a light starts to flicker and perhaps the most incredibly engaging piece of drama in the entire show, where a character argues with a pre-recorded message from the Doctor who knows what he's about to say. How can you have a copy of the finished transcript? He's still writing "." I told you, I'm a Time Traveler. I got it in the future." 'Blink' won a ton of awards and I think it shows that executing enough under time and budget constraints, that sometimes constraints can be good for creativity, I didn't really believe in that old aphorism until I watched Sherlock and realized that if you give people too much money, they do things like that instead of telling interesting stories.

This style of production leads to the characters being underused, because they have very little to do, because of the attention. focuses on over-producing the scenes where Sherlock does random things and other nonsense instead of making them a decent addition to the story This problem even extends to the second main character, John Watson sucks and doesn't have any. purpose in this version of the story. Maria Watson. No, seriously, after shooting the bad guy at the end of episode 1, Watson has nothing to do and spends most of his time being treated like shit by his friend without no reason and running next to him while he solves everything.

Watson is the point. The visual character is the literal narrator of most of the Holmes stories and barely gets to see many of the events of the plot. What else does he do? Oh, once. He is kidnapped and Sherlock has to save him. Oh, again he- uh- gets mysteriously kidnapped and Sherlock has to- Uh, one time, uhm, he starts a fire? Oh, and technically he's there sometimes while Sherlock figures things out. He's here for this fight too, I guess? And then there's the time where, uh, he gets kidnapped and Sherlock has to save... One time, he's held at gunpoint and Sherlo...

One time, he's held at gunpoint and Shheer... Awh, I He made my ears ring and slapped my face. Jesus Christ. Fuck you, Steve. And, oh my God. Did you see Watson in the background of this exciting scene? Literally the most important thing Watson does in all of season 2 is watch Sherlock die. The wedding episode has a part where Sherlock tells us that Watson is a good doctor and a really useful ally and gives anecdotes of times when he did useful things for a case. Wouldn't it have been great if Watson's skills had been useful in episodes of The Show That Really Made?

And not the ones who had a backstory for this wedding. The guy is a doctor and a war survivor and the POV character of most of the books and he's barely present at his own fucking wedding dedicated to Sherlock's hour-long speech supposedly about him but actually about How Smart Sherlock Is to Discover a crime during a speech. Fuck off. Mary, Watson's wife John is a minor character in some of the books and is not very important, but his relationship with his wife emerges in interesting ways, usually to highlight the limited roles of women in British society at the time of the history. it was established.

In the show, she appears between seasons two and three. The next episode is her wedding. Don't worry though, we all know who that episode is really about. And then in the next episode, she turns out to be a secret Ninja Assassin. Then in the next episode, not counting the special, because most of it takes place in Sherlock's imagination, and she's not really in it, she dies. Mary lived a hugely interesting life and would have been a great addition to the story. Unfortunately, most of it happens in the same place that most of the interesting things on the show happen.

Offscreen Then for some reason John sees her as a ghost for a moment and then she gives the dumbest speech of all time about how mega special Holmes and Watson are, even though Watson doesn't do anything and even she had more information about the events. of the four episodes in which she had the privilege of being alive. You give Moffat a hand, he finally created a strong, intelligent, interesting female character and then just when she had a chance to really interact with the story, he kills her off, to create tension for the "real" main characters. Sherlock and... whoever this guy is, what does he do?

I think he was kidnapped a couple of times. Well done, Steve. You developed a really clever addition to the main story Just to Kill It. Although I can see why it would be necessary. There are only so many important women in the original stories to ruin, aren't there? Speaking of which, okay, it's going to be difficult to broach this topic. You see, in the Sherlock Holmes Pantheon there are some characters that really stand out because they are unique, different, well-written, or special to the period in which the stories were first made. That future adaptations cannot help but lavish even more attention on them.

You know, you would expect Moriarty to become this giant super villain because you know, even though he was only in two stories, one of them was the one that killed Sherlock.Holmes for ten years. That's a very good reason to stand out. Irene Adler has appeared in almost every adaptation of Sherlock Holmes that exists, and she was in one story. The third in history. 'A scandal in Bohemia.' Sherlock is approached by the king of Bohemia who is about to marry a princess and consolidate a lot of land and power, but five years ago he had a love affair with the controversial opera singer named Irene Adler. and sent her love letters and a compromising photo: the original dick pic, and since the background of the image clearly shows her My Little Pony collection, she's worried Adler will email it to her in-laws and wedding is canceled and he will lose a good deal "His Majesty has certainly committed an indiscretion" The King offers Sherlock basically infinite money if he can get those things back because none of his people have any idea where it is hidden.

Then you have a story that Sherlock is in. covering up the actions of a King stealing from an innocent woman who basically did nothing wrong. Sherlock and the King are not the good guys here. Sherlock despises Adler and is sure he can outsmart a woman. He knows what they are like. . Disguised, Sherlock tricks Adler into revealing her location. But when he returns later to look for it, he instead discovers a letter that tells him, "No, no, nice try, idiot." and she finds out that she is married for love of someone and left the country and just wants to move on with her life.

Adler outsmarts Sherlock and gets his way, which is more than can be said for almost anyone else in the entire series, and also refutes his reductive view of women while she's at it. Sherlock loses and has to learn a lesson from it and the viewer is shown that not even the great detective is immune to the prejudices of the culture in which he lives. Not a feminist story by modern standards, but a story published by a man. in the 1890s he treads cautiously by showing that women are not only capable of being as intelligent as men, but that they do not overcome the preconception that they cannot be.

They will always win. Sherlock gains a grudging respect for her, not in a romantic way but because he appreciates that he has been outsmarted. "What a Queen she would have been..." "Isn't it a shame she wasn't on my level?" "From what I have seen of the lady. Yes, indeed, she is on a very different level than his Majesty." In 2012's 'Scandal in Belgravia', Sherlock defeats Irene who, by the way, is sexually attracted to him from time to time and later on as well. He saves her life because he captures her when she goes on the run.

Oh, and now she's also a fucking bisexual kung fu dominatrix. That's... That's one way to adapt the story! This episode has already been criticized to the core and I'm going to defend a couple of little things about it. Like how Adler defeats Sherlock's over-the-top text/vision special effects by simply using nothing, and I like how the show leaves it somewhat ambiguous, whether it's leaving Sherlock with nothing to easily detect or whether it's because he just reacted that way. seriously to see a naked woman. Those were the advantages. Did you miss them? You may have blinked. The disadvantages include: everything else.

First of all, she doesn't beat Sherlock. She loses and then losing from her puts her in a bad situation, which, don't worry, Sherlock saves her from, how heroic. But secondly, Sherlock is heroic now. This is a big problem. The scandal was shocking because Sherlock worked for the bad guy. A rich and powerful king trying to tie up loose ends so that his convenient marriage to someone he clearly didn't care about could go as smoothly as possible. Now Adler is directly blackmailing people and also stealing really important intelligence from the British government. Sherlock is arguably doing the right thing by getting involved here.

Whatever moral ambiguity the original stories had is being erased in the name of Always Make It Good, then it turns out she's working directly with Moriarty, the real bad guy, because of course everything has to be related to Moriarty now. And basically she is acting on his orders and advice. "I can't take all the credit... I had a little help. Oh, Jim Moriarty sends you his love." "Yes, he has been in contact." And of course, she loses because of those pesky emotions. She couldn't help but have feelings for Shirley because he's so dreamy and nice and not a constant piece of shit on the actual show.

In an adaptation of a story where the character wins by using her own ingenuity: others tell her what to do, and then she gets hit and then has to be saved. If the show's creators were really so uninterested in telling a story using Irene Adler's original traits, why put her here? Why not invent a new female character to ruin? Oh no, wait, they do that in season 4, right? Even though, as you can see, I didn't really like the show, I was looking forward to this story being adapted because I hoped that Sherlock would finally learn that he wasn't always right about people and feel a little humble.

But Moffat does. too busy being clever by linking everything to the now all-powerful Moriarty and the hashtag modernizing the story by turning a woman who marries for love in the 1890s into a dominatrix that he forgot to put in the fun core of the story and we are left with a Sherlock who ends exactly how he started, boring, smart and the best guy ever. Well, I guess he now has a semi-girlfriend. Is that something like character development? 'Scandal in Belgravia' not only screws up the most important non-protagonist character in the entire Canon behind perhaps Moriarty, but it also contains 'The Scene'.

For me it's always 'The Scene'. You will rarely hear me mention it by any other name. In my opinion, it overshadows and predominates the entire series, it is the crown of jewels of this whole sordid affair. 'The Scene' combines all the worst aspects of this fucking show and compresses it into one solid diamond of shit. The mystery that Sherlock must solve, before he starts the Adler thing, involves a guy who is found dead for seemingly no apparent cause. . We are shown nothing, no clue that could leave an attentive viewer with a chance to solve it. He figures it out, but doesn't explain what happened or how he discovered it or why and he just stops caring about it.

Then, in an extravagant and fucking ridiculous scene. He and Adler Sci-Fi imagine their way through a scene neither of them have been to. And Irene discovers that... A fucking boomerang did it. "A boomerang." "Boomerang..." "Boomerang..." "Elementary, dear, Watson." We've talked before about times when the show has pulled something out of its ass, but this fucking scene puts everyone's mind at ease. Based on nothing, without any clue we've been given, Sherlock leads Irene to the conclusion that she boomeranged him and the show presents this as if Sherlock is some super mega genius. We see shots of Adler making googly eyes at him because he's so attracted to him now that he knows he successfully solved the stupidest scripted scene in television history.

The epic soundtrack swells and everyone wishes they were killed by a fucking boomerang. The key to mystery stories, the burning core of the genre that makes it what it is, is receiving information. Enough that maybe you could figure out what was going on and then have a character show you something about the information you managed to miss or put the pieces together in a way you wouldn't expect. But to make sure you can't figure it out before Sherlock does because he's supposed to be the most amazing, special guy in the world. They can't risk giving you too much information.

So they craft a story where you're basically shown nothing and then they tell you 'bing!' He's a legendary serial killer I just made up, 'bing!' someone else told me the off-screen response, 'Bing!', it was a fucking boomerang. The audience will never truly accept Sherlock as intelligent because they are never given the pieces and then presented with a solution they wouldn't have thought of. They tell them almost nothing and then Sherlock comes in with information you didn't have or just something incredibly unrealistic. "Did you get that in one look? "Definitely the new sexy." The show is edited as if you're supposed to, like Adler, be completely in awe of this genius, but that will never happen.

Contrast is required. Precisely why the Puzzles are fascinating in the first place. There is a tangible emotional reaction to figuring out how to solve something and solving something together in a similar way to make a mystery story work, they have to show you the problem and the clues before it is solved so that you have. the opportunity to do it yourself and then marvel at watching someone else find a solution. It entertains you to see someone else solve a puzzle that you can't because you recognize that they have seen something that you haven't seen. of a trivial puzzle piece, then produces the finished puzzle and tells you "it was really hard, I promise." In this show, the viewer never gets a chance to watch.

So Sherlock has nothing to reveal that he observed, so you're left with an incredibly expensive sequence of elaborate camera tricks filmed with an Arri Alexa featuring a man telling you that he's very smart because. He observed events that you never had the opportunity to observe better than you. Look at all these hard-working people dragging their camera equipment here so they can film a smooth transition, setting up all the guides on their dollies, and carrying a couch the whole time. very far away and carefully planning and timing dozens of takes, doing excellent professional work, and it's all in service of a mystery story in which they don't tell you anything, so you're not involved with it at all, and then at the same time At the end, they give you a fucking bullshit explanation you couldn't have seen coming: "And he was really smart, you just have to trust me." Why does the camera rotate so much?

Is it to make this reveal seem more dramatic? Or is it to simulate the spinning of a boomerang? Is that why they did this? my nightmares to make fun of how stupid it is. "Let's take a look at that guys, cut." This scene is so bad that it almost makes you forget that the final scene of this episode is Sherlock fighting without help from Al-Qaeda. with a machete, I half expected the boomerang to come back and take a couple of guys for it. Credit to whom it is deserved. There's still a lot to like about the Sherlock show, at least to begin with, despite all of it's enormous flaws.

It's still very good at making you think it's going to get better and there are plenty of decent moments and funny bits that make you keep watching just to see, just to see if it can start to get more and maybe go somewhere. All the plots that season 4 has destroyed that illusion first. Let me explain to you indirectly, when I was researching for this video I came across a lot of theories about season 4, the usual Sherlock stuff that explains how secretly gay he is. The main characters are, but the one that really caught my attention was the "lost special" theory.

You see, for some Sherlock fans, the fact that the show is bad is just a minor problem in the grand scheme of the incredible meta-narrative of Moffat's mythical reimagining of Sherlock as a magical pretty boy. Therefore, the horrible evil and plot holes of season 4 are just more data to add to a running theory about what's really happening. The conclusion many people came to was that the final episodes of Sherlock couldn't be as bad as they were. Instead, it's a fakeout, a setup for a secret, unannounced fourth episode of season 4, in which everything is actually explained. The garbage from the previous 8 episodes, sorry, 3, is revealed to be a hallucination or a skit or a dream sequence and the show finally turns out to have always been good.

The main focal point of the theory was a show supposedly starting right after the end of Sherlock called 'Appletree Yard'. The theory is that 'Appletree Yard' is a code name and it's actually when the fourth Sherlock airs and all is revealed. The proof? The German version of the program's website or something is a 404 page. 4-0-4. Get it? Season 4, Episode 4. OMG, even the inventor of http error messages is involved. And if that wasn't enough to prove it, the lead actress's name is Emily Watson Watson... Watson. And if that's not enough to convince you, I hope it isn't.

There are many more tests on the way. At one point in the show, Sherlock says, "We found three possible recording devices in your coat pockets and searched all your belongings." "It must be kind of comforting about the number three, people always give up after three..." See? The Apple tree. Clowns, magpies and fish, none of which match aesthetically, but all have intricate symbolic meaning. And in this promotional image for the series, Mark Gatiss holds up four fingers. See? Oh wait, that could have simply been because it's season four. But you can see how the crushing weight of all thisevidence caused me to postpone work on this video for a while.

In case it turned out that it was really going to happen. be another In case 'Appletree Yard' was fake and Moffat really was a secret genius. I'm just pretending to be a bad showrunner this whole time. and then 'Appletree Yard' aired, and guess what? You'll never believe it, but it turns out it was an adaptation of 'Appletree Yard' starring Emily Watson. Which is just her name, because some people are called Watson. The Twitter hashtag for 'Appletree Yard ' when it aired was, um, 5% people interested in this new show or an adaptation of a book they quite liked, and 95% angry Sherlock fans hoping to see when Sherlock and retro appeared. actively justify the bad program he was on.

It didn't happen and the fan theory people either apologized for getting everyone's hopes up or got upset because it turned out that their show had always been bad and they had simply fooled them into thinking it would be with flashy overproduced wedding photos in bullet time. He wouldn't write this if he wasn't completely convinced that this is going to happen. JohnLock is the endgame, the series is not over yet. And I'm going to tell you why, because it doesn't make sense. to remind you that these people have been producing Sherlock for seven years. Seven years of hard work on it, we were told over and over again that every little detail matters.

Do you really believe anyone on the show, including the producers, cast, etc.? ...Would everyone suddenly lose their minds overnight? Overnight? I mean it's possible. I can even tell you what night it was. The one right before Moffat decided to adapt Sherlock Holmes. I never actually thought of 'Appletree Yard' as a completely fake show, so literally all this does is postpone my questions of why it was 'The Final Problem'. Badly written on purpose? Uh- Ah... No, no, no no, sorry. I'm really sorry to tell you this, but it wasn't mean on purpose. They were trying to make a good show and they failed, and even if it's bad on purpose, that means the show is bad, a secret fourth episode still wouldn't be a get-out-of-jail-free card for wasting your damn time and, what is more important. , mine.

But since the secret missing episode never came to fruition, because it doesn't exist, I can finally conclude that I have, in fact, watched the entire fourth season of Sherlock and can therefore weigh in on it. It's really bad. So bad that people who wanted to like the show had to make up a secret good episode that, if it existed, would fix it somehow. It's much worse than the rest of the series. And I'm pretty sure I've established that that's bad enough, but the bad runs pretty deep. It's not just that it's worse written, the characters are facsimiles of themselves and the characters.

The driving momentum of the story is completely broken. It's that he ultimately trips over the curtain and rips every flaw in the entire show from front to back, revealing that he's always been the worst, like a car that looks like a disaster, but at least convincingly seems to be headed. To the end. correct address. Until he hits a brick wall and it turns out it's been a doomed ride from the start. So after the special where Sherlock Imaginary solves the crime he knows very little about and realizes Moriarty is definitely dead, the game-changing twist from two years ago was once again bullshit, fake nonsense designed to fool you and make you think The show was going to get interesting.

The implication was that Moriarty had some kind of plan designed to be executed after his death in order, what? Provoke Sherlock and gain power he doesn't need because he's dead? Destroy the world or just mess with people for fun? Who knows? I don't, because Moriarty doesn't figure into the actual plot of season four at all. The special also ends by implying that something interesting is going to happen with Sherlock walking away saying that he knows what Moriarty's people are going to do next. "I know exactly what he's going to do next." The episode begins with Sherlock revealing that he has no idea and that he will just wait and see what happens next and react. "We brought you back to take care of this.

What are you going to do?" "Wait." So, it's a trap for nothing. This is something the series has always done by ending by implying that something interesting is about to happen next and then doesn't happen. But this series is especially atrocious in this regard. Instead, Sherlock notices a broken statue of Thatcher. And he notices it and somehow realizes that the remnants of Moriarty's network want a pearl that could be hidden in Thatcher's last statue. "What's so important about a broken bust of Margaret Thatcher?" "I can't stand it, I never can." "I noticed the strangest feeling..." "Do you miss me?" But then it turns out that no, it's a completely unrelated series of events revolving around Watson's wife again.

By the way, this is exactly the shitty twist they gave in the previous episode, where it turns out to be Mary. It's hard to explain how much whiplash there is in this season. The thing about this one is that we spent the entire time waiting for a reveal that Sherlock was really into something and then he's actually into something completely different that we had no way of seeing coming either. So Mary goes undercover to try to hide so the other Cool Killer can't find her and basically picks random numbers so she can't be traced with this long montage showing how hidden she is acting and wow, it's incredibly, super out of character. . grid, we get it and then bam!

Sherlock is there. "Oh, hello, Maria." "How did you find me?" "I'm Sherlock Holmes." "No, seriously, how?" "Every move I made was completely random, every new personality was just a roll of the dice." Once again, here is one of the key types of questions that the Sherlock Holmes stories raise. How did you solve the puzzle and solve it? What kind of genius application of reason will make you say, 'Ah!' and feel like an idiot and marvel at the simplicity of it. The show recognizes that these questions are Sherlock's goal. "Mary, no human action is truly random." "I myself know at least 58 techniques for refining the seemingly infinite variety of randomly generated possibilities down to the smallest number of feasible variables.

But they're really difficult, so instead I just stuck a plotter on the inside of the memory card. But instead of giving a helpful answer, we get this bullshit, fake explanation that turns out to be false and he actually just put a tracking device on the USB stick she took from him. This is played as a joke, but it is not a comedy, a funny moment, a joke for laughs at comedy, hijinks. It's a joke at the audience's expense for even wanting to know how Sherlock did something. Sherlock finds Mary and you're screwed if you were hoping or hoping for anything clever.

Then the killer he's hiding from shows up because of course he was tracking Sherlock, who knew he would track Mary. So we have this mega genius who knew how to plant a tracking device before Mary could drug him and take the device, but somehow he's not smart. enough to A. Detect that Mary was going to drug him and maybe stop her or convince her to work with him. B. React productively as he did when he had a 10-minute sequence dedicated to how he reacted in the 5 seconds of consciousness he had when he passed out from the gunshot.

For Mary! Whose, at this point, he should perhaps be able to anticipate attacks. Or C. He realized that he himself was being tracked or even thought to consider that he might be tracked by the murderer that he had met before and that he knew who he was. So if they all successfully track everyone to the same place and fight anyway, what was the point of him writing it to make this happen? As if this doesn't add anything to the real story, it's all a setup for this big joke about how great Sherlock is. Which we have already been told enough.

This is more time than could have been spent telling a story. Thats false. But it becomes tragic because of how good Sherlock Holmes stories and adaptations can be. 'Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death'. It adapted the same story quite excellently by having clearly delineable themes about the power of money, greed and fear, and making the Macguffin actually a nice pearl that many people wanted. The pearl has been unattainable throughout history because no group that has strived to find it has been exempt from internal tensions that compete to appropriate it. They always end up killing each other and dying and leaving him lost again.

Representing a deeper problem with the human soul, Sherlock's every move is either understandable or explained in retrospect when the moment comes with a nice revelation or justified by reasoning you may have noticed at the time. And then maybe Sherlock reveals and then you go, 'Ah! Of course'. It's a charming game, where the story makes a lot of sense and real themes are explored. "It is nothing more than a symbol of the greed, cruelty and lust for power that has pitted men against each other throughout the centuries." "And the fight will continue, Watson, for one pearl..." "A kingdom..." "Perhaps even world domination, until greed and cruelty have consumed each of us." "And when that time comes..." "Perhaps even the pearl..." "It will be washed again." It is a good adaptation because it understands what is good about the original story and takes advantage of it.

It doesn't for the first, maybe 30 minutes, and then it turns into a fucking stupid spy thing that is once again about Mary. . In this story, the killer tries to kill Mary because he misinterpreted a conversation some torturers were having and assumed they were talking about Mary and therefore sought revenge for years and years and years. The entire plot of this episode revolves around mishearing someone. It is literally the plot of the second half of 'Shrek', but with some superficial aspects of the basic plot of the six Napoleons, for the simple reason of resembling a real Sherlock Holmes story.

What are the themes? What is the story about? How does Sherlock come across the only crime that is being committed right at that moment and that directly affects Mary Watson? Presumably by magic? Sherlock is so smart that he saw something and realized it without even knowing he did it because, at this point, what the fuck is the show, and yeah, sometimes that's the justification for the things he notices. "...if every strand of trembling data were attenuated, the future would be completely calculable." I discovered this because I am in tune with every data point. Well, that's really fucking convenient, isn't it?

It saves you having to write a story that people have to follow. Oh no, it's not like that! Because those are the people who see it. This has to be entertaining for us, Steve. You...? You forgot it? The closest thing this episode has to a theme is that this was a mistake, this should never have gone this far. Thank God, it's the last season. The show is so aware that killing off Mary Watson is a bad idea that it's actually still in the other two episodes. Like she's a ghost for part of the second and appears on DVD and then in the third she...she is.

In another one that she knew how to send? Then the second DVD. By the way, who uses DVDs more? She, of all people, should know that USB sticks are the way to go. Hey, do you remember the plot of Sherlock? The story twists are undermined by trying to have, you know, an interesting story that ties together well, but then it turned out that having Moriarty had nothing to do with any of that. Or have Sherlock successfully track Mary, only she's just a tracking device, or the killer is trying to kill Mary because of something in her dark past, except it turns out she didn't do anything wrong.

This endless twisting and untwisting plays out throughout season four to such an extent that you can never be sure of anything and this makes you not give a shit about any of it. Also, this is the second time in two seasons or 2/3 episodes, depending on how you count it, that Sherlock, by pure coincidence, stumbles upon a story that directly concerns Mary while he was trying to do something else. Would it really have been that difficult to put things together? For example, with the twist and untwist, you have Mary with this dark past, just like, her whole thing is that she used to do some bad things, so when someone from her dark past seeks revenge.

You say: Oh, this is the due payment for that. This is an interesting thing to explore, but then it's like 'No, she didn't do anything wrong, she was fine.' She actually she was a friend. She was good all the time and... Uh... she's wrong.' So I guess that's screwed! The villain of episode 2 is Culverton Smith. There's no evidence that he's a criminal, but you start the episode knowing he's a bad guy because his daughter tells Sherlock that she remembers him saying he's a murderer. So now we have his confession. Then he turns around and says ah, she was fake, but then in about five minutes she uncurls because heHe did it again, so what was the fucking point?

And then it turns out that he didn't hallucinate that woman. In reality, she was his secret sister disguised as him. Damn, they actually wrote that. That wasn't... Oh my God. One thing they could have done immediately to improve this season is unraveling, not happening. For example, the guy who is trying to get revenge on Mary has justifiable reasons for trying to kill her, like maybe she betrayed him or maybe Sherlock really hallucinated a confession and Culverton Smith is innocent. Have an episode dedicated to Sherlock's actual breakdown, rather than him obviously faking it. Which is obvious because you already know it's bad.

Because even after it turns out that he actually hadn't met his daughter before, after a couple of minutes he says, 'No, no, you're right.' I am the bad one.' But no, on the contrary, they always make sure that the characters are 100% right. Mary never betrayed anyone and she was very trustworthy and Sherlock didn't have hallucinations and everything was faked and he was right all the time even though a couple of things turn out to be, not what he thought they were, and it's just... Oh well, fuck you. So the characters aren't really being challenged, we were told Sherlock was right in the first five minutes, and he turned out to be right, so was that the point of the last hour and 25 minutes?

Of course, they never explained how Sherlock's sister discovered that Culverton Smith was the villain because you just have to assume it. She is a super genius who discovered it with magic. Why did any of this happen? Why did his sister pretend to be Culverton Smith's daughter so Sherlock would catch him? Why did she pretend to be Watson's therapist? Why did she flirt with Watson in disguise? "He's making a funny face." "I think I'll put a hole in it." Why does he say "I'll put a hole in his head" and then it turns out she just calmed him down?

Why do you do something? Well, because, like Moriarty, he wants to test Sherlock or play with him or just, you know, mess with his head or something just because. Why is he doing it now? Pffttttt... But everything gets complicated in the final episode. An episode so bad that even the show's biggest fans wish it were fake. Just to make it clear how fucked up this episode is, let me explain the opening in detail. A girl wakes up on a plane, everyone else on it is unconscious or dead. She looks around her and there is no one to help her.

She's in trouble. She rings a phone and hears Moriarty. "Hello..." my name is Jim Moriarty." "Welcome to the final problem..." This is a pretty good setup, right? At the end of this episode Moriarty is still dead, turns out it's just a recording. , but also it's not even a recording and she doesn't play it to anyone because none of this is happening because it's just a fantasy story about Sherlock's sister that she's making up and telling Sherlock Maybe the only thing sadder than the 'lost ones. 'The "special" theorists are the people who say, "Oh no, there's a lot of really profound stuff going on in the background, let me explain why it's secretly really smart." So I eat a plane full of dead people. ?

Short of a little girl with no clues to suggest that the adults perhaps inhaled or ingested something the little girl didn't or some explanation for how this plane was able to stay in the air for several hours without anyone flying it, I don't think it was ever intended to be it was us "To interpret this literally, the show wanted us to doubt the authenticity of all of this." You see? They certainly imply that this is a false story by having clues in the form of the story that is so ridiculous it is impossible to believe. Listen, I hate to burst your bubble, but those aren't clues at all.

This is the kind of crazy, stupid nonsense we were expected to believe throughout this whole damn show. In one episode, it turned out that a boomerang did it. And in that same episode Mycroft's plan literally involved making an entire plane full of dead people! This literally happened on the fucking show and suddenly! We're supposed to realize how unrealistic it is... Now?! Fuck off! Fuck off! For! Please stop trying to fool people into thinking this shit was smart. Please! The show starts off with a relatively interesting setup and concludes by telling him that he made it all up and it's a lie, and that's the current theme of this episode.

No, this season, no, the whole show. Relatively clever setups that imply something interesting is going to happen and then unravel. Mycroft gets chased by a fucking clown and images of him start bleeding from his eyes, and you're like, 'Oh shit, what the hell is going on?' ?' Oh, it's just Sherlock playing with him...Oh, it's okay...' 'Oh, well.' Sherlock is on the trail of Moriarty's secret gang trying to find... Oh no, it's not. OMG, a DVD with a message, this could be Moriarty's final message... No, it's not. Oh my god, Sherlock actually had a hallucination with a confession, and he actually has a problem...

No, no... Shit, did Mary betray her oldest friends and comrades? No, don't worry, she didn't. Not well. How are Holmes and Watson going to get out of this? He leaves. He goes out. Shit, who is this damn shady guy? Who just kidnapped Wats... Oh, it's his brother, and everything is fine. It doesn't matter, who cares? Shit, they just killed Sherlock. How are you doing...? Oh? He's fine. Oh, everything okay? OMG, Moriarty is back and he has a genius plan and he can hack all the things in London. No he can not! He's not even in this story.

What makes season four in particular so off-putting to fans isn't that it's so much worse than the rest of the show, although it is, it's that at this point people are starting to realize that all of these setups won't have reward. Anyway, back to the episode at hand, Sherlock, Mycroft, and Eurus Holmes are all super geniuses, right? Eurus is groomed to be so incredibly mega-intelligent even when she was a child, that she became too smart and became a psychopath that Sherlock forgot because she was too traumatic. The final episode is, guess what? Season 1 Episode 3 again, with Eurus taking the place of Moriarty, who it turns out he found out about... somehow and asked to meet five years ago and got recordings for this test that he had planned years in advance and possibly also programmed Moriarty to want to play with Sherlock all those years ago, but you'll never really know because the writers apparently don't know or care.

There are a lot of plot holes in this episode about how a character knew something or how he knew something could have happened years in advance, or any of the decisions he made. But at this point the writers can move on, well, they are geniuses and they are in tune with every point of information and they know everything and there is so much smarter than you, the viewer, by making the characters so incredibly intelligent that it gives them the writers. a get-out-of-jail-free card for having to justify or explain anything in a tangible way that a normal person could follow and the response is 'Fuck you, they're smart.' The episode ends with the revelation that Sherlock has another person locked in his memory.

A doubly secret person that he forgot even more. A childhood friend whom he remembers as a dog. "One of the things that characterizes the Holmes stories is that we know virtually nothing about Sherlock Holmes, and I'm curious to know if Benedict, Steven and Mark Gatiss spent any time on Sherlock and Mycroft's backstory and their backgrounds." "No, not really. I don't think you get to know a character by creating a backstory for them." "Sometimes we speculate because we're interested and we chat about what his parents were like, what he did. But you know what? We're not... it's... it's sacred territory.

Don't... - Don't ruin it. No. ..don't put it in the show. It's not right. There are some things we don't know about Sherlock Holmes, just as there are things we don't know about our friends, and we never meet them, and that's right and appropriate. I think if we did something like that, somehow, the audience wouldn't believe it, 'No, you made that up.' "Okay, I'm going to be honest here. I was looking through, uh, old interview recordings to find B-roll to use in a later section where I talk more about Moffat and I accidentally stumbled upon...

This smoking gun, where Moffat says, if we decide to stop and get In the History of Sherlock background, maybe we're doing something wrong. This interview did not age well. And also Eurus made up the girl on the plane, she was trying to save the whole episode, and then Sherlock hugs her, because at this point it's easier than figuring out what she really wants or why she did it. And he plays the violin until he's happy. The end. It's actually quite believable that fans who stuck with this episode until the end assumed that this episode was some kind of fake stunt.

This season is so bad that it ends with the most interesting addition to the story so far. Adding not one, but two forgotten secret people. Constantly parading Moriarty around like he's on the sidelines, about to return, but in reality he's basically not in this at all, which basically everyone thinks is complete bullshit. The saddest thing is that while I could talk longer about the problems of season four, no one needs me to tell them that season four is bad. You know the first three seasons are only really bad if you care about the Sherlock mythos or pay attention or want a compelling story or like to think about things.

You know, you can turn off your brain and have a really fun time watching Benedict Cumberbatch and, uh, Martin Mcbacon... uh, talk about... the things they're doing and... ...watch the camera spin. Season 4 is so bad that it doesn't take any analysis to recognize how shit it is. Ah, so I'm basically out of work. Like I said, the reaction is not just a reaction to this season. It's more than that. It's a reaction to the deeper understanding this season brings to the entire show. If there's one thing this show was always good at, one thing Moffat as a writer always did, it's making you think that an explanation was coming, that the show was going to get better.

The main way he does this is with cliffhangers and endings that suddenly imply there's more going on. It is revealed that the bread and butter of the show has always hinted that the show is about to get deep. Which implies a characterization and backstory that is much more interesting than what ends up on screen. After four seasons and an implications special, people began to realize that they were playing games. The drug of this manipulative writing style began to wear off. Fans of the series have been pretty harsh on season 4 and while it deserves everything, the previous show deserved it too.

But since they still didn't realize they were being fooled, people thought those were better. Well, sorry, come back and check. That's why I mentioned the secret theory of the fourth episode of Sherlock. Because the show has squeezed out a dozen hours of content to tell you, the audience, all about good future episodes that you won't actually get to see, instead of giving you. any. Fans who want that new episode simply take the promise the show made to them more seriously than anyone else. Which, by the way, is increasingly difficult to do because of the show's very clear attitude toward people who want to think about it.

If you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes stories, Stephen Moffat and his co-writers hate you. If you're a fan of the show Sherlock, Moffat wants you dead. If you really want to understand what's happening in the story, Stephen Moffat calls you a stupid piece of shit, repeatedly in the show. This hatred not only manifests itself in quarrelsome insults, as if it turned into a fucking boomerang. Or by deliberately rewriting one of crime fiction's first proto-feminist icons into a sexy kung fu dominatrix in love with the main character. But in how the show directly tells you that if you're a fan, you should personally go fuck yourself.

When they reveal, a couple of minutes after killing him, that Sherlock is still alive, they intentionally don't explain how he survived, so people could speculate about it for years leading up to season 3. But guess what? They never explain it. In fact, season 3 features several characters whose only job is to portray fan theories and theorists and make fun of them, calling them stupid for bothering to try to figure out what happened based on the information the show gave them. Now, I just want to make something clear: a lot of the theories about how Sherlock survived were silly.

Not as dumb as the 'extra good secret episode from season 4' theory, but dumb. However, the people who come up with these elaborate theories are the real fans of the show, they are the real audience, the people who care enough to get over the stupid plot and lack of real mysteries because Sherlock solves them with magic, to really try it. and rebuild things, peoplewho try to uncover the mystery of the mystery story present themselves as a small club of weirdos who get together in strange ways. The creator of the story seems to be so fundamentally incapable of recognizing how to tell a mystery he has perceived that people treat him as if he were crazy.

They even have one of the possible theories that Holmes and Moriarty were gay lovers who pretended together and even the other theorists make fun of her for that. Even though the same people who write this scene to make fun of it, are also the people who deliberately provoked the relationships between Holmes and Watson and Holmes and Moriarty. They spend a lot of this episode literally calling people stupid for reading the clear, intentional subtext of the story instead of: You know, writing better text! "First of all, I want to thank all my UK Tumblr friends who are staying up too late to watch this right now..." The episode resolves with the lead theorist, played by a Lindybeige impersonator, being told by Sherlock, what he really did.

But then maybe it turns out that Sherlock isn't there and he's losing his mind and the last we see of this character is him laughing maniacally at his wall of conspiracy theory, like a loser. Did you want to know how Sherlock did that? Did you expect the story to actually tell you? This is you. Fuck off. The actual correct answer given by John Watson. You're just not supposed to care. "I don't care how you pretended, Sherlock. I want to know why." It doesn't matter how he did it. You should only care about why. You're not supposed to care how something happened in a damn crime mystery story.

Literally a fucking book series about figuring out how things happen. This shit... This shit, like the boomerang scene or the 'I did a lot of things you don't know' scene is a blatant disregard for the core appeal of Crime Mystery Stories. Damn, stories! It's so disgustingly wrong on almost every level, and so hateful toward people for expecting things to make sense and trying to form a theory from what they've been shown, that it's almost avant-garde. Instead of bothering to use the couple of hours they have every two years, they can tell a compelling story. They're basically calling people who like the show stupid for thinking about it.

For that you need balls. Moffat and Gatiss are apparently above the idea of ​​people wanting to solve the mystery at hand. Because they're so up their own asses writing about smart people who just know and you're supposed to accept that as a story. They solve it because they're smart, and that's without even reaching outright disdain for the rewriting of the source material. all the most interesting characters in the myths and one of the few people to ever beat

sherlock

so she's not interesting because she's just the villain and then she doesn't beat him is apocalyptically bad but it's just the tip of a gigantic iceberg . of frozen pee.

In 'The Hounds of Baskerville'. They are too special to simply have a big dog that people are afraid of and a local legend abused so that someone can claim an inheritance by sacrificing his relatives. No, that world-famous story on the UK's best-loved novels list, the best Holmes novel ever written as rated by Sherlock fans, was too silly, simple and comprehensible. What he really needed was a drug that would make you hallucinate and a secret government research center. and pointless intrigue with Sherlock sneaking into a facility he could have easily asked his damn brother to let him in, which he later does anyway, and the only reason there's a dog in the story is because The word 'HOUND' turned out to be written on the killer's shirt when he killed a child's father.

So the kid hallucinated a giant dog and yet, while they try to embellish this famous story to make it smarter with this shit, they don't even bother to explain why the killer didn't kill the only witness to his fucking shit. crime. There is a fundamental mismatch in the sensibility of the authors of history. They don't just hate you for wanting to solve a mystery. They apparently hate mystery stories themselves, for being too understandable and for having too many simple pleasures, like watching a story unfold. Moffat and Gatiss decided that shit wouldn't fly anymore and had to be fixed by overcomplicating it and adding a secret facility.

I wonder if Moffat made this damn mistake in an adaptation before. "'Rache'- In German it means revenge, she could be trying to tell us something--" "Yes, thank you for your input." "...Find out who Rachel is..." "Was he writing to Rachel?" "No, she was leaving an angry note in German. Of course...she was writing to Rachel!" Oh wow! They straight up had Sherlock dismiss the original story twist as being stupid and for idiots, brilliant! Thank you! Listen, Steve, I know you're listening because what else are you going to do? What are you doing with your fucking time now that you're not directing Doctor Who and you probably won't get another season of this if you think you're too smart for the simple pulpy crime stories that make up a famous property you're adapting. and you think they need to be fixed, why are you adapting them in the first place?

The Sherlock Fandom, people who make gifs of all the romantic moments between Sherlock and Watson with the saturation slightly raised to make the image stand out and also spruce it up. the shit of the program itself, the color grading. The people who truly believe there are enough pieces of the puzzle to explain how Sherlock survived. People who actually liked the show enough to not believe that season 4 was as bad as it was and that there had to be an episode explaining why it was meant to be shit. The only people who will stick with Sherlock until the end and truly profess to enjoy it are those people who fully believe in the promise of the show, that one day it will be good and clever and draw back the curtain to reveal an incredible true narrative it kept hidden all this time. the one that had always been there.

It's very easy to make fun of people for proposing that silly theory. In fact, I've done that and you should too. It's stupid, but honest. It is the truest expression of being told over and over again that something is coming. He'll be fine. There's something really secret going on in the background. All these people did was take that seriously, but in reality they just lied to them. Reality is a show that keeps telling you I know it's bad, but I promise it will eventually get good or it turns out it's always been smart. After four seasons, it's just a bad show.

Older books and series were designed to keep you reading or watching and coming back for more. When Sherlock went over the Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty and the final problem threatened to live up to his name, there was a public outcry. People wanted more, their appetite fed by the story format and love for the character. A decade later, still "persecuted," pardon the pun, by fans of his best work who still didn't care much for his historical novels, Doyle had no choice but to have Holmes return. The new show kills Sherlock and, within minutes of mourning him, he tells you that he's fine.

Alright. No one would clamor for Sherlock's resurrection a decade later. They had to make sure you knew he wasn't really dead because otherwise you would have given a shit about an upcoming series and moved on with your life. They needed you to be speculating for years about how he did it, even though then they planned to tell you that you were a fucking idiot for doing it. It's been ten years since Jekyll came out and it ended on a cliffhanger. Is someone badgering Moffat to bring back that beloved story? No. He is not loved. Moffat is handing over the direction of Doctor Who to someone else and has said in interviews that he simply wants to leave the show better than he found it for someone else to take over.

Well, guess what, Steve? We all wish you had done that too. Doctor Who was a silly, weird, fantastic show that went off the air in 1989 and people remembered it, wanted more for so long, to the point that almost 20 years later, people wanted the show to come back. They cared to see what happened next, like Sherlock Holmes before him, the creators of Doctor who created a character and series so good, so iconic that not even a long absence could kill the love for what they had done. After a few years directing Doctor Who? Even Moffat can't wait to leave.

Moffat will forever be remembered for his contributions to the show when someone else was running it when he was on the edge doing the best parts. Forced to tell a full story and keep the promises he was making instead of infinitely delaying the moment when things get better until people realize that they aren't and never will be and that no one can tell them what to do, because the executive producers are him. his co-writer and his mother-in-law. Many of the previous Holmes adaptations are simply written and filmed. There are a lot of flat shots of people talking, the camera never pans and reveals that they actually built a set in the middle of London, and it's a dream sequence.

But I'd rather watch Sherlock figure things out by sitting down and looking at the things we see too and getting a better explanation than I could get with the same information any day of the week. Than sit through another second of self-indulgent, 'look at me, I'm so smart', spinning camera, nonsense that reveals it was probably just a fucking boomerang. The new Sherlock thinks it's so much better, more important, and smarter than the mystery stories it's based on, so it strips away everything that defines it, leaving only blatant queer-baiting, pretentious blanket stories that never go anywhere. and the false assurance that somehow, someday this will all make sense and come to an entertaining conclusion that ties everything together and proves you didn't waste all this damn time watching it.

But the sad truth is that you were. I'm honestly disappointed in this work and a writer I greatly respected, and I honestly think it's a shame. I really do. Also, Benedict Cumberbatch is a terrible actor and his face is stupid. Hey, thanks for watching this video until the end. I really appreciate it, another thing I really appreciate is being able to have the luxury of taking the time to do things like this and for that I really have to be grateful besides the names that are coming across the screen right now; Rebecca Harold, Acelin, Get Dunked On, Commissar Taco, Joseph Greco, Evan Richy, Yacucha Boris, Eugene Butler, Silas Pumpkins, Zigfried, the Immortal Dragon Slayer, Mr.

Clonem, Alex Lemcovitch, Cha boy Cammy Kemsay, Klil H. Niori Olivia Mellow, Brennan Arts, Malarkey Bingo, Daniel Vincent Chiltern, Paul Yoen Ewmerthweel, Kelly M.Knipy, Emily O, Fora, Owen Piper, Andrew Gilly, Parker Anderson, Eight in Goldstrum, Caleb McMurphy, Cal Ashton, Amy Ledge, AhhQbGeeVaneskaborptoplessworflegalsteinhousenbegerdorftuleefranskash , Spilled Coffee, Jenny Angel, Renee Larshowg, Thomas Kissner, Jack Harvey, David De Marzalou, Gar Internet, David the Benevolent malevolence, John Cantwell, Procor, A Huge Pair of Googly Eyes on a Flaccid Penis, Open Parentheses 2006 Closed Video Game stands, Matthew Harris, Daddy's Thick Meaty Arms, Corwin Light Williams, Shawn Kemp, Shadow Bag, Findley bowick Copley, Mon s'il vous plait's tunesrom, Kay plays Dota, Jeffrey Theobald, Tom Martel Nathan H, Scott Girton , Sean Lampall, Recammy, Edin Jankovic Sumar, George sirach Lisi Roberts, Minty Freakin Fresh Three fifths of a brain, Lauren, Mackenzie gallo, I'm daddy's bitch, give me money, sugar, daddy, ah I see what you did there, you changed the name so I had to: Ream and sell, Clawsue Daniel Stewart, Anna S, Iranian top purp, Macarthur, Casey explosion, Young Kaori, Cheeseoid, Saul, The almighty quackosaurus, Mome, the trading symbol Daniel Sullivan, a human being that aren't one hundred and seventy-two salamanders in trench coats, Eric Hunter, Marco Shard, Jan Anders Breamer, Garry Marshall, Aidan Bradley, Graphon Blackpor, Alexander Corbett, Sammy J Luke Swanson, Fully Automated Luxury Space, Post-Scarcity, Commulism, Zachary Clarke Benjamin Davidson, Hero of time 88, Bob Mackie, Hero R war Jason Walter, a few slices of lightly spiced French soft cheese on a bun Kieran, Recovering Zombie, Thad Wasalouski, Bill Mock, Mike Stanley, Theral Kimchi, Kaden Putine , Elliott Soudan, Jordan Telus, Kanika, a hairy bundle, Gerry Terry, David Rose, Snow fire, Sean Higgins, Davis Remmy, Naathan Hore, the specter of communism, Cafsile, Poggington Jones, Richard Pearson, Rebecca Washem, Soraka Vulcan, Ricard Heathersma, Samael Brendon Mitri, LERV, Besotten Jenny, Garrett Mitchell, Justin Conquer Beard, Alicia Parker Martel Femininja, Skeptic Frog, Cav P, Robert Phillips and Sled.

I swear to God, when I start making several shorter videos a month, I'll split the credits. {Please Hbomb, that was brutal} But honestly, the factThe fact that these credits are very long is probably a good sign. I would like to thank you all for giving me the time and money to watch and analyze many hours of television and also to buy a teddy bear dressed up to look like Sherlock Holmes, which I now keep by my bed at all times. , It's really amazing.