#all the memory weirdness....John and Arthur and ALSO ARTHUR LIKE. INTENTIONALLY NOT THINKING ABOUT THINGS

[stonekeyy]

still in "flipping the fuck out over ma/levolent" mode, suffering because I can't tag for it without tumblr's search picking it up and I Don't Want That but I want to scream about everything ever

[mewtonian-physics]

hi i saw ur sherlock post and wanted to hear why you wouldnt be looking forward to that, if ur okay with answering :) i was wondering bc its a show i really enjoyed so i prolly missed the issues it has :0

ok im going to be totally honest. i LOVED sherlock when i first started it. sherlock holmes has been a huge favorite of mine for a very very long time and sherlock did so much for me. i must’ve been what, 13 or 14 when i first watched it? and i loved it. now, though... i have some Thoughts.

this is going to get really long because i have a lot to say about this show. it’s also going to be full of spoilers.

‘a study in pink’ had me absolutely enthralled. i’m not kidding, i was so excited throughout the whole episode and i will admit i actually ‘squee’d. i really liked the switch from the original story with regards to the victim’s message; in case anyone reading this hasn’t read the original a study in scarlet, in that, the message the victim leaves is also ‘rache’, and people assume it’s meant to be ‘rachel’, before holmes says that it’s german for revenge (don’t ask me if that’s true. i don’t speak german.) but in ‘a study in pink’, they swap it, so that someone originally thinks it’s meant to mean revenge, but holmes says no, it’s meant to be rachel. i LOVED it! it felt really clever and fun. i also really enjoyed how they rendered the text messages and deductions on screen. i still love that. it’s a cool effect. (but i’m going to be honest with you: that ‘deduction’ about john’s phone was stupid. i fumble with my phone charger a lot because i don’t always have the best motor skills. there are so many reasons why someone could have scratched up their phone like that, and sherlock was honestly just guessing. it wasn’t nearly as clever as it was supposed to look. it was lifted from an actual deduction from the original stories, but that wasn’t all that impressive of a deduction either.)

i also liked that they made a nod to and resolved a weird continuity error in the original stories, where the location of watson’s war wound (ha. alliteration) kept switching from his shoulder to his leg. sir arthur conan doyle was not always the best at keeping track of things, haha. but he actually didn’t even like sherlock holmes, so he may just have been a lot more lax about it. 

i really enjoyed all the little references to the original stories; you can tell the show was written by sherlock holmes fans. that made it really fun for me.

i don’t have a whole lot to say about ‘the blind banker’ because i thought it was a pretty boring episode and also it was really fucking racist. ‘yellow peril’, much? i can’t really go into a lot of details because i watched it like. once. (also i was very displeased that soo lin yao got killed by her brother. but that’s a me problem.)

but the season finale! oh my god! the season finale. i do have a complaint with the plot that i’ll mention later (because it’s more of a criticism of the overall show.) also not a huge fan of the homophobic tones taken towards ‘jim, from it’. but the episode itself was so fun. i had such a great time watching and the ending had me absolutely on the edge of my seat. i was desperate to watch the next season right then. 

on to ‘a scandal in belgravia’. if you haven’t seen this episode then skip this section. also, it’s gonna get into some (not graphic) nsfw discussion, just because of what the episode is about, so if you don’t want to read that then skip that too. i watched it once. and it took me a couple years to even do that, because i was young when i started watching sherlock and let me tell you my parents did NOT want me watching that episode then. (frankly, i didn’t want me watching that episode then, either.) when i did watch it, i promptly forgot a lot of it, because i hated it. irene adler in the original stories was super cool; she was smart and capable and outwitted sherlock holmes himself, to the point that she got the title of ‘the woman’ (which. bit sexist. but this was the 1800s so i’m not too shocked.) unfortunately, irene adler from sherlock was... uhhhhh... look, i don’t give a damn about her job but i do give a damn about how she was written. she wasn’t portrayed as the same awesome woman from the original a scandal in bohemia. she was portrayed as... beating sherlock holmes... through the power of being sexy????? i mean, what the hell. what the actual hell was happening there. some people might think that kind of writing is feminist, but i really don’t. also, it wasn’t even fully her plan. it was moriarty’s. (once again, we are reducing the really smart and capable woman and making her dependent on a man.) ALSO, she was in love with sherlock(despite saying she was a lesbian??? if she’s bi then say she’s bi, for fuck’s sake, lesbian erasure isn’t cool), and that was her downfall? excuse me? that episode sucked so much and i was quite frankly miserable. the ending was stupid too. in the original story she got away scot free, having outwitted the great detective himself. in sherlock... she didn’t really win at all, and became a damsel in distress. thanks, moffatt and gatiss. very cool of you.

‘the hounds of baskerville’, though! oh that one was SO entertaining. i will say that the ending where sherlock intentionally tried to drug john was really fucked up. but the rest of the episode absolutely thrilled me. when john actually said ‘aspergers?’ in relation to sherlock i felt like i might die on the spot from pure joy, and for a while i had the exact timestamp at which he said it memorized because it made me so damn happy. (this was back before i realized some of the problems with that terminology.) and the episode itself... i LOVE horror and it creeped me out so much. 

and of course. ‘the reichenbach fall’. ohhhhhh my god. just thinking about it... i cried so much in that episode. even though i knew he would be totally fine because hey, i read the original stories, sherlock holmes doesn’t actually die, i don’t give a fuck, i still cried. i don’t have a lot to say about this episode because it just had me losing it the whole time. it was a total shift from the original story but i didn’t even care. it was just. oh my god.

but then things started going downhill.

season three was fine. not the best, but fine.

‘the empty hearse’ was kind of weird. it was interesting how they really showcased sherlock’s selfishness by how he just waltzed right back into john’s life (while he was planning to propose!) and expected things to be fine. it was not, however, interesting nor fun, how he made john think they were both going to die in order to manipulate john into admitting that he missed sherlock. i like mary, though. she’s cool.

full honestly: i loved ‘the sign of three’. that best man speech. it was weird, and rambling, and really, really sweet. totally thought sherlock was just being an asshole again, and then it ended with a genuine, heartfelt expression of how much john has changed him for the better. the ending made me sad though.

aaaaaaaaand then we got ‘his last vow.’ uhhhhh. uhhhhhhhhh. i don’t have a lot to say about this one. i don’t like it. i don’t like how sherlock manipulated janine (hello, fucked up territory). i don’t like what they did with mary’s character. and i don’t like how they took charles augustus magnussen (milverton, in the original) and made sherlock kill him instead of the cool ending of the original, where one of his blackmail victims took revenge. 

i can’t properly review the abominable bride here. that would need its own post.

unfortunately it was all very much downhill from here.

‘the six thatchers’. john has an affair? john watson? has an affair? we go back to the problems i had with mary’s character, and then she dies? she sacrifices herself for sherlock? right after she has a baby? she just fucking dies? this episode was horrible. 

i don’t have a whole lot of thoughts on ‘the lying detective’ except that i think ‘the dying detective’ was better. also, this is where things really went to hell in a handbasket.

eurus. oh my god, eurus. look. i am a little sick of ‘secret holmes sibling’ plotlines. ‘how many have you seen?’ two, and that’s two too many. (it might be different if they handed over some sibling rights to go with it, but they never do.)

also, the whole plot was just ridiculous. i can’t even begin to explain how ridiculous it was. total genius smarter than even sherlock and mycroft, SO SMART that she can program people to do whatever she wants just by talking to them for a few minutes, killed sherlock’s best friend and traumatized him so much that he had to get his memories erased? RIDICULOUS. the ‘saw’ style games? all organized by eurus and, you guessed it, moriarty? for fuck’s sake. IT’S ABSURD. and in the end, it was all a cry for help? cool motive, still MULTIPLE MURDERS. also molly getting forced to say she loves sherlock was just so incredibly fucked up. these are only surface level complaints based on what i remember of the episode (which i have seen only one time because i only watched this season one time.) if i watched it again i’m sure i could come up with more, but i don’t really want to watch it again, because i think it might kill me instantly.

now for some more overarching criticisms:

from a purely plot based perspective, i’m not a fan of how moriarty was behind so much. he really wasn’t that involved in the original stories; the guy played a role in two stories and showed up a grand total of once and then died. that was it. he was there so conan doyle could finally kill off sherlock holmes (though we all know how well THAT went. did you know people actually went into mourning for holmes? and conan doyle got accosted in the street about it. i’m not even kidding. people were so upset. and, i mean, so was i.) yes, he was a criminal mastermind (the napoleon of crime!) but he wasn’t behind basically every single case. it’s not the worst change ever, but it is a little bit weird to be giving sherlock an archenemy. but sherlock is far from the first adaptation to do that. (if i wrote it, it’d be less archenemy and more ‘sherlock holmes is being really annoying again, guess i have to do something about it.’ which honestly felt like what was happening in the original stories.)

from a more socially conscious perspective: the sexism in that show is so ridiculous. most of the female characters are written horribly (molly deserved so much better. so. much. better.) and often damsel in distress types. when they aren’t, well, see my discussion of ‘a scandal in belgravia’. i can’t think of a single female character in sherlock whose story doesn’t essentially revolve around the men in her life.

furthermore, the constant jokes about john and sherlock TOTALLY NOT BEING GAY is. i will be honest with you; i do not give a damn about j*hnlock. i don’t ship it at all. but those jokes were so damn uncomfortable. homophobia much. 

also: the racism. particularly egregious in ‘the blind banker’ but it was scattered throughout the rest of the show too. (can we talk about how sally donovan was treated? because the intersection of racism and misogyny was... deeply, deeply unpleasant.)

oh and the whole ‘high functioning sociopath’ thing was... can we not be weird about this for five minutes. can we. i’m begging. i do not like a character that i’ve related to for years (one of the reasons i’ve been so into sherlock holmes for so long was bc he was one of the first characters i really related to and made me feel a lot better about my autism diagnosis) being treated like this.

i am not going to pretend that the original sherlock holmes stories weren’t horribly racist, misogynistic, and so much more. they were. they were written in the 1800s, though. i will say that that is absolutely not an excuse and they could have and should have been better, but that goes so much more for sherlock, because, i mean. come on. this is the 21st century. there’s less than negative excuse for this kind of bullshit. moffatt in particular has received a lot of criticism for both sherlock and doctor who, particularly regarding the misogyny that often shows up in his writing, and it seems he learned absolutely nothing.

as i said, i have a lot of thoughts on sherlock. but given some of the overarching problems with the series as a whole, as well as the sharp downturn the quality of the writing took in the second half (particularly season four), i really do not want another season. i am frankly terrified of what kind of absurdity might be produced. 

so yeah. that’s my thoughts on Why I Do Not Want Sherlock Season Five.