#and also how he loves surprising old fans with new plot twists in the vox animated series the most--

[dent-de-leon]

Thinking again about self indulgent animated Nein thoughts, chances to explore missed opportunities or threads cut too soon and just...Thinking of how Molly never got to know Caleb's backstory, even though he was the one who ran to to try and comfort him first when he got lost staring off into the flames.

And then I remembered how Caleb's confession in the Pillow Trove takes place at the same time as the "Long may I reign" scene, and just...how it would feel getting hit with both those scenes back to back in the animated series. Caleb's gutting grief and Molly's unbridled joy--Molly who cares so much, and has no idea Caleb is laying his heart bare and reliving his worst nightmare right next door.

And just imagining--Molly so giddy and tipsy and feeling like a god, this vision of decadent self-indulgence. Still giggling over some silly story he shared with his companions, tail swinging happily, fangs bared in a wicked grin.

Caleb stumbling out into the hall just a few doors down, head hung, breaths coming sharp and fast. He just needs some air, just needs to get outside and get away from it all, can't bear Nott's achingly kind words or Beau's scathing glare any longer.

He took a gamble--reckless, foolish, sure to come back and bite him in the end--he risked everything, all for a desperate, hopeless dream. He can't bear the thought of any of the others ever finding out. Can't stomach the thought of even looking them in the eye after tonight.

And then, in his eagerness to make an escape, Caleb runs right into Mollymauk. Or perhaps Molly crashed into him--he's not certain, he wasn't looking, wasn't seeing much of anything except all the walls closing in--and he's not really sure what he expected, but it wasn't the sight of Mollymauk Tealeaf draped in only that ridiculous, gaudy tapestry.

It's almost distracting enough to wake him from this nightmare, to startle him into laughter. Molly looks at him then--really sees him--and that's almost as terrifying as admitting the whole truth. His showman's smile falters, crimson eyes sharp and piercing, reading Caleb's soul as easily as a deck of cards.

"You alright, Mr. Caleb?" He asks slowly, carefully. Like Caleb's one of the old carnival horses he's trying not to spook, like he could turn and just take off into the night at any moment.

Caleb trying to push past Molly, muttering some excuse, unable to face anyone else for the night. And Molly catching him by the hand before he can go, unwilling to just leave another heartbroken soul.

Just, tiny little nods to how attentive Molly is to Caleb, how they carry so much of the same pain without ever even realizing it--

[constancecream]

Sherlock season 4 premiere: “The Six Thatchers” offers a disappointing end to a 3-year-old mystery

Sunday’s episode dropped a major character death — that of John’s wife, Mary — into the middle of an already-messy series of plot complications. Frustratingly, the only real reason for Mary’s demise predictably seems to be to examine its impact on Sherlock and John.

The lack of surprises — note: a plot twist is not always surprising — includes the occasional unworthy cliché, such as a slow-motion bullet hovering on its way to its target. On the other hand, a struggling, gurgling, smashing fight in a swimming pool is a refreshing change. It’s a jolly enough episode, but not as thrillingly stylish as some past adventures. Dare one suggest that we need more Moriarty? As it is, the Holmes brothers, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and writer Mark Gatiss as Mycroft, remain the most stylish performers though — or because? — they talk RP in a general swamp of mockney. Modified rapture, then. It would be a shame if the new series sinks into the peremptory and mechanical.

Amanda Abbington’s arrival as Mary Morstan at the start of Sherlock season three seemed to accompany a shift in the show’s overall direction away from crime-solving and toward a rhetorical plot cycle in which John attempts to swap his dysfunctional relationship with Sherlock for something healthier, only to fail because in the world of Sherlock, all roads and all people ultimately lead back to the title character himself. The people around him, even John, ultimately seem to exist only as extras in his world, showing up when needed to lecture, scold, or spurn him into a renewed sense of purpose or a showing of human decency. (This trait is so well developed that all the characters who appeared in 2016’s one-off, 1890s-set holiday special turned out to be Sherlock’s mental representation of them as pieces of his conscience.)

Mary, who was initially the only character whose storyline seemed totally independent of Sherlock’s, fully upset this pattern for a moment. Ultimately, however, the show gave her very little autonomy; in the final episode of season three, her entire mysterious and unrevealed history — which fans have spent the last three years debating — was framed as an insight into John’s character rather than Mary herself. We learned that she was a secretive former assassin, and that she lied her way into John’s life after stealing a new identity; but this entire story was framed as a story about John, not Mary — a story of how John was drawn to her because he was a reckless thrill-seeker.

This moment is the inevitable result of three seasons’ worth of Sherlock’s hubris and refusal to heed warnings or take seriously the judgment of anyone besides himself; and when Mary just as inevitably jumps in front of him, sacrificing her own life for his, it should feel like a wake-up call and a moment of reckoning. Sherlock registers a glimmer of self-awareness that her death is his fault, but by this point, the show seems to be so far immersed in the cult of worship around its anti-hero that the scene is hardly more than an afterthought. By episode’s end, Mary herself — via posthumous “If you’re reading this, I’m dead” message sent to Sherlock via a video file — is giving Sherlock permission to insert himself right back into the center of John’s life, thus making her death all about his relationship with his best friend.

John, meanwhile, had cheated on Mary emotionally before her death; his grief sees him processing his obvious guilt as anger toward Sherlock for failing to protect her. Given all the terrible things Sherlock has done to John directly over the course of their friendship that John has inexplicably managed to forgive — including lying to John, drugging John, sending John into a PTSD-triggering war zone, and making John watch as Sherlock faked his death before pretending to be dead for two years — the fact that Sherlock’s failure to save Mary is the final straw that threatens to cause a permanent rift in John and Sherlock’s friendship does even more injustice to Mary’s narrative. Her story was never her own story; it was always and ever about fueling the heart of the series, the relationship between Sherlock and John.

At this point, does anyone even really care if Sherlock and John are in love?

Much has been written about the way Sherlock queerbaits — that is, the way in which it arguably exploits queer identity by making John and Sherlock’s relationship into the ongoing subject of homoerotic speculation and subtext, even as the show’s creators insist, again and again, that they’re not writing the two men as queer. Almost every episode of Sherlock up until now has contained some sort of side-speculation by one character or another that John and Sherlock are gay and/or in love. “The Six Thatchers” was notably devoid of this kind of interaction, and was in fact extremely straightforward about John and Sherlock’s friendship without any of the usual frustrating homoerotic overtones.

Except, of course, Mary is now dead, and she has charged Sherlock to “save” John after her death. This sets the stage for an even deeper level of intimacy forged by mutual grief over her loss. Before “The Six Thatchers,” we had queerbaiting in the form of a lot of gay jokes. Now the gay jokes may be gone, but the show has traded them for something that feels even more insulting: the death of its most independent female character purely to further some manpain that in the end probably won’t bring John and Sherlock together as more than friends. It’s kind of a mess. And it really only justifies the impending narrative for the rest of season four — in which John will push Sherlock away as Sherlock awkwardly tries to help him recover — if you ultimately think their relationship is worth salvaging. Frankly I’m not sure that it is. Sherlock, for all of his occasional attempts to be a friend, is a perpetually selfish individual who seems to need John more as a reflection of a certain version of himself than because he values who John is. John, in turn, appears to still be the PSTD-ridden soldier who can only snap out of his stupor when he’s chasing the adrenalin high of crime-solving that Sherlock offers him. If this is friendship, it’s darkly co-dependent; if it’s true love, it’s a tragedy. Sherlock has never been forced to reckon with any of the utterly unconscionable things he’s done to John over the years (look back at that list — it’s a horrific list!). And if the show is going to sacrifice entire characters on the altar of “Johnlock,” a.k.a. the shipping name for their eternal love, it should probably make Johnlock something worth caring about. I’m just not sure that it has. Also, though this may be an afterthought for a series that has built itself around its own cleverness, it’s just not very much fun anymore.

Still, at least Abbington and Mary got a fierce send-off. Whether it will be worth the loss in the long run depends on how willing Gatiss and Moffat are to really have Sherlock undergo the moral reckoning that would justify her death, or whether they intend to keep spinning out the same empty, self-satisfied love story of two crime-solving bros who would probably each be better off alone — or at least without the other.

Vox