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allthelittlecreepycrawlies · 7 months ago

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Arranged marriage. NHS is going to get married to some good match girl they've found for him, and coming out as cut-sleeve won't save him from this fate. So he stages his own kidnapping and hires a mercenary who kidnaps him all in red attire on his wedding day. The kidnapper he hired turns out to be MY, who became a mix of wandering cultivator + mercenary after being kicked out of the unclean realm, and NHS first secret love. (You can make MY go to do the deed dressed in red too)

Once they'd finished practically binding him into his robes, the servants had left the changing room, meaning there was nothing Nie Huaisang could do except sit and stare despondently at the lanterns as they burned through their store of incense.

His wife to be was pretty; he could accept that in an aesthetic sense. She was kind, with a cute laugh; up until the betrothal had been announced, they'd been good friends.

But the idea of marrying, of sleeping with anyone besides Yao-ge her made him very glad he hadn't eaten over the past two days.

No matter how much everyone wrote it off as pre-wedding jitters -the more charitable ones- or him just being an obstinate brat -everyone else- he just couldn't deal with this.

Even just the night before, he'd gotten in a huge fight with his brother about it, as Da-ge continued to never give him a straight answer why it had to be him to continue the family bloodline, when even an idiot who knew nothing about gentry would figure the sect leader doing it himself made more sense.

They hadn't spoken to each other at all during the final preparations.

He had become so desperate to get out of this that at one point he'd even attempted to arrange a very public disappearance. A fake death, even. But as upset and angry as he was with his brother, he hadn't been able to go through with that, and had sent word to the facilitator to just call it off and keep the money for their trouble.

Fuck. It wasn't even time for the ceremony yet, and he was so tired that his vision was-

-wait.

He quickly tried to stand up, only to sway on his feet and topple to the side.

Hands caught him before he could hit the floor, and he caught sight of a blurry red theater mask as he was scooped up.

"Wha... what's..." he slurred, only to be shushed.

"Just sleep," crooned a voice that he never thought he'd hear again was familiar, even through the haze caused by the drugged incense. "I'll take care of everything."

---

To say that the Unclean Realms was caught off guard was an understatement.

No one had expected that there would be someone who actually wanted to steal would be so audacious as to steal the second son on his wedding day.

And yet a masked figure in red, the young master over one shoulder and a whip in his other hand, had practically exploded out of the window of the sealed changing room and swung down to the courtyard, before splitting off into a dozen illusions to keep the guards guessing as they scattered to and over the walls.

Nie Mingjue was the first to spot the real one, for all the good it did him. The thief was surprisingly fast on their feet and agile, even carrying his unconscious brother. At the same time, it was clear that neither side wanted to risk hurting Huaisang, which gave the stranger more of an advantage with a whip than it gave him with a saber.

Baxia was sent flying, and with that first chance to escape laid out, they took it. By the time Nie Mingjue had called her back to his hand, they had disappeared with the same quickness they had appeared, and had taken his brother with them.

And now there was an even bigger mess to deal with.

#mdzs #sangyao #sangyao week #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #nie mingjue #fanfic

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mst3kproject · 5 years ago

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The Vindicator

We’re heading back to Canada, the True North Strong and Free that brought us The Final Sacrifice. Our indie movie scene up here is pretty weird and very cheap, and this is a prime example of the latter. It’s a dimly-lit, badly-directed ripoff with shitty effects and a has-been headliner. The perfect thing for Pearl to throw Mike’s way in between her other cruel experiments.

A research guy named Carl is killed in a Science Accident at EvilCo, so his bosses save his brain to make into an indestructible cyborg I hereby dub RoboCrap. Boy, that’s a great idea. Not like he’ll escape and go on a rampage. EvilCo’s boss decides that the only way to get him back is to hire Hunter, a ninja lady played by the closest thing this movie has to a star, Pam Grier. By using RoboCrap’s wife Lauren as bait, they lure him back to EvilCo for a final confrontation. Somehow this all results in people being able to land on Mars. I don’t know. I don’t care.

So despite a title that’s supposed to invoke The Terminator, this is in fact a ripoff of Robocop, and it’s very, very bad. Almost Future War bad, where they really shouldn’t have tried to make this movie on this budget. I can say in its favour that it did understand what was interesting about Robocop and tried to ape that rather than just showing us a cyborg killing people, but it still gets it all wrong.

Let us start with RoboCrap himself – I know his name is Carl because people keep yelling it at him. He’s obviously the Alex Murphy of this story, the guy whose death is co-opted to create a killing machine, and who eventually turns this weapon against his creators while reclaiming his humanity. They do this wrong at every stage. RoboCop made sure we got to know Murphy just well enough to feel for his death and be interested in him rediscovering himself. When we meet Carl we see that he’s at odds with his boss over funding, but this isn’t particularly compelling, and the only thing we know about him on a personal level is that his wife is pregnant. It’s kind of like Hawkeye in Age of Ultron, where the existence of a family is treated as a substitute for characterization.

Having failed to humanize Carl, the movie then fails to dehumanize him. RoboCop presented the title character to us very much as a machine, with very little idea, at first, how much of Murphy was left in him. Carl still knows who he is and soon finds out what he is, and there’s never any doubt even among the bad guys that there’s still a human being under all that machinery. This is illustrated best by the movie’s own visuals – one of the way’s RoboCop hid Murphy’s humanity was to cover his eyes. The Vindicator covers everything but Carl’s eyes.

While I’m on that topic, the suit design is terrible. Robocop had an easily recognizable silhouette that looked convincingly mechanical while not being distractingly complex. RoboCrap here looks like he’s made of garbage. There are far too many little parts and the lighting is so bad you often can’t see anything but a mass of vaguely metallic stuff. Even in daytime shots, you never really get an impression of what this being looks like or what any of this junk does. The fact that you can see the actor’s eyes mostly just emphasizes that this is a stupid costume with a guy stumbling around inside of it.

Look at that. This shot would be forty times better if he were standing in front of the yellow van, where he’d stand out, instead of in front of the scrap metal he blends right into. Morons.

I guess the wardrobe department’s reasoning for leaving the eyes uncovered was that it would allow the actor to emote. It’s too bad they hired a crappy actor. He’s bad as RoboCrap, and worse in the early scenes where he’s just supposed to be Carl. The worst thing he does is shout NOOOOOOO during the science accident, which is so awful it’s hilarious. Then not only do they show it to us again in flashbacks, they also have him go off on another NOOOOOOO when he realizes he’s killed a bunch of people in a sewer. You can’t watch this and take it seriously.

A poorly-handled main character will kill a movie very effectively, but The Vindicator does just about everything else wrong, too. The EvilCo boss’ reasoning for creating this cyborg never makes any sense – in fact, it makes so little sense that other characters keep pointing out how dumb it is! When you know something in your movie is stupid, the last thing you want to do is draw attention to the fact! Nor do we ever really know what it is Carl’s trying to achieve. He hangs around in the sewer, leaves cryptic messages for his wife, and defends himself from a biker gang and from Hunter’s mercenaries. Eventually he reprograms himself to remove the insta-kill mode they inexplicably installed in him, but that happens offscreen and is rather anti-climactic. The insta-kill is established for us in a scene with a lab chimp, where the CEO of EvilCo literally pokes the animal with a stick until it gets so pissed off at him it dies of a heart attack. This is established like it should be a plot point, but we never even see anyone concerned that Carl will Rage To Death. The movie has totally forgotten about it by the time we get that far.

Similarly, we never find out what Carl was threatening to ‘blow the whistle on’ when he argues with his boss. EvilCo is up to some shifty stuff to be sure, but as far as I can tell from the movie we see, it’s all disguised. The development of the robotic limbs was undercover as advanced prosthetics, the indestructible shell was a spacesuit, the mind control was only for use on animals, etc etc etc. Even the people developing this stuff were surprised when the CEO had them bring it all together to create RoboCrap. What did Carl know? We never find out, because the movie never mentions it again. I figured he would try to use secrets as leverage but nope.

Another really weird plot point has to do with the synthesizer in Carl’s house, which apparently has a short circuit or something that picks up radio broadcasts. RoboCarp uses this to communicate with Lauren, but it’s never clear why this is necessary. He’s perfectly able to speak, and there’s no reason why he couldn’t just phone her. Using the synthesizer doesn’t even accomplish anything in the plot – EvilCo has the house bugged, so they’re listening in on the conversations anyway!

The list of crap goes on. There’s an annoying little kid playing in a junkyard who sees RoboCrap and asks him if he’s from outer space. Like the ape raging itself to death in the opening scene, this kid is introduced as if he ought to be important to the plot, but he isn’t – he just stands around going ‘ooooh’ as RoboCrap lifts cars, and then he’s gone. I guess we should be glad of that, because it means we’re not obliged to put up with his ‘cute’ antics for more than a couple of minutes. At the same time, he’s still annoying, and since he doesn’t do anything important, he’s also pointless.

One of the biggest ruined opportunities in the movie was the character of Carl’s co-worker Bert. When they’re introduced they seem to be good friends and Carl asks Lauren to contact Bert for him so that he can ask for help. Bert meets Carl, but it turns out to be a trap by EvilCo, who have rewarded Bert for his help with a promotion. This makes Bert, and the conflict between his loyalty to his friend and his loyalty to his job, potentially quite interesting… but then it turns out he’s just an asshole, who only hung out with Carl at all because he was in love with Lauren. When Lauren rejects him, he tries to kill her.

This means we don’t have to feel bad about it when RoboCrap kills Bert a few minutes later, and neither does RoboCrap himself. But honestly, it would have been a way better movie if we did. Carl and Bert’s friendship was one of the only relationships in the movie that was properly established, and having Bert actually blackmailed into betraying him, and Carl actually forced by his programming to murder his friend, would have had far more emotional impact. Carl is horrified by his own killing but we don’t really feel that when his victims are criminals and his evil bosses.

Is there anything good in this movie? There’s a few things here and there. The lab animals that escape from their cages to kill the scientist who’d been torturing them did richly deserve that revenge. There’s a scene in which some extremely creepy dolls are used to emphasize that Carl has become an uncanny effigy of humanity or something, and it goes on way after we’ve got the idea but it’s all right. It’s also established that RoboCrap will only kill in self-defense, when a perceived threat activates the insta-kill. He states that he doesn’t want to kill people but cannot control this programming – so the bad guys repeatedly bring violence upon themselves when they attempt to attack him. This is clearly intended to be ironic and kind of works. Hunter’s suicide, when it’s very unlikely RoboCrap was actually going to kill her, functions on a similar level.

Man, this movie is bad, and it’s not even bad in a fun way – it’s just bad. It ‘got’ what made RoboCop worth watching but it still couldn’t do anything with that, and everything it could have done with what it had, it fucked up. The result reminds me of that Fix Auto commercial where the kid flails around and ends up whacking his mom’s car instead of the pinata. They could have had something tasty, but instead they just made an expensive mess.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the vindicator #tw: rape #tw: suicide #80s

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castlesbyrs · 8 years ago

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After a three-year hiatus, the BBC’s Sherlock finally returned on New Year’s Day to kick off its fourth season with the first of three new episodes, “The Six Thatchers.”

The show is coming off a divisive third season that drew plenty of audience backlash for what many viewers felt was too much fan service at the expense of good character development, and for plotting that seemed all over the map. The general fear was that the show had moved away from the more compelling stories of its first two seasons and gone off the rails in favor of highly implausible plot twists that did nothing much for the overall narrative. It was a worry that 2016’s Christmas special, “The Abominable Bride,” did nothing to allay.

Unfortunately, the season four premiere has revealed that Sherlock’s most promising and divisive element in the wake of the season three finale — the evolving three-way relationship between Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch), John Watson (Martin Freeman), and John’s mysterious wife, Mary (Amanda Abbington) — is little more than a giant distraction, a red herring for ... whatever the show has up its sleeve next.

But will the major change in plot direction the show sprung on us in this episode be worth it?

“The Six Thatchers” starts off feeling like one of Sherlock’s manic drug trips before settling into a story about the past

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.

Written by series co-creator Mark Gatiss and directed by Rachel Talalay (Tank Girl), the episode title “The Six Thatchers” pays homage, like the titles of all of Sherlock’s previous episodes, to an original story from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian Sherlock Holmes canon (in this case, “The Six Napoleons”). The “Thatchers” in the title cheekily refer to a series of destroyed busts of Margaret Thatcher; in the original story, the busts are the center of a giant mystery, but in the updated version, they’re side jokes in an episode full of misdirections and side excursions into mini cases, montages, and flashbacks that serve no purpose other than to illuminate the frustrating genius of one Sherlock Holmes.

We’ve seen this before. Showrunners Steven Moffat and Gatiss (who also plays Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft) are quite fond of gleefully showcasing Sherlock’s brilliance alongside his rudeness and interminable unconcern for social mores. In “The Six Thatchers,” Sherlock is more Sherlockian than ever; his drug addiction seems more serious, and his determination in solving cases has translated into a constant obsession with his cellphone. His rudeness extends to texting obliviously through the christening ceremony for John and Mary’s newborn daughter, Rosie, but they ask him to be her godfather anyway, because every human being in Sherlock’s life ultimately decides that his general horribleness is worth tolerating because it’s his noble commitment to detective work that makes him act that way, or something.

Case in point: In “The Six Thatchers,” all the people around him patiently endure as he ravenously takes on case after quickly solved case, hoping to figure out the maddening-to-many season three turn that brought back the very-dead Moriarty (Andrew Scott) as a spectral presence in Sherlock’s life. None of these cases lead him to Moriarty, however; instead, they plunk him down into the rabbit hole introduced in the tumultuous season three finale: the truth about Mary’s murky past as a mercenary assassin.

The trouble with Mary

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.

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 past 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.

The larger questions season three raised about Mary — whom or what she had been working for, what her new role would be now that her old career was known, and how the birth of a wee baby Watson would affect her and John’s relationship with Sherlock — were shelved until this season. Alas, Moffat does not have the world’s most excellent track record for giving women arcs with agency and satisfying plot resolutions, and it seems Mary is no exception to this pattern.

Who is Mary Morstan? Turns out it doesn’t really matter.

Although “The Six Thatchers” gave Mary plenty of chances to be badass, the episode revealed her entire assassin arc to be not a foray into independence from Sherlock and his radius of dysfunction, but an enabling of it.

“The Six Thatchers” casts Mary as the victim of a routine revenge plot carried out by a former co-agent of hers from her days as a hired assassin. Through total coincidence, Sherlock is the one who figures out that someone is attempting to kill her, which prompts him to embark on a misguided attempt to protect her that ultimately results in her death. After identifying the shadowy government figure behind a plot to kill Mary and her fellow agents, Sherlock unnecessarily goads the suspect into taking a shot at him.

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 antihero 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 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 it is.

Sherlock, for all of his occasional attempts to be a decent 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 PTSD-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.

There are now two episodes left in season four, which Moffat and Gatiss have called “climactic” and have hinted may be the show’s last. But I’m not holding my breath for a narrative that boasts any finality, particularly since Sherlock still has a lot of loose threads to tie up. After all, we not only still don’t know what Moriarty’s end game was, we haven’t even met this season’s villain, Culverton Smith (Toby Jones). There may even be a third Holmes brother in the mix.

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.

Friend...my pal... THE SHOW IS FUCKING CALLED SHERLOCK AND IT’S ABOUT SHERLOCK AND JOHN

#read it #no seriously read it #sherlock #tst #omfg

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mechagalaxy · 7 years ago

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Mountain of Mayhem

Personal Log: Boverk Borson, XO Defenders of Bunny

Things went sideways with a haiku. I kid you not. We got a message from the Prince of Flowers. We backed him in the war with his brother the tightass prince of rust, and he has been using us for special missions ever since. He would never lower himself to hire mercenaries, so he sends little bits of poetry from which Alyssa and I have to figure out what the frell he is after, then carry out the mission. We then get these cute little gifts, crystal, ferrite, niodes and no kidding gift baskets. Its messed up and classy in about equal amounts. This time the Haiku was obscure even for the Prince of Flowers.

Faithful forty seven

Condemned by Shogun’s law

From mountain gaze

This is what we have to deal with. Accompanying the poem was a bouquet of white Chrysanthemums. Oh crap. The prince, he is old school Meji, as in swords and freaking pony samurai. You only give white Chrysanthemums as a funeral gift. This is a warning we are condemned to die!

Faithful 47, the 47 Ronin of ancient Japan back on Terra, forty seven faithful samurai who broke the law to avenge their lord against an arrogant an unjust government lacky. What the frell is going on, were we in trouble? We have been good little mercenaries lately, stomping pirates left and right, not a single border incident that could slot anybody off, and we haven’t even really shot that many of his officials caught working with pirates either. I mean we shot a few, but no one really big enough to get people worked up enough to death list us. I shot Alyssa a quick text of what was going on, she was in the mecha bay getting ready for King of the Mountain, and had the “Do not disturb unless Ragnarok” sign up. She was better at reading tea leaves and the Princes squirrely little mind than I was, she might be able to figure out what the last line was about, as it made NO SENSE. Easter 123 was the home base of the Defenders of Bunny and we were on the Vigrid plains, not a mountain in sight. We kind of need a lot of cleared areas for our war games, and we just hate getting snuck up on, so we didn’t put any great mothering terrain obstacles blocking our sensors. I checked the newsfeed and was in the middle of a sort for anything related to military activity when I got a misrouted message. It was addressed to the OC of the local Planetary Defense Force. He routinely copies us on all his traffic as we take the lead in defense on Easter 123 as our forces are a whole lot stronger than his, and form the point element in all his defense plans, with his own forces in a supporting role where their larger numbers and lighter machines can be useful (and survivable).

“To all Planetary Defense Forces, Pirate Moon Sector From Sengakuji Reaches Ministry of Military Affairs Classification: Sengakuji Eyes Only, not for distribution to formerly allied mercenary forces

Action Immediate: As of this date, all privately operated military forces, aka Mercenary Clans, are to be disarmed and integrated into the Reaches military. All gate traffic by Mercenary forces is suspended, and the codes for the gates have been changed. Fleet forces have been dispatched to secure control of nearspace, with instructions that any and all clan troop carrying vessels are to be fired upon if they approach within 100,000 kilometers of the atmospheric interface. This message constitutes a war warning, and all leaves are cancelled. Martial Law has been declared and stage one information control procedures are hereby ordered.”

Got to wonder, did Iko forget to take me off the distribution list, or was this another example of our Sengakuji lords and masters giving us a back door warning while officially getting ready to trap and disarm us. Almost like they are being forced to go after us, and want us to get away, but with the fleet not able to approach close enough to Sengakuji airspace to lift us off, and the gates locked against us, how do we get off?

I tried to activate our own gate, and the damned thing was shut down hard. We were trapped, and the warning made no sense at all. “From mountain gaze” What FRELLING mountain?

My comm pinged, Alyssa was calling. “Bolverk, get you hairy ass moving. I want all our mecha, our tech crews, dependants, and mech bay bunnies mounted up and moving to the gate. Send an alert to the Bouncing Blue Brotherhood, follow us to the mountain. We will evac from there.” Alyssa sounded pumped up, she always was when war was on, but I still had no clue what she was talking about. “Boss” I asked her “What FRELLING MOUNTAIN! And how are we supposed to gate out when they are all locked against us?”

Alyssa’s laughter was genuine, she really had no idea the rest of us didn’t already get it. She stopped long enough to explain, and suddenly I felt a whole lot less trapped, and a whole lot more eager.

“THE mountain you silly bunny. The Craftsman’s mountain. No one controls the Craftsman’s gate but them. You can’t get any mecha to function beyond their gate filters except the ones in the current King of the Mountain specialty, but you can physically move anything through the gate. We move the Defenders of Bunny through, I have already talked to Slaughterhouse 5, Star League, and Myth and Legends 13th, Smurf Brigade, they will meet us on the mountain and we will let the fleet lift us off from there. The Prince is right, from the mountain we can look at all the shiny armies lined up to arrest us and blow a nice raspberry, because no one but mercenary mecha jocks will get past the Craftsman’s gate. They think they can put together an army big enough to swat a clan? Then we get us a Faction together. We raise the Bouncing Blue Berserker banner. Lets get the band back together and go on a road trip! Faction War! Don’t you love it?”

That’s the boss for you. When in doubt, escalate. Oh well, if you are going to get shot as rebels, you may as well do it in style. The Bouncing Blue Berserkers are coming for you, and them that dies will be the lucky ones!

John T Mainer 28840

��.<

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ilovebennystuff · 8 years ago

Text

taken from VOX . Some interesting comments here. I wondered what other people thought.

After a three-year hiatus, the BBC’s Sherlock finally returned on New Year’s Day to kick off its fourth season with the first of three new episodes, “The Six Thatchers.”

The show is coming off a divisive third season that drew plenty of audience backlash both for what many viewers felt was too much fanservice at the expense of good character development, and plotting that seemed all over the map. The general fear was that the show had moved away from the more compelling stories of its first two seasons and gone off the rails in favor of highly implausible plot twists that did nothing much for the overall narrative. It was a worry that 2016’s Christmas special, “The Abominable Bride,” did nothing to allay.

Unfortunately, the season four premiere has revealed that Sherlock’s most promising and divisive element in the wake of the season three finale — the evolving three-way relationship between Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch), John Watson (Martin Freeman), and John’s mysterious wife Mary (Amanda Abbington) — is little more than a giant distraction, a red herring for ... whatever the show has up its sleeve next.

But will the major change in plot direction the show sprung on us in this episode be worth it?

Major spoilers follow.

“The Six Thatchers” starts off feeling like one of Sherlock’s manic drug trips before settling into a story about the past

Sherlock’s forever escalating drug addiction is just one of his problems in season four. Sherlock/YouTube

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.

Written by series co-creator Mark Gatiss and directed by Rachel Talalay (Tank Girl), the episode title “The Six Thatchers” pays homage, like the titles of all of Sherlock’s previous episodes, to an original story from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian Sherlock Holmes canon (in this case, “The Six Napoleons”). The “Thatchers” in the title cheekily refer to a series of destroyed busts of Margaret Thatcher; in the original Conan Doyle story, the busts are the center of a giant mystery, but in the updated version, they’re side jokes in an episode full of misdirections and side-excursions into mini-cases, montages, and flashbacks that serve no purpose other than to illuminate the frustrating genius of one Sherlock Holmes.

Case in point: In “The Six Thatchers,” each of the people around him patiently endure as he ravenously takes on case after quickly solved case, hoping to figure out the maddening-to-many season three turn that brought back the very-dead Moriarty (Andrew Scott) as a spectral presence in Sherlock’s life. None of these cases lead him to Moriarty, however; instead, they plunk him down into the rabbit hole introduced in the tumultuous season three finale: the truth about Mary’s murky past as a mercenary assassin.

The trouble with Mary

Oh, Mary, we hardly knew you.

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.

The larger questions that season three raised about Mary — who or what she had been working for, what her new role would be now that her old career was known, and how the birth of a wee baby Watson would affect her and John’s relationship with Sherlock — were shelved until this season. Alas, Moffat does not have the world’s most excellent track record for giving women arcs with agency and satisfying plot resolutions, and it seems Mary is no exception to this pattern.

Who is Mary Morstan? Turns out, it doesn’t really matter.

Although “The Six Thatchers” gave her plenty of chances to be badass, the episode revealed Mary’s entire assassin arc to be, not a foray into independence from Sherlock and his radius of dysfunction, but an enabling of it.

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?

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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.

Sherlock, for all of his occasional attempts to be a decent 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.

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.

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