I am Sherlocked: A Scandal in Belgravia

Previously, on Sherlock….

One of the most intelligent people in the world decides to meet with a serial killer/bomber, alone, at night, without telling anyone where he was going, despite knowing that this man frequently employs snipers.

His bestie and flatmate shows up wearing a jacket packed full of explosives. The baddie says that he’s leaving after just having a chat…. Then comes back. And decides to kill both of the goodies.

Except, instead of actually doing it, he allows one of the good guys to turn around and slowly point a gun at the aforementioned explosives jacket.

I don’t know why the snipers didn’t, you know…. Shoot. Before he could threaten the lives of everybody present.

But it provided a dramatic cliff-hanger.

Which is broken by….. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive…..”

“Mind if I get that?”

“You’ve got the rest of your life….”

Well, we’re back.

Moriarty answers the call. Clearly he’s talking to a subordinate. Did I say talking? I meant shouting… anyway…

This is a great way to start a series. The tension had already built. It’s quickly re-established… then drops a little. A gentle tease. Then starts to rise again, as Moriarty threatens the life of the person he’s talking to.

At this moment, after the moment of relief, the tension should build again. The stakes should be raised higher, building to a dramatic climax….

But no. Moriarty decides not to kill Sherlock just yet. And he just walks out.

The tension just.. vanishes. It’s a sad way for this scene to end. Even when you know what’s actually happening here… it doesn’t make much sense.

Irene Adler calls Jim. “Hi, I just realised, you’ve popped out to kill that detective, haven’t you? Well, did you know that he happens to be Mycroft Holmes’ little brother, so you probably shouldn’t kill him. Let me use him to get to Mycroft. Sound good to you? Because I might have a way of confirming a theory that could make us lots of money and political power.”

And Jim, rather than saying “Um, no, I’ve literally dropped hundreds of thousands, of not millions of pounds worth of projects on this guy. You want me to let him carry on running around, in the hope that you can outsmart him, trick him and get some juicy information about national security from his brother? Um… you know I just claimed that I could get my hands on the Bruce-Partington plans with ease? You don’t? Oh, of course, you’re not here…. (wait, how did you know that this would be a particularly dramatic point to call? How did you know that I hadn’t already killed him? HOW DID YOU EVEN KNOW I WAS MEETING WITH HIM WHERE’S THE SECRECY IN THIS SUPER SECRET ORGANISATION?????) Well anyway, I already have plenty of ways of getting information out of the British government, so clearly we don’t need Sherlock. Sorry, gotta go, got a whole stand-off thing going here” (And how did Jim not know that he could use Sherlock to get to Mycroft anyway???)

Instead of saying that (or an abbreviated version of that, anyway), Jim is just like….. “yeah, sure. Here Sherlock, have a vague threat. Bye now.”

I mean, it doesn’t make much sense, does it? And we never find out what Adler actually tells him. That kind of… cheapens the moment, actually. It would have been much better to not tell us who it was that called him at all. Then it could have been used later. (My personal theory was that the Jim Moriarty that we meet isn’t actually Moriarty. I really thought that that was where the whole “Richard Brooke” thing was going- the Jim Moriarty that we had met was an actor representing the real Moriarty, a much greater threat behind the face, who had been toying with Sherlock all along).

Anyway, we cut away from the swimming pool to….

Irene Adler. The Dominatrix. Calling Moriarty and offering him top-secret information and compromising photos of a royal… while stood just outside a room in which said royal is.

Look. I have already done a post about Irene Adler, and how she is so poorly understood and managed by almost every modern interpretation. Let me include a quick summary, so we’re all up to speed.

In the original story, Irene Adler is an Opera singer who once had an affair with the now-King of Bohemia. She possesses a photograph of the two of them together. Now that the King is looking to marry, he is determined to get this photo back and bury it forever. When Adler refuses to give it back, the King starts sending people after her. They accost her, they try and steal it from her…

Long story short, the King is definitely the villain in this story. Holmes and Watson agree to take the case in the hope that they can de-escalate things, but fundamentally they are working for a…. really unpleasant guy who believes that Adler is still hopelessly, jealously in love with him, and would use this photo to stop his marriage to another woman.

Holmes begins spying on Adler. A short while into the case, he follows her to a church, where she meets with a frequent visitor of hers, a lawyer. They quickly get married (with Holmes acting as a witness while wearing a disguise). Then Holmes pretends to have been injured in a fight, seeks refuge in Adler’s house while Watson calls “Fire!” outside. Adler looks to the secret place where the photograph is concealed, Holmes spots the tell. He returns later to try and steal the photograph.

Adler is gone, the photograph with her. She leaves behind a photograph of herself, and a message basically explaining how she realised that Holmes was watching her, and saying that she keeps the photograph of herself and the king only to protect herself and her husband from reprisals from the King of Bohemia.

Holmes meets with the King, and expresses his apologies for failing to obtain the photograph, but assures his venerable client that the photograph is safe, and that he doesn’t believe it will be published if he stops taking action against Adler. The King accepts this, and offers Holmes a great reward. Holmes refuses it, asking only for the photograph of Adler that she left for him to find. The King agrees.

The story ends with Holmes recognising Irene Adler as his intellectual equal, and probably his moral superior given that, in the course of this case he has followed, invaded the privacy of and broken into the home of an innocent woman, who only wanted to move on and start a life with the man she loved.

It’s a poignant tale, showcasing a strong female character being harassed by several groups of men, all in the pay of a former partner. It is a story in which Holmes and Watson, essentially, play the part of aggressors towards her. Even if they are acting to try and stop their patron escalating to violence, they are still working for the villain of the story. Once all is revealed, a big impact is clearly left on Holmes. He has to re-evaluate his opinion of women (he still doesn’t come to a great conclusion, but… it’s something).

It’s one of my favourite Holmes stories.

Let’s see how well Sherlock does at adapting it, shall we?

 

So, Um….. Adler is a dominatrix.

Yurgh.

But OK, let’s just….

No. Nope. Can’t do it. Irene Adler isn’t meant to be a sex symbol. She isn’t meant to be Holmes’ girlfriend. She isn’t meant to be a criminal mastermind. She is a woman who is trying to escape from an abusive relationship. She is a woman who wants to move on and start her life.

She is the woman who outsmarts Sherlock Holmes, who notices him when he is in disguise, who deduces enough about him to be able to escape from under his gaze.

To me, it seems INCREDIBLY dodgy to turn a character who is trying to escape from an abusive ex-partner into… a dominatrix who deliberately collects photos of famous people to be used in blackmail.

It seems incredibly disrespectful to this character, who is meant to be the ACTUAL hero of “A Scandal in Bohemia” to make her a villain. A criminal working with Moriarty, no less. Prepared to put the lives of hundreds of people at risk for her own personal gain.

It seems like a waste of one of the best Holmes stories to oversimplify it, remove the complex ethical points and self-reflection that it is meant to inspire in Holmes, and turn it into…… this.

OK.

I think I’m OK now.

Can’t promise I will stay that way, but…. We’re four and a half minutes into this episode and I’ve written over a thousand words.

We can do this.

John and Sherlock are at home. Watson is writing his blog. Sherlock has lots of drop-in clients.

Lots of people, it seems, want his help. Sherlock refuses all of them.

Later, some of these will be important. People being forbidden from seeing their dead relative. Human ash being switched for a substitute.

I mean, I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad way to introduce a few little threads of a greater story…. Except in this instance, it’s just…. Look, people being told that they can’t see a relative’s body? That’s actually, genuinely odd. Sherlock should have realised that that was odd.

And the whole “substitute ash” thing… Sherlock could have just… looked? Identifying human ash sounds like something that Sherlock should be able to do.

And, as it turns out, if he’s looked properly into either of these kind of interesting stories, he might have got to the end solution of this episode’s story much, much faster.

But this show revolves around Sherlock being unnecessarily mean.

So instead, he starts dismissing a few “geeks” (so-called because they’re into comic books. Fun fact, liking to theorise about comic books doesn’t automatically make you a geek. But hey. This page is called the “Geek Philosophers”, and I’m not a geek, so who am I to talk?), then he realises there is interest in the case and looks into it.

Next case, we jump straight into. “The Speckled Blond”.

Another reference to an original story, The Speckled Band. In which a young girl is murdered via venomous reptile by her evil father-in-law to stop her from claiming her inheritance. Such a cheerful story to joke about.

We jump straight from that to the two little girls insisting that they weren’t allowed to see their Gran’s body. They… appear to be totally unaccompanied. Which is helpful for the writers, because if a parent had been there and had been able to explain that “actually, yeah, they said “Insert dodgy excuse here” and we couldn’t see the body”, which might have aroused Sherlock’s suspicions. To avoid that awkward possibility, they let two small children wonder around London alone, and enter the house of two complete strangers, one of whom has killed someone fairly recently, the other has…. Probably killed someone fairly recently. (I am sticking with my “Sherlock is actually a serial killer” theory from the second episode of series 1.)

And immediately afterwards…. Oh look, a body turning up in a place where it shouldn’t be!

A body that has clearly been dressed to look like it was on a particular flight (as it is logically impossible for him to have been on that flight given where/when his body turned up). A body that was… left in the back of a car, waiting to be found?

That’s professional. Really professional.

And apparently, Sherlock couldn’t solve it.

We don’t get to see what actually happened, or what steps he took…

Ooh, also John’s blog has had 1895 hits. I would love to make a joke about that, but I don’t think this blog has had 1895 hits in the last year. Possibly ever, actually…..

This is another thing that is set up now and comes up again later. Sherlock wonders if someons hacked the counter after it freezes on that number, and so tries it on Adler’s phone as a passcode. It doesn’t work.

So…. I guess the counter just glitched then? There’s no other explanation given as to why that number might be even slightly significant?

Anyway. Another case. “The Naval treatment”. This one isn’t even explained.

That’s because it’s actually just a vehicle to allow Sherlock to get some press exposure. It looks like he doesn’t really like this. Another departure from the original stories here. In the originals, Holmes begins his career wanting to earn his fame as the best brain in Britain. Later on in his career, he stops seeking acclaim, which is a sign that he feels more fulfilled and confident in his work. This trend of feeling less in need of external recognition ultimately transitions into his contentment in retiring. It’s a lovely character arc, spread over years and years of writings.

But nah, let’s just cut all of that out, shall we?

Let’s just make Sherlock vaguely irritated by the whole thing. And give him THE HAT. The deerstalker.

(And when I say “give him the hat”, I mean “let him steal it from a dressing room”. Yes, he literally steals it.)

Anyway, cut back to Adler.

“I think it’s time, don’t you?” she says to someone on the phone. Presumably this is her getting permission from Moriarty to begin her piece of royal blackmail.

Two things wrong in one here. Firstly, Irene Adler asks permission of NO-ONE. Secondly… Irene Adler as a blackmailer. The WHOLE POINT of her story was that she WASN’T a blackmailer.

But anyway…. On this fateful day, Mrs Hudson is rooting through 221b’s fridge. (Because she’s not a house-keeper, remember?). She finds a lovely bag full of… human thumbs…..

Yay. First human tissue act violation of this series.

Under 9 minutes in, in case anyone’s counting.

And a random guy walks in and startles her. Then he faints.

Apparently, someone left the front door open.

And we get our “big puzzle piece” for this episode.

A guy’s car breaks down. He stops, and sees a man across a field. His car backfires. When he looks back, the man in the field has fallen to the ground, dead. With a head injury.

Spooky… or what?

(seriously, what? This is just a… boring case. This guy could have been killed in so many ways. The one they come up with is actually unrealistic, boring, and stupid. This could have been so much more interesting. Also, it would be nice if this over-produced “mystery” actually had any significance on the plot at all.)

The police arrive. They call Sherlock.

Sherlock’s feeling lazy, so he sends John with a laptop and a webcam. I don’t know when “lazy” became a defining character trait of Sherlock Holmes, but clearly the case just isn’t that important to him. And he has a ranking system to decide when a case is worth his leaving the flat.

This is just…. Irritating.

Even more irritating is Sherlock joking about not realising when John is away. That’s just so… so….. I wish Sherlock’s character was more like that of Sherlock Holmes. I wish Sherlock’s character didn’t consist of “insult people repeatedly, then repeat until they are prepared to die for you”.

The only good thing about this scene is John pre-empting the Handforth parish council meeting by several years by threatening to mute Sherlock if he doesn’t behave.

Right. So anyway, before Sherlock can finish with the case, he is magicked away by some people in smart suits. At the same time, a helicopter appears to pick up John. Sherlock immediately deduces that he is being taken to…. Buckingham Palace.

And, obviously, Sherlock refuses to get dressed before he goes. So he turns up wrapped in a white sheet. I don’t even know what the sheet is, a towel? A bedsheet? Why was he wrapped in it in the first place?

To be fair, this scene, despite the ridiculousness, works. Purely because of the acting. The chemistry between John and Sherlock, playing off the awkwardness of the situation, just…. Works. Especially when they can laugh at Mycroft.

Then, we meet Mr Random Palace Employee. He insists that he can’t tell Sherlock who wants to hire him, but that the client is “illustrious”.

I mean… they literally brought him to Buckingham Palace. Who do they expect him to think he’s working for?

And, come to think of it, why bring him there at all? If they wanted to protect their client’s secrecy, surely it is better to get a third party (or just Mycroft) to approach Sherlock?

But it makes a genuinely good scene, so I’m not mad about it.

Even when Mycroft nearly pulls Sherlock’s sheet off, just before telling Sherlock to “grow up!”

Then they have a childish squabble, at the end of which Mycroft says “look at where you’re standing, you are to be employed by the highest in the land!”, cementing the point that they clearly don’t care about keeping the client’s identity secret at all.

Anyway, Sherlock puts some clothes on, and they sit down to have tea. Because that’s what British people do.

Anyway, Sherlock is shown a photograph of Irene Adler. Sherlock doesn’t know her at all (odd, given that he is meant to be on the ball with these things). She has been involved with various scandals, and is professionally known as “The Woman”.

This is downright insulting to the original character of Adler, and the original use of that title. Making it the name she uses in her profession as a dominatrix, rather than an honorific bestowed by one who admires her and considers her a worthy rival.

Then, Mycroft feels the need to explain what a dominatrix is. Meanwhile, Adler is sent a series of pictures of Sherlock being taken to the Palace, presumably by Moriarty. Labelled as a “gift”.

I mean, Moriarty isn’t sending Sherlock to her, and she already knows about Sherlock and expects their paths to cross soon… in short, this makes little sense as a message.

Anyway, Sherlock asks who she has compromising photographs of. “A person of significance to my employer, a young female person”.

What follows is a carbon copy of the original Holmes conversation. He asks about the photographs, then advises that Adler should simply be paid whatever she demands for them.

But apparently (as in the original), she isn’t selling. She doesn’t plan on using them for extortion, seemingly just wants to keep them as a “power play”.

I mean, it isn’t really…

OK, so the real reason, as we know, is that she is looking to attract Sherlock over to her. She sets the whole thing up to reel him in. Only problem is, neither of the Holmes brothers are in the least bit suspicious about this.

Great geniuses… accept that Adler reveals that she possesses something, not for any immediate benefit but rather for long-term immeasurable gain, while being aware that making such a play might invite severe repercussions.

Anyway, Sherlock and John leave to go and visit Irene. And are photographed multiple times on the way. In a car. Never explained how those pictures are taken… looks like maybe someone in the next car along? But if so, it’s probably quite… obvious.

Anyway, we get a compilation of Sherlock and Irene “preparing for battle”. To do this, Sherlock gets John to punch him in the face, Irene tries on a few dresses, then decides to go naked for this encounter instead. Sherlock and John scrap until they look untidy. Then Sherlock goes to visit Irene. Dressed as a priest.

The PA lets them in. Then Irene turns up.

“Always hard to remember an alias when you’ve had a fright?”

Sherlock freezing like this is… out of character. Quickly, all veils are dropped. Irene knows who they are, and where they’ve been. Sherlock struggles to deduce much about Adler given her lack of clothing. Then we are shown him deducing things about John based on his face. So why can he not tell anything about Irene?

Um…. No idea.

Anyway, Irene puts a coat on, and asks Sherlock how the hiker with a bashed in head was killed.

She, apparently, knows one of the policemen on the case. Well, she knows what he likes…

How she knew that there was something to ask him about, we will never know.

Anyway, it turns out that Irene believes that “brainy is the new sexy”, and she likes detectives. Sherlock teases her with a few facts about the case, and gets her to confirm his guess that the photos are in that room.

Meanwhile, John heads out into the hall to start a fire.

Again, this is just… more silly than the original. Because in this case, Adler knows that there is a stranger wandering around her house. In the original, she doesn’t, and so she is more likely to believe that there really is a fire. Sherlock even neatly leads into the fact that there is about to be a noise, just before the fire alarm starts, making it even less believable.
Am I making sense?

I don’t even know any more…

Anyway, Sherlock is prompting Irene to think through the Hiker case. To “kill time”. Then the fire alarm goes off. Irene is, supposedly, caught off guard and glances towards the mirror. Sherlock thanks her for revealing where her most previous possession is kept, and looks at the safe.

Sherlock asks John to turn the alarm off… and some men with guns come in and shoot it. No-one hears the silenced gun shot, so Sherlock is still busily trying to work out the code to the safe.

The invaders come in after Adler has “told Sherlock the code”, and threaten to kill them if Sherlock doesn’t open the safe.

 Sherlock, though, hasn’t solved Adler’s little puzzle yet, but the invaders don’t care. They are going to shoot Dr Watson unless…

 

Wait. How do they know who Watson and Holmes are? Surely they weren’t expecting them to be there?

Anyway, Sherlock cracks the puzzle just in time to save John.

The code is her measurements.

I can’t even…. I mean, who? Why? This is ridiculous!

Anyway, Sherlock correctly guesses that there is a trap in the safe, a gun that will fire when the door is opened, and he uses this to create a bit of chaos, allowing them to defuse the situation, and knock the inttruders unconscious/shoot them

How Irene opens the safe without triggering the trap, we don’t know. But she has to do so regularly to access the phone inside. This is just a bit silly.

Sherlock goes outside to “call the police”, AKA shoot a gun into the air.

This, by the way, is not an effective way of summoning police help. Gunshots are surprisingly hard to localise.

And at the end of this, Sherlock has the phone. The phone containing the only copy of the photos.

Apparently the phone is Irene’s only form of protection, and she wants it back.

I mean, only form of protection apart from Moriarty’s sponsorship.

When Sherlock refuses to help, she injects Sherlock with a sedative, and takes it.

After hitting him with a whip.

And so, Adler becomes the Woman who beat Sherlock Holmes.

A shudder goes down my spine at the thought.

We see Irene escape, then cut suddenly back to the Hiker scene. Adler, apparently, has got it.

And now she wants to tell Holmes, so she pops over to his home where he is lying in bed, sleeping off the drug…

(seriously, John didn’t take him to a hospital after he was injected with a drug that made him lsoe consciousness????)

Irene talks him through the solution she has come up with. All the while, we are treated to a medley of weird camera work and editing. It’s just… odd.  

Apparently, the hiker was using a boomerang. He threw it, heard the car backfire, turned his back and it hit him in the back of the head.

Then the boomerang, made of wood, landed in the nearby water and floated off downstream.

There’s a lot to talk about here. Firstly, this death makes no sense. A boomerang is a hard weapon to wield or use accurately. Throwing one hard enough that it will kill on the return seems… unlikely. Even if it were possible, it would be something that the hiker would be trying to avoid, if he wanted the weapon to return to him he would certainly want it to come back fairly gently so that he could catch it without getting injured.

Then there’s the whole “floating downriver” thing. From the pictures we are shown, the water is shallow (grass is poking up through the surface), and very slow moving. Even if there was actually enough of it to allow the boomerang to float without catching on things (which it doesn’t look like there is), it would take a long time for it to travel any distance at all.

Even if it didn’t catch on anything, from the images we are shown, it would DEFINITELY still be visible when the driver comes down just a few seconds after the car backfires.

Then there’s the whole… look of this piece. It could work well as an idea, Irene and Sherlock exploring the scene of the crime together in their minds. But then they keep cutting away to pictures of Sherlock collapsing, and his mental ability during this is really variable. One moment he’s walking fine and looks awake and aware, the next his eyes are drooping, he can barely speak.

And then he falls into bed (actually achieved by a bed being built that would raise up to perpendicular to the ground). This is a piece of imagery in this scene that I like. It’s cleverly done, and there’s a good imagination behind it.

In short, this scene kind of almost works as a whole… but really could have been better if it had been massively simplified.

Sherlock is in bed, looking up at Irene again. She’s just returning his coat.

So she broke into Baker street, into a room with John next door, to return an item of clothing and talk to a very drugged, barely conscious guy, shortly after fleeing the scene of a murder/self-defence killing.

This is… irrational.

Then Sherlock gets up and, in his drugged state, rambled about “The Woman”. Again, not using this title as the honorific it’s meant to be, but only because he can’t remember her real name in his drugged state.

Urgh.

Anyway, he collapses to the floor, and John has to lift him up into bed. The door closes, and we see Sherlock’s coat. Returned. By Adler.

And we hear the… moan. I hardly even know how to describe it. While she was there, clearly, Irene messed with Sherlock’s phone, setting the message tone for her own contact to a moan/sigh. Then she sends him a message. “Till we meet again”.

So…. What was Irene’s plan again? Lure Sherlock over, presumably attempt to form a relationship with him that she can then abuse… so that she can get him to look at the coded message we see later?

I mean, it’s not bad… but it’s risky. Very risky.

Very, very risky, in fact, because she is relying on her ability to attract Sherlock Holmes, her ability to hide her true motivations from him, her ability to avoid the people already out to kill her (really her phone doesn’t seem to be providing her much in the way of protection if she’s frequently attacked by CIA operatives, does it?) and her ability to be able to trick Sherlock into solving her code for her.

I mean… there are other codebreakers out there, you know? Ones who don’t have brothers capable of imprisoning you for the rest of your life?

The next day, Mycroft visits Sherlock. Sherlock reassures him that Adler has no intention of releasing the pictures, and Mrs Hudson berates him for sending Sherlock into danger. Mycroft tells her to shut up, Sherlock jumps to her defence before telling Mrs Hudson to shut up himself.

I really hate that trope. The whole “I’m the only person who can insult this person” thing.

Anyway, Adler keeps texting, Sherlock’s phone keeps moaning. Sherlock reads every message, and ignores them all.

Meanwhile, Mycroft is having a highly confidential conversation in earshot of his genius brother and a couple of other civilians. This is a fantastic move on his part, because it allows Sherlock to work out what’s going on later, plays a part in moving forward Adler’s scheme and ultimately leads to the whole “coventry” plan failing.

Oh wait, that would make it a bad thing to do from Mycroft’s perspective, wouldn’t it?

Ironically, if he had just told Sherlock what plot he was worried about Adler unveiling, Sherlock would probably never have solved Adler’s little code for her, and everything would have been fine.

But Mycroft instead just tells Sherlock to stay out of it, so… well, that would work.

Finally, he leaves, Sherlock plays him out to “God Save the Queen” on the violin. At least they dubbed it this time, but we still get to enjoy Cumberbatch trying (and failing) to mime playing the instrument.

To be fair, his violin skills have clearly improved since series 1, but the fact that he isn’t bowing in time is just….

Anyway, now it’s Christmas!

This is a Christmas story now!

Behold, the crisp, untrodden snow! The violin rendition of “We wish you a merry Christmas!”

And Christmas parties!

John has a new girlfriend. Sherlock goes through a list of every name of his previous girlfriends before getting to the new GF’s name, thus ensuring that we will never see this one again. I’m not even going to bother working out what her name is.

And look, Molly and Lestrade are here, as well as Mrs Hudson!

You have to wonder who invited them. It definitely wasn’t Sherlock, was it?

Sherlock, instead of celebrating, is reading John’s blog. THE COUNTER HAS GOT STUCK, OH THE HORROR.

Briefly, we are led to believe that the number it sticks on is actually significant. Turns out it isn’t. Spoiler alert.

So, in fact, the counter is stuck on a totally random number completely coincidentally. Just a computer glitch.

I’m warning you now so that you don’t get your hopes up.

We do, however, get possibly the best moment in this episode (in my opinion) because it is totally relatable (to me). Molly asks after Mrs Hudson’s hip. Hudson replies, “Oh, it’s atrocious”. Molly: “I’ve seen much worse. But then, I do post-mortems”. This is exactly the kind of medical dark humour that I very guilty of slipping into conversations. When you’re talking to other people who are in healthcare, you can get away with this kind of thing. If you’re talking to someone who isn’t…..

Then, the fun movement is ruined by Sherlock instructing Molly not to tell jokes.

Grrr.

Anyway, Sherlock is busy insulting everyone. Telling Lestrade that his wife is cheating on him, telling Watson that his sister isn’t really going to stop drinking….

Then, as always, he goes back to his favourite punching bag. Molly.

Molly, who apparently has a new boyfriend. Someone she is getting serious with. He deduces that she is seeing him tonight, that she is trying to compensate for the size of her mouth and breasts with a beautiful dress…..

And, of course, the present is for him.

Molly breaks down in tears. Sherlock has the decency to apologise and look slightly abashed. Then he kisses her on the cheek.

Yet again. He insults her. He berates her. And then he gives her a crumb of attention, a hint that he might care for her. Enough to keep her hoping.

This is just… beyond cruel.

I think this is meant to come across as “ooh, look, Sherlock is socially inept and deduces things without thinking about the consequences of what he says”. It doesn’t come across like that to me.

Sherlock is intelligent. He has shown in the past that he is fully aware of Molly’s feelings for him, and that he is willing to exploit those feelings to manipulate her into doing things for him.

Now, he grinds his heel into her a little further.

But let’s move on.

Irene Adler has visited the flat again, apparently, and recently. She has left her phone there for him.

(How she texted him from her number to tell her that her phone had been left for him… is never explained. I know she could probably have used some kind of delayed message, but…)

Sherlock calls Mycroft, to tell him that he thinks Irene Adler will be found dead, on the grounds of her sending the phone to him.

Now, from Adler’s perspective, this decision is… intriguing. If she thought people were about to catch up with her, you would think she would call in her favours, she would use the information on her phone to find herself a safe-haven somewhere.

Instead, she fakes her death, and sends off her phone to make it more believable. Two possible explanations for this. One, she actually has people after her, and she wants to cool them off by letting them think she’s dead. Two… she has been messaging Sherlock, trying to engage with him,, trying to build the relationship she wants to exploit. He has been ignoring her, so she has to up the stakes.

Fakign her death, though, would be a bad way of doing this. Turning up on his doorstep, in distress and disarray, practically begging him to join the fray…

Sorry, I have Hamilton songs stuck in my head.

Anyway, if she just wanted to get closer to him, she could just turn up and ask for his help. He might turn her away, but at least the contact would be strengthened. Faking her death actually increases the separation between them, rather than strengthening the relationship…

Whatever her motive was, basically, this doesn’t really make sense.

But it gives us a chance to go to the morgue. Molly has come in because “everyone else was busy with Christmas”.

Poor Molly.

Then Sherlock identifies Adler by looking at her body, rather than her face. Again, he must know that this would be upsetting for Molly, but again… he doesn’t care.

Also, turns our Sherlock was wrong with this ID. Turns out a woman’s body measurements aren’t a great way of identifying them.

Mycroft and Sherlock have a nice little smoke inside hospital. I know they say they’re in the morgue so it’s OK, but… it’s in a hospital!!!

And, as we see, they’re really close to a grieving family.

 Nice.

They have a discussion about “caring”. Sherlock bounces it back by complaining that the cigarette is low-tar.

So, nice. Sibling relationship being built right there.

Anyway, Mycroft is worried that Sherlock might use drugs because he thinks Irene is dead. Mycroft insists that John cancel all plans to watch Sherlock and make sure that he’s safe.

Anyway, because of this, John’s girlfriend dumps him and leaves.

Sherlock gets home. He immediately knows that someone has been searching for his drug stash, and, as a throwaway comment, reveals that he has a…

a….

Sock index.

Sock. Index.

I’m so glad that Sherlock Holmes, who chooses not to know anything about politics or astronomy because he doesn’t want it cluttering up his brain, has the mental capacity to… keep an index… of his…

Socks.

So glad that the famously eclectic and untidy detective, who leaves his possessions scattered around the flat willy-nilly to the point where, when John enters Baker Street for the first time, he remarks that “the place will look lovely once we’ve got rid of this junk”…. Keeps his socks in a particular order.

Look, I’m sorry to go on about this, but what do you think they were trying to establish here? Is this meant to be some kind of character development, “Sherlock now has become very tidy and keeps his socks in a particular order”? Is it meant to suggest that Sherlock has an element of OCD? Because if so, they never mention it EVER AGAIN???

Or is this just the kind of throwaway line that was meant to give the audience a quick laugh, but which actually, if you stop and think about it, doesn’t line up with the character, story or whole BEING of Sherlock Holmes at all, and therefore has the potential to further transport the audience out of the world that the writers are trying to build?????

I’m OK.

I’m totally, totally fine.

Oh goodness, there’s still 40 minutes left. We’re barely past the half-way point.

If this is released, like, three years after my last Sherlock review…. This is why.

Right. I will try to move on. Sherlock is composing and playing violin. He isn’t eating.

He’s thinking about Adler’s phone lock.

He tries the number John’s blog is stuck at. It doesn’t work. Because the blog is just faulty.

I really thought that this would end up being a plot point at some point.

It doesn’t. Oh well. Opportunity for a cool set-up lost.

John pops, out, and receives a message from a beautiful woman. He presumes this person works for Mycroft, perhaps reasonably given Mycroft’s MO.

Still, without a moments thought, he gets into a strange car, driven by a stranger, and lets them take him to an abandoned warehouse.

He has great instincts.

But, guess what? It isn’t Mycroft.

It’s Irene.

The woman is, I think, Irene’s PA from earlier.

John didn’t recognise her.

He does recognise Irene.

He begs him to tell Sherlock that she’s alive. She asks John to get the phone off Sherlock. The story that she’s selling is that she brought John here so that he could steal the phone without Sherlock having to find out that she’s alive.

It’s a pretty stupid, easy to see through story. Obviously John will tell Sherlock that she’s alive.

Good thing for the plot though, no-one does see through it.

Irene messages Sherlock, revealing that she is alive.

And then we get the…. The…..

The thing.

John: “In case anyone cares, I’m not actually gay”

Irene: “Well I am. Look at us both”.

This simple short exchange, is so, SO problematic.

Now, I am definitely not the best person to discuss the myriad ways in which this is problematic. There are countless blog posts, youtube videos etc. talking about it in much more detail than I do here. I will try to be brief.

What is happening in this statement, is that Irene Adler is saying that she was/is gay, but Sherlock was JUST SO HOT that he has turned her into someone who is attracted to men. Basically, it’s a male fantasy based on the idea that sexual orentation is not a fixed, predetermined thing, but rather something that can be changed.

This is a damaging idea. This is a false idea. This is a really, really dangerous idea to portray in a hugely popular TV series.

This also kind of mirrors the problems in the way that Adler is portrayed in many adaptations now. In the original she is a strong, independent woman who deliberately makes a choice to move on with the man that she loves (Not Holmes, by the way!). In adaptation after adaptation, she is instead made to fall hopelessly in love with Holmes.

It’s the same thing happening over and over again. I can’t help but see this sexualisation of Adler, and the sexual attraction between her and Holmes as a blatant misinterpretation of the original idea behind Adler. But of every adaptation I’ve seen, this is by far the worst. This not only reduces a powerful feminist icon to a sexual object, “the love interest” rather than “the protagonist”, it also makes a very, very dangerous false statement about the nature of sexual orientation. It could reinforce mis-information some people have already clung onto. In the extreme, this idea that sexuality can be changed by outside forces could be used to justify conversion therapy.

Now, is this show in itself, as a stand-alone thing going to lead to people believing that conversion therapy works? No, probably not. But in a culture where some people still believe that sexual orientation is a choice, or that people who are not heterosexual should be forced into becoming heterosexual using an array of different tortures… sorry, ahem, conversion therapies, ANYTHING that enforces this idea is HARMFUL. It is dangerous.

Well, I have just had a couple of hours off to vent the anger.

Let’s see if I can continue.

Oh, right. Just after Adler proclaims this, look out, Sherlock was there all along!

Never explained how he got there, or how he knew to follow John, of course. But there he is.

Sherlock walks down the street, his head in the clouds.

Here, I would like to pause for a moment to appreciate the music.

Not the stuff Sherlock was playing, the soundtrack. Irene Adler has a theme that is glorious and glossy, tormented and tragic. Every time it plays, it takes us back to the moment when Sherlock was drugged, and so it reinforces the idea that Irene is like a drug to Sherlock. She dazes him, she takes him out of the world.

Not too much out of the world, though. Not so much that he doesn’t notice the scratches around the keyhole of the door of 221b. Not so much that he doesn’t see the signs of Mrs Hudson being dragged upstairs, he fingernails scratching the paint, the marks of her shoes on the wall.

The music switches. No longer the dreamy Irene theme. This is angry, this is mad. For a moment we see a Sherlock hovering on the brink, a man hurt, a man lied to, a man whose dear friend has been threatened. We see the man who could kill.

He walks into his flat, and sees Mrs Hudson with a gun pointed at her head by the CIA operative who invaded Adler’s home earlier.

Sherlock inspects Hudson. She is distraught, she has been hurt by the man.

We see Sherlock in attack mode. His calm is terrifying. We see him preparing to kill.

This scene… this whole set-up is glorious. This fits this character so perfectly. The manipulator who despite himself, cares.

The man from the CIA checks Sherlock for weapons. Before he can find it, Sherlock wields a spray of some kind, maybe taken from Mrs Hudson’s cleaning supplies downstairs?

Then he knocks the man unconscious.

John returns. I don’t know why it took him so much longer than Sherlock to get home. There’s a note on the door, asking John “Please disturb”.

Sherlock knows what he could do. He wants John to stop him.

Interestinyl… John lets him down. He takes Mrs Hudson downstairs to look after her, but he doesn’t stop Sherlock from throwing the man out of the window.

Possibly several times.

This scene, start to finish, is so, so fascinating. I… I love it. It’s intoxicating, a culmination of Sherlock’s grief, his anger, his frustration.

More than that, it builds on a theme that runs throughout this episode. Compassion. Is it a weakness, or a strength?

This moment proves that Sherlock has the ability to feel compassion. He loves Mrs Hudson, he risks his life for her, he is filled with rage at the man who hurt her.

The problem is, this theme should have one culmination. Sherlock admits his feelings for Irene.

In fact… the opposite happens. Sherlock demonstrates his compassion, wraps it up in a show of strength and control. This should be counterbalanced by his realisation of his feelings for Irene, but it… never is. We are told that the answer is “sentiment is a weakness” because Adler falls victim to it, but we never see the opposite side of it, that compassion can be a strength. Love for Mrs Hudson pulled Sherlock out of his daze. It dragged him our of the despair that came from knowing that he’s been lied to.

But while the one side, ie sentiment = weakness is beaten over our heads, the other side which is hinted at here is never spelled out. It’s a missed opportunity. The argument is left one-sided, despite the door being left open for the counter-argument to be voiced.

I love this scene. The tension, the anger, the fantastic, fantastic acting. But somehow, this moment ends up being… unimportant. Almost irrelevant. Instead of becoming a fundamental part of the episode, it becomes a cheap joke. Punchline:

“How many times did he fall out of the window?” “I lost count”.

Everything we felt about that moment is wasted.

Sherlock and John go upstairs to discuss the phone- the object of the break-in. John is (only now???) starting to realise that there might be more important things than blackmail pictures on it.

But rather than discuss it, let’s ring in the new year with some more violin miming.

And Sherlock sending Irene a text. Happy new year.

Finally, after having it for a week, Sherlock starts investigating the phone properly. He x-rays it, finding a tamper-proofing device, and takes the opportunity to have another awkward conversation with Molly.

Molly comments that “everyone does silly things”, and Sherlock decides that the pin might be 221B, the address the phone was sent to.

It’s kind of irritating how easily Sherlock uses up his three chances to get into the phone. He doesn’t stop and think, doesn’t consider them. He just tries a number after a few seconds.

Anyway, turns out Sherlock has a client. Irene has broken into the flat (that’s three times now), and wants his help.

For Irene, this is the final stage of her plan. Turn up on the doorstep, begging for help.

Why she had to do the…everything before that, we don’t know.

She wants her phone. For protection. Again, invalidating the fact that she is in danger in the first place.

Anyway, Sherlock wastes another phone unlocking attempt. He gives Irene a duplicate phone to unlock, she spots the difference and enters a random number.

Not a fantastic ploy, unless he went through and copied every smudge, every scrape from Irene’s phone to the dupe. But still, more intelligent than his address. At least he thought about it, this time.

Anyway, it’s Irene’s time to shine. She has been preparing Sherlock for weeks, months to solve this puzzle. (Good thing it wasn’t… time sensitive or anything). Finally she presents it to him.

He solves it in a few seconds.

Look, I’m sorry, but the only way that this works is for everyone else (including Irene, who is, you know, meant to be more intelligent than Sherlock) to be incredibly stupid. Suggesting that “a code breaker couldn’t crack it because it’s not a code” really suggests a lack of knowledge of how codes work! There are literally people online cracking far, far more complex and obscure codes than this over the plot of indie horror games, and you’re saying that neither Irene’s expert, nor Irene herself, and presumably not Moriarty (given that she’s doing this whole thing for him) could realise that this referred to a plane?????

And remember, Irene was SO STUMPED about how to solve this that she spent months creating this complex trap, involving threatening the royal family, going on the run, faking her own death, and….. it was all over this?

(Also, side note, one of the ways in which Sherlock cracks this is because there are clusters of numbers, referring to families sitting together. Since, knowing how this goes, I know that those seats will be filled with corpses, there’s no reason for families to be sitting together, and unless the bodies and identities that they are using happen to come from several families who all happened to die together, the bodies should be collections of individuals, not families. When the planes crash, the remains will be forensically examined for identification, which would include things like identifying the ages of the victims. Grouping seats for families would imply some younger passengers, and child corpses are considerably harder to come across than adult corpses, generally. (Do you ever type something and then realise that it sounds really weird…?). In short, there wouldn’t be grouped seating for families, because to make the whole thing match up you need the corpses in the plane to roughly match the bodies found at the crash site).

Anyway, turns out this flight is flight 007. While Sherlock tries to work out why that sounds familiar, Irene texts Jim Moriarty (who is just hanging around… in public…. By the way….), with the solution.

A few moments later, Sherlock remembers Mycroft saying “Bond air is go”.

Bond, 007, Britishness, get it?

Anyway, Moriarty texts Mycroft (How did he get that number? More importantly, wouldn’t Mycroft want to, you know, try to track Moriarty based on the location that text was sent from?) to tell him that the game is up.

This makes Mycroft sad. Poor Mycroft.

Anyway, Sherlock recounts a story to Irene. The story of Coventry, the city that, supposedly, the government allowed to be bombed to prevent the Germans from knowing that their codes had been cracked.

Fun fact: Cumberbatch played Alan Turing in the Imitation Game- a film where the Coventry story was explored in detail.

Other fun fact: I wish I was watching that film right now so that I didn’t have to see the next bit of this story unfold.

A stranger turns up to pick up Holmes. Despite the recent, you know, break in, assault, Hudson just opened the door to him.

Mrs Hudson needs to get a door camera or something.

The man is here to deliver something to Sherlock. A ticket for the doomed flight.

Sherlock gloats about the fact that he has uncovered the plot to the random people in the car with him. Good going, for something that is meant to be really, really secret.

The CIA operative meets Sherlock at the plane. He… doesn’t seem to be very happy with Sherlock, and implies that he isn’t a popular man at the moment.

Sherlock enters the plane. It is packed full of corpses.

Honestly though, think about this. That is a lot of bodies. And bodies are surprisingly quite hard to make vanish. Funeral homes up and down the country would have to be involved to repeatedly pull this scam. That’s dozens, even hundreds of people aware that human bodies are going missing.

So, Mycroft, “what do I think of your solution?”

Um… it’s not great, to be honest. It was going to come out sooner or later.

Also, how are these bombs being planted on the planes in the first place? Or is the government arresting the perpetrators, and deliberately blowing them up themselves? Because… I mean, again, they’re going to be found out.

Mycroft, though, decides it’s all Sherlock’s fault, rather than his plan being awful. Why?

I mean… Sherlock put the cherry on the cake, but it was baked by Mycroft and iced by the MOD man who gave the email to Irene in the first place.

Anyway, now Mycroft has to negotiate with Irene. He wants the data on the phone.

I mean, I don’t know why they don’t just destroy it and let the secrets die… sure, it has information on their enemies, but the risk of that information existing at all is very high.

Irene claims that people will die if that information is destroyed. I think what she means is that there is information that could be used to save people. Not the same thing at all, really. And there’s also information that, as she admitted, could topple the world.

Anyway, then she gloats about her relationship with Moriarty. Mycroft is about to hand over a lot of money, when Sherlock interrupts.

He has come down on one side of the “sentiment” argument. It is a “chemical defect found on the losing side”. Except he risked his own life to save Mrs Hudson.

And now he claims to know that Irene loves him because he took her pulse. He saw her pupils dilate.

These are all things that happen when you are with someone that you love… unfortunately they also happen when you are doing anything else stressful. Like lying. Like trying to sell a con.

So no, Sherlock, you cannot tell if someone loves you based off their pulse and their eyes.

But, anyway, he goes off on a rant about how love is always a disadvantage. He types four number into Irene’s phone. Irene admits that she loves him, that everything she said was for the sake of the game.

And so, the pin. S. H. E. R.

I am

SHER

Locked

Sherlock unlocks the phone and hands it to Mycroft.

OK, so a few things.

Firstly, “love is always a disadvantage”. Oh really? So, does Sherlock love Irene?

No, I don’t think so. I think he is fascinated by her, I think he values her as an interesting curiosity. But no, he does not love her.

Which comes back an idea we’ve seen in Sherlock before. The woman madly in love with Sherlock, but treated with coolness. Nothing in return. In fact, worse, the love she has for him turned back, used as a weapon against her.

We saw it in the very first episode of series 1 with Molly. Now, we get the same story playing out with Irene as well.

I hate the fact that, seemingly, every young, attractive woman in this series ends up falling hopelessly for Sherlock, regardless of the way he treats them, regardless even of their sexual orientation.

This is just…. Disgusting. I think I mentioned the “male fantasy” idea earlier. Here it is again.

Sherlock coldly tells Mycroft to send Irene away, knowing that she will die quickly without the information on her phone to protect her. In fact, he specifically tells her to beg.

He makes her beg for her life. Then he dismisses her anyway.

This is just… disgusting. We hear Irene’s theme again. Plaintive. Sad. She fell in love with Sherlock Holmes, and he sent her to her death.

Some time later, Mycroft comes to bring the news. Irene is dead. But he wants to tell Sherlock that she was relocated to a witness protected scheme.

John agrees to go and tell him.

Sherlock takes the news surprisingly well. Amazingly well. All he asks for is Irene’s phone, now wiped.

And then, we see what really happened. Irene is about to be executed by…. Decapitation in front of an audience? Weird. Anyway, the blade is about to fall. Irene sends a text message…. And we hear the moan of Sherlock’s text alert. She looks up at him, smiles, and they run.

What are the problems with this episode?

Irene. The way that she is taken from a heroine to a villain (and not even a good one at that). The way that she is prevented from being her own character, and instead simply made a will they/won’t they love interest for Sherlock. The way that she, like a lot of female characters in this series, end up rotating around Sherlock, clinging to him despite the abuse he dishes out upon her. She is foiled because she is too emotional and falls in love, then in the end needs to be rescued by her knight in sharp cheekbones. Also, what actually becomes of her is left completely ambiguous. She is never seen or heard of again, so I think we can all presume that she ends up dying in a ditch somewhere.

Then there’s the whole “changing sexual orientation by pure sexiness” thing. That is dodgy in so many different ways. I’d say that I had said enough about it… but I don’t think it’s possible to say enough about it. It’s more accurate to say that I’ve said all I can stomach saying about it.

Finally, the whole arc of this episode is meant to be about love and sentiment- are they weaknesses or strengths? There are several ways they could have taken this. They could have come down on the side of love. They could have come down strongly against it. Or they could have left it as an unanswered question, something for the audience to ponder. None of these things really happen for me. Sherlock decisively says love is a weakness, but clearly loves Mrs Hudson, and then goes to rescue Irene. But he also is the one who puts Irene in danger in the first place, so maybe he doesn’t love her at all, maybe he just thinks that she’s too glorious a mystery to destroy. The set-up was there, and it could have gone in any direction, but the bow was never tied.

 

All in all, I would say that this episode, like so many, has some glorious moments. Some fantastic attributes. But underneath all the beautiful wrapping, there’s something stinking and rotten inside.

 

Wow. I am amazed that I have managed to get to the end of this episode.

I am also amazed that this review comes in at under 10,000 words. Which is… something, I suppose.

Thank you, if you have got to the end. I will see you for the next one.