Unsolicited Advice

Fandom frightens me sometimes. Often, if we're honest. I've been digging around for the Sherlock Holmes project I mentioned before, and one of the things I ran into is The Johnlock Conspiracy . For those who don't know, this was a movement among fans of the BBC's 2010 series Sherlock  who contended that the series was building up to a Big Damn Gay Kiss between the leads at the end, which was theoretically the conclusion of series 4. Lots of people contributed, but this particular lady seems to have been the biggest and most thorough, having contributed a 40-some-odd episode analysis of the show, via YouTube. Shit like this terrifies me. There's nothing wrong with her character analysis. Her take on the significance and motivation behind what the characters say and do on screen is completely valid. I think she's 100% right in some areas, particularly Moriarty. Jim Moriarty's obsession with Sherlock is both disturbingly sexual in tone, and disturbingly indicat...

One of the reasons I'm not immediately impressed with Elementary is that I feel it's missing an important element which has been an integral part of the Holmes/Watson relationship in all its successful forms. They're setting Holmes and Joan Watson up in this semi-adversarial bicker-yourselves-friends dynamic, which is lamentably common in television drama, and which I am sick to death of seeing. (They also seem to be setting her up to be the Woman Who Fixes Him, which annoys me more, but that's another rant altogether.) It seems to me that they have missed the point of why this particular relationship is famous. There is much snark about slash in Sherlock . Downey and Law are playing it up intentionally (in the words of one critic: "It's a decent yaoi fanfic.") in their films. What Doyle was actually writing between Holmes and Watson was a kind of relationship not much seen, or at least not much acknowledged today, what was known as a "romantic fri...

If anyone was wondering where I get some of the supplemental stuff for Sherlock , there are actually a small collection of tie-in sites for the series online. Aside from a few scattered things on the BBC site itself -- which tend to not work for US fans without a proxy -- there are also a tiny set of mock blogs and other sites set up in sort of mini-ARG fashion. The most useful one, of course, is John's blog , but from there you can also get to Sherlock's site (the same one John admitted finding in "A Study In Pink" when he looked Sherlock up, and the one Sherlock posts his answers to in "The Great Game") and Molly's blog, and a few other things. John's blog is from whence the fandom gets a lot of things like the name of John's therapist, and some tantalizing bits of write-up about unaired cases. I don't know who's behind it, but the general accuracy to the on-screen stuff suggests that it's Gatiss and Moffatt, or one of the other f...

Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I have now seen the pilot for Elementary . Not. Impressed.

So the premiere of CBS' Elementary goes out tonight, and like Han Solo before me, I've got a bad feeling about this. I have no complaints about the cast. Nobody makes me cringe. Jonny Lee Miller is actually quite a respected thespian, if mostly unknown in America, and in fact was recently on stage with Benedict Cumberbatch, switching off the roles of the mad doctor and the Creature in Frankenstein . Lucy Liu gets a lot of undeserved crit, mostly for doing fluffy pop things, but she isn't a bad actress. I have not, however seen her in anything serious enough to evaluate whether she's a good enough actress to save a crap script, which I suspect is going to be the problem here. I have serious misgivings about the combination of "female Watson" and "American network television". I don't object to a female Watson per se ; in the Victorian originals, the constraints of military service and medical school meant that Watson pretty much had to be a w...

One of the banes of the modern Watson's existence, in Sherlock , is that the public at large are constantly mistaking him for Sherlock's date. It happens from the very start; when they go to look at the apartment, Mrs. Hudson mentions that there's a second bedroom upstairs "if you'll be needing it", and when they use a restaurant as cover for a stakeout, the owner offers to get the table a candle on the grounds that it's more romantic. The sheer repetition is what pushes it into funny territory -- and then out of funny territory again in places, like when John's erstwhile girlfriend starts believing it -- and the fact that two of the first people to make the mistake are people who have evidently known Sherlock much longer than he has make John squirm a bit and make a most awkward, but very diplomatic, attempt to ask Sherlock if he is being flirted with and failed to notice. The attempt to clarify makes Sherlock wonder if John has been flirting and h...

It is a running joke in the Holmes canon -- or, alternately, one of Holmes' pet peeves -- that other people wonder what he sees in the world, and he protests that he sees exactly what they do, he just makes something of it. You see, he says (especially to Watson), but you do not observe . I'm generally less crabby about it, but his protest is largely true. People see a lot of things, every day, that they just don't treat as real observations. The thing goes into their brain, rattles around in there, and apparently hits nothing on its way back into the pile of unsorted sensory impressions. It's not even that people don't see what happens, although that's sometimes the case. They just don't ever think about why that happened, or how the world got this way. I'm going to keep using Sherlock for examples. Aside from thinking that the cast is quite talented, that the writing is fantastic, and that clips are easy to come by on YouTube, I have this sneaking...

Have been going through the press junket for Sherlock again, as if this is going to help them win an armload of awards tonight. (Must find a live blog or webcast -- the apartment is currently without a TV and we never did have cable.) Honestly, if they're going to keep stubbornly not giving Cumberbatch a BAFTA for anything, he ought to at least have an Emmy or a Globe or something for his mantelpiece. Or an Oscar. Although for that he'll probably have to be in a major story-driven movie where he's not upstaged by the horse. (No, I haven't seen War Horse . I'm told it came out excellently and I know he's done a lot of interviews for it with internet-favorite Loki Tom Hiddleston, but I try to stay away from depressing things where loads of animals die.) (Also, I've seen said interviews, and god you'd never guess he was the older one. Hiddleston is my age; Cumberbatch is in his mid-30s somewhere. He's just got this perpetual air of '12-year-o...

I am pleased to point out that Sherlock is up for ALL THE EMMYS next Sunday. Not kidding -- I think they've hit everything they're qualified for in the Miniseries category. Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Writing, Best Directing, Best Cinematography, Best Sound/Mixing, Best Costuming, Best Casting, probably Best Craft Services for all I know, I only check when shows I care about start winning things. (For non-estadounidenses, the Emmys are basically the Oscars for TV. Foreign actors win things like Emmys and Golden Globes for American television productions fairly often -- Hugh Laurie has a pair of Globes for House , f'r instance, and his first acceptance speech confused an awful lot of people who didn't know he's from the original Cambridge -- but it's not very common for productions outside of North America to sweep nominations like that, much less win anything. The only reason Sherlock qualifies is that it was widely aired on public broadcasting ...

I keep bringing up the cab scene from "A Study In Pink" on the assumption that everyone has seen it. Of the many, many, many very accurate things about being terrifyingly smart that have been written and acted on "Sherlock", this is one of the best. And also one of my favorites, because it highlights both one of the huge things that stand between the odd Sherlocks of the world and the rest of the people in it, and one of the biggest reasons Sherlock and John get along, insofar as either of them get along with anybody.

I did finally sit down and read the essays "explaining the autistic experience by analyzing Sherlock as though he is a high-functioning autistic" . I think personally that the bits on stereotypies and physical movement are assuming a lot of facts not in evidence -- in general, the author presumes Sherlock has learnt to conceal things in pretty much the same places I presume he's playing things up intentionally to cover for things he can't figure out how to hide -- but in general, Sherlock-as-autistic strikes me as about as plausible as Sherlock-as-deeply-isolated. It is cheerfully accepted as alternate head-canon, and my brain won't bitch at me about out-of-characterness if I find well-written fic on the premise. That wasn't the interesting part, though. Because the author of the essay is an autist writing for a largely allist audience, there is a lot of compare and contrast, particularly when talking about Sherlock and sociability. "In general, allis...

Still leaving the autism paper unread -- it's on Instapaper for sync to Kindle, if anyone's interested -- I should probably mention some of the other discussions I've seen on Holmes' mental state over the years. There are a lot of them out there that contend more or less that Holmes is a dick mostly for the sake of being a dick. The general postulate is that he does it because he thinks other humans are contemptible and he knows they need him, so nyah. These also tend to see him as keeping Watson for a pet, much as Watson mentions keeping a dog at their first meeting.* Notably, I have not yet seen one of these from any author who independently sets off the 'gifted kid' bell in the back of my head. They seem to be from people who are reasonably intelligent, but have not hit the Weird Smart Kid level that leaves you completely without peers for the first mumble-teen years of your life. It's an interesting look as to why a lot of people see the Weird Smart Ki...

One of my readers, to whom I am going to start referring as "my anonymous source in the autistic community" any day now, has thoughtfully pointed me at a series of essays which attempt to explain the internal experience of autism via Sherlock and his exceedingly Sherlock-y behavior on-screen. I was going to sit down and read it the other night, but then I thought: That's cheating. Either the author will make a compelling argument and I'll end up agreeing, or the author will say something so bizarre that I won't be able to finish the damn thing without developing a headache. In order to do a proper compare-and-contrast, I ought to go write down what I think already, before I fill my head with something else. Personally, my read is that Sherlock would not get a formal ASD diagnosis. I do a lot of social psychology of the gifted and talented, and the standards I'm used to using are basically "would this be disabling enough to require special schooling...

I raided BPL for interesting things again and have succeeded in getting David to watch a couple of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes films. These things are fantastic or terrible, depending on who you ask and how much they are nitpicky purists when it comes to their Sherlockiana. The films -- fourteen of them, I think -- starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson are infamous, partly for their popularity at the time, and partly because the first two were, at the time, the only real effort to make Holmes films as period pieces. They were very "Hollywood Victorian", but it was more of an effort than anyone else made. The latter dozen were updated to what was then the modern day, including elements of wartime intrigue and sometimes wacky pulp-novel "science". Several of them have fallen into the public domain and can be viewed  here , at the Internet Archive, if you are inclined to go poking around to find them. The picture quality is pretty awf...

In the Wikipedia article on eidetic memory, it's suggested that Sherlock from the latest BBC series has it, but this is then disputed with the observation that he also seems to have cultivated the ability to 'delete' things from his internal storage. What Sherlock seems to have is pretty close to what I  call an eidetic memory, i.e., whatever I've got. The sticking point seems to be whether one needs to "know" things or merely "remember" them for it to count. There is a distinct difference between the two for me. I obviously know  a lot of stuff -- this can be attested to by any one of the probably thousands of people who, over the course of my lifetime, have stared at me slack-jawed while I ramble blithely across three different subjects that normally require a graduate degree -- but that's not my eidetic memory. That's the fact that my brain is a enormous filing cabinet. Facts  and procedures  require understanding, at least for me. I f...

Translating written work is one of my most, and least, favorite things. On the one hand, I hate reading things in translation. It's just not the same. Particularly since the sorts of fiction I like tend to be full of puns and wry, clever phrasing -- it's just not possible to get both the tone and the content of the joke the same every time. 'Stuff I can't read' is one of my very biggest pet peeves, and because I am crazy, every time I run into something I desperately want to read and can't I fix the problem by learning another language. My taste in literature runs to old and drôle , so the tongues I have cover most of the series I know about, but I'm sure I'm missing a fantastic line of snarky adventure novels in Indonesian or something. Because I have had my nose in the Arsène Lupin books again, and I have a number of friends who don't speak very much French who would nevertheless love the things, I have sat down to try to bring some of the storie...

I mentioned in a previous post that I am a Sherlockian . This tends to strike people as being a bit bats, a little like being a scholar of the history of Middle Earth, whilst pretending it wasn't made up out of whole cloth. The idea is that, from one counterfactual premise -- that Holmes and Watson were real people, with Doyle being Watson's literary agent -- you jump off into a huge game of recreational research and logic, where you try to figure out where and when the cases happened, in what order, who some of the "disguised" names might really have been, etc. Sherlockians, in fact, call it "The Great Game", which if you've been watching the BBC's modern series Sherlock  you'll note they used as the title of the finale of series one. It's loads of fun if you're the sort of person who reads academic papers in your spare time, which I am -- I have a lot of anecdotes that start with sentences like "It was Friday, so I was drinking and...