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...

For any of the Sherlock  fans who also happen to be hanging around for my social psychology of the gifted and talented stuff, you may be interested to know that I think Benedict Cumberbatch has about eight million giveaway behaviors that say he's been so very smart from so very early on that he's never developed any good idea of normal. He spends a lot of time guessing what it is people expect from him, and judging by the quickness with which he apologizes when he startles someone, at this point he's rather resigned himself to getting it wrong. Some of the confirmation is circumstantial. His native accent is from south-east London somewhere (for the linguists: non-rhotic, L-vocalization, intrusive Rs, Yod-coalescence, T-glottalizaton, but generally lacking th-fronting, H-dropping, or labiodental R, plus someone occasionally gets him to spit out a "gosh, luv" when he isn't nervous enough to suppress it -- it's urban Estuary) and it's probably terribly...

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...

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...

Well, that was disappointing. I bother to actually watch the Emmys and nobody I was rooting for won anything. Although I was unaware that Dame Maggie Smith was up for something -- good for her! I don't watch Downton Abbey , but she's a pretty awesome person. You don't get to be a Lady of a Certain Age and still be on television without being a damn sight sharper than people give you credit for, and people give her credit for a lot. I am generally puzzled at the lack of fuss made over the Sherlock people, to be honest. I didn't even expect the fuss to be for Sherlock -- both of the leads are currently working on a massive, long-awaited, endlessly hyped fantasy movie adaptation of a classic piece of literature, which follows a trilogy of like from the same director, and will probably gross about as much as Avengers . The bobblehead doing interviews on the red carpet asked Stephen Colbert what he thought about The Hobbit , and inexplicably didn't go scare up the ac...

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.

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...