Sherlock and Our Final Problem

SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. If you have not watched all of BBC Sherlock’s season 4, stop reading immediately. SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT.

As of last night, we’ve come to the end of an era. Although some reviewers have been saying things like “this certainly can’t be the last season” of Sherlock, I disagree. Last night’s episode, “The Final Problem,” was indeed the final episode—and the show’s creators, Gatiss and Moffat, had been preparing us all season long.

Well. I say “all season,” but it’s not like we had ten episodes. No, as Sherlock fans, we always only get three, but, in the case of this final season, the three episodes were really just one long episode that culminated in fully developed characters and plot lines decisively closed.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty. If you watched all of season four, you know what happened (good and bad). After last night’s episode, my husband expected me to be sobbing. I wasn’t. In fact, I was grinning like a goose, possibly relieved that everyone important lived, possibly because the final montage was just so damn cheerful. It took hours for me to wind down from my Sherlock high.

This morning, I reassess as I take a look back at season four in its entirety.

The first episode, “The Six Thatchers,” was brilliantly acted, had a kick ass Cumberbatch fight scene, and killed off one of the show’s lead characters. The second episode, “The Lying Detective,” was arguably the best of the entire series (despite poor Sherlock looking like a beat up drug addict for its duration). “The Lying Detective” is the episode that will win this show awards. Awards should, in fact, be thrown at Cumberbatch and Freeman’s feet for that episode and no one could tell me otherwise.

Then, “The Final Problem” premiered. I loved the casting of Sian Brooke (I adored her as Ophelia in Cumberbatch’s Hamlet and really enjoy seeing them work together). The revelation of a secret psychotic sister was brilliant. Despite the amazing, again, emotional performances from not only Cumberbatch and Freeman but also Gatiss and Brooke, the episode took suspension of disbelief to a whole new level with its escape room tactics and melodrama.

The further revelations into Sherlock’s childhood were heart-wrenching (as was that tragic “I love you” moment between Sherlock and Molly). Yet, in the end, everything was all right. Sherlock even managed to save his crazy sister via the medium of music. They could finally “play” together.

“The Final Problem” wasn’t my favorite episode. I haven’t read many reviews yet today, and I don’t plan to. I don’t need to. I also haven’t perused Tumblr, because I know the Johnlock hordes are going to be up in arms over the fact that John and Sherlock never kissed and the series is over. Resolutely, the series is over, although for the Johnlock shippers, it could be argued that John and Sherlock are some sort of couple—platonic—as they are back living together and raising a child while Sherlock apparently balances the women who try to love him: Molly and Irene Adler. More importantly, they’re back to being the crime fighters of Arthur Conan Doyle canon.

What mattered most to me in season four was the character of Sherlock and not only because I’m singularly obsessed with Cumberbatch. The show is called Sherlock, after all. The show is about the man, his friends background noise to the great detective’s struggles.

As a writer, I was impressed with what Gatiss and Moffat achieved with Sherlock’s character development. We all remember the coarse man of season one, blind to social graces. In season four, we find a man who has learned to love his friends, protect his friends. He was so soft, even giving a comforting hug to John Watson after the loss of his wife. He saved John. He saved his sister. He even saved his imperious elder brother.

The moment that resounded most was in “The Lying Detective,” after Sherlock’s pained pronouncement of “I don’t want to die” in the hospital bed. It happened while sitting in the quiet warmth of 221B, chatting with John. Sherlock suggested he might come and see John’s daughter, and that moment—that single look—showed how vulnerable our coarse, biting detective had become.

I realize the famed stories of Sherlock Holmes are thrilling mysteries, and from my time spent reading Conan Doyle, he wasn’t huge on character development, which is where Gatiss and Moffat surpass him. This show wasn’t about a calculating, brilliant man solving mysteries; it was about a calculating, brilliant man becoming weak, human, and ultimately, loved despite his flaws—by his fellow characters and by us, the fans.

People are going to complain today that they didn’t get everything they wanted from Sherlock’s final season. I get that. (For instance, I would have liked the reappearance of Irene Adler in the flesh, as opposed to just on Sherlock’s phone, since she is arguably the love of his life.) Despite complaints, we will all remember this show fondly for not only introducing many of us to Benedict Cumberbatch but for introducing us to a new Sherlock Holmes: a man riddled with demons and yet fighting to keep them at bay for the sake of the people who love him.

As Sherlock perceptively said, “Taking your own life. Interesting expression. Taking it from whom? Once it’s over it’s not you who will miss it. Your own death is something that happens to everybody else. Your life is not your own, keep your hands off it.” Thanks for sharing your “life” with us, Sherlock. It was one hell of a ride, and we will indeed miss you an awful lot, you beautiful bastard.

New Sherlock fan fiction: You Were Wrong About Him

You thought my husband was cruel. He said horrible things to you—biting, personal things. He brought out your worst and made you monstrous. You hated him for it, and for his brilliance, his need for blood and murder and work (always the work) with no pay because he didn’t need the money.

You hated him for that, too, his bottomless bank account and the way he wore expensive clothes and that coat. The damn coat. The way he walked with purpose, or rather strutted. You hated my husband because you didn’t know him, not at all. No one did. But me.

I didn’t always. I once called him a machine, before he died and came back, before my divorce from Mary and before Moriarty almost took him away a second time.

That was when it began, when Sherlock Holmes began to show himself to me, and he didn’t mean to. It was all an accident, the way we really got to know each other—the way I got to know myself.

I was beginning to feel my age by then. My war injuries ached when the weather was bad and the weather was often bad in London. I carried lines around my eyes that hadn’t been there when we first met, not when I first set eyes on him in the St. Bart’s laboratory and had no idea my life was about to change forever.

Or maybe I did. How could I not? I was drawn to him as soon as he spoke. Magnetized. I trusted him, God knew why. I killed for him, to protect him. I only realized later that was what we did for each other, always: we protected each other.

John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

The jokes about us being a couple stopped when I turned fifty and Sherlock, damn him, still looked twenty-five. On the night I began to know the real Sherlock Holmes (and the real John Watson), we were simply confirmed bachelors who solved cases together and lived in the same flat: 221B Baker Street.

It had been days without a case, wherein which I found time to catch up on reading and trash telly.

For a while, Sherlock bemoaned his state of boredom. He flapped around like a limp fish on the couch and sighed dramatically until I turned up the volume to ignore the muffled obscenities he’d picked up at The Yard. He obsessively checked his cellular, but Lestrade, who refused to retire, had nothing to offer.

As the days stretched into a week, we settled into our natural rhythm. I took a few shifts at hospital and tried to make Sherlock eat. Always a battle. I stayed out late one night, consuming perhaps a pint too many with Stamford for old time’s sake and came home to a silent flat.

“Sherlock?”

I wobbled a bit on my feet as I locked the front door behind me. Yes, definitely one pint too many.

“Sherlock? Are you home?”

I wondered if he’d been called onto a case. I was used to him running off without me, although I never liked it. Never.

I searched through a few cupboards for chips, thankful to find no fingers or heads. Some things never changed.

Of course I found nothing to eat. I considered a cup of tea, but as I moved to put the kettle on, I noticed Sherlock’s bedroom door was open. The dim light on his bedside table threw shadows on the hall floor.

“Sherlock?”

I took a few heavy steps toward his door and, well, was shocked to find him … asleep? The door creaked as I looked inside, but he didn’t move so I stood and watched. No matter how many times I’d caught him snoozing at the microscope or taking short blinks in the back of cabs, I still found it strangely miraculous to see the great Sherlock Holmes actually taking a proper rest.

His back was turned to me, but his still shaggy curls stuck up like thick ferns sprouted beneath the soil of a moonlit forest floor. One of his long-fingered hands clutched to the blanket that covered him. I saw one pointed edge of a pale cheekbone. Then, I backed away, tried to leave before he woke. He always woke when I watched him sleep, like he could feel me in his dreams.

Then he whimpered and I froze. He whimpered again, mouthed incoherent words. His fingers closed tightly to the blanket above him. He said, “No, stop, don’t …”

Intellect does not dissuade nightmares.

I moved to the bed and put one hand on his shoulder. “Sherlock.” I said his name again, louder. And again.

He sat up suddenly. “John.”

“Sherlock. You all right, mate?”

“Of course.” He pushed out of bed and past me. I listened to his bare feet patter into the bathroom. The door closed behind him.

When I reached down to touch his mattress, I found it soaked with sweat.

I returned to the kitchen. After over fifteen years of friendship, one learned not to ask questions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. But just as I put the kettle back on the stove, his voice poured over my shoulder.

“I need you to stay with me tonight,” he said.

…

Read the rest at Archive of Our Own.

(Be warned. One reviewer said, “You made me cry a river.”)

Image credit: br0-Harry at DeviantArt

Norwegian Sherlock parodies: Not to be missed

It’s no surprise to all of you that I love the BBC’s reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes. This is due in part to my obsession with British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, but the show really is brilliant. I’m shite at writing mysteries, but I love (love) watching them, so the brilliance of writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss is beyond me. It doesn’t hurt the show’s appeal when both leading men, Benedict and Martin Freeman, garner Emmys for their performances as the immortal Sherlock and Dr. Watson.

Okay, that said, there are so many jokes about how Sherlock and Watson are totally gay for each other. Although Watson just got married in season three, the show doesn’t do itself any favors. There are some pretty long, lingering stares shared between the leading men. Sherlock has no respect for personal space, so it occasionally looks like he’s about to kiss his best mate. And there was that whole awkward “boyfriend” conversation in episode one.

The fans have noticed, and Johnlock (the official term for Watson-Sherlock romance) is rampant in fan fiction and fan art … and most of it is definitely rated R with Watson almost always playing the top, which I guess makes sense since Benedict’s Sherlock is super pretty.

Enter Norway. Two comedic actors, Vidar Magnussen and Bjarte Tjøstheim, have caused quite the internet sensation with their take on the BBC series, and well, I’m enamored. From cell phone auto correct mistakes to “jump-and-kiss” moments, these guys have done their research, and their parodies are not to be missed. (They even mastered the BBC camera angles.)

I present, for your viewing pleasure, episode one, “Oklahomo.”

In case that wasn’t enough, “Mind Phallus.” (Not for underage consumption.)

And for one more laugh, “Missing Shoulder.” (My favorite one, with a shout out to Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr.)

Thank goodness someone spotted these actors’ resemblances to the real thing, because they certainly know how to make a girl laugh. Happy clueing for looks!

I Am Sherlocked

Never, in a million, billion years would I have thought to replace Robert Downey Jr. in my heart. Then, I met Benedict Cumberbatch, and a new Sherlock Holmes was born.

Sherlock is a BBC production, featuring a modernized version of the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mystery novels. The show was created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, well known for their work as writers on another acclaimed British series, Doctor Who. Basically, they were intrigued by the idea of a modern Sherlock Holmes, able to utilize technologies like cell phones and the internet to hone his sense of deduction.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock is played by thirty-four-year-old British actor Benedict Cumberbatch; silly name, sure, but this boy will now and forever be my Sherlock Holmes. Prior to Sherlock, he is best known for roles in Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy; War Horse; and Atonement (the film which convinced Moffat and Gatiss that Cumberbatch would be the perfect Sherlock).

Since the show’s enthusiastic reception by British audiences, Cumberbatch has become a household name overseas. He is quoted as saying, “I am very flattered. I have also become a verb, as in ‘I have cumberbatched the UK audience’ apparently.” Despite the fact that he’s not conventionally attractive, women respond quite nicely to dear Benedict, as evidenced by the Facebook and Twitter “Cumberbitches.” Tagline: “The most glorious and elusive society for the appreciation of the high cheekboned, blue eyed sexbomb that is Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch.” And okay, yes, I’m a member. The guy oozes charisma.

Sherlock and the dreaded Moriarty!

Dr. Watson, recently returned from war in Afghanistan, is played by Martin Freeman, who I first saw in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, followed by Love Actually. He’ll be playing Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming Hobbit series, and he is a perfect comic foil to Sherlock’s rude, uncouth, and egotistical behavior.

Other notable characters are, of course, Jim Moriarty (played flamboyantly by Irishman Andrew Scott). Moriarty is so twisted in his utter evil, and even though you gotta hate the guy, you have to like him, too, if only for his repartee with Sherlock.

So far, there have been six hour-and-a-half long episodes, divided into two seasons. Each episode title is a play on words based on the original Conan Doyle novels (for instance A Study in Scarlet becomes “A Study in Pink”). The relationship developed between Sherlock and Watson is stellar, and the mysteries are never easy to unwind. The acting is a certain strong point, but so is the rapid dialogue. Jake and I needed subtitles, and frankly, it was hard even then to keep up with Sherlock’s mile-a-minute discourse.

Comedy mixes effortlessly with violence and drama. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the show is how badass and violent these two pale, British boys can be. Watson is a sharpshooter with perfect aim, and Sherlock is just as willing to give a fist to the face as shake a hand.

There is never a dull moment in this BBC masterpiece—just another example that Europe is winning the battle for entertainment quality. Yes, there are already talks of a season three, set to start filming in March of 2013, since both Cumberbatch and Freeman are currently working on other projects. That means I will obsessively watch the only six episodes I have over and over, because I can’t get enough of the characters, the writing, and the ever-present comic undertones of this, my new favorite show.