The Final Problem - saner, non-keyboard-smashy thoughts. Lots of them.
Okay, now that the immediate and momentary effusions of squee are over and sober second thoughts have largely eradicated them, a somewhat more balanced post on The Final Problem and its many problems.
1. Why the hell did they decide to call it The Final Problem? The only thing that can be construed as “finality” in this episode is the possibility that it might be the last one, and I think it's borderline idiotic. I was assuming / hoping that this would in some way acknowledge, and hopefully begin to address what was stated as the actual “final problem” in S2:
JIM: Ah. Here we are at last - you and me, Sherlock, and our problem - the final problem. Stayin’ alive! It’s so boring, isn’t it? It’s just ... staying. All my life I’ve been searching for distractions. You were the best distraction and now I don’t even have you. Because I’ve beaten you. And you know what? In the end it was easy. It was easy. Now I’ve got to go back to playing with the ordinary people. And it turns out you’re ordinary just like all of them.
Now, I've always interpreted this little speech as being about how to solve the problem of being a genius in the ordinary world, finding a way to function without going mad or finding distraction in drugs or other forms of self-destruction. This is an interesting conundrum because this is a real problem for people like Jim, Sherlock and Mycroft, and the way they each come up with their own personal solution is interesting (well, to me, anyway). And I'd been hoping (to no avail) that this might at least feature in this episode. But apparently not. Because continuity, resolution and completing your own story arcs are apparently anathema and I blame Steven Moffat 100% for this. Because he's got form for all of the above.
2. “Humanizing” Mycroft. I love Mycroft as a character. Anyone who knows/follows me knows that Mycroft's the star of the version of the show that exists in my head. But the disembowelment of Mycroft's character that's taken place over S4 pisses me off a lot. On the other hand, there's three times as much Mycroft in this series than in the other three combined, so I feel I'm being a bit ungracious complaining. But in TFP, in particular, everything we've ever learned about him or observed is proved to be a lie, every plan he's constructed falls apart before his very eyes; the consequences of his miscalculations and risks taken blow up in his face every time he turns around. Then to top it all off, his mother sneers and calls him “limited”, then turns her back on him and says to Sherlock (Sherlock!!) “You've always been the adult.”
I've never, ever wanted to pity Mycroft. I've never wanted to see him be pitiable. I've never expected him to be perfect (because, wow, his flaws are way out there for the world to see), and I've gone on record as saying I don't think he's all-powerful or all-knowing. But in this, he's been stripped down, and all his strengths presented as “really” being weaknesses. He's persistently ridiculed, and left bleeding by the side of the road, and I can't get my head around what exactly we're supposed to make of this. Is it to make the brothers more “equal”? To say that he needs to be more like Sherlock? That the personal sacrifices he's made for his family were all a mistake and his life has been wasted? I don't know. This is one aspect of the episode I'm going to be giving a lot of thought to over the next few months as I decide how much I'm going to incorporate S4 canon into my fic/brain space going forward.
3. Moriarty's demotion from criminal mastermind to Eurus' dogsbody. I've never made any bones about the fact that I loathe this incarnation of Moriarty: from the casting to the writing to the performance. But what happened in this episode makes absolutely no sense. The entire point of Moriarty is that he's supposed to be Sherlock's greatest opponent, period. He's supposed to be the most dangerous dude around, the man with the plans, the connections. The guy who kills people for shits and giggles and blows off millions of pounds just so that he can watch Sherlock dance to his tune.
But that's all false now, isn't it? Because in reality he was always just Eurus' messenger boy. This is really the shits. For two guys who constantly defend their sometimes hinky decisions with the “OMG we're such Doyle fans”, demoting Moriarty seems like a very, very strange course to take. Especially after TAB, which doesn't seem to have any connections to this series at all. Maybe I'm just to stupid too figure out what those connection are, or maybe I'm just clever enough to see how hollow some of this episode is. *shrugs again*
4. Eurus as the quintessential “madwoman in the attic”. It's like they took every single cliche there was about the non-compliant woman, threw them into a blender and produced this...goop of a person. After all these years, I have such low expectations of Moffat when it comes to female characters, that for me the most shocking thing is that I was almost shocked at how asinine this character turned out to be. It started out so well: Eurus, the Holmes With a Thousand Faces, master of (some) accents and flirting and other forms of manipulation (as any Holmes would be). And then in the episode which is (sort of) about her, she's turned into the first Mrs. Rochester. Well, at least they didn't kill her off, as inconvenient woman so frequently are. But this leads to...
5. Eurus' change of heart from “You have to murder either your brother or your best friend” to compliantly walking back into her cell in, like, five minutes, with no explanation or rationale at all. Oh, and voluntarily silenced so that no one in her family needs to every hear her inconvenient voice ever again. That's it, it's all over: a lifetime's plotting the downfall of her brother, and preferably her entire family in the most vicious and emotionally destructive way imaginable disappears under the ministrations of a couple of lines and a hug. Really? This is the person who co-opted and “enslaved” Moriarty and every other person who came in contact with her? This has to be the laziest piece of writing I've ever come across in my entire life. And why was she gunning after Sherlock? It was Mycroft who's been responsible for her incarceration for the last twenty years or so.
6. The tons and tons of nonsensical bullshit and downright internal continuity errors. Such as: who unchained John from the bottom of the well? The ghost of Victor Trevor? And when Victor disappeared, where the hell were his parents? If my kid disappeared while visiting the home of his best friend, I'd tear every building down with my bare hands, comb every inch of turf non-stop until I found them. The kid disappears and no-one thinks, “Gee, maybe Victor fell down that old well we've been meaning to board up for the last twenty years.” And what family with young kids leaves an open well just laying around. Maybe Mrs Holmes was hoping Mycroft would fall in and drown.
7. “Consequences” my fat, hairy ass, Moffat. What consequences? HLV ends with Sherlock murdering the most powerful man in Britain in cold blood, and the “consequences” are that Sherlock is forced to spend three minutes having Sir Edwin roll his eyes at him and Lady Smallwood get a bit tetchy. Really? This sort of nonsense is the reason I stopped watching Doctor Who about six years ago. If you're going to use your fascination with convoluted, multi-season story arcs as your excuse for episodes lacking internal logic (“you'll understand the reasoning at the end of next season!”), then at least finish the bloody multi-season story arc in a way that actually addresses what you did along the way, instead of constantly pulling new rabbits out of new hats, ignoring the old rabbits crapping on the stage and gnawing on the furniture.
8. Mary's valedictorian speech at the end. I thought this was just weird on first watching. On second it annoyed me to no end. Beyond how insipid and wrong-footed it was, it was another WTF “Logic? What logic?” moment. Who keeps sending these things? Mary's been dead for weeks and these things keep popping up in the mail? How many did she record before she died? Will John be receiving these things on a regular basis for years? And who's mailing them? Are we supposed to think she's not really dead? Does she have an accomplice who was instructed to mail them at two-week intervals? Mrs Hudson's my suspect no. 1, if that's the case.
Okay, enough bitching. All of the above said, this is still probably going to end up being my favourite episode of the season. It noses ahead of TLD for the reason (I think) that has got so many people up in arms: the focus on the Holmes family history. Because Sherlock and Mycroft's relationship has always been the one I'm most interested in. I have nothing invested in Sherlock and John's relationship. I've always thought John is actually pretty boring as a character. I don't care about Moriarty, or Molly, or Mrs Hudson, or pretty much anyone else. Except Greg. I love Greg.
Of course, a lot of what we got about the Holmes family is exactly what I didn't want: the (admittedly quite small) stately home, the fundamentally dysfunctional, down-at-the-heels posho family. I hated it in pre-S3 fic and I hate it now. And I hate that it was done solely so that they could make a passing hand-wavy reference to one of the very few Doyle stories I actually like: The Musgrave Ritual. Without Sherlock actually solving the Musgrave puzzle, of course, because Sherlock is apparently only allowed, at any one time, to engage either his heart or his brain. And as he was in heart mode this episode, no braining was to be allowed.
Did I say the bitching was over? Sorry.
I have a lot less of an issue than most people with the fact that the plot was totally bonkers, had nothing to do with any known Doyle story (other than a few fleeting moments of token ornamentation), or that Sherlock didn't get to do any real deductions. I've never been a Doyle fangirl, so the lack of canon content wasn't an issue for me. As to the absence of real deductions, I've always thought the deductions that Moffat and Gatiss write are crap, all the way back to the first one we see in SiP (the one about John in the lab was lifted straight from Doyle, so doesn't count). As a side note, I guess that's why they got rid of Stephen Thompson; he was the only one of the three of them who could actually write half-ways decent ones and as Moffat keeps telling us, it's not a detective show. Anyway, the detective-ing parts of the show have never been what I was really jazzed about, so their absence here didn't bother me that much.
The entire time I've been in this fandom, my fannishness has been based on and nurtured by what has been, in essence, table scraps. The things I'm interested in are things that have been presented to us during previous seasons in bits: a part of a scene, maybe if I'm lucky a whole scene in an episode. A few scenes a season. Bits and pieces, cobbled together and glued with lashings of head canon. I've spent all my fannish life with this show ignoring a lot of what's going on because it just doesn't interest me, so it's way easier for me than most people to ignore the stuff I don't like, I think, because it's the way things have always been for me.
I'm not going to apologise for enjoying that the things I like were much more prominent in this episode than they ever have been before: Sherlock and Mycroft's relationship, and Mycroft and his work. I got a lot of little, satisfying details out of their story, again ignoring the whole Eurus situation, none of which makes a whit of sense. Because Mofftiss.
In the end, there was only one thing I was really invested in: Mycroft being alive at the end. And I have to admit, the scene where Sherlock is “forced” to choose was really, really difficult for me to watch, largely because I knew I would be enraged if they killed Mycroft off in such an asinine way. With the benefit of hindsight and third thoughts, I should have realised halfway through that even though Mycroft would have been the logical target of Eurus' madness if the show had been written by someone else, there was no way that Moffat would allow a single moment of significance to happen that wasn't about Sherlock. Because it's always been obvious to me that this version of Sherlock is Moffat's Tyrion Lannister: the authorial fantasy self-insertion character. Right down to the sarcasm and curly black hair.
So I got what I wanted. And I got a little more than that, in regards to Mycroft and his bonkers family, and maybe a new accord between him and Sherlock. And after getting so little of this for most of three seasons, it was more than a little giddy-making (which has passed, as you see). But I can understand why so many people are so incredibly pissed off. There are so many ways in which this episode came across as some kind of weird bait-and-switch.
Will I watch it again, I wonder. In a way, I think I may be kind of over the show, at least for a while. Unlike after S3, I have no impulse to watch any of them at the moment, though I might do a complete S4 re-watch in a few weeks, and try to get my head around some of my outstanding issues. Or not. Maybe I'll just go back to writing. Today I was thinking about a story I had an idea for in the summer of 2014 but never wrote, because I knew there was something important missing from it. And a throw-away line of Mycroft's in TFP gave me my way back into it, the thing that's been the missing heart of the story.
I suppose that's the way it's always been for me and this show: it's a jumping-off point for writing fic. I've never been interested in analysing it, squeeing about it (other than the occasional moment in my head about some tiny detail), or using it to find a “tribe”. It's been entirely unlike my experiences in other fandoms. So the fact that it's given me a bit of a booster shot to my flagged out writing mojo after powering through my monster fic series is a win for me. And more than that I try not to expect from these men.
1. Why the hell did they decide to call it The Final Problem? The only thing that can be construed as “finality” in this episode is the possibility that it might be the last one, and I think it's borderline idiotic. I was assuming / hoping that this would in some way acknowledge, and hopefully begin to address what was stated as the actual “final problem” in S2:
JIM: Ah. Here we are at last - you and me, Sherlock, and our problem - the final problem. Stayin’ alive! It’s so boring, isn’t it? It’s just ... staying. All my life I’ve been searching for distractions. You were the best distraction and now I don’t even have you. Because I’ve beaten you. And you know what? In the end it was easy. It was easy. Now I’ve got to go back to playing with the ordinary people. And it turns out you’re ordinary just like all of them.
Now, I've always interpreted this little speech as being about how to solve the problem of being a genius in the ordinary world, finding a way to function without going mad or finding distraction in drugs or other forms of self-destruction. This is an interesting conundrum because this is a real problem for people like Jim, Sherlock and Mycroft, and the way they each come up with their own personal solution is interesting (well, to me, anyway). And I'd been hoping (to no avail) that this might at least feature in this episode. But apparently not. Because continuity, resolution and completing your own story arcs are apparently anathema and I blame Steven Moffat 100% for this. Because he's got form for all of the above.
2. “Humanizing” Mycroft. I love Mycroft as a character. Anyone who knows/follows me knows that Mycroft's the star of the version of the show that exists in my head. But the disembowelment of Mycroft's character that's taken place over S4 pisses me off a lot. On the other hand, there's three times as much Mycroft in this series than in the other three combined, so I feel I'm being a bit ungracious complaining. But in TFP, in particular, everything we've ever learned about him or observed is proved to be a lie, every plan he's constructed falls apart before his very eyes; the consequences of his miscalculations and risks taken blow up in his face every time he turns around. Then to top it all off, his mother sneers and calls him “limited”, then turns her back on him and says to Sherlock (Sherlock!!) “You've always been the adult.”
I've never, ever wanted to pity Mycroft. I've never wanted to see him be pitiable. I've never expected him to be perfect (because, wow, his flaws are way out there for the world to see), and I've gone on record as saying I don't think he's all-powerful or all-knowing. But in this, he's been stripped down, and all his strengths presented as “really” being weaknesses. He's persistently ridiculed, and left bleeding by the side of the road, and I can't get my head around what exactly we're supposed to make of this. Is it to make the brothers more “equal”? To say that he needs to be more like Sherlock? That the personal sacrifices he's made for his family were all a mistake and his life has been wasted? I don't know. This is one aspect of the episode I'm going to be giving a lot of thought to over the next few months as I decide how much I'm going to incorporate S4 canon into my fic/brain space going forward.
3. Moriarty's demotion from criminal mastermind to Eurus' dogsbody. I've never made any bones about the fact that I loathe this incarnation of Moriarty: from the casting to the writing to the performance. But what happened in this episode makes absolutely no sense. The entire point of Moriarty is that he's supposed to be Sherlock's greatest opponent, period. He's supposed to be the most dangerous dude around, the man with the plans, the connections. The guy who kills people for shits and giggles and blows off millions of pounds just so that he can watch Sherlock dance to his tune.
But that's all false now, isn't it? Because in reality he was always just Eurus' messenger boy. This is really the shits. For two guys who constantly defend their sometimes hinky decisions with the “OMG we're such Doyle fans”, demoting Moriarty seems like a very, very strange course to take. Especially after TAB, which doesn't seem to have any connections to this series at all. Maybe I'm just to stupid too figure out what those connection are, or maybe I'm just clever enough to see how hollow some of this episode is. *shrugs again*
4. Eurus as the quintessential “madwoman in the attic”. It's like they took every single cliche there was about the non-compliant woman, threw them into a blender and produced this...goop of a person. After all these years, I have such low expectations of Moffat when it comes to female characters, that for me the most shocking thing is that I was almost shocked at how asinine this character turned out to be. It started out so well: Eurus, the Holmes With a Thousand Faces, master of (some) accents and flirting and other forms of manipulation (as any Holmes would be). And then in the episode which is (sort of) about her, she's turned into the first Mrs. Rochester. Well, at least they didn't kill her off, as inconvenient woman so frequently are. But this leads to...
5. Eurus' change of heart from “You have to murder either your brother or your best friend” to compliantly walking back into her cell in, like, five minutes, with no explanation or rationale at all. Oh, and voluntarily silenced so that no one in her family needs to every hear her inconvenient voice ever again. That's it, it's all over: a lifetime's plotting the downfall of her brother, and preferably her entire family in the most vicious and emotionally destructive way imaginable disappears under the ministrations of a couple of lines and a hug. Really? This is the person who co-opted and “enslaved” Moriarty and every other person who came in contact with her? This has to be the laziest piece of writing I've ever come across in my entire life. And why was she gunning after Sherlock? It was Mycroft who's been responsible for her incarceration for the last twenty years or so.
6. The tons and tons of nonsensical bullshit and downright internal continuity errors. Such as: who unchained John from the bottom of the well? The ghost of Victor Trevor? And when Victor disappeared, where the hell were his parents? If my kid disappeared while visiting the home of his best friend, I'd tear every building down with my bare hands, comb every inch of turf non-stop until I found them. The kid disappears and no-one thinks, “Gee, maybe Victor fell down that old well we've been meaning to board up for the last twenty years.” And what family with young kids leaves an open well just laying around. Maybe Mrs Holmes was hoping Mycroft would fall in and drown.
7. “Consequences” my fat, hairy ass, Moffat. What consequences? HLV ends with Sherlock murdering the most powerful man in Britain in cold blood, and the “consequences” are that Sherlock is forced to spend three minutes having Sir Edwin roll his eyes at him and Lady Smallwood get a bit tetchy. Really? This sort of nonsense is the reason I stopped watching Doctor Who about six years ago. If you're going to use your fascination with convoluted, multi-season story arcs as your excuse for episodes lacking internal logic (“you'll understand the reasoning at the end of next season!”), then at least finish the bloody multi-season story arc in a way that actually addresses what you did along the way, instead of constantly pulling new rabbits out of new hats, ignoring the old rabbits crapping on the stage and gnawing on the furniture.
8. Mary's valedictorian speech at the end. I thought this was just weird on first watching. On second it annoyed me to no end. Beyond how insipid and wrong-footed it was, it was another WTF “Logic? What logic?” moment. Who keeps sending these things? Mary's been dead for weeks and these things keep popping up in the mail? How many did she record before she died? Will John be receiving these things on a regular basis for years? And who's mailing them? Are we supposed to think she's not really dead? Does she have an accomplice who was instructed to mail them at two-week intervals? Mrs Hudson's my suspect no. 1, if that's the case.
Okay, enough bitching. All of the above said, this is still probably going to end up being my favourite episode of the season. It noses ahead of TLD for the reason (I think) that has got so many people up in arms: the focus on the Holmes family history. Because Sherlock and Mycroft's relationship has always been the one I'm most interested in. I have nothing invested in Sherlock and John's relationship. I've always thought John is actually pretty boring as a character. I don't care about Moriarty, or Molly, or Mrs Hudson, or pretty much anyone else. Except Greg. I love Greg.
Of course, a lot of what we got about the Holmes family is exactly what I didn't want: the (admittedly quite small) stately home, the fundamentally dysfunctional, down-at-the-heels posho family. I hated it in pre-S3 fic and I hate it now. And I hate that it was done solely so that they could make a passing hand-wavy reference to one of the very few Doyle stories I actually like: The Musgrave Ritual. Without Sherlock actually solving the Musgrave puzzle, of course, because Sherlock is apparently only allowed, at any one time, to engage either his heart or his brain. And as he was in heart mode this episode, no braining was to be allowed.
Did I say the bitching was over? Sorry.
I have a lot less of an issue than most people with the fact that the plot was totally bonkers, had nothing to do with any known Doyle story (other than a few fleeting moments of token ornamentation), or that Sherlock didn't get to do any real deductions. I've never been a Doyle fangirl, so the lack of canon content wasn't an issue for me. As to the absence of real deductions, I've always thought the deductions that Moffat and Gatiss write are crap, all the way back to the first one we see in SiP (the one about John in the lab was lifted straight from Doyle, so doesn't count). As a side note, I guess that's why they got rid of Stephen Thompson; he was the only one of the three of them who could actually write half-ways decent ones and as Moffat keeps telling us, it's not a detective show. Anyway, the detective-ing parts of the show have never been what I was really jazzed about, so their absence here didn't bother me that much.
The entire time I've been in this fandom, my fannishness has been based on and nurtured by what has been, in essence, table scraps. The things I'm interested in are things that have been presented to us during previous seasons in bits: a part of a scene, maybe if I'm lucky a whole scene in an episode. A few scenes a season. Bits and pieces, cobbled together and glued with lashings of head canon. I've spent all my fannish life with this show ignoring a lot of what's going on because it just doesn't interest me, so it's way easier for me than most people to ignore the stuff I don't like, I think, because it's the way things have always been for me.
I'm not going to apologise for enjoying that the things I like were much more prominent in this episode than they ever have been before: Sherlock and Mycroft's relationship, and Mycroft and his work. I got a lot of little, satisfying details out of their story, again ignoring the whole Eurus situation, none of which makes a whit of sense. Because Mofftiss.
In the end, there was only one thing I was really invested in: Mycroft being alive at the end. And I have to admit, the scene where Sherlock is “forced” to choose was really, really difficult for me to watch, largely because I knew I would be enraged if they killed Mycroft off in such an asinine way. With the benefit of hindsight and third thoughts, I should have realised halfway through that even though Mycroft would have been the logical target of Eurus' madness if the show had been written by someone else, there was no way that Moffat would allow a single moment of significance to happen that wasn't about Sherlock. Because it's always been obvious to me that this version of Sherlock is Moffat's Tyrion Lannister: the authorial fantasy self-insertion character. Right down to the sarcasm and curly black hair.
So I got what I wanted. And I got a little more than that, in regards to Mycroft and his bonkers family, and maybe a new accord between him and Sherlock. And after getting so little of this for most of three seasons, it was more than a little giddy-making (which has passed, as you see). But I can understand why so many people are so incredibly pissed off. There are so many ways in which this episode came across as some kind of weird bait-and-switch.
Will I watch it again, I wonder. In a way, I think I may be kind of over the show, at least for a while. Unlike after S3, I have no impulse to watch any of them at the moment, though I might do a complete S4 re-watch in a few weeks, and try to get my head around some of my outstanding issues. Or not. Maybe I'll just go back to writing. Today I was thinking about a story I had an idea for in the summer of 2014 but never wrote, because I knew there was something important missing from it. And a throw-away line of Mycroft's in TFP gave me my way back into it, the thing that's been the missing heart of the story.
I suppose that's the way it's always been for me and this show: it's a jumping-off point for writing fic. I've never been interested in analysing it, squeeing about it (other than the occasional moment in my head about some tiny detail), or using it to find a “tribe”. It's been entirely unlike my experiences in other fandoms. So the fact that it's given me a bit of a booster shot to my flagged out writing mojo after powering through my monster fic series is a win for me. And more than that I try not to expect from these men.