Well, it wasn't a turkey

[fpb]

But I wasn't happy with it either. Once again, as in the first episode, Moffatt has cheapened and flattened an opponent who was, in the original, much more interesting and many-sided. Just like Jefferson Hope, the consumptive cabman carrying out a long-delayed and well-deserved vengeance, was reduced to an assassin - however clever - in the service of Moriarty, so Irene Adler, the brilliant actress and adventuress with ambitions to respectability and who felt badly treated by her royal lover, has been flattened into a prostitute whose cleverness, again, is her only redeeming feature. And frankly I don't believe in intellectually impressive dominatrices - the trade has too much to do with taking advantage of the easy target of inadequate male self-image to provide much stimulus for the intellect. The story wasn't a failure; Moffat is a master in keeping the reader on the hop by the constant use of red herrings and surprises, which is indeed a very Holmesian thing to do, and the thread of reasoning is mostly quite ingenious. But there is a certain inability to perceive subtlety and nobility which actually seems to me a defining feature of much contemporary imagination. Just as Peter Jackson coarsened every noble character in Lord of The Rings, so Steven Moffatt coarsens and flattens Jefferson Hope and Irene Adler.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Had read before I got to your kind warning in my own post, but no worries, this is not spoiler territory as such. I feared as much; whereas to me Irene, who is largely defined BY HOLMES by her sense of honour, should read a lot more like Madame Goesler in "Phineas Finn".

Got your email, THANK YOU - have to see when I can make it to Londra before the exhibition ends! Would I've to go with your mother and sister! News soon!

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Have now seen, and agree on Irene. But there was some fantastic writing in it, including the bleak, Pinteresque exchange between the Holmes brothers at the morgue:

"Smoking indoors, isn't there one of those... one of those law things?"

"We're in a morgue. There's only so much damage you can do."

and

"Look at them. They all care so much. Do you ever wonder if there's something wrong with us?"

"All lives end, all hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock."

"This is low tar."

"Well, you barely knew her."

Very still, very impressive.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All right, but do we WANT a Sherlock Holmes story to be "bleak, Pinteresque"?

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Surely 98% of it wasn't, but this scene provided a still centre to the story that was very affecting - Irene didn't amuse me much, but what we saw of the Sherlock-Mycroft relationship was wonderful. And both BC and MG were terrific in it - restrained and minimalist.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I just re-read A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA, and you are mistaken. Sherlock Holmes expects anything, clearly including blackmail, from Irene Adler; it is the King, her former lover, who is reassured when she says she will forget him for good, because it is he, correcting Holmes, who says that her word is "inviolate". And in spite of many theorists, it is the King, not Holmes, who is plainly still in love with her. If you want to see Holmes close to being in love, you have to read his account of Violet de Merville in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client:
“I don’t quite know how to make her clear to you, Watson. Perhaps you may meet her before we are through, and you can use your own gift of words. She is beautiful, but with the ethereal other-world beauty of some fanatic whose thoughts are set on high. I have seen such faces in the pictures of the old masters of the Middle Ages. How a beastman could have laid his vile paws upon such a being of the beyond I cannot imagine. You may have noticed how extremes call to each other, the spiritual to the animal, the cave-man to the angel. You never saw a worse case than this.

He didn't speak about Irene Adler like this.