Alexandra Kingsley

I promised myself I would blog my reactions to each Sherlock episode this series, but I’m afraid it’s just going to get repetitive if I keep writing, “Well, that was basically the best thing ever.”

But it was.  Again.

In a series of three episodes, the middle has a tendency to be the closest thing to filler: a little running-in-place, a little time-wasting between the triumphant introduction and the dramatic finale.  Last series’s middle episode, “The Blind Banker,” was certainly the weakest of the three.  But this time around, versed as we all are in Sherlock’s style of deduction and no need to continue introducing him to us, we’re treated to a standalone episode that reworks Conan Doyle’s detective-horror tale.  The choice to bank on adrenaline to overcome the placeholder status of the middle episode was a smart one, to be sure.

Mark Gatiss is a brilliant purveyor of horror in any form, be it detective story, documentary, or sketch comedy series.  ”The Hounds of Baskerville” not only upped the horror quotient, it continued with the current series’s mission to humanize Sherlock through his relationships.  Out in the Devon countryside, his friendship with John took center stage.  I enjoy that the series has yet to let the mistaken-for-boyfriends gag drop; but jokes aside, it continues to mine their interactions for emotional depth.  Again, this is all build-up for next week’s “The Reichenbach Fall,” which I’ve already heard is a tearjerker in the extreme.

Sherlock was at his most manic last night as well, at least at the episode’s start.  Benedict Cumberbatch is a tour de force whose work must be seen to be believed.  He’s fearless, thrilling, and always on.  There are literally not enough things in the world that I could say about Cumberbatch as an actor.

Lastly, last night’s episode was yet another reference-hunters dream.  It featured, among other things:

• Being Human‘s resident werewolf, Russell Tovey, as a man haunted by memories of a giant hound in the woods
• John Philip Sousa, Elvis, and a whole range of other references, during an inspired depiction of Sherlock’s mental indexing and cross-referencing process
• and a lovely nod to Undershaw, Conan Doyle’s endangered estate (where he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles)
• an episode tag that led into the BBC’s tie-in viral marketing with this eerie video blog

And with all this under our belt, we’re only one away from the end!  Time to brush up on the canon with “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle’s attempt to shuffle off his hero’s mortal coil.

image from watsonjohn.tumblr.com

Sherlock is back and my general attitude toward the show can be summed up with the above gif.  Last night’s “A Scandal in Belgravia” proved that we haven’t even seen what this team is capable of yet.  There were emotional highs and lows, cases galore, oneliners and character-study set pieces, and a twisty, turn-y plot that ended up ranging pretty far from its source material.

I actually had to watch twice because my brain was tripping over itself trying to figure out what was coming next during my first viewing.  The altered plot of “A Scandal in Bohemia” occupies only the first section of the episode; things go much further from there.  One of the things this show does best is take details from the stories and remix them in new and delightful variations.  While I prefer the canonical opera singer Irene to the BBC’s dominatrix Irene, it was thrilling to watch the updated version reveal her hiding place as a result of the fire trick, and see completely through his vicar disguise, and all the rest of it.

The show has also, now that we’re in the second season, begun remixing itself.  As has been pointed out on tumblr, the whole phone plot is a callback to the very first episode:

I really like the symmetry with Irene’s phone. Allow me to explain. In ASiP, Sherlock makes a series of deductions about John’s “brother” Harry from the hand-me-down mobile. He says “If she’d left him, he would have kept it. People do, sentiment.”

Then lo and behold. The end of scandal. He wants to keep Irene’s phone. Sentiment.

Well spotted!

(If I had more time, I would love to compile all the annotations and notes about this new batch of episodes; as it is, I’ll likely only be able to link and mention a few for each.)

I do have to take a moment to shout out my favorite re-titled case: “The Geek Interpreter,” which has been written up on the BBC’s excellent tie-in website of John’s blog.

At its heart, though, this episode centered around the strange emotional ties in Sherlock’s life.  I have to say, I’m pleased with the show’s commitment to a very specific, 21st-century understanding of asexuality.  The original story, told from Watson’s perspective, represents things a little bit differently, but I’ve always chalked this up to Watson’s subjective writing style.  He may write with a tone of mastery that leaves little room for interpretation, but his view is just as subjective as any other.

TO SHERLOCK HOLMES she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer–excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

The John of “Belgravia” has far less of a clue about what is going on inside Sherlock’s head, and the emotional effect of this change is startling.  John, usually the one adept at social situations in a way Sherlock is not, founders when asked to play interpreter to Sherlock’s emotional state.

I think this was the perfect moment to go for the show to go for the heart, and it did so on a tremendous scale.  The episode highlighted each and every one of Sherlock’s major relationships, while also giving him another, totally different one to cope with.

Nothing has changed since Sherlock met Irene, and yet everything has.  I can’t wait to see where we go from here.