Sherlock

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized sherlock, sherlock holmes 0 Comments

It was good. Interesting. I don’t think it’s ever going to be my favourite adaptation though…

I dunno, I just can’t warm up to Martin Freeman’s Watson. Or Cumberbatch’s Holmes, for that matter. He’s just too cold, too inhuman, and the Holmes of the books wasn’t. It’s actually been the minor characters who’ve won me over the most, Lestrade especially. They did a really good job with him.

Guessed who Moriarty was, pretty much, from the moment ‘Jim’ showed up. (Jim = James, see?) When he wasn’t mentioned again I thought maybe the name was a red herring, but no, there he was at the end. Was the swimming pool the Reichenbach pool? Because it totally should have been.

So, yes. Also, the guy standing in the middle of the street very obviously wearing a bomb and looking terrified and holding a phone- didn’t anyone notice that? Londoners aren’t that apathetic!

Sherlock

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized sherlock, sherlock holmes 0 Comments

You know…that one left me pretty apathetic. It wasn’t as good as the last one, and I’m not warming to Martin Freeman’s Watson. Everyone involved is a good actor, the script is good, but I’m just not feeling it. Martin Freeman’s always played the Everyman, but Watson isn’t an Everyman, not really. One of my favourite bits in any of the books is in The Dying Detective, where Holmes tells Watson not to come near the sickbed or he’ll catch the disease, and Watson replies with something like, “Such a thing would not stop me doing my duty to a patient, what makes you think it would affect me in the case of so old a friend?” See, that’s not the Watson in this show.

Benedict Cumberbatch continues to be great, but I miss the awesomeness that is movie!Holmes-Watson and book!Holmes-Watson. Really, all I got from this was an overwhelming desire to read the books again.

I’m gonna watch next week anyway. Just to see what it’s like…

Sherlock

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized sherlock, sherlock holmes 0 Comments

Four years on and I can finally stop seeing Benedict Cumberbatch as the paedophile rapist from Atonement.

So here you’ve got this guy who geniunely can’t understand why a dying woman would write her dead daughter’s name, and another guy who’s half traumatized by and half horribly missing the horrors of war, and together they fight crime! No, actually, I mean…

…Watson is basically Holmes’ humanity. In all of the books and adaptations. I’m not quite getting that from this show, but I think it’ll pick up later. I want to see the ‘great heart as well a great brain’ scene. Basically, Holmes and Watson are the original yin-and-yang-style friendship, each of them brings out the best in the other, and I really want to see more of that.

Yeah, the new Watson…he’s good, Martin Freeman is always good, but I want more of the kindly, Gentlemanly (with a capital G) Watson. Jude Law is still my favourite, weirdly enough.

Anyway! Onto everything else. I (along with 99% of the Holmesian population) assumed that sharp-dressed-umbrella-guy was Moriarty, and was actually a little disappointed when it turned out to be Mycroft, mostly because Mycroft is supposed to be fat but partly because I secretly hoped that if the show even featured him he’d be played by Stephen Fry.

I knew the plot from A Study In Scarlet, but I don’t think I have any issues with the changes. Although I think on the whole I would have preferred the murderer to be a dying man seeking revenge for his dead girlfriend (as in the original) rather than a guy killing for the heck of it.

Hey, I have a really random theory but I’ll laugh if it turns out to be true: that woman with Mycroft is Moriarty. They already changed the gender of Watson’s sibling, so they can change other genders too, and I’m sure there’s never been a female Moriarty before. It could work!

Either that, or it’s the name of an organisation…

On the whole, it was great! The next one’s next week, right? I hope so.