Scandal in Belgravia

[ivyfic]

For now, just one of my many thoughts on this episode--

I'm rewatching it trying to catalogue exactly what Irene Adler is responsible for. Since she is one of the biggest Mary Sues to ever roam through fandom, rampaging for over a century, I'm hyper sensitive to any portrayal of her. This one I like, but bears a worrying potential for her to pop up over and over, which would be grating to me. In particular, I've always hated the portrayals of Adler as a lovable rogue (see RDJ's Sherlock). In this, she is a lovable rogue--but not really. She is actually quite bad.

1. We can assume that it was her call to Moriarty at the pool, probably about the email she photographed. (Unless we find out what that phone call was in a future episode, that seems the most logical--Moffatt doesn't leave threads hanging.)
2. Since she reported it to Moriarty immediately, and since Moriarty was clearly giving her direction in the seduction of Sherlock, when she says later that she had one of the best cryptographers in the world look at it, and that he was upside down at the time, I'm going to assume that was Moriarty. Meaning she's probably, if not had sex with him, at least dominated him in a professional capacity.
3. Faking her death was part of the Moriarty directed plan. We aren't told how she could trick Sherlock so convincingly, but it would require the corpse to be a perfect body double. Those don't turn up by chance. Which means she either murdered someone or, more likely, was involved in the conspiracy that murdered someone. And she doesn't seem at all bothered by that.

Sherlock showed in the pilot that he's unreasonably attracted, intellectually, to killers, if they're smart. So I don't think the murder would give him pause.

What I think would, though, is what she says at the end--that she had all this information but didn't know what to do with it until Moriarty. That makes her Moriarty's subordinate. And, given the photos she received at the beginning, however well she played the game, it makes her Moriarty's pawn.

I think that it is that emotion--the sudden realization that she, as a subordinate, is inferior to him--that frees him up to solve the puzzle at the end. The very end of the episode was rather ludicrously over the top, more than a little Mary Sue, and clearly just to leave the writers the option of bringing her back. Which I will be annoyed if they do too often.

But I can't help feel that Sherlock must have lost some respect for her. Killing, that wouldn't turn him away. But allowing yourself to be someone else's pawn? That would. Look at how he reacts to Mycroft's attempts to use him as a pawn.

Comments

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

I would love to see a portrayal of Irene Adler that's true to Scandal in Bohemia - a woman who is absolutely genuine in only wanting insurance that will let her live happily with her middling husband. And a woman who is honourable enough that the king of Bohemia (eventually) trusts her to do just that.

I'm so fed up of this Catwoman version of Irene.

[alizarin-nyc.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. I would love to see canon-compliant Irene. A smart, beautiful woman who largely just wants agency in her own life. That was missing here.

The ending! OY. And yeah, she's hardcore evil here, moreso than I've ever known her to be portrayed.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

This was reminding me of a fic I skimmed a little while ago that featured Sherlock in a relationship with John being seduced by a woman who turns out to have been sent by Moriarty to break up him and John. That's kind of the vibe I'm getting off this episode. Moriarty said he'd burn the heart out of Sherlock--Irene is his gambit. Send him the perfect woman, the perfect puzzle, make him fall in love, then have her dismiss him with utter contempt. Because Moriarty would know that being outplayed would hurt far more than being rejected.

Fandom has taken that line to mean John, but given this episode, I think it means Irene.

So really, if you watch that scene at the end, where it's her, Sherlock, and Mycroft, he's morosely resigned to his defeat until she mentions she had help. Could just be the galvanizing mention of Moriarty, but I think it's more the realization--oh. She didn't beat me. She played well, but she never had the intelligence or the imagination to come up with this strategy. And I think it is that sudden lowering of her abilities in his eyes that lets him crack it. Before she mentioned Moriarty, she's an unbeatable foe. Once he knows she's just a pawn, then he can see her mistake.

That's what I find interesting about this Irene. But, as we can already see, *hem* Irene is SO DIVISIVE TO FANDOM, I always sort of cringe when she's there at all because I know things are about to go badly wrong, even if they're handled brilliantly.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

a woman who is absolutely genuine in only wanting insurance that will let her live happily with her middling husband

She was absolutely, genuinely out to ruin the king out of spite at the beginning of the story:

"Very, indeed. And what does she propose to do with the photograph?"

"To ruin me."

But how?

"I am about to be married."

So I have heard."

"To Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia. You may know the strict principles of her family. She is herself the very soul of delicacy. A shadow of a doubt as to my conduct would bring the matter to an end."

"And Irene Adler?"

Threatens to send them the photograph. And she will do it. I know that she will do it..."

This theory that ACD!Irene was just a quick-witted lady with a mildly scandalous past she used only in self-defense requires a substantial inattention to the actual text.

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

Yet, by the end of the story, months later, she is keeping the photograph purely for insurance and the king does trust her to do so.

"We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call to-morrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future."

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

But, well, so what? She falls in love with someone else and decides to pass up her opportunity. She was still ready to do it; that says plenty about her character and her priorities.

Also, the king calls her "the well-known adventuress," and even gentlemanly John characterizes her as "of dubious and questionable memory." And she was a stage performer--permanently shady in that era, though of a higher class than most.

The details of the story make it perfectly clear that Irene is a demi-mondaine and ruthless. There are plenty of ways to interpret Irene that play off one or another aspect of her ACD!character, especially as our attitudes towards women have changed so much since then, but whenever I see someone complaining that the "canon Irene" wouldn't do something shady or belong to a shady profession, all I can imagine is that they haven't actually read the story and/or have no idea what the Victorian attitude towards stage performers was.

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, she's definitely a courtesan, definitely ruthless, and definitely inclined towards extreme revenge. I've never claimed otherwise.

ACD!Irene is inherently selfish, acting on her own behalf and looking out for her own interests. She's not part of some wider plot to destroy European monarchy, whereas Sherlock and Guy Ritchie!Irenes are both catspaws for the actual Big Bad.

ACD!Irene also looks after an apparent injured clergyman with 'grace and kindliness', which I can't see either of the recent adaptations doing. (Even if BBC Sherlock had bothered with a better disguise.)

And I could believe that ACD!Irene would, possibly, murder in the heat of passion but she wouldn't go in for such a calculated, cold-blooded plot as Sherlock!Irene.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Time! I'm calling time on this argument! I was just saying to a friend that this episode would divide fandom because Irene Adler is inherently divisive to fandom and has been for a hundred years. So feel free to have this debate over canon compliance...just not here. Thanks!

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

Sorry - didn't mean to invade your journal!

Sarah T., feel free to continue at mine.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

No problem! It's just a very old argument, and one I don't think people ever agree on. People seem to come away from "Scandal in Bohemia" with one of two diametrically opposed views of her, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Hear hear!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_abulafia/]

I can't even get over how clever and subtle almost everything about this episode was, and how much I liked it!

I still don't get why Adler needed Sherlock to solve the puzzle of the jumbo jet, though. I'm embarrassed to have to ask this, because I'm probably missing something really obvious and important, but couldn't she have done the same damage with something else on her phone? Was the idea just to get Sherlock even more involved by presenting him with a puzzle that she knew he could solve? (Why?) I feel like the answer is right there in my head but maybe it's just been too long since I've seen the episode and I've forgotten it. Why does Irene Adler need Sherlock Holmes at all, except to test the phone? And, this is a separate point, but how is it possible that he had it for six months, if she gave it to him on Christmas, and returned from the dead on New Year's Day?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Having just rewatched it, I'm of the impression that the entire point of involving Sherlock at all was to crack that email. The way it plays to me is this:
Irene to Moriarty: I've found something potentially compromising!
Moriarty to himself: Aha! This is something of vital importance to that thing Mycroft is doing!
Irene to Moriarty: Can you crack it!
Moriarty in extreme frustration and upside down: No! But I know who can!
And that is the reason behind the entire entanglement of Sherlock. Which takes a full year, start to finish, which stretches credulity a bit, as does neither Irene or Moriarty cracking it, but that's the only thing that makes sense to me from the episode.

As for the timeline, this time I watched it with special attention to timeline. Irene dies and leaves Sherlock phone on Christmas. Comes back from dead on New Year's, then there's the whole CIA break-in. When Sherlock finds Irene in his bed, though, it is months later. He says he took a safe deposit box "months ago," there's Irene's comment about six months, and the Christmas decorations are completely down. It's sloppy, since Sherlock refers to increased pressure, which we assume is the CIA break in, but must actually be a new threat that has flushed Irene out of hiding. But yes, months have indeed passed, during which time Sherlock has had the phone.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_abulafia/]

Okay, that makes sense to me. Although I question how it was possible for Irene/Moriarty to know that the potentially compromising string of numbers was relevant to the thing Mycroft was doing. (What if it wasn't? In that case, everyone would have lost seven or eight or nine months of their lives.)

(And how would Moriarty know that Mycroft was working on something? Couldn't he have used the same method to figure out what Mycroft was working on? Maybe not: maybe he just saw the pattern. But then! How would he know that there was a connection between Mycroft and the pattern?)

When Irene made the "six months" comment, I think it occurred to me in the back of my mind that time must have passed before she showed up in Sherlock's bed. But... why would she have waited six months? To give Sherlock time with the phone? Did she think if she waited, he'd be more willing to help when she showed up again? Did she think a period of six months was actually necessary?

I don't think this is a plot hole or anything, since the line of dialogue could have just as easily been "three months" or "five weeks," and I figure that it was six whole months for a reason.

I thought all of the character stuff was fantastic, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of the plot stuff.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_abulafia/]

(Sorry to come to your journal and attack you with all these questions, I'm just really excited about Sherlock and I haven't seen anyone else discussing it!)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Oh, no problem!

And now that I think about it, I would guess that Moriarty's main motivation in involving Irene and Sherlock is to "burn the heart" out of him, as he promised. I think Irene thinks it's about the code, though clearly she cares more about the game. But I think Moriarty sees cracking that as kind of a bonus, which explains the gap. I mean, all you'd need to do to get him to crack the code is for Irene to send him a fake phone that he could hack with the code on it and--done. But I think both she and Moriarty were trying to shoot the moon--to not just beat him but make him give up. Which he did, I think, at that moment when Irene walked right past him to talk to Mycroft. As I said above, he only gets his mojo back when he realizes she hadn't done everything he'd given her credit for.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_abulafia/]

That moment killed not just Sherlock, but also me! Didn't she actually call him "Junior" or something? I thought that moment was well-written and well-acted.

I agree with your insight about making Sherlock give up. I think the reimagining of Irene as a dominatrix was a stroke of genius.

I didn't consider the problem of bridging the gap between the last series and the current series. (I also didn't notice that six months passed between incident with the pool and Irene's first staged death! But that makes sense: Sherlock accepted a lot of cases. I actually found it really satisfying to watch Sherlock plow through half a dozen monster-of-the-week plotlines in about thirty seconds. I tend to think that pretty much every monster-of-the-week episode of pretty much every TV show could be condensed to a few seconds of dialogue, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that we wouldn't have to spend half an hour watching Sherlock Holmes solve the case of the spotted blonde.)

I forgot about the "burn the heart" line!

Anyway, all of the stuff you mention about the timeline makes a lot of sense to me: I somehow hadn't even realized that there were practical considerations that the story had to deal with, plus I forgot (!) that John and Sherlock had only just met. I can't remember how much time the first series covered, but I vaguely had the idea that they had been living together for a while, like at least a year. And I didn't realize until you mentioned it that this sense I had was unsupported by anything I'd seen.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I just rewatched the first series yesterday and today (hadn't watched "The Blind Baker" since it first aired). There's no indication that I caught of how long they've been living together, but I'd put it at a few weeks, maybe two months, since the pilot. John's very loyal very fast in the pilot, but if you look at "The Blind Baker," it's still clearly very, very new. John spends most of that episode pissed at Sherlock over domestic things, and even asks him for money at one point, which I don't think he'd do once he knew him at all well. Not to mention that he gets a job in that episode because of money problems, which can't be too long after he moved into the flat.

Then "The Great Game" is their first actual row, which bursts John's hero worship bubble, which I think he'd been operating in up to that point. Which still says to me, very new relationship. And he kips at Sarah's. Given what he says about maybe next time not sleeping on the couch when he's over, they haven't yet slept together, which means it's pretty early in their relationship. Put that together, elapsed time between pilot and Great Game I can't see as more than two months at most.

By contrast, in this episode, John and Mrs. Hudson seem to have taken over housekeeping responsibilities entirely. Mrs. Hudson complains about the thumbs, but John doesn't bitch about anything (which, seriously, rewatch Blind Baker--it's the whole episode). John also is extremely confident in his role as Sherlock's partner, and confident that he brings in the business. Again, compare to Blind Baker, where John spends half of it bitching that Sherlock goes off on his own and doesn't let him in the apartments they break into.

There's a huge difference in the relationship. But I really don't see a reason in the first series to think it spanned a great deal of time.

The problem with the time between the series is that the fandom has had a year and a half to mature before there's new canon. So a lot of fanon tropes have gotten deeply embedded and are about to be pulled out by the roots.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I honestly think that it's six months (and six months between the pool and the first adventure with Irene and her "death") to account for the year and a half between the last series and this one. And it brings us back up to the summer, which, since they're doing Baskervilles next week, would be necessary.

What I like about the timeframe is it gives Sherlock and John plenty of time to develop a rapport, which clearly they have. Also John and Mycroft. (Note to Mycroft: Training John to unquestioningly get into unmarked vehicles may not have been your best idea ever.) Note the mentions of a "danger night," which clearly implies it has happened enough that John and Mycroft have had to collaborate on caring for Sherlock, and the mention of "usual places." So it gives a lot of time for various relationships to be built, and lots of dangling case mentions for fandom to build off of. (Though, for every reference to an ACD story, I did a little sigh of oh, we're not getting that episode. They're burning through multiple ACD stories every episode. They're going to run out fairly quickly.)

But for the purposes of this one plot, the Bond airlines, it does happen over an extremely prolonged period, and there are still some things that are entirely unexplained. (Like why that body was in the boot of a car and not in Germany.)

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

We just watched it last night, and really enjoyed it. Except the end, which I agree is too much, too Mary Sue, and too obviously set-up. And since Moffat has already demonstrated--oh, River Song, how I loathe thee!--that he'll bring his favorite ladies back ad nauseum, we may well face more Adler. I like her a lot more, though, so I can live with that. :)

I agree, though, that the tipping point was when Sherlock realized that a) Irene hadn't been the one to outsmart him, and b) it had been Moriarty, of all people. That brought him out of his funk, and finally gave him a handle on her--which he hadn't been able to find until then. He still liked her, obviously, but now he knew he could beat her.

I was a little disappointed with that, though. I'd hoped that she would in fact beat him at his own game on her own.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

My reaction to River Song is forever colored by the fact that I watched that actress on ER.

And yes, I am worried about the recurring Irene Adler. I almost feel like I can't react to this episode yet--as is, I liked it a lot. If it's the tip of an Irene iceberg, I will retroactively hate it.

I'm not sure if there's ever been a character so consistently Mary Sued in fandom. The fact that the fandom has been around for a century and is public domain, making many Irene Sues published novels just aggravates. Consequently, I'm hyper aware of Mary Sue tendencies in Irene. It's like if you have a character with purple eyes and wings--you have to work really, really hard to keep that character from sprouting psychic powers left and right and being everybody and their mother's love interest.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

I think if you've got a character with purple eyes and wings, you've already got problems. :) Unless everyone has those, in which case, whatever.

I don't know the fandom side of it, but I believe you about her. It makes sense that people would want to be her and would write themselves in as her. I like what little I have seen of the character, and I just hope Moffat can leave well enough alone, at least for the rest of this season. If he wanted to bring her back for an episode next year, that wouldn't be too much, I think.