Scandal in Belgravia
Jan. 2nd, 2012 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficFor 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-03 01:56 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-03 02:26 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-03 03:14 am (UTC)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.