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Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here's Why — Transcript

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0:00You already know who Sherlock Holmes is, he's one of the most famous characters in all of Western Canon
0:05he was in dozens and dozens and dozens of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from 1891 to
0:101927 he's a Pop culturally important icon and a
0:13foundational figure in the Crime and Mystery genres of fiction that have continued all the way to the present day the character has been adapted
0:20and re-imagined and referenced more than any other fictional character except, of course, for Jesus Christ
0:27the characters so instantly
0:29recognisable that if you strap a hat and coat and pipe to a teddy bear and put it in the window of your shop
0:34people will come in asking how many thousands of pounds they can give you for the Sherlock bear?
0:40Three. Three thousands of pounds.
0:43There's many direct film adaptations, including two fun rumps made by Guy Ritchie of all people?
0:50There's a bunch of old film serials, and there's a whole bunch of famous actors who've had a turn playing him.
0:55There's multiple different television versions, an animated series set in the 22nd century where he got frozen for hundreds of years. And also
1:03Watson is a robot for some reason and the Canadian children's TV series starring Sherlock's great-grandniece Shirley Holmes
1:11Those last two are canon, I can prove it and there's perhaps an
1:16Uncountable amount of books shows films and other properties directly inspired by or based on the stories and characters
1:22One of the most obvious invest in recent history being House M.D.
1:25A show I've seen all the way through multiple times starring 'Huge Lorry' as Dr.. House and Robert Sean Leonard as Dr.
1:33James Wilson you get it and my goodness
1:36We haven't even talked about the anime adaptations- you- Let's not do that. Then there are the [two] recent and still active television adaptations
1:44Elementary plays out like a police procedural in tone which is fitting because that type of story is arguably a natural descendant of the original
1:50Genre, and it's set in the U.S. This time with Dr.. Joan Watson played by Lucy Liu, and it's pretty good
1:56It's not as good as House
1:57but it's a well put together show and it's very comfy and
2:01Then there's Sherlock. Sherlock is an over produced, over written over
2:06pissed pile of garbage and the greatest reason ever made to dodge paying your TV licence.
2:12But what's so wrong about it? And why do so many people like it? Or rather
2:16Why did so many people think they liked it until season four came out and everyone collectively realized it was bad and always had been
2:22[and] why did that happen [all] these questions and more are going to be answered over the course of this primal hallucinatory nightmare?
2:29[I] mean video essay
2:30And I hope I can properly impart why the show is such a horrible travesty and just to make it clear in advance
2:35[I'm] going to do it without ever getting Benedict Cumberbatch's name wrong on purpose for a lazy overused joke not even once
2:42[ok] I'm gonna do it once
2:44Benedict Cumber-BAD
2:46Okay, now it's out of my system.
3:07This isn't just the story of one bad show really it's the story of the life and times of its lead writer
3:14Stephen William Moffat. Moffat got spat out of a hole in the ground in Paisley in
3:181961 with the straightforward mission of systematically destroying all of English pop culture and no one stopped him yet, okay?
3:26That's not fair
3:27Moffat is himself a staple of modern English pop culture having written or been involved with a couple of really good shows in his life
3:33including 'Coupling', one of the more experimental
3:35Creative and genuinely funny romantic sitcoms ever made it's loosely based on how he met his wife who by the way
3:42produced the show which is probably why he had so much creative freedom. Although it does raise some
3:46questions about how insular the higher level production staff at the BBC
3:49have become. I'm sure that won't come up later after that during the reboot of Doctor Who, perhaps the only other British Pop Cultural staple
3:55as iconic as Sherlock Holmes, Moffat came on and wrote numerous really good episodes that are loved by the [fanbase]
4:01Giving him massive critical acclaim and winning him among other things a Hugo award and a Bafta
4:06If you don't know what those awards are or what they mean, it's okay. No one does
4:10He's been a fan of Doctor Who all his life and in
4:131999 he even wrote the doctor who parody episode 'The Curse of Fatal Death.' "Why do you have chairs on a Dalek spaceship anyway?"
4:20"We will explain later.."
4:23[this] special is one of the best contributions to the series ever and
4:27Somehow still more progressive than the real Doctor Who ever managed to be it ends with the doctor regenerating into a woman
4:35Scandalous. Now there's a guy who should be running Doctor Who the [fanbase] collectively said aloud. His writing is scary, dramatic
4:41He has genuine established comedic chops both within and without the science fiction Genre. He might even, you know,
4:49Make there be a doctor
4:51That's not played by man
4:53You know maybe and in a television miracle the likes of which hasn't been seen before or since in science fiction
5:00When Rusty Davies stood down a showrunner the fans got what they wanted
5:08Oops. Some of the good aspects of Moffat's writing remain
5:11But overall the show is somewhat lacking something with him in the driver's seat
5:15[there's] a lot of problems
5:17but the main one alongside him not doing the one thing it would have been really [cool] for him to do the two times and
5:22Soon to be three the doctor has regenerated under his watch
5:25Is that the show is now totally dedicated to the persona of the Doctor. Previously the Doctor was the main character
5:30[yes], and he was very important in the story of the canon he'd been around for a long time
5:35And he knows the [history] of the universe almost offhand
5:37He's dabbled in events, so often that writers have played this both for drama and for comedy
5:44"Sonic Blaster, 51st Century. Weapon factories of Villengard." "You've been to the factories?" "Once."
5:48"Well they're gone now, destroyed. Main reactor went critical, vaporized the lot." "Like I said, once."
5:54That one's from the first episode Moffat did by the way
5:57But ultimately he was just a guy with his own
5:59personality and problems who liked having adventures and was a single piece of the puzzle of every episode's
6:04story. Moffat's version of the show positions the doctor as the central puzzle piece to complete the universe with an army of secret societies out
6:11to personally destroy the Doctor because he's the most important person of all time and special and wow.
6:18"He has walked this universe for centuries
6:20untold. He has seen stars fall to dust."
6:23The first episode written by Moffat with himself as showrunner ends with the doctor winning by telling the villains how cool and important and special
6:30he is and the speech scares them off.
6:33It's all about the Doctor.
6:34Instead of the stories the Doctor interacts with, the lesson here is that Moffat is a decent writer
6:39Capable of being a great one at times, but a terrible Showrunner because he believes his own hype
6:44He's very good at implying there's something smart or deep happening and throwing nice tidbits about the Doctor's history into the mix like the thing
6:51about the gun factory
6:52But he's not very good at actually doing these things that are referred to and a story that consists entirely of a man running around
6:58implying he used to do cool shit is a bad story. Moffat simply doesn't write in the way
7:03that's required to pace and execute a full series of television. Which leads us to the problem of him getting to do that
7:11with Sherlock.
7:18What made the original story so popular was the fact they were self-contained.
7:22Apart from a few scant references to other events or the year the story takes place
7:26Nothing connects the Sherlock Holmes stories to each other as a singular narrative. On top of that , Holmes and Watson don't change all that much
7:31as people over the course of all those stories.
7:33This was hugely beneficial to the impact of the work because it meant that even though there were tons of stories a
7:39person could get a complete narrative without the idea that they were missing too much if they read one of them. It also meant that
7:44since there wasn't a larger overarching plot that needed to be served by each individual story
7:48they all had their own room to breathe. If all the dozens of stories had tied into each other people would have got confused
7:54and bored
7:54And it won't have been as punchy as getting a series of short complete stories that were all satisfying on their own
7:59This format survives in many adaptations the [forties] serials, for example, don't tie into each other at all even though
8:04there's 14 of them. You can watch Sherlock Holmes and 'The Pearl of Death.', a personal favourite, and never need to see any of the
8:10others to know what's going on or feel satisfied and even in 'Elementary' or 'House'
8:13While there's narratives that run throughout the series most episodes deal with their own particular one-off mystery and don't have to be [all] interlinked
8:20So even tuning in to a random episode you feel like you've got a complete story
8:23I think it's fair to say the episodic nature of Sherlock Holmes is key to its appeal and should remain in any adaptation.
8:30Sherlock takes the core concept of the storytelling of Sherlock Holmes and why it works
8:35crumples it up, hides it in one of six busts of
8:37Napoleon and then uses them as clubs to kill baby seals. It opens on Watson's
8:42experiences scarring him and the murders that set up that episode's killer. See, it opens on Watson because
8:47historically, Watson is the point of view from which the audience
8:50experiences Holmes. Watson is the one we actually relate to. We must first understand Watson to understand Holmes.
8:56Remember that because this is the last time it ever happens on Sherlock. Then, Watson meets Holmes.
9:00he comes with him on a case, and they begin to bond and
9:03Almost the entire episode is focused on actually solving the crime
9:08You know the- the fun mystery story? Well...
9:11[Sigh]
9:12Sort of, about 30 minutes in Watson is taken out of the story to meet Sherlock's, brother, Mycroft.
9:18Played by Mark Gatiss, one of the other two writers of the show from Moffat. They take time attention and focus
9:24away from the plot of the episode at hand just to let you know as early as possible that Sherlock has a brother
9:29who's around and he does stuff. He keeps popping up just to sort of let you know he
9:34exists, and he's keeping tabs on what's going on.
9:36But apart from that, almost a full hour is
9:39dedicated to trying to solve the crime the first two episodes are probably the closest the show ever gets to being good
9:45Because you get a lot of long stretches where the characters try to use deductive reasoning to solve a mystery.
9:50It's still bullshit for reasons we'll get into later, but it's the least bullshit
9:54we're going to get and that makes it worthy of a fucking prize.
9:58But then this happens the killer, the cab driver, shows up at Sherlock's place for unknown reasons, and then he just sort of
10:05Gets into the cab..? Then he takes him to an abandoned building and they play mind games
10:09while he explains that he knows about Sherlock because Moriarty pays him
10:12Whenever he kills someone and also told him about Sherlock because Moriarty knows about Sherlock and is a fan of his.
10:18" How did you find me?" "I was warned about you."
10:21"Who warned you about me?" "There's someone out there who's noticed."
10:25"Who would notice me?"
10:26"Got yourself a fan."
10:34"I want a name."
10:35"MORIARTY"
10:37Wait, wha- wha- w-what?
10:40[Tapping noise] This. (I'm tapping my table.)
10:42This is where the problems begin.
10:44Right here. Everything in the entire universe of the show exists to set up the inevitable confrontation between Sherlock and Moriarty.
10:52Who already knows about Sherlock, and is playing games with him for fun from day one.
10:57It wasn't enough to have a one-off murder mystery where Sherlock figures out who the killer is and
11:02Set a good tone
11:03and then maybe have him
11:05come up in the future to deal with. The same thing happens again
11:08with the second episode. It starts out on the right foot with the opening setting up the characters of that episode
11:13but then at the end we get this scene where it turns out the villain also works for Moriarty and
11:18he has her killed.
11:19Once again, this is completely unnecessary.
11:21Not everyone bad in the world has to turn out to be working for Moriarty. This to me relates two things.
11:27One: Lack of understanding of what makes the source material work.
11:31And Two: The creator's lack of faith in their own material.
11:34The creators have taken a series of stories made famous in the first place by the fundamental
11:38fact you can read them in any order and made it into a continuous slog,
11:42depicting a pitched grand battle in which most of the playing pieces you see don't actually
11:47have any influence on this wider thing. None of these people matter, this guy doesn't matter.
11:52It's all about Sherlock and Moriarty fucking with each other. Sometimes in the books Sherlock
11:56just helped a couple of people out of a jam
11:58and that was enough. Adding in this big, important grand plan undermines the investment in the actual stories. 'A Scandal in Bohemia.'
12:05wasn't going to be made any better by being part of some long-running intellectual magic mind battle between Sherlock and a gay supervillain.
12:14So Arthur Conan Doyle didn't bother and instead focused on telling one of the most popular and compelling
12:19mystery stories in the entire Western fucking Canon.
12:22Moffat however seemed to have other plans.
12:25The worst part is that at some point Moffat understood this. The unaired pilot of Sherlock is a version of the first episode where Mycroft
12:31isn't shoehorned in and the villain doesn't turn out to be funded and informed by a Moriarty who already knows about Sherlock.
12:37The resulting story is much stronger because you get the entire episode dedicated to setting up Sherlock and Watson's
12:43dynamic far better than you can when you're too busy with everything else and the actual crime
12:47they're solving isn't undercut by already being all about Moriarty and whatever the hell he's up to.
12:51It gives the motivations and intentions of the episode's villain more of a wait. In the pilot, Sherlock fucking around trying to be clever gets
12:59him captured by the cab driver, who figures out that he's been found out and drugs him. You even get a cool exchange setting up Sherlock's
13:05previous drug problems. "You do a lot of drugs, Sherlock Holmes?"
13:08"Not in a while." "I ask because you're very resilient...
13:12Most people would've passed out by now."
13:14This is far better at setting up Sherlock's drug stuff
13:17Than having the cops be at this place looking for drugs and mentioning he used to have a problem
13:22and then he walks out and gets into the cab? It's like a fucking- mad libs Chinese telephone
13:29version of the plot of the pilot. It's so dumb. A thing to keep in mind about the pilot is that it's only an hour long.
13:34I have this theory that
13:36almost any story could be improved if, once the creator came to you and said they thought it was done,
13:40You forced them to take out maybe 10, 15 percent.
13:42It forces them to reassess the importance of what's on the screen and remove indulgences that don't really add anything.
13:48For example this section in the script begins with like a 10-minute ramble about the importance of the original stories
13:54But then I decided to rewrite that bit to be a tenth of the length and that turned out to be way better. The pilot seems to
13:59demonstrate this happening in reverse.
14:01Where the full show was given an extra half an hour so they thought 'Oh great,
14:05that gives us time to insert the co-writer of the shows character
14:08early and have intrigue that doesn't go anywhere because he turns out to be, like, just a normal guy who's worried about his brother and also connect a
14:15nice, and simple first story to Moriarty, for no reason.
14:17I'll here restate my previous point that Moffat is a decent writer who would be best utilized in one-off episodes with strong direction and oversight
14:24by others.
14:25And not directly in charge of running an entire show based on one of the most well known properties in British history.
14:30Like in Doctor who or in Sh--...Jekyll! Oh, you thought I'd forgotten about Jekyll didn't you, Steve? [Huffed laugh]
14:36Well, I can't blame you, most people have. 'Jekyll' is an adaptation of/sequel thing to 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'
14:45made in 2007 with Moffat writing all of it and executive produced by Moffat, Catherine Mitchell, and Moffat's Mother-in-law.
14:52Dr.Jekyll, Mr.Hyde is behind Doctor who and Sherlock Holmes. Maybe the one other really big English Pop cultural character we have..
14:58Can we-- Can we stop giving these to him, please? It's six episodes, and it's quite bad
15:04It's very bad in some places and surprisingly okay in others
15:08but it exhibits all the same problems as Moffat's work on Doctor who and Sherlock so it's worth bringing up as an example of the
15:13wider problems of Moffat's writing. The most noticeable and informative thing about the show is it's pacing. The show opens very strongly with Dr.
15:21Jackman aware that he has a condition where he manifests a very strong and dangerous
15:25personality and working to manage it. We open 'in media res' with someone else being
15:30introduced to his techniques. When I first saw the show I couldn't be happier that Moffat didn't write the three previous episodes worth of plot
15:37he could have written leading into this room showing
15:39Jackman getting his condition and becoming aware of it and working to try and find a way around it. Finding out exactly
15:45how the transformation works and the state of his life and the people in it over the course of the first episode is mostly great?
15:51Excluding the bad writing and editing in some places.
15:53But it ends super strong with the viewer interested in what's going to happen next with Hyde learning that Jackman has a family
15:59he's been keeping secret from him and Jackman getting pretty pissed about that.
16:03"Come to my family again, and you and I are at war."
16:07It's a good pilot,
16:08and it sells you on the story and the conceit of the
16:11transformation very well. The first episode is clever in places, like with Hyde initially not having a name and
16:16deciding the call himself Billy after kicking a guy's ass and deciding to literally take his name.
16:21Then he gets more intriguing with him meeting someone who addresses him as Mr.
16:24Hyde and referring openly to the actual story the show's based on. It's a clever twist.
16:29You started out thinking the show's a modern reimagining of the story, but then it turns out no the original book still exists
16:35It's genuinely entertaining watching the cogs turn the narrative do unexpected things like that
16:39But after the first episode the show immediately
16:42begins to fall apart it turns out that the Jekyll in the original stories was a real person who also
16:47existed and had the same condition as Jackman and also they exactly resemble each other.
16:52There's also a secret organization bent on making Super Soldiers out of Hyde's advanced
16:57physiology. A mystery regarding how Jackman came to exist, because Jekyll died a virgin.
17:02Henry Jekyll died a vir- Henry Jekyll
17:06didn't have any heirs- do you get it? An unrelated mystery about human cloning that sort of comes in out of nowhere and, by the
17:13way, isn't the resolution of the why Jackman exists and looks exactly like Jekyll plot because Moffat felt like being clever. Hyde starts screaming
17:20'Why am I not a Superman.' like a tiny baby and Jackman and Hyde merged their
17:25personalities and all the electricity turns off and he has mind
17:30powers and..Oh, for some reason a bunch of characters and lines that could have been ripped whole cloth from coupling start turning up in
17:35this horror drama four episodes in. But the show even commits, in my opinion, based on what I liked about it the cardinal sin it
17:44shows the backstory. The fourth episode is almost entirely
17:47long flashbacks showing Jackman gaining the condition and starting to discover it and figure out how to manage it.
17:53That's right, Moffat starts, in media res, smartly skipping explaining an origin story, that's not necessary for getting to the
18:00interesting bits that take place in the first episode
18:02And then goes back to explain it. The show ends with Jackman's mother, who has appeared intermittently, suddenly
18:09transforming into the lady who runs the organization, that's trying to study Hyde.
18:13It's a twist intended to set up a second series and its own deeper mysteries or whatever
18:17but the show was cancelled so we'll never find out what happens next.
18:21Why Jackman's mother's alter ego was trying to study Hyde in the first place, given she could have just studied herself.
18:26Why Jekyll is so goddamn important or how the company got so big and rich and powerful over the course of 100 years when it's
18:32run by a woman who couldn't have been around for more than 60 of them and all their money was revealed to have come from
18:36studying imperfect clones of Jekyll and their cloning was only achieved in the 50s
18:39so how did they get the riches required to learn to fucking clone humans before then, and it turns out that love is what made Jekyll
18:45become Hyde in the first place because there is no potion. So they've even ruined the premise of the original fucking book!
18:50Most importantly the keyword I would associate with Jekyll is promise.
18:53Jekyll has for all its faults a very strong pilot episode and honestly Moffat should just write pilot episodes for the rest of his life
18:59and then hand the rest of the series off to other writers to play on the interesting ideas he brings up and then abandons while trying
19:05to be smart or
19:06outsmart the source material. Moffat desperately needs people
19:10Slapping his wrists away from the keyboard when he decides to write an episode of backstory to a show that started strong
19:15specifically by not having any. So we're left with two pilots penned by Moffat which both promise really
19:20interesting and good shows and work, basically all the way through on their own level.
19:24But then the actual shows in question fail to live up to any of those ideas.
19:28Also, I kind of have to bring this up. The editing of the show is pretty bad.
19:32But it's clear the editors were given very little to work with. Most of the fights happen off screen.
19:37Here's the scene where Hyde throws a guy out a window.
19:40"Cheers."
19:41[WINDOW SMASHING]
19:44They play a glass smashing sound effect, before cutting, and then it cuts to him getting off the ground.
19:51They simply didn't shoot the money shot of this scene, of the guy actually getting thrown through the window.
19:55The editor had to really stretch the shots
19:58they had to make the scene have any continuity whatsoever
20:01and you can almost feel the editor's anger at whoever decided not to shoot most of the
20:05interesting events called for in the script. By far the funniest part of the show is this outtake an editor left in that nobody seemed
20:12to notice where Hyde uses his superpowers to pull out a book of matches and light one out of nowhere
20:16But, Nesbitt accidentally flings the entire pack directly into his face and eyes. They try and cut away
20:22but all they can cut to is this other angle of him doing the same thing. It's like wow
20:28Do you have a take where he doesn't [Laughing] throw the matches into his face?
20:33No?..Oh, well-- Oh well, have to go with this then!
20:37Actually, considering the way a lot of the show plays out and the lack of coverage everywhere else,
20:41I'm willing to bet they didn't even shoot a second take at all. I've spent so long laboring on Jekyll
20:46Well, partially because I watched 6 hours of it preparing for this video and wanted to justify the wasted time.
20:51But also because it's very much a blueprint for a lot of the mistakes in Sherlock's writing.
20:55What Moffat's really good at is telling single stories that have to start and then end conclusively.
21:00because you're never going to see most of these characters or even this planet again.
21:04You can't just set up the next season with a hackneyed cliffhanger or whatever you have to end the story satisfyingly.
21:11"It needs a big strong idea every week."
21:14"I think you know you've got a good idea for a Doctor who story if you think well,
21:18I've just blown that feature-film idea forever, haven't I?" [Tennant] "Right."
21:21"That's the size of story that you gets you through 45 minutes of Doctor who."
21:25Compare and contrast the writing of this scene from 'The Empty Child' in Season one. The Doctor follows a
21:30mysterious mauve object through time as it crashes on Earth and assuming it would have made an impression,
21:35decides to ask the locals if they've seen something fall from the sky.
21:38"Might seem like a stupid question, but has anything fallen from the sky recently?"
21:43[Laughter from the crowd]
21:51That's a weird response. He doesn't get it and neither to you.
21:54What's going on? And then an air-raid siren goes off and he sees the wartime posters and you go
21:59'Ahhh...'
22:01'So it's the war..'
22:02This is a clever and simple setup and reveal.
22:05Over the course of the episode and the second part we learn what the ship was, what it does
22:10What's happened in London and by the end of these two episodes you have a complete picture of what happened and why.
22:15Also a guy's face gets turned into a gas mask by Nano machines,
22:18and it's the scariest thing anyone my age has ever seen in their entire lives.
22:23There's good writing and a good story here with a conclusion that feels earned. Moffat's supposedly famous for writing the more dark episodes
22:30but at the end of this one everyone who has died comes back to life.
22:35"Everybody lives, Rose."
22:38"Just this once."
22:40"Everybody lives!"
22:42Like, he unkills people and yet the tone carries it. Makes it feel dark even then.
22:48That's just how good he is when he's given a single story to tell.
22:52"Right, you lot, lots to do. Beat the Germans, save the world- Don't forget the welfare state."
23:00But when Moffat has to write the whole series and manage the wider progression you start to see holes.
23:05Things start being implied, that sound deep, seem like they might be going somewhere,
23:10but actually don't. His first season starts with the Doctor finding a crack in space and time on the bedroom wall of a girl
23:16he happens to run into. And then the cracks keep turning up and a piece of the Tardis comes through one.
23:20Where did the cracks come from? Keep watching and maybe you'll find out.
23:24Then it turns out they come from the Tardis exploding at the end of the season.
23:27But why did the Tardis explode? Keep watching and maybe you'll find out.
23:31Oh, the Silence.. Did it? Maybe? I-I'm still not clear
23:34Why did they do it? Well keep watching and maybe you'll find out.
23:37Oh, they did it because there's a prophecy that silence must fall when the question is asked.
23:42Who made this prophecy of what the hell does it mean? Keep watching for yet another fucking season and maybe yo--..
23:48[Exasperated noise]
23:50It also feels like Moffat really did use up all his feature film ideas because he brings back the Weeping Angels for a two-part episode
23:56and then they come back again later, even more.
23:59In the first series, which is still my favourite, they would have the Doctor do something shitty.
24:04Like, torture a Dalek and he would have to confront himself that episode and get better as a person.
24:08Say what you want about Russell T Davies,
24:10but under his watch almost every episode would feel
24:13involving because characters would change or grow or have to actually confront and deal with something about themselves.
24:18"Why don't you finish the job and make the Daleks extinct? Rid the Universe of your filth."
24:23"Why don't you just die!?"
24:28"You would make a good Dalek"
24:39This episode explores the Doctor's anger at the Daleks and shows it's an
24:43expression of seeing his entire race die in a war with them. Over the course of this episode he has to confront these feelings in
24:49Ways he hasn't let himself and grow as a person.
24:51It's a really small change, but we get to see it happen, and it's good.
24:56In contrast, here's a superficially similar scene in a Moffat run season in an episode co-written by Moffat.
25:02"You are a good Dalek."
25:06This happens at the end of an episode.
25:08The purpose of this scene is to tell you that the Doctor is full of hatred. Not so we can deal with that hatred being
25:14there in the actual story of the episode or explore these emotions in more detail
25:18but to make you watch the next episode to see if maybe
25:21they'll eventually deal with the interesting thing they brought up and did nothing with.
25:26"I see into your soul, Doctor."
25:29"I see hatred."
25:32[Deadpan] 'Oh, I've looked into your soul, I see hatred Doctor.'
25:36Hatred, that a future episode might eventually fucking deal with and be interesting...
25:42"Do you have it in you to murder me?"
25:44"Did he push you out of that thing?.."
25:46"Or did you fall?...Couldn't really tell."
25:49"He can be very mean sometimes."
25:52We get it, the Doctor's an ambiguous character now
25:55Are you going to explore that in more detail or you're just going to keep telling us that?
25:58For all his flaws, Davies tried to make each episode have a satisfying complete story and arc for it's characters.
26:04"I'm the only one left."
26:06"I win."
26:08"How about that?"
26:09Moffat as a Showrunner tries to make each episode imply something satisfying is maybe gonna happen eventually.
26:15You can have all the fantastic premises you like: Shrinking yourself down to go inside a Dalek to do surgery,
26:21having a sword fight with Robin Hood with a spoon, having to go on a space bank heist with strangers- whatever.
26:27But if most of the time the conclusion is
26:29'Wow you've got some anger, Doctor, I bet a future episode might bother to deal with it.'
26:33Those episodes are wasting a lot of their potential.
26:36Again, this is something Moffat grasped excellently when he was writing one-off episodes.
26:40'Blink' starred characters that were never seen before and haven't been seen since
26:44But it has a complete emotional arc for its main characters over the course of one episode.
26:48It doesn't end with someone saying 'Wow you have problems you probably ought to deal with at some point.
26:52Tune in next week [to] see if we do....'
26:55The problem is when you come down to it Doctor who is about visiting other worlds and going on fun adventures.
27:01Moffat made it all about 'The Doctor.'
27:03In much the same way, the Sherlock Holmes stories are about solving crimes and fun mysteries and figuring things out using deductive reasoning.
27:10Moffat made his show all about Sherlock.
27:16Sherlock is too important, too special, too powerful, and this ruins the tension of the show and our ability to empathise with the character.
27:23The entire show is dedicated to telling you about Sherlock instead of showing you Sherlock by way of his interaction with the actual plot.
27:30Season 1 was the only season that came close to getting this right.
27:33Where you learned what sort of person he was and his abilities based on how he used them in the episode.
27:37As the show progresses the actual mystery- You know the crimes we're supposed to have fun watching Sherlock solve?
27:43Take a back seat to the show telling us how cool and wacky Sherlock is, and his mind battle with Moriarty.
27:49In this episode in Season three there's a huge set up just for Sherlock being weird.
27:54They spend a pretty sizeable portion of the run-time and budget for a quick joke
27:57about how rude and thoughtless Sherlock is, while Lestrade is gearing up to capture someone who's clearly been a problem with him for a long time.
28:03"I-I-I..I have to go."
28:07"Do you know any funny stories about John?"
28:09They could have just made him rude and thoughtless over the course of the plot of the actual fucking episode.
28:15The punchline of these jokes is supposed to set up something regarding the principal characters.
28:18But they do it so poorly and in such a roundabout way that they're neither funny nor really tell us anything new.
28:23We should already know Sherlock is a big, inconsiderate piece of shit because Moffat has been writing him as one for three seasons at this point.
28:30This kind of overindulgent nonsense is antithetical to actually telling an interesting story.
28:34Nothing remotely like this would have happened in the short stories because they actually had a story worth telling and wanted to get to it.
28:40Cumulatively stuff like this reduces the entire show to Sherlock prancing around showing off how smart and or rude he is and very occasionally pausing to do something.
28:49"I'll get hung for this."
28:51"No, no..Not at all."
28:53"Hanged..Yes."
28:56Sherlock corrects a guy's grammar a bunch for the first two minutes of this episode
28:59and then walks away
29:00This doesn't serve the story at all except to tell us that Sherlock doesn't like when you say words wrong.
29:04Which is you know an admirable character trait. Obviously, fuck that guy he deserves to die even if he didn't do the murder
29:09But it's really not something so pivotal as to be the start of an episode, It's a show about solving crimes
29:14the episode should be starting with a...Crime.
29:17A thing happens that piques your interest like the first two episodes did, but by the time of the third
29:23episode we open on Sherlock being shitty,
29:26dramatically walking out and the credits go and then we cut to Sherlock being shitty in his house for another three minutes
29:34"There's a head.."
29:34Ooh, there's a head in the fridge.. How wacky!
29:37The actual start of the episode's fucking plot is at around 6 minutes 20 seconds when someone suddenly attacks the house out of nowhere with a bomb.
29:44Everything leading up to that is Sherlock being bored and smarmy
29:47and literally waiting around for the plot to come and get him now this characterisation isn't utterly terrible.
29:53We do have a strong sense that Sherlock is a dick.
29:56But the problem with this is that in effect the entire show is bent towards providing characterisation for Sherlock
30:01and making the story he's interacting with take a back seat until it becomes convenient. In the actual books and many of the adaptations
30:08Sherlock Holmes was not the real focal point, the mystery at hand and the other characters were equally as important
30:14and the point was the way Sherlock interacted with them to help solve the case.
30:17Let's take the very first story 'A Study in Scarlet.'
30:20Sherlock, while examining the body, refers to pre-existing events he's clearly studied
30:24and actively recommends others do the same. Instead of simply telling everyone
30:27how smart he is, he makes a tangible reference to a piece of information that could be relevant, we're seeing his reasoning in action
30:33We're also getting strong characterisation while the plot moves forward of Sherlock checking the body and making comments.
30:39That teaches about Sherlock and about the case.
30:42Characterisation and story are happening at the same time and not in separate segments for the first six minutes before the story decides to start
30:49Lestrade assumes R-A-C-H-E written in blood on a wall
30:52are meant to say Rachel and the killer was disturbed before they could finish writing and that someone called Rachel therefore has something to do
30:58with the case. That's all he gets from this scene the assumption that these words might say Rachel. Which it turns out
31:03They don't
31:04Sherlock looks at this scene and deduces, for example, the approximate height of the person who wrote the message based on where it had made
31:09sense for them to write the letter. Something no one else in the room thought to observe or consider
31:13but something that you can absolutely arrive at yourself.
31:15This is a tangible piece of information that you yourself could apply to real-life.
31:19Sherlock just taught you how to figure out how tall someone is based on how they would naturally write on a wall or
31:24the length of the stride of their footprints. This characterisation is very strong because it gets across that Sherlock is smart
31:30but also why he's smart- what he did to learn the things he learned and
31:34got across the point of the scene which is to demonstrate the use of his analytical techniques.
31:39For comparison, there's a scene in the first Sherlock episode, 'A Study in Pink.'
31:43Ooh, do you get it? How clever. Where Sherlock goes to a crime scene clearly based on the one from 'Scarlet.'
31:47Rache here is written by the victim and it actually turns out that she really is trying to write the name Rachel, because knowing German
31:54I guess is too much to expect of an audience. This isn't necessarily a bad change
31:59What is a bad change is what information Sherlock learns and how he learns it.
32:03We''re shown Sherlock inspecting the body and instead making the conclusion, based on the inside of a dirty
32:07Wedding ring being clean that the woman is a serial adulterer. This actually doesn't have very much impact on the story whatsoever
32:13It's just the writers finding a way to be clever by having Sherlock derive an entire sexual history from a ring.
32:18He then realises something no-one else notices and dramatically runs off screaming.
32:22"Pink!"
32:24This is tonally, utterly wrong. Instead of being given tangible explanations and the intrigue
32:28coming from deciding what to do next with the information in order to catch the killer you're told to assume someone's
32:33marriage is failing because their ring is dirty and that Sherlock knows something you don't and has just run off to deal with it himself.
32:39The tone here is utter confusion.
32:42Sherlock's smart because he figured something out
32:44but we're not going to say what or how or why.
32:47Just for contrast, the first time we see CBS's 'Elementary's' Sherlock on a crime scene
32:51he discovers a hidden room by feeling the incline of the floor with his feet.
32:55"The extra weight of a safe room steel reinforcements can cause the floor around it to decline slightly, creating...
33:01a slope between 1 and 5 degrees."
33:12This thing with the marble is clever and based on quite simple available information like that big armored panic rooms are heavy
33:19It's not rocket science, but it's a believable deduction
33:22And it did just teach you an actual real-life way of finding hidden panic rooms this show might not be perfect, but at least they
33:29Solve crimes using information they detected.
33:33Like Detectives would? This early scene is the best analysis in the show you're going to get too.
33:38you are shown pieces of information that lead to a conclusion
33:41For example, he recognises that she would have had to have a suitcase with her, because of splash marks which the viewer's even shown and has a chance to
33:48figure out for themselves before Sherlock explains it but in most
33:51investigations after this one Sherlock starts either making wild assumptions that don't have any basis in reality
33:56Or straight-up learns key information the viewer isn't even told about.
33:59In episode two, Sherlock assumes a man found with a gunshot on the right side of his head,
34:02couldn't be self-inflicted because he was left-handed.
34:05"The wound's on the right side of his head." "And?" "Van Coon was left-handed.."
34:09"Requires quite a bit of contortion.."
34:11This isn't even a solid assumption, in practice plenty of left-handed people use their other hand for firearms
34:16So that the kickback of the weapon doesn't potentially injure the hand you use for writing with including say for example,
34:22John Watson [GUNSHOT]
34:25Bing.
34:26In episode 3 Sherlock has to figure out how a TV personality lady was poisoned
34:30He sends Watson to the Lady's house
34:31and we get scenes of him checking stuff out and Sherlock starting to watch a few episodes and check the internet for theories.
34:35The characters meet up and Sherlock just sort of throws out there the house boy, who is in a relationship with the lady's brother,
34:40probably poisoned her in revenge from mistreatment of the brother on TV based on all the research
34:45He did off screen. All we see of this research is her patting him a little bit too hard on the back
34:50Sherlock proves this theory by having a toxicology report come in and show
34:54it was botulinum toxin and that the house boy's job was to give her botox and that he knows he's been bulk ordering it.
35:00"My contact at the Home Office. Gave me the complete records of Raul's internet purchases."
35:04"He's been bulk ordering botox for months, bided his time. Then upped the strength to a fatal dose."
35:09That's right in a show about solving crimes and giving the viewer a sense of unfolding mystery and maybe giving them some information
35:15So they can try and figure it out themselves as they go, so you know that brain is engaged
35:20Sherlock solves the crime off screen using information the viewer's never shown or
35:24even has a chance to deduce for themselves. He just comes out of nowhere and reveals
35:28It was botox and that he has a friend with the power to find out people's internet purchases and shared them with him.
35:33The ability to be intelligent in finding and interpreting available information is replaced with a superpower
35:38Where he holds all the cards and knows more than the viewer possibly could rendering the experience of trying to follow the story
35:44Roughly similar to trying to figure out where a car is driving while there's a bag over your head and Steven Moffat is punching you
35:50And insisting he's being clever. In this same episode based on a guard being found dead who works in a gallery?
35:56He immediately then arrives at the conclusion that a recent
35:59painting unveiled there has to be fake because why else would anyone ever be killed? And then concludes based on...
36:06circumstantial evidence that a well-known legendary hitman we've never heard of before must have done it.
36:11"One of the deadliest assassins in the world. That it is trademark style."
36:15And then someone off-screen finds out where he is and then they go to where he is.
36:20"Anytime you wanna explain?" "Homeless network, really is indispensable."
36:25Like all the deduction and thinking isn't done in a way that is actually interesting or fun for the viewer to see. How would a person track this hitman?
36:33How would you find out where he is? That's an interesting story.
36:36They skip over it. Sherlock literally hires someone else to do it.
36:40And they do all of this so that Sherlock and Watson have an excuse to run around
36:44Chasing a really tall guy
36:46And then having a wrestle with him you know yeah the original stories were fantastic and groundbreaking pieces of literature about solving mysteries
36:53But what they really could have done with was a bit where the main characters wrestle a tall guy for a while.
36:57I'll say again that the show does start out better and
36:59Lots of season one does feature some genuine deduction based on information the viewer's also shown but you can see the slip starting to happen here.
37:06The deductive reasoning a superior show would be centrally about is replaced with a conjuring trick where you're told later
37:12How clever Sherlock was and then he tells you about all the other stuff you didn't even know about that led him to it.
37:17In 'The Hounds of Baskerville' Sherlock intentionally tries to drug Watson with what he thinks is sugar
37:22that's had a hallucinogen added to it. Based on how he thinks he's been drugged and it's the only thing they didn't both consume.
37:27the fact it's the one thing they haven't both eaten or drunk isn't established
37:30until after Watson has been given the sugar and started hallucinating
37:33The purpose of this part appears to be to make Sherlock look clever for knowing something we didn't even have the chance to think about for ourselves.
37:39Also, he could have just tested the sugar instead of trying to drug his friend with an unknown chemical to see what would happen and then
37:45testing it later only to discover the sugar is clean. You can even imagine a better,
37:50smarter show having a section where the two stop and think about everything they've eaten
37:54maybe even cutting back to scenes of everything they ate that we already saw because they could have had scenes of them doing that as
38:00other stuff happened and
38:01eliminating everything except the sugar then testing it in the lab and
38:04discovering that it's normal. Instead, all this information is excised on purpose
38:09so you can have the mystery. Ooh! Of Sherlock maybe drugging his only friend and fill some precious time as Watson hides in the
38:16lab from an imaginary dog for five whole minutes. The story it would have made sense to tell is just too normal for Moffat and Gatiss.
38:22The real focus is what wacky or cool things Sherlock will personally do and then how he'll justify it later using bullshit
38:29Instead of being on the piece of evidence or information and the proper approach to finding it and acting on it.
38:34This conveniently let's the writers off the hook for ever having to deal with things like character traits or
38:39motivation or choices.
38:41When you read a chapter of a Sherlock Holmes story you feel like you've gotten a little bit smarter it feels weird to say out
38:46loud but often it's like you've personally seen the benefit of a certain way of looking at the world.
38:51Sherlock has the strongest characterisation in the show but, in effect,
38:54it's too strong, pulling the focus away from things that actually make watching him do stuff interesting.
38:59Like the other characters and their lives and the mysteries he's solving.
39:03This is a gigantic problem in both storytelling and characterisation.
39:07A lot of the original stories were only a few pages long, there wasn't enough time to mythologise
39:11what a badass Sherlock was, because there was crime to solve.
39:15The 90 minute format of the show seemingly gives the creator's too much time. Hell, the pilot was better
39:20because they didn't have that extra 30 minutes to shoehorn in the Mycroft stuff and then tie it all in to Moriarty.
39:25Because why not make it all about him too?
39:28Speaking of which...
39:31If you thought the show's obsession with Sherlock was too much wait until you get a load of Moriarty.
39:35The entire Sherlock world has been almost completely absorbed into the all-encompassing
39:40plans of some guy who was in two of the many dozens of original stories.
39:44After being suddenly being inserted into the first two episodes to let you know he's coming
39:48so you have
39:49something to keep watching for, because the writing and mystery solving certainly can't be doing that for you. Episode three's all weird mind games
39:55explicitly for Sherlock by Moriarty. It's all about a big smart Baddie messing with Sherlock
40:00but in a really boring way where he holds all the cards and Sherlock never actually outsmarts him,
40:04just solves his puzzles, but he solves them off screen or using magic mind powers, so it's a struggle
40:09We don't even get to see. There's also the problem of him being relentlessly queer coded.
40:15"Gay."
40:16"But the flirting's over Sherlock. Daddy's had enough now.."
40:20Seriously, this guy is just the fucking most.
40:23"You like my boys? This one's got more stamina but he's less caring in the afterglow."
40:29What are you doing, Andrew?
40:31Oh boy, do you get it? He's a queen.
40:35Ahh, fuck you, Steve.
40:37Like I get it, he's really into Sherlock and the writers imply this means he wants to do the fuck on him,
40:43but like...
40:45Why? What does this add to the narrative?
40:48'Moriarty is usually a rather dull, rather posh villain so we thought someone who was genuinely properly frightening,
40:55someone who's an absolute psycho,' Moffat sai- Okay.
40:59[Exasperated sigh]
41:00Number one, absolute psycho? Make him act like a gay? Great. That's that's really fucking comforting of you. Thank you.
41:07Uh, number, two
41:09Moriarty - Dull and posh? One of the most memorable fucking characters in like
41:16the history of Literature? Oh, yeah. He needs to be fixed. We need to make him into the fucking
41:23loudest, shouting-ist,
41:26prancing-ist
41:27Weirdest most over-the-top guy ever. Just, you know, because we really needed to fucking fix
41:33Moriar- You [Noises of sheer disgust].. Jesus Christ.
41:36"Moriarty is self-consciously a villain, he knows what he's doing. He's a nutcase."
41:41He knows what he's doing, and he's a nut case?
41:44Uh.
41:45Mark, those... Those things don't..
41:47See? He's an absolute psycho, which means the creators can have him do anything, even contradictory things like
41:53threaten Sherlock to try and keep him away and do everything he can to protect his identity
41:58and
41:58needlessly play with Sherlock up to an including fucking just killing himself just to mess with his head and
42:03they don't have to justify any of it because 'he's a complete psycho.' He doesn't have to make any sense
42:09'We don't have to write a cohesive character. He's mad, and that's it
42:12That's all you're going to get. Fuck you..' At the end of season one slash beginning of two he threatens them, leaves
42:19realises he should probably kill them, comes back in to do it, then changes his mind again once the cliffhanger's over in season two starts
42:26What's the lesson here?
42:28Also, why does he come back in? He could have just said 'Hey snipers, just kill him.' The villain is practically all-powerful
42:33doesn't kill Sherlock for the sake of the fun of messing with him and Sherlock never ever gets the upper hand or
42:39surprises him because he's so ridiculously smart.This makes the conflict have no real weight for the viewer and thereby render it pointless
42:46Moriarty always holds all the cards and knows more than Sherlock does
42:49"Boring..."
42:51"I coulda got them anywhere."
42:53In the books when he's tracking down other criminals
42:55And, of course, Moriarty, Sherlock has to try very hard not to get murdered and in the original novel
43:00literally does, because Moriarty and himself end up shuffling off the Reichenbach Falls together.
43:05In this version, Moriarty literally doesn't want Sherlock dead,
43:08And he doesn't really care about his crime empire because he shoots himself in the head simply as a ploy to mess with him
43:14He's just fucking around with an impossibly genius-level intellect to seemingly no end except literally his own sometimes
43:20he's a pragmatic mastermind
43:22who'll do anything to protect even the vaguest sliver of his identity like have this lady murdered or
43:28Detonate the bombs on the old woman when she tries to tell Sherlock he sounded nice
43:32"If you don't stop prying.."
43:35"I'll burn you."
43:39"I will burn..The heart out of you."
43:44Why not just burn him anyway?
43:46Why make this allowance for the one man who actually stands a chance of ever catching you? Ohh..
43:51Oh, because he's crazy, so we don't have to justify it
43:54He's crazy
43:55The original Moriarty shows up in two stories is formidable and once Sherlock's dead for fucking with him and the two die in mortal
44:02combat trying to kill each other, although Sherlock is eventually revealed to have survived after a full decade of readers being convinced he was dead.
44:09This Moriarty runs seemingly all crime everywhere, will go to great lengths to protect his identity
44:15but is also so fascinated by Sherlock
44:17he'll literally kill himself to see what he does,
44:20while gay baiting the fuck out of him so Tumblr will give it some shipping attention.
44:24Then when Sherlock dies to stop his plans, ten minutes later
44:27it turns out Sherlock isn't dead because the writers can't even trust you to wait for the next season, because they're rightfully worried you'd lose
44:32interest in this garbage if the story felt too conclusive. He kills himself because I guess they wanted him to do something surprising?
44:39"The most essential thing about Moriarty for me. Is that you don't know what you're going to get, on the day."
44:44"That he has to be completely surprising."
44:46So they had him do the stupidest fucking thing possible?
44:49The only way this could be stupider is if, right before he shot himself in the head for no reason, he told Sherlock
44:55He was going to come back for every season finale afterwards as an increasingly stupid and bullshit fake-out.
45:00Or that Sherlock has a secret sister,
45:03he magically forgot about and also a mega super double secret old best friend
45:08who he remembers as a dog for some reason and who the sister killed.
45:11That would be really stupid wouldn't it?
45:14But Moriarty's shitty characterisation doesn't end there.
45:17After the big twist in season 2 that there is no secret, all powerful hacking technology.
45:21"No, no, no, no, no...This is too easy...This is too easy."
45:26"There is no key, you don't really think a couple of lines of computer code are going to crash the world around, do you? I'm disappointed...
45:33..I'm disappointed in you."
45:36It turns out that it does exist, because this happens.
45:38They were worried people would stop watching if there was no Moriarty to fight and they just killed the other
45:43quite well-known villain, so they had to make sure they implied he was coming back because if everything doesn't tie into Moriarty
45:49there's basically no story here.
45:50He doesn't actually come back either this turns out to just be
45:53like, I think this turns out to be a plot hole. Like who did this in the end? Did someone who works for Moriarty do it?
45:59Did he set this up to happen long after his death?
46:03Did Eurus do it?
46:04After teasing everyone into thinking he's going to come back,
46:07and having an entire special dedicated to figuring out that yes, he's dead,
46:10But he must just have some other plans going.
46:12It just keeps turning out to not have anything to do with him and the plot continues on as if Moriarty wasn't around.
46:19Then, in the worst episode of all time it turns out before he died
46:22Moriarty met Sherlock's secret sister and provided video recordings to use in some bullshit things she pulls for him for no reason other than 'she's crazy.'
46:31[Unenthused] Woo!
46:32Nice one, Steve, you got out of having to characterise yet another villain. At least he didn't make this one gay
46:38Oh and at the very end of the show this happens
46:41[Moriarty's voice] "Surprise."
46:43"You didn't think I'd just disappear did you?"
46:45Now, provided the show actually get's another season.,
46:49baiting people with the return of Moriarty yet again, after all this time, establishing
46:53he's definitely dead is absolutely taking the piss.
46:56And I don't even want to know about a prospective season 5, or what that would look like.
47:00Because I have no idea how the show could possibly get any worse, so instead. I'm going to just move on.
47:08Another thing Sherlock has, is a style problem
47:10It's clear the production crew were given a vastly higher budget than the majority of British television normally gets and you can see why.
47:16Except for Doctor who ,QI, British Bake Off, Come Dine with me and the legacy of Colonialism. Britain has virtually no remaining cultural exports
47:24So it makes sense for the BBC to invest heavily in the TV adaptation of one of our most
47:28important cultural icons, so people think we're still relevant as a nation.
47:31Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anyone really knew what to do with that money so...
47:36Consequently, the show is over produced to the point where it only gets in the way.
47:39The show is trying at every moment to be the coolest most, important thing in the entire world.
47:45And it has the time and money to execute on this which isn't necessarily a good thing
47:50The most obvious way that's features is the text that comes up whenever Sherlock's doing his magic mind powers
47:55Or whenever someone gets a message on their phone it appears on-screen in a cool, visual way.
47:58This makes sense and so do things like having images be wiped by people moving through them or doors closing and stuff
48:04That's just nice editing, and it does help scenes flow together easier
48:07This is a vast improvement on Jekyll which appears to have been rushed and had no budget
48:11So you get stuff like Hyde's super-strength being shown off by having them just fast forward footage of James Nesbitt walking normally or this shot
48:28You can see the bones of the style Moffat and the production team of Sherlock finally get the budget to actually make
48:33But it just doesn't work, this is meant to be Hyde drinking a lot of alcohol very quickly because of his advanced metabolism
48:38and unexplained 'superpowers.'
48:40But it just looks like a guy
48:41drinking in fast forward and the sound effects just make it silly.
48:44A lot of the special effects in the scenes that are meant to be scary
48:47are just dutch angles and shaky cam with under crank and weird filters
48:51Sherlock's enhanced budget and scope of production allows it to pull off versions of this without looking as
48:56terrible when Sherlock's using his mind powers because, let's be honest,
48:59that's basically what they are. The soundtrack swells and all kinds of cool sound effects are used to get across his sheer attentiveness
49:07Here for example because she was scraping the ground with her nails as the text appears. You hear a nail scraping sound
49:16Giving the text a sound effect as it writes itself in helps draw your attention to it, make it pop.
49:23"Writing the numbers. You've been over the last four digits yourself in another pen, so you wanted to keep the number."
49:27"Just now though, you used the napkin to blow your nose. Maybe you're not that into her after all."
49:31They use pen drawing and nose sniffling noises when he talks about those and you can even see they animate the images as it happens
49:36They do this because they think you're an idiot and don't understand what writing with a pen means,
49:40so you need both visual and audio cues. This use of images and sound effects is very effective
49:45It helps trick the viewer into thinking they're doing more than watching
49:48Benedict Cumberbatch sit in a chair and tell you about things he's noticed.
49:51In a way, I wouldn't really recommend analysing this show too much
49:55I must mention that paying attention to sound and visuals causes the show's trick to start to wear thin very quickly
50:00"Like?" "The wound was on the right side of his head."
50:04"The left"
50:04"She used the ones on the left"
50:06"Picked it up with his right and took down messages with his left."
50:09"With butter on the right"
50:10"Just the shirt..and the trousers."
50:13At it's best you get intense scenes where the level of
50:16thinking being done by Sherlock is highlighted and you're put into his mind with these extreme
50:21close-ups and pauses, seeing the world how this mega genius sees it for brief spurts.
50:25And it's all very stylish. At its worst this style is a stupid nonsense mess that ends up being needless, or just straight-up, silly
50:34[Mimicking the ridiculous wooshing noises] Bing!
50:38[CLOCK BELL CHIME]
50:40[OLD MUSIC PLAYS]
50:43I swear to God, I didn't edit that in.
50:45This tonally dissonant nightmare doesn't put us in Sherlock's mind
50:48and doesn't even show us his trail of thought.
50:49It's just text and images flying past the screen with weird sound effects.
50:53This is the sort of thing I would do for a quick joke,
50:56not the dramatic investigation scene.
50:58[DOG HOWL]
50:59['YOU AIN'T NOTHING BUT A HOUND DOG' PLAYS]
51:03The show is so dedicated to this amped-up over-the-top style that it applies it to places that are
51:07incredibly poorly served by it.
51:09My favourite examples are in the wedding episode.
51:11Firstly you have this bizarre montage of Sherlock and Watson getting drunk.
51:15Set to a fucking atrocious dubstep remix of the show's theme, with a blurry vignette over it because that what alcohol does.
51:22Intersected with ultra fast graphs of their night out. You're like, 'whoa, wait I didn't even see that.'
51:26What? What? This is the most overproduced pub crawl in the history of television.
51:31But the bestest example ever is earlier in the episode when you have the wedding photographer taking the gangs pictures
51:36"Okay. Three...Two..One. Cheese!"
51:40The music swells, you get this cool time frozen effect and all that.
51:44This shot was quite difficult to pull off, I know someone who worked on this episode.
51:47They had to build a giant rig with dozens of DsLRs all at precise positions and angles and focal distances.
51:53This is a cool technique. Two of my favourite directors, the Wachowskis, pioneered for the Matrix.
51:58In theory, this is a nice set of shots, right? But there's a difference between theory and practice
52:03What is happening in these shots? How is the story being furthered? What action is being exacerbated by executing the scene with this technique?
52:10It's a few brief, elaborate, expensive shots of people getting their picture taken
52:16at a wedding.
52:17The Wachowskis only used this technique in the most intense moments of some of the most dramatic and well edited action scenes in film history.
52:24Where, a single second decompressed, during a life-or-death moment, has maximum payoff
52:29I don't know which burk saw this scene and thought oh, let's do that
52:32but for the scene where everyone's standing still. But whoever they were they should have been fired.
52:37But I guess since the writers accidentally wrote an episode mostly consisting of Sherlock farting about at a wedding
52:42I guess they decided they had to blow the budget on something. By golly, I wonder who produced this sho--
52:47Oh...
52:48Is this a purposeful reference to the Matrix?
52:51Like, it wouldn't be the first time they did that. They did that thing at the beginning with the two pills?
52:56What's the deal with these references?
52:58[In a questionable cockney accent] 'Alright if you take this pill, you'll wake up in your bed and the Sherlock
53:04TV series was never made, it was all a bad dream..
53:08If you take this pill, you have to watch all of it. Again.'
53:13Oh cool. What do you want in return? Do I need to, like, suck your dick, or something?
53:16[In the accent again] 'What? No, no, I'm going to shoot you if you don't take either pill, but you've got to take one. That's all.'
53:22Really? [Soft laugh]
53:23Wow, you just talked yourself out of a sweet deal, mister.
53:28Sign me the fuck up, sailor.
53:30[Strange noises of enjoyment]
53:34...I forgot where I was going with this bit...
53:36I'm sorry.
53:37This kind of attitude to production can be bad for creativity
53:40Throwing all the money ever at every scene means you get shots like this getting in the way of the story
53:45and supposedly tense moments of Sherlock trying to figure something out,
53:48are ruined by flinging random images and sound effects at the audience in the name of production value.
53:52This is the one lesson I'd have expected Moffat to have learned by now.
53:56You see, one thing Doctor who was quite famous for, was shooting for expensive ideas
54:00and concepts so often with such tight schedules, that it becomes necessary for there to be episodes
54:05where the main characters don't make too much of an appearance and there aren't too many effects or expensive props.
54:09within these constraints, Moffat himself wrote 'Blink', one of the most
54:13universally loved episodes of the show where the Doctor and Martha barely show up and the monsters literally don't even move.
54:19Creating some incredibly tense moments out of almost no budget whatsoever. Such as this,
54:24sphincter-tightening scene of a light starting to flicker and perhaps the most incredibly engaging piece of drama in the entire show
54:30Where a character's arguing with a pre-recorded message of the Doctor that knows what they're about to say
54:35"How can you have a copy of the finished transcript, it's still being written."
54:38"I told you, I'm a Time Traveller. I got it in the future."
54:40'Blink' won a ton of awards and I feel
54:42proves that sufficient execution on time and budget constraints that sometimes limitations can be good for creativity
54:48I didn't really believe that old aphorism until I saw Sherlock and realised that if you give people too much money
54:53They do shit like this instead of tell engaging story.
54:56This production style leads to characters being underused, because they have so little to do,
55:00because the focus is on over producing the scenes where Sherlock does stuff and other random bullshit instead of making them a decent
55:06addition to the story. This problem even extends to the second principal character
55:10John Watson.
55:11Watson sucks and has no purpose in this version of the story.
55:14Mary Watson.
55:15No, seriously after shooting the baddie at the end of episode 1,
55:18Watson has nothing to do, and spends most of his time getting treated like shit
55:22by his friend for no reason and running around next to him while he solves everything
55:26Watson is the point-of-view character the literal narrator, for most of the Holmes stories
55:31and he barely even gets to see plenty of the events of the plot. Uh, what else does he do?
55:36Oh, one time. He gets kidnapped and Sherlock has to save him.
55:39Oh, another time he- uh- he gets mysteriously kidnapped and Sherlock has to-
55:43Uh, one time, uhm, he starts a fire?
55:47Oh, and technically he's there sometimes while Sherlock figures stuff out.
55:50He's also here for this fight, I guess?
55:52And also there's the time when, uh, he gets kidnapped and Sherlock has to save--
55:55One time, he get's held at gunpoint and Sherlo..-- [Noises of frustration]
55:59One time he gets held at gunpoint and Shheer..... [SLAPPING NOISES]
56:06Awh, I just made my ears ring, slapping my face.
56:09Jesus Christ.
56:11Fuck you, Steve.
56:12And, oh my God. Did you see Watson in the background for this exciting scene?
56:19Literally the most important thing Watson does in all of season 2 is watch Sherlock die.
56:25The wedding episode has a bit where Sherlock tells us
56:27Watson is a good doctor and a really helpful ally and provides anecdotes of times he did stuff useful to a case
56:33Wouldn't it have been great if Watson's skills had come in handy in the episodes of the show that were actually made?
56:38And not the ones there was backstory for this wedding
56:41The guy's a doctor and a war survivor and the POV character for most of the books and he's barely even a presence
56:47at his own fucking wedding
56:49dedicated to Sherlock's hour long speech supposedly about him
56:52but really about how smart Sherlock is for figuring out a crime during a speech.
56:56Fuck off.
56:57Mary, Watson
56:59John's wife is a minor character in some of the books and not super important
57:02but his relationship with his wife does come up in interesting ways
57:05usually in order to make points about the limited roles of women in British Society in the time the story was set.
57:10In the show, she just sort of appears between seasons two and three. The episode after that is their wedding.
57:15Although, don't worry, all know who that episode's really about.
57:17And then the next episode after that she turns out to be a secret Ninja Assassin. Then,
57:21in the next episode, not counting the special, because the bulk of it takes place in Sherlock's imagination, and she's not really in it,
57:26She dies.
57:27Mary lived a hugely interesting life and it would have made for a pretty cool addition to the story
57:31Unfortunately, most of it happens in the same place most of the interesting stuff in the show happens.
57:35Off screen
57:36Then for some reason John sees her as a ghost for a bit and then she gives the dumbest speech of all time about how mega
57:41special Holmes and Watson are even though Watson doesn't do anything and even she had more input on the events of the four episodes
57:48she had the privilege of being alive for.
57:49You've got a hand it to Moffat, he finally created a strong, smart
57:53interesting female character
57:54and then just when she was getting a chance to really interact with the story he
57:58fucking kills her, to create tension for the 'real' main characters
58:01Sherlock and- whoever this guy is, what does he do?
58:04I think he got kidnapped a few times --
58:05Nice going, Steve. You fleshed out an actually clever addition to the main story
58:09Just to kill her. Although I can see why that would be necessary
58:12There's only so many important women in the original stories to ruin, aren't there?
58:16Speaking of which
58:22[Heavy sigh]
58:24Okay, this is going to be kind of a tough one to get into.
58:28You see
58:30in the Pantheon of Sherlock Holmes
58:33there are some characters who stick out so well because they're so unique or different or well written or
58:40special for the time period in which the stories were first made.
58:43That future adaptations can't help but lavish them with even more attention. You know you would expect
58:51Moriarty to be made into this giant Super villain because
58:56you know, even though he was only in two stories one of them was the one that killed Sherlock Holmes for ten years
59:01That's a really good reason to stand out
59:06Irene Adler makes it into almost every single adaptation there is, of Sherlock Holmes, and she was in one story.
59:14The third one ever.
59:16'A Scandal in Bohemia."
59:19Sherlock is approached by the King of Bohemia who is about to get married to a princess and
59:22consolidate a shit ton of land and power, but five years ago
59:25he had a love affair with controversial opera singer called Irene Adler and sent her love letters and a
59:30compromising photo- the original dick pic and since the background of the picture clearly shows his my little pony collection
59:37he's worried Adler will email it to his in-laws and the wedding will be called off and he'll lose out on a sweet deal
59:41[Tutting]
59:43"Your Majesty has certainly committed an indiscretion"
59:46The King offers Sherlock basically infinite money if he can get that stuff back because none of his people have any idea
59:51where it's hidden. So you have a story in which Sherlock is covering up for a King's actions by stealing from an innocent woman.
59:57Who, basically did nothing wrong. Sherlock and the King aren't the good guys here.
1:00:02Sherlock is dismissive about Adler sure he can outsmart a woman
1:00:05He knows what they're like. In disguise Sherlock tricks Adler into revealing its location.
1:00:10But when he comes back later to get it he discovers instead a letter telling him
1:00:14'Nah, Nah, nice try, idiot.' and finds she's married out of love for someone and left the country and just wants to move on with her life.
1:00:21Adler outsmarts Sherlock and gets away with it,
1:00:24which is more than can ever be said for almost anyone else in the entire series and
1:00:28moreover, she disproves his reductive view of women while she does it.
1:00:32Sherlock loses and has to learn a lesson from it and the viewer is shown that even the great
1:00:36Detective is not immune to the biases of the culture
1:00:39he lives in. It's not a feminist story by modern standards, but for a story published by a man in the 1890s
1:00:44it makes careful strides in showing that not only are woman capable of being as smart as men
1:00:48but if we don't get over the
1:00:49preconception that they can't be. They will win every time. Sherlock gains a grudging respect for her, not in a romantic way
1:00:56But because he appreciates that he's been outsmarted.
1:00:59"What a Queen she would have made.."
1:01:03"Is it not a pity she was not on my level?"
1:01:10"From what I have seen of the lady. Yes indeed, she is on a very different level to Your Majesty."
1:01:16In 2012's 'Scandal in Belgravia'
1:01:17Sherlock beats Irene who, by the way, is sexually attracted to him now and also then later
1:01:22He saves her life because she gets captured when she goes on the run.
1:01:25Oh, and also she's a fucking bisexual kung fu dominatrix now.
1:01:29That's--
1:01:30That's one way of adapting the story!
1:01:32This episodes already been criticised to hell and back
1:01:34I'm going to defend a couple of small things about it. Like how Adler defeats
1:01:39Sherlock's over the top special effects text-o-vision by simply not wearing anything and I like that the show leaves it somewhat ambiguous
1:01:46Whether this is because it leaves Sherlock with nothing to easily detect
1:01:49Or if it's because he just reacted that badly to seeing a naked woman.
1:01:52Those were the pros.
1:01:53Did you miss them? You might have blinked. The cons include: everything else.
1:01:57Firstly, She doesn't beat Sherlock.
1:01:59She loses and then losing puts her in a bad situation, which, don't worry, Sherlock saves her from- how heroic.
1:02:06But secondly, Sherlock's heroic now.
1:02:09This is a big deal.
1:02:10Scandal was impactful because Sherlock worked for the bad guy. A rich and powerful king trying to tie up loose ends so his
1:02:17convenient marriage to someone he clearly didn't really care about could go off as smoothly as possible
1:02:21Now Adler is directly blackmailing people and also is stealing really important intelligence from the British government.
1:02:27Sherlock is arguably doing the right thing by getting
1:02:29involved here. The moral ambiguity that the original stories had is being erased in the name of
1:02:35Making him always the good guy, then it turns out
1:02:38she's working directly with Moriarty, the real bad guy because of course everything has to tie in to Moriarty now.
1:02:44And basically she's acting on his orders and advice.
1:02:46"I can't take all the credit..
1:02:49Had a bit of help
1:02:51Oh, Jim Moriarty sends his love."
1:02:54"Yes, he's been in touch."
1:02:56And of course she loses because of those pesky emotions.
1:02:59She couldn't help but have feelings for Shirley because he's so dreamy and nice and not at all a constant piece of shit in the
1:03:06actual show. In an adaptation of a story where the character wins using her own wits- she's told what to do by others,
1:03:13And then is beaten and then has to be saved. If the creators of the show were really this disinterested in telling a story
1:03:19using the original traits of Irene Adler, why even put her in here? Why not come up with a new female character to ruin?
1:03:26Oh, no wait, they do that in season 4, don't they.
1:03:28Despite, as you can tell, not really liking the show that much I was looking forward to this story being adapted because I
1:03:33was hoping for this Sherlock to finally learn he wasn't always right about people and be a little bit humbled
1:03:38But Moffat was too busy being clever tying everything into the now all-powerful Moriarty and hashtag modernising
1:03:44the story by making a woman marrying for love in the 1890s into a dominatrix that he forgot to put in the fun
1:03:51core of the story and we're left with a Sherlock who finishes exactly as he began, bored,
1:03:57smart and the bestest guy ever.
1:04:00Well, I guess he kind of has a semi-girlfriend now
1:04:03That's kind of like character development?
1:04:05'Scandal in Belgravia' doesn't just fuck up the most important non-protagonist character in the entire Canon behind maybe
1:04:11Moriarty- it also contains 'The Scene.'
1:04:17To me it is always 'The Scene.'
1:04:20You will seldom hear me mention it under any other name. In my eyes, it eclipses and predominates the whole of the series
1:04:26it's the crown in the
1:04:28crown jewels of the whole sordid affair. 'The Scene' combines all the worst aspects of this fucking show and
1:04:35compresses it down into a solid diamond of shit
1:04:39The mystery Sherlock is called in to solve, before the Adler thing starts, is about a guy who's found dead with seemingly
1:04:44no apparent cause. We're shown nothing, no clues that could possibly leave a keen-eyed viewer with the chance to figure it out.
1:04:50He solves it, but doesn't explain what happened or how he figured it out
1:04:53or why and just stops bothering with it.
1:04:55Then, in an extravagant and fucking ridiculous scene.
1:04:58Him and Adler Sci-Fi imagine-ate their way through a scene neither of them have actually been to.
1:05:03And Irene discovers that...
1:05:06A fucking boomerang did it.
1:05:08"A boomerang."
1:05:10"Boomerang.." [Repeated]
1:05:14"Boomerang.." [Joined by Hbomberguy's anguished screams]
1:05:19[ECHOED CRYING]
1:05:25"Elementary, my dear, Watson."
1:05:27We've talked before about times where the show has pulled something out of its ass
1:05:30But this fucking scene puts them all to rest. Based on nothing, based on no clues
1:05:35we've been given whatsoever, Sherlock leads Irene to the conclusion that a boomerang did it and the show presents
1:05:41this as Sherlock being a massive super mega genius.
1:05:44We get shots of Adler making googly eyes at him because she's so attracted him now that she knows he
1:05:48successfully solved the stupidest written scene in television history.
1:05:52The epic soundtrack swells and everyone wishes they were being killed by a fucking boomerang.
1:05:58The key to mystery stories
1:05:59the, white-hot burning core of the genre that makes it what it is, is being given
1:06:05information. Just enough that you could maybe figure out what was happening
1:06:09and then having a character show you something about the
1:06:11information you managed to miss or put the pieces together in a way, you wouldn't expect.
1:06:16But to make sure you can't possibly solve it before Sherlock does because he's supposed to be the most amazing,
1:06:21special boy in the world. They can't risk giving you too much information.
1:06:25So they craft a story in which you're shown basically nothing and then told 'bing!' it's a legendary serial killer
1:06:31I just made up, 'bing!' someone else told me the answer off-screen,
1:06:35'Bing!', it was a fucking boomerang.
1:06:37The audience will never really accept
1:06:39Sherlock as smart because they're never given the pieces for themselves and then presented with a solution they wouldn't have thought of instead.
1:06:46They're told next to nothing and then Sherlock walks in with the information you didn't have or just something unbelievably unrealistic
1:06:54"You got that from one look?
1:06:57"Definitely the new sexy."
1:06:59The show is edited as if you 're supposed to, like Adler, be completely in awe of this genius, but that's never going to happen
1:07:06Contrast is required. This is precisely why puzzles are fascinating in the first place. There's a tangible,
1:07:12emotional reaction to figuring out how to solve something and putting something together
1:07:16similarly for a mystery story to work you have to be shown the
1:07:19problem and the clues before it's solved so you have a chance to do it yourself and then marvel at seeing someone else find a
1:07:25solution. You're entertained by seeing someone else solve a puzzle you can't because you recognize they've seen something you haven't
1:07:32Sherlock gives you a meaningless glimpse of a trivial piece of the puzzle then
1:07:36produces the finished puzzle and tells you 'it was very hard
1:07:38I promise.' In this show, the viewer's never given a chance to observe
1:07:42So there's nothing for Sherlock to reveal he observed so you're left with an incredibly expensive
1:07:46sequence of elaborate camera tricks shot on an Arri Alexa.
1:07:50Featuring a man telling you he's very smart because he observed events you never got the chance to observe better than you.
1:07:55Look at all these hard-working people dragging their camera rigs all the way out here
1:07:59so they can film a smooth transition, laying all their dolly tracks and lugging a couch all the way out there and
1:08:05carefully planning and timing dozens of shots, doing excellent professional work,
1:08:09and it's all in service to a mystery story where you're not told anything,
1:08:13so you're not engaged with it at all, and then at the end,
1:08:16you're told a fucking bullshit explanation that you could not have seen coming.
1:08:19'And he was really smart you just have to trust me.'
1:08:22Why is the camera spinning so much? Is it to make this revelation feel more dramatic?
1:08:27Or is it to simulate the spinning of a boomerang? Do boomerangs even spin?
1:08:31Is that why they did this?
1:08:33Fittingly this scene keeps 'coming back' in my nightmares to taunt me with how stupid it is.
1:08:40[Director] "Let's have a look at that guys, cut it."
1:08:41This scene is so bad it almost makes you forget that the final scene of this episode
1:08:46is Sherlock single-handedly fighting Al-Qaeda with a machete.
1:08:50I half expected the boomerang to come back and take a couple of guys out for him.
1:08:55Credit where credit is due,
1:08:56There's still a lot to like about the Sherlock show, at least to begin, with for all its massive flaws.
1:09:01It's still very good at making you think it's going to get better and there are plenty of decent moments and fun bits that make
1:09:07you keep watching just to see- just to see, if it can start having more of them
1:09:11and maybe go somewhere with all the plots it has going.
1:09:14Season 4 destroyed that illusion.
1:09:17Let me explain in a roundabout way first, when I was doing research for this video
1:09:21I stumbled upon a bunch of theories about season 4, the usual Sherlock stuff explaining
1:09:25how secretly gay the main characters are, but the one that really caught my eye was the 'lost special' theory.
1:09:30You see, for some Sherlock fans the fact the show is bad, is just a minor hitch in the grand scheme of the
1:09:36amazing meta-narrative of Moffat's mythic re-imagining of Sherlock as a magical pretty boy.
1:09:41Thus, the horrific badness and plot holes of season 4 are just more data to
1:09:45incorporate into a running theory about what's really going on.
1:09:48The conclusion quite a lot of people reached was that the last episodes of Sherlock couldn't possibly be as bad as they were.
1:09:54Instead, it's a fake-out, a build-up to a secret unannounced
1:09:58fourth episode of Season 4, in which everything is really explained. The garbage from the previous 8, sorry 3,
1:10:05episodes is revealed to be a hallucination or a play or a dream sequence and
1:10:09the show finally turns out to have always been good.
1:10:12The main focal point of the theory was a show supposedly starting just after the end of Sherlock called 'Appletree Yard .'
1:10:19The theory is that 'Appletree Yard' is a code name and in reality,
1:10:22It's when the fourth Sherlock airs and all is revealed.
1:10:25The proof? The show's website's German language version or something is a 404 page.
1:10:304-0-4. Get it? Season 4, episode 4.
1:10:35Oh my God, even the inventor of http's error messages is in on it.
1:10:39And if that wasn't enough to prove it the lead actresses name is Emily Watson
1:10:44Watson...Watson.
1:10:46And if that's not enough to convince you and I certainly hope it isn't.
1:10:49There's plenty more evidence coming your way. At one point in the show Sherlock says,
1:10:54"We found three potential recording devices in the pockets of your coat and all your possessions were searched."
1:11:00"Must be something comforting about the number three, people always give up after three.."
1:11:06See?
1:11:09The apple tree.
1:11:10Clowns, magpies and fish- none of which go together whatsoever aesthetically, but all of which has intricate symbolic meaning.
1:11:21And in this promotional image for the series, Mark Gatiss is holding up four fingers. See?
1:11:28Oh, wait, that might have just been because it's the fourth season
1:11:30But you can see how the crushing weight of all this evidence caused me to hold off on working on this video for a while
1:11:36Just in case it turned out that there really was going to be another one.
1:11:40Just in case 'Appletree Yard' was fake and Moffat was really a secret genius.
1:11:45Only pretending to be a bad showrunner this entire time.
1:11:49and then 'Appletree Yard' aired, and guess what? You'll never believe it,
1:11:52but it turns out it was an adaptation of 'Appletree Yard' starring, Emily Watson
1:11:57Which is just her name, because some people are called Watson.
1:12:01The hashtag on Twitter for 'Appletree Yard ' when it aired was, mm,
1:12:055% people interested in this new show or an adaptation of a book they quite liked, and 95%
1:12:10pissed Sherlock fans waiting to see when Sherlock would show up and retro actively justify the bad show he was in.
1:12:17It didn't happen and the fan theory people were mostly apologetic about getting everyone's hopes up or
1:12:21annoyed that it turned out their show had always been bad and had just tricked them into thinking it would be with flashy
1:12:26overproduced bullet-time wedding photos.
1:12:29I wouldn't write this if I wouldn't be utterly convinced that this is going to happen
1:12:33JohnLock is endgame, the series isn't finished yet
1:12:37And I'm going to tell you why- because it doesn't make sense
1:12:41I want to remind you that these people have been producing Sherlock for seven years now
1:12:45Seven years they put hard work into it, told us again and again that every little detail matters
1:12:51Do you truly believe anyone on the show, including the producers, the cast, etc... Would all suddenly lose their minds overnight?
1:12:58Overnight? I mean it's possible.
1:13:00I can even tell you which night it was. The one right before Moffat decided to adapt Sherlock Holmes.
1:13:06I never actually thought 'Appletree Yard' was a completely fake show, so literally all this does is defer my questions
1:13:12Why was 'The Final Problem.' badly written on purpose?
1:13:15Uh- Ah... [Laughter]
1:13:18No, no, no no, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry to tell you this, but it wasn't bad on purpose.
1:13:24They were trying to make a good show and failed and even if it's bad on purpose that
1:13:29Still just means the show's bad, a secret fourth episode
1:13:32Still wouldn't be a get out of jail free card for wasting your God damn time and more importantly, mine.
1:13:40But since the secret lost episode never came to fruition, because it doesn't exist,
1:13:44I can finally conclude that I have, in fact, seen all of season four of Sherlock and can therefore weigh in on it.
1:13:51It's really bad. So bad that people who wanted to like the show had to invent a secret good episode,
1:13:57that would, if it existed, somehow fix it. It's orders of magnitude worse than the rest of the show
1:14:04And I'm pretty sure I've established that's already pretty bad, but what's bad about it goes fairly deep
1:14:09It's not just that it's worse written, the characters are facsimiles of themselves and the driving thrust of the story's utterly fallen apart.
1:14:15It's that ultimately it trips on the curtain and tears away all the flaws of the entire show from front to back
1:14:20revealing it to have always been the worst, like a car
1:14:23that looks like a shambles,
1:14:25but at least convincingly seems to be headed in the right direction.
1:14:27Until it collides with a brick wall and turns out to have been a doomed journey from the very start.
1:14:32So after the special in which Sherlock Imaginary solves the crime
1:14:35He knows very little about and he figures out that Moriarty is definitely dead,
1:14:39So the game-changing twist of two years ago was once again faked fucking bullshit nonsense
1:14:43designed to trick you into thinking the show was going to get interesting.
1:14:46The implication was that Moriarty had some kind of plan designed to be executed after his death in order to, what? Taunt Sherlock, gain power
1:14:54he doesn't need because he's dead?
1:14:56Destroy the world or just mess with people for the fun of it?
1:14:59Who knows? I don't, because Moriarty doesn't figure at all into the actual plot of season four.
1:15:04The special also ends by implying something interesting is going to happen
1:15:07with Sherlock striding off saying that he knows what Moriarty's people are going to do next.
1:15:11"I know exactly what he's going to do next."
1:15:13The episode begins with Sherlock revealing he has no idea
1:15:16and he's just going to wait and see what happens next and react to it.
1:15:19"We brought you back to deal with this. What are you going to do?" "Wait."
1:15:23So, it's a setup for nothing.
1:15:25This is something the series has always done by ending implying something interesting is about to happen next
1:15:29and then it doesn't.
1:15:31But this series is especially fucking egregious about this.
1:15:34Instead, Sherlock happens to notice a Thatcher statue broken.
1:15:37And becomes fixated upon it and somehow becomes certain the remains of Moriarty's network want a pearl that might be hidden in the last Thatcher statue.
1:15:44"What's so important about a broken bust of Margaret Thatcher?" "Can't stand it, never can."
1:15:48"Noticed the strangest feeling..." "Miss me?"
1:15:51But then it turns out no, it's a completely unrelated series of events revolving around Watson's wife again.
1:15:57By the way, this is the exact bullshit twist they pulled in the previous episode, where it turns out, it's about Mary.
1:16:02It's hard to explain just how much whiplash there is in this season. The case in point with this one
1:16:07is that we spend the whole time waiting on a reveal that Sherlock really was on to something and then actually he's on to something
1:16:12completely different we also had no way of seeing coming.
1:16:15So then Mary goes undercover to try and hide so she can't be found by the other cool Assassin guy and
1:16:21basically chooses random numbers so she's untraceable with this long montage showing just how hiding-y she's being
1:16:27and wow she's incredibly, super off the grid, we get it
1:16:30and then bam Sherlock's there.
1:16:31"Oh, hi, Mary."
1:16:32"How did you find me?" "I'm Sherlock Holmes." "No, really though, how?"
1:16:37"Every movement I made was entirely random, every new personality just on the roll of a dice."
1:16:43Once again, here's one of the key sorts of question begged by Sherlock Holmes stories.
1:16:47How did he solve the puzzle and figure it out?
1:16:49What sort of genius application of reason will make you go, 'Ah!' and feel like an idiot and marvel before the simplicity of it.
1:16:56The show recognises that these questions are the point of Sherlock.
1:17:00"Mary, no human action is ever truly random."
1:17:02"I myself know of at least 58 techniques to refine the seemingly infinite array of randomly generated
1:17:06possibilities down to the smallest number of feasible variables.
1:17:09But they're really difficult, so instead I just stuck a tracer on the inside of the memory stick."
1:17:14But instead of giving a useful answer, we get this bullshit fake explanation that turns out to be fake and
1:17:20actually he just put a tracking device in the USB pen that she took from him.
1:17:24This is played for a joke, but it's not a comedy fun time jokey-joke to laugh at for comedy, hijinks.
1:17:30It's a joke at the expense of the audience for even wanting to know how Sherlock did something.
1:17:36Sherlock finds Mary and fuck you if you hoped for or expected something clever.
1:17:41Then the assassin she's hiding from turns up because of course he was tracking Sherlock who knew he would track Mary
1:17:46So we have this mega-genius who knew to plant a tracking device before Mary could drug him and take the device
1:17:51but somehow isn't smart enough to
1:17:53A. Detect Mary was going to drug him and maybe stop her, or talk her into working with him.
1:17:58B. React at all in a productive manner the way he did when he had a 10 minute sequence
1:18:02dedicated to how he reacted in the 5 seconds of consciousness he had as he passed out from being shot.
1:18:08By Mary! Who at this point, he maybe should be capable of anticipating attacks from.
1:18:13Or C. Notice was being tracked himself or even think to consider he might be tracked by the assassin
1:18:19he'd met before and who knew who he was. So, if everyone successfully tracks everyone to the same place and they fight anyway
1:18:26What was the point in writing it so that this happens?
1:18:29Like this adds nothing to the actual story, it's all a set up for this big fucking joke about how cool
1:18:34Sherlock is. Which we've been told enough by now. This is yet more time that could have been spent telling a story
1:18:41It's a farce.
1:18:42But it's rendered tragic by just how good Sherlock Holmes stories and adaptations can be.
1:18:46'Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death.'
1:18:48adapted the same story fairly excellently by having clearly delineable themes about the power of money and greed and fear
1:18:55and having the Macguffin actually just be a nice pearl lots of people wanted.
1:19:00The pearl has been unobtainable across history
1:19:02because no group endeavour to find it has ever gone without internal tensions all vying to take it for themselves.
1:19:07They always end up all killing each other and dying and leaving it lost again.
1:19:11It stands for a deeper problem with the human soul, all Sherlock's moves are understandable or
1:19:17explained in retrospect when the time comes with a nice reveal or
1:19:21Justified by reasoning that you could have noticed at the time
1:19:24And then maybe Sherlock reveals and then you go, 'Ah! Of course'.
1:19:27It's a delightful romp, where the story makes goddamn sense and real themes are explored.
1:19:34"No more than a symbol of the greed and cruelty and lusts of power that have set men at each other's throats down through the centuries."
1:19:41"And the struggle will go on, Watson, for a pearl..."
1:19:45"A kingdom.."
1:19:48"Perhaps even world dominion, til the greed and cruelty has burned out of every last one of us."
1:19:56"And when that time comes..."
1:19:59"Perhaps even the pearl..."
1:20:02"Will be washed clean again."
1:20:04[MUSIC SWELLS]
1:20:06It's a good adaptation because it understands what was good about the original story and plays off it
1:20:12It doesn't do it for the first, like,
1:20:16maybe 30 minutes
1:20:18and then it actually becomes a fucking stupid spy thing that once again is all about Mary.
1:20:22In this story, the killer is trying to kill Mary because he misunderstood a conversation
1:20:27some torturers were having and assumed they were talking about Mary
1:20:30and therefore sought revenge for years and years and years.
1:20:32The entire plot of this episode revolves around mishearing someone.
1:20:36It's,
1:20:37literally the plot of the second half of 'Shrek,'
1:20:39but with some superficial aspects of the basic plot of the six Napoleon's draped across it, for the simple reason of
1:20:47resembling a real Sherlock Holmes story. What are the themes?
1:20:50What's the story about?
1:20:52How does Sherlock happen to stumble upon the one crime being committed right that moment that happens to directly concern Mary Watson?
1:20:59Presumably because of magic? Sherlock's so smart that he saw something and
1:21:04figured it out without even knowing
1:21:06he'd done it because at this point that how fucking bullshit the show is, and yes
1:21:10sometimes that is the justification for things he notices.
1:21:14"...attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable."
1:21:19I figured it out because I'm attuned to every data point. [Annoyed sigh]
1:21:24Well, that's really fucking convenient isn't it? It saves you having to write a story that people have to follow.
1:21:29Oh, no, it doesn't! Because those are the people who watch it. This has to be entertaining for us to watch, Steve.
1:21:36Did you-- Did you forget that? The closest this episode has to a theme
1:21:40is this was a mistake, this never should have gotten this far.
1:21:43Thank God, it's the last season. The show is so self-aware that killing off
1:21:47Mary Watson is a bad idea that she's actually still in the other two episodes
1:21:52Like she's a ghost for some of the second one and she appears on DVDS and then in the third one
1:21:57she-- she's in another one that she knew to send?
1:22:01Afterwards, the second DVD. By the way, who uses DVDS anymore?
1:22:06She of all people should know that USB pens are the way forward.
1:22:11Hey, remember the plot of Sherlock?
1:22:12The story's twists undercut itself by trying to have, you know, an interesting story that ties together well
1:22:17But then having Moriarty turned out to have nothing to do with it all.
1:22:20Or, having Sherlock successfully track Mary, only it's just a tracking device or
1:22:24having the assassin be trying to kill Mary for something from her dark past except it turns out
1:22:28she did nothing wrong.
1:22:29This endless twisting and untwisting
1:22:30runs through season four to such a degree that you can never be certain of anything and this makes you unable to give a shit
1:22:35about any of it. Also, this is the second time now in two seasons or 2/3 episodes depending
1:22:41how you count it, that Sherlock completely
1:22:43coincidentally stumbled into a story that directly concerns Mary while trying to do something else.
1:22:48Would it really have been that hard to tie things together?
1:22:51Case in point with the twisting and untwisting, you have Mary have this dark past, right like, her whole thing is she used to do
1:22:57some bad stuff, so then when someone from her dark past is looking for a seeking revenge. You're like
1:23:02Oh, this is the comeuppance for that. This is an interesting thing to explore, but then it's like 'Nah, she didn't do anything wrong,
1:23:08She was fine. She was actually friend. She was good all the time and..Uh..
1:23:11He's mistaken.' So, I guess, that's fucked!
1:23:15The villain of episode 2 is Culverton Smith
1:23:17There is no evidence that he's a criminal, but you begin the episode knowing
1:23:22he's a bad guy because his daughter says to Sherlock that she remembers him saying he's a murderer. So we already have his confession.
1:23:30Then it twists and says ah she was fake, but then within about five minutes it untwists because he did do it so
1:23:38again what was the fucking point? And then it turns out that he didn't hallucinate that woman.
1:23:41She was actually his secret sister in disguise.
1:23:45Oh fuck, they actually wrote that. That wasn't--[Laughter] Jesus fucking Christ..
1:23:50One thing they could've immediately done to improve this season is have the untwist,
1:23:55not happen. Like, have the guy who's trying to get revenge on Mary
1:23:59actually have justifiable reasons for trying to kill her like maybe she did betray him or
1:24:05maybe have Sherlock actually hallucinate a
1:24:08confession and Culverton Smith is innocent. Have an episode dedicated to Sherlock's actual breakdown,
1:24:14instead of him obviously faking it. Which, it's obvious because you already know he's bad
1:24:20Because even after it turns out that he hasn't actually met his daughter before
1:24:26within like a couple of minutes there he is saying, 'Nah, nah, you're right. I'm the bad guy.'
1:24:31But no, instead, they always make sure that the characters are a hundred percent right. Mary never betrayed anyone and was very reliable and
1:24:38Sherlock did not hallucinate and it was all pretend and he was right all along even though a couple things turn out to be,
1:24:45not what he thought they were, and it's just-- Oh well fuck off then, the characters aren't really being challenged
1:24:49we were told that Sherlock was right in the first five minutes, and it turned out to be right, so
1:24:54was the point of the last hour and 25 minute? They never explained, of course, how Sherlock's sister figured out the Culverton Smith was the villain because
1:25:02You just have to assume. She's a super genius who figured it out with magic. Why did any of this happen?
1:25:07Why did his sister pretend to be Culverton Smith's daughter in order to make Sherlock catch him?
1:25:12Why did she pretend to be Watson's therapist? Why did she flirt with Watson in Disguise?
1:25:18"He's making a funny face."
1:25:21"I think I'll put a hole in it."
1:25:25[GUNSHOT]
1:25:26Why does she say 'I'll put a hole in his head' and then it turns out
1:25:30she just tranquilised him? Why does she do anything?
1:25:33Well because like Moriarty she wants to test Sherlock or play with him or just
1:25:38Uh, you know mess with his head or something just because. Why is she doing it now?
1:25:44Pffttttt..
1:25:45But everything is compounded in the final episode.
1:25:48An episode so bad that even the show's greatest fans wish it was fake.
1:25:54Just to set up how fucking bullshit this episode is, let me explain the opening in detail.
1:26:00A girl wakes up on a plane, everyone else on it is out cold or dead
1:26:04She looks around her there's no one to help. She's in trouble. A phone rings and she hears Moriarty.
1:26:10"Hello.."
1:26:11my name's Jim Moriarty."
1:26:14"Welcome to the final problem.."
1:26:18[INTRO MUSIC]
1:26:19This is a fairly, okay setup isn't it? By the end of this episode
1:26:23Moriarty is still dead, it turns out
1:26:25that's just a recording, but also
1:26:27It isn't even a recording and isn't playing to anyone because none of this is happening because it's all just a fantasy story by Sherlock's
1:26:33sister that she's making up and telling Sherlock.
1:26:35Perhaps the only thing sadder than the 'lost special' theorists are the people who are like 'Oh, no,
1:26:40there's loads of really deep stuff going on in the background, let me explain to you
1:26:44how it's secretly very smart.'
1:26:46"So like a plane full of dead people?
1:26:48Except one girl with zero clues suggesting that the adults maybe inhaled or ingested something that the girl didn't or any
1:26:55explanations for how this plane could stay airborne for several hours of no-one flying it, I don't think we were ever meant to
1:27:02interpret this literally- the show wanted us to doubt the authenticity of all this."
1:27:06See? They certainly imply
1:27:08this is a fake story by having there be hints in the form of the story being so ridiculous, it's impossible to believe
1:27:14Listen, I hate to burst your bubble, but those aren't really hints at all. This is the sort of crazy stupid bullshit
1:27:21we've been expected to believe over the course of this entire
1:27:24fucking show. In one episode, it turned out a boomerang did it! And in that same episode
1:27:31Mycroft's plan literally involved making an entire plane full of dead people!
1:27:35This literally fucking happened in the fucking show and suddenly we're supposed to cotton on to how unrealistic it is...Now?!
1:27:44Fuck off!
1:27:46Fuck off!
1:27:47Stop it!
1:27:48Please, stop trying to trick people into thinking this bullshit was smart.
1:27:53Please!
1:27:53The show opens with a relatively interesting setup and it concludes by telling you it made all of it up
1:27:58and it's a lie, and that's the running theme of this episode
1:28:01Nay, this season, nay this entire show.
1:28:04Relatively clever setups that imply something cool is going to happen and then it fucking undoes itself
1:28:11Mycroft is chased around by a fucking clown and his pictures start to bleed out of the eyes, and you're like
1:28:16'Oh fuck, what the hell is happening?' Oh, it's just Sherlock messing with him..Oh, okay..'
1:28:21'Oh well.'
1:28:21Sherlock's on the trail of Moriarty's secret gang trying to find--
1:28:26Oh, no it's not.
1:28:27Oh my god a DVD with a message on it this might be the final message from Moriarty--
1:28:31Nah, it's not.
1:28:32Oh my God Sherlock actually hallucinated a confession, and he actually has a problem--
1:28:35Nah, no..
1:28:36Holy shit, did Mary betray her oldest friends and comrades?
1:28:39No, don't worry, she didn't. Nope, it's fine.
1:28:42[Gasp] How are Holmes and Watson gonna get out of th-
1:28:44He walks out. He walks out.
1:28:46Holy shit, who's this fucking shady guy? Who just abducted Wats--
1:28:49Oh, it's his brother, and everything's fine. Doesn't matter, who cares?
1:28:52Holy shit, they just fucking killed off Sherlock. How are they goin--
1:28:54Oh? He's fine. Oh, all right?
1:28:56Oh my God, Moriarty is back, and he's got some cool plan and he can hack all the things in London.
1:29:01No he can't! He's not even in this story.
1:29:04[Irritated sigh]
1:29:06What makes season four in particular, so disliked by fans,
1:29:09isn't that it's that much worse than the rest of the show, although it is, it's that at this point people are
1:29:13starting to realise that all these setups will have no payoff.
1:29:17Anyway back to the episode at hand
1:29:19Sherlock, Mycroft and Eurus Holmes are all super geniuses, right?
1:29:23Eurus is set up to be so amazingly mega smart even as a kid that she got too smart and became a psycho murderer that
1:29:29Sherlock forgot about because it was too traumatic.
1:29:32The final episode is, guess what? Season 1 episode 3 again, with Eurus taking the place of
1:29:36Moriarty, who it turns out she learned about
1:29:39...somehow and asked to meet five years ago and got recordings of for this test that she'd planned years in advance and also possibly
1:29:46programmed Moriarty to want to play with Sherlock herself all those years ago,
1:29:50but you'll never really know because the writers seemingly neither know nor care.
1:29:54There are plenty of plot holes in this episode for how a character knew something or how they knew something could possibly have happened
1:29:59years in advance, or any of the choices that they made.
1:30:03But at this point the writers can run it off with, well they're geniuses and they're attuned to every data point and they know everything
1:30:09and there's so much smarter than you, the viewer, making the characters this amazingly intelligent
1:30:14gives the writers a get out of jail free card from having to justify or explain
1:30:18anything in a tangible way that a normal person could follow and the answer is
1:30:24'Fuck you, they're smart.'
1:30:25The episode ends with the revelation that Sherlock has yet another blocked person in his memory.
1:30:30A double secret person he extra forgot.
1:30:33A childhood friend who he remembers as a dog.
1:30:36"One of the things that characterises the Holmes stories,
1:30:39is that we know virtually nothing about Sherlock Holmes,
1:30:43and I'm curious if Benedict and Steven and Mark Gatiss spent any time on the backstory of
1:30:51Sherlock and Mycroft
1:30:52and their antecedents."
1:30:55"No, not really. I don't think you know a character by creating a backstory for them."
1:30:59"We sometimes speculate because we're interested and we chat about it what his parents were like, what he did. But, d'you know what? We're not--
1:31:06It's--it's sacred turf. You don't-- You don't mess that up. You don't--you don't bring that into the show.
1:31:12It's not right.
1:31:13There are some things we don't know about Sherlock Holmes, just as there are some things
1:31:17we don't know about our friends, and we don't ever know them, and then that's right and proper.
1:31:20I think if we went and did something like that, in a way, the audience wouldn't believe it. They'd say, 'Nah, you've made that bit up.' "
1:31:25Okay, I'm gonna be honest here. I was just looking through, uh, old
1:31:29interview footage to find B-roll to use for a later section where I talk more about Moffat and accidentally stumbled upon...
1:31:35This smoking gun, where Moffat's like, if we decide to stop and get into Sherlock's backstory,
1:31:42maybe we're doing something wrong. This interview did not age well.
1:31:47And also Eurus made up the girl on the plane,
1:31:49he was trying to save the whole episode, and then Sherlock hugs her, because at this point
1:31:54it's easier than figuring out what she actually wants or why she did it.
1:31:58And plays the violin until she's happy.
1:32:01The end.
1:32:03it's actually pretty believable that fans who stuck with this episode all the way through would assume
1:32:07this episode was some kind of fake trick.
1:32:10This season is so bad, killing off the most interesting addition to the story so far.
1:32:15Adding in not one, but two, secret forgotten people. Constantly parading Moriarty around as if he's just on the fringes, about to come back,
1:32:22but actually he's basically not in it at all, that basically everyone thinks it's utter shite.
1:32:27The saddest thing is, even though
1:32:28I could talk the longest about the problems of season four, nobody needs me to tell them that season four is bad.
1:32:34You know the first three seasons
1:32:35they're only really bad if you care about the Sherlock mythos or paying attention or want a compelling story or
1:32:42like to think about things. You know, you can turn your brain off and have a pretty fun time watching Benedict Cumberbatch and, uh,
1:32:49Martin Mcbacon- uh, talk about- the stuff they're doing and...
1:32:55...Watch the camera spin.
1:32:56Season 4 is so bad that you don't need to perform any analysis whatsoever to recognise how shite it is.
1:33:01Ah, so I'm basically out of a job.
1:33:03Like I said, the backlash isn't just a reaction to this season though. It's more than that.
1:33:08It's a reaction to the deeper realisation this season brings about the entire show.
1:33:12If there's one thing this show was always good at, one thing Moffat as a writer always did,
1:33:17Its keep you thinking an explanation was coming, that the show was going to get good.
1:33:21The main way he does this is with cliffhangers and endings that suddenly imply more is going on.
1:33:26The show's bread and butter is revealed to have always been implying the show is about to turn out to be deep.
1:33:32Implying characterisation and backstory that's way more interesting than what ends up on the screen. After four seasons and a special of implying
1:33:40People started to realise they were being played.
1:33:43The drug of this manipulative writing style started to wear off.
1:33:46Fans of the series have been pretty rough on season 4 and while it deserves all of it, the preceding show deserved a lot of it too.
1:33:53But because they hadn't yet realised they were being played, people thought those ones were better.
1:33:57Well, sorry go back and check.
1:34:00This is why I brought up the secret good fourth Sherlock episode theory
1:34:04Because the show has wrung a dozen hours of content out of telling you, the audience, all about future good episodes
1:34:10that you don't actually get to see, instead of giving you any.
1:34:14The fans who want that new episode simply take more seriously than anyone
1:34:17else the promise they were made by the show. Which, by the way, is increasingly difficult to do because of the show's very clear
1:34:24attitude to the people who want to think about it.
1:34:27If you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes stories
1:34:29Stephen Moffat and his co writers hate you.
1:34:33If you're a fan of Sherlock the show, Moffat wants you dead.
1:34:36If you actually want to understand what is happening in the story, Stephen Moffat calls you a stupid piece of shit, repeatedly in the show.
1:34:45This hatred doesn't just manifest in insulting wankery,
1:34:48like having it turn out to be a fucking boomerang.
1:34:51Or in deliberately rewriting one of the first protofeminist icons in Crime fiction to be a sexy kung fu dominatrix in love with the main character.
1:34:59But in how the show directly tells you that if you're a fan, you should personally go and fuck yourself.
1:35:05When they reveal a couple of minutes after killing him that Sherlock's still alive,
1:35:09they purposely don't explain how he survived,
1:35:11so that people could speculate about it for the years leading into season 3.
1:35:15But guess what? They never explain it.
1:35:17In fact, season 3 features several characters
1:35:20whose sole job is to portray fan theories and theorists and make fun of them, and call them stupid
1:35:24for bothering to try and figure out what happened based on the information given to them by the show.
1:35:30Now, I just want to be clear on something, a lot of the theories about how Sherlock survived were dumb.
1:35:34Not as dumb as the 'secret good extra season 4 episode' theory, but dumb.
1:35:38However, the people coming up with these elaborate theories are the true fans of the show
1:35:43they're the real audience, the people who care enough to push through the
1:35:46stupid plotting and lack of real mysteries because Sherlock solves them with magic, to actually try and piece things together
1:35:53people trying to figure out the mystery of the mystery story are
1:35:57presented as a little club of weirdos being weird together. The creator of the story appears to be so
1:36:03fundamentally incapable of recognising how to tell a mystery that he's perceived people treating it like one as insane.
1:36:10They even have one of the prospective theories be that Holmes and Moriarty were gay lovers who faked it together and
1:36:16even the other theorists make fun of her for that.
1:36:19Even though the same people writing this scene to make fun of that, are also the people who
1:36:23Purposefully queer baited the fuck out of the relationships between Holmes and Watson and Holmes and Moriarty.
1:36:29They spend a huge chunk of this episode literally calling people stupid for reading into the story's
1:36:34clear, intentional subtext instead of -You know, writing better text!
1:36:40"First off, I want to say give a shout out to all of my UK Tumblr friends who are staying up very late to watch this right now.."
1:36:46[CHEERING FROM AUDIENCE]
1:36:49The episode resolves with the main theorist, played by a Lindybeige impersonator, being told by Sherlock what he actually did
1:36:56But then maybe it turns out Sherlock isn't there and he's losing his mind and the last we see of this character is him laughing
1:37:02maniacally with his conspiracy theory wall- like a loser.
1:37:05Did you want to know how Sherlock did the thing? Did you expect the story to actually tell you?
1:37:10This is you.
1:37:11Fuck you.
1:37:13The actual correct answer that's positioned by John Watson. Is that you're not supposed to care.
1:37:18"I don't care, how you faked it, Sherlock. I want to know why."
1:37:23It doesn't matter how he did it. You should only care about why.
1:37:26You're not supposed to care how a thing happened in a fucking,
1:37:31fucking crime mystery story.
1:37:35Literally, a fucking series of books about figuring out how things happen
1:37:40[Unintelligible noises of pure disbelief]
1:37:44This shit- This shit, like with the boomerang scene or the 'I did a bunch of stuff you don't know about' scene
1:37:51is a blatant disregard for the core appeal of crime mystery stories.
1:37:56Heck,
1:37:57stories!
1:37:58It's so disgustingly wrong on almost every level and so hateful
1:38:02towards people for expecting things to make sense and trying to form a theory out of what they were shown
1:38:08that it's almost Avant-garde. Instead of bothering to use the couple of hours they get every two years
1:38:14they get to tell a compelling story. They're basically calling people who like the show
1:38:19stupid for thinking about it.
1:38:22That takes balls.
1:38:24Moffat and Gatiss are seemingly above the idea of people wanting to solve the mystery
1:38:29they're being presented with.
1:38:30Because they're so far up their own arses writing about clever people who just know and you're supposed to accept that as a story
1:38:38They solve it because they're smart and that's not even getting into the sheer contempt for the source material
1:38:44rewriting all of the most interesting characters in the mythos and one of the few people ever beat Sherlock so that she's
1:38:51not interesting 'cause she's just the villain and then doesn't beat him is
1:38:55apocalyptically bad, but it's just a tip of a gigantic iceberg made of frozen wee.
1:39:01In 'The Hounds of Baskerville.'
1:39:03they're too special to simply have a big dog people are scared of and a local
1:39:07legend being abused so someone can claim an inheritance by offing their relatives.
1:39:11No, that world famous story on the UK's best loved novel list,
1:39:16the best Holmes novel ever written as rated by Sherlock fans, was too dumb and simple and understandable
1:39:22What it really needed was a drug that makes you hallucinate
1:39:25and a secret government research
1:39:26facility and pointless intrigue with Sherlock sneaking into a facility he could easily have asked his fucking brother to let him into, which he does
1:39:34later anyway, and the only reason there's a hound in the story at all is because the word 'HOUND'
1:39:38happened to be written on the killer's shirt when he killed a kid's father.
1:39:42So the kid hallucinated a giant dog and yet while they're trying to gussy up this famous story to make it more cleverer with this bullshit,
1:39:51they don't even bother explaining why the killer didn't just kill the only witness to his fucking crime.
1:39:56There's this core mismatch in the sensibility of the story's authors. They don't just hate you for wanting to solve a mystery
1:40:04They seemingly hate mystery stories themselves,
1:40:07for being too understandable, having too many simple pleasures like watching a story unfold.
1:40:13Moffat and Gatiss decided that shit wouldn't fly anymore and it had to be fixed by
1:40:18overcomplicating it and adding in a secret facility. I wonder if Moffat made this fucking mistake in an adaptation before?
1:40:26"'Rache'- It's German for revenge, she could be trying to tell us some--" "Yes, thank you for your input."
1:40:30[DOOR SLAMS]
1:40:31"..Find out who Rachel is.." "She was writing Rachel?"
1:40:33"No, she was leaving an angry note in German--Of course she was writing Rachel!"
1:40:37Oh, wow! They straight up have
1:40:38have Sherlock dismiss the twist from the original story as being stupid and for idiots, great!
1:40:43Thanks!
1:40:48Listen, Steve, I know you're listening because
1:40:51What else you going to be doing with your fucking time now that you're not running Doctor who and probably not going to get another season of this.
1:40:57If you think you're too smart for the simple pulpy crime stories that make up a famous property you're adapting
1:41:03and you think they need to be fixed.
1:41:05Why are you adapting them in the first place?
1:41:08The Sherlock Fandom, the people who make gifs of all the romantic moments between Sherlock and Watson
1:41:13With the saturation slightly raised to make the image pop and also fix the show's own shit wank color-grading
1:41:19The people who actually believe enough pieces of the puzzle are there to explain how Sherlock survived
1:41:25The people who actually liked the show enough to not believe
1:41:28Season four was as bad as it was and there had to be an episode that explained
1:41:32why it was pretending to be shit.
1:41:34The only people who will stick with Sherlock all the way through and actually profess to enjoying it are
1:41:39these people these people fully believe the promise of the show, that it really will one day be good and smart and pull back the
1:41:46curtain to reveal an amazing true narrative kept hidden all this time that had always been there.
1:41:50It's so easy to make fun of people for coming up with that silly theory. In fact, I've done that and you should too
1:41:56It's stupid, but it's honest. It's the truest expression of being told over and over that something was coming
1:42:02It's going to get good
1:42:03There's a real secret thing going on in the background.
1:42:07All these people did was take that seriously, but in reality
1:42:10they were simply lied to. The reality is a show that keeps telling you
1:42:15I know it's bad, but I promise eventually it'll get good or turn out to have always been smart. After four seasons
1:42:21It's just a bad show. The old books and serials were designed to keep you reading or watching and coming back for more
1:42:28When Sherlock went over the Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty and the final problem threatened to live up to its name
1:42:34There was a public outcry.
1:42:36People wanted more, their appetite fed by the format of the story and love for the character. A full decade later, still
1:42:43'hounded', pardon the pun, by fans of his greatest work who still didn't care that much for his historical novels, Doyle had no choice
1:42:51but to have Holmes return.
1:42:52The new show kills Sherlock and within a few minutes of mourning him tells you it's okay
1:42:58He's fine. No one would clamor for this Sherlock's resurrection a decade later
1:43:03They had to make sure
1:43:05You knew he wasn't really dead
1:43:07Because otherwise you wouldn't have given a shit about a next series and would have moved on with your life.
1:43:12They needed you to be speculating for years about how he did it even though later they planned
1:43:17on telling you, you were a fucking idiot for doing it.
1:43:20It's been ten years since Jekyll came out and ended on a cliffhanger
1:43:24Is anyone hounding Moffat to bring back that beloved story?
1:43:28No.
1:43:29It's not beloved.
1:43:30Moffat is handing off the running of Doctor who to someone else and he said in interviews that he wants to simply leave the show
1:43:37better than he found it for someone else to take over.
1:43:39Well, guess what, Steve? We'dve all liked if you'd done that too.
1:43:43Doctor who was a silly, weird and fantastic show,
1:43:47That went off the air in 1989 and people remembered it, wanted more of it, for so long to the point that almost
1:43:5420 years later, people wanted the show to return.
1:43:57Cared about seeing what happened next, like Sherlock Holmes before it, the creators of Doctor who crafted a character and series
1:44:05so good, so iconic
1:44:07that not even a long absence could kill the love for what they had made. After a few short years of running Doctor who?
1:44:14Even Moffat can't wait to be gone.
1:44:17Moffat will be remembered forever for his
1:44:19contributions to the show when someone else ran it when he was just on the edge making the best bits.
1:44:25Forced to tell a complete story and deliver on the promises
1:44:28he was making
1:44:29instead of endlessly delaying the time things get good until people realise it isn't and never will and no one can tell him what to do,
1:44:36because the executive producers are him, his co-writer and his mother-in-law.
1:44:40Many of the previous Holmes adaptations are straight forwardly written and shot
1:44:44There's a whole lot of flat shots of people talking the camera never turns and reveals
1:44:49they actually built a set in the middle of London, and it's a dream sequence.
1:44:52But I would rather watch Sherlock figure things out by sitting and looking at things we also see and
1:44:58deriving a better explanation than I could with the same information any day of the week. Than sit through another second of
1:45:05self-indulgent, 'look at me, I'm so clever,' spinny camera, nonsense that reveals it was probably just a fucking boomerang.
1:45:11The new Sherlock thinks it's so much better, more important and smarter than the mystery stories
1:45:17it's based on that it cuts out everything that defines them, leaving only shameless queer baiting,
1:45:22pretentious overarching stories that never arrive anywhere
1:45:26and the false assurance that somehow, someday all of this will make sense and arrive at an entertaining conclusion that ties everything together
1:45:34and proves you weren't wasting all this fucking time watching it.
1:45:37But the sad truth is, you were. I'm honestly disappointed by
1:45:43this work and in a writer who I had a lot of respect for and honestly, I...
1:45:49I just think that's a shame.
1:45:51I really do.
1:45:54Also, Benedict Cumberbatch is a terrible actor and his face is stupid.
1:46:03Hey, thanks for watching this video all the way through to the end. I really appreciate it, another thing
1:46:07I really appreciate is being able to afford to take the time to make stuff like this and for that
1:46:12I really have to thank in addition to the names going past the screen right now; Rebecca Harold, Acelin, Get Dunked On,
1:46:19Commissar Taco, Joseph Greco, Evan Richy, Yacucha Boris, Eugene Butler, Silas Pumpkins,
1:46:26Zigfried slayer of the Immortal Dragon, Mr. Clonem, Alex Lemcovitch,
1:46:30Cha boy Cammy Kemsay, Klil H. Niori
1:46:34Olivia Mellow, Brennan Arts, Malarkey Bingo, Daniel Vincent Chiltern, Paul
1:46:38Yoen Ewmerthweel, Kelly M.Knipy, Emily O, Fora, Owen Piper,
1:46:43Andrew Gilly, Parker Anderson, Eight in Goldstrum, Caleb McMurphy, Cal Ashton, Amy Ledge,
1:46:50AhhQbGeeVaneskaborptoplessworflegalsteinhousenbegerdorftuleefranskash,
1:47:01Spilt coffee, Jenny Angel, Renee Larshowg, Thomas Kissner, Jack Harvey, David De Marzalou,
1:47:08Gar Internet, David the Benevolent malevolence,
1:47:12John Cantwell, Procor, A huge pair of googly eyes on a flacid penis, open brackets 2006 video game closed brackets,
1:47:19Matthew Harris, Papa's thick meaty arms, Corwin Light Williams, Shawn Kemp,
1:47:25Shadow Bag, Findley bowick Copley,
1:47:28Mon s'il vous plait's tunesrom, Kay plays Dota, Jeffrey Theobald, Tom Martel
1:47:34Nathan H, Scott Girton, Sean Lampall, Recammy, Edin Jankovic Sumar, George sirach
1:47:41Lisi Roberts, Minty Freakin Fresh
1:47:44Three-fifths of a brain, Lauren, Mackenzie cockerel, I'm daddy's little bitch give me money sugar Daddy,
1:47:50Ah, I see what you did there, you changed the name so I had to--
1:47:54Ream and sell, Clawsue
1:47:56Daniel Stewart, Anna S, Top purp Iranian,
1:48:00Macarthur, Casey explosion, Young Kaori,
1:48:03Cheeseoid, Saul, The almighty quackosaurus, Mome, the ampersand symbol
1:48:10Daniel Sullivan, a human being who is not a hundred and seventy two salamanders in a trench coat,
1:48:15Eric Hunter, Marco Shard, Jan Anders Breamer, Garry Marshall, Aidan Bradley, Graphon Blackpor,
1:48:23Alexander Corbett, Sammy J
1:48:25Luke Swanson, Fully automated Luxury space, Post-Scarcity, Commulism, Zachary Clarke
1:48:31Benjamin Davidson, Hero of time 88, Bob Mackie, Hero R war
1:48:37Jason Walter, a few slices of slightly peppered French soft cheese on a bun
1:48:41Kieran, recovering Zombie, Thad Wasalouski, Bill Mock, Mike Stanley, Theral Kimchi, Kaden Putine,
1:48:49Elliott Soudan, Jordan Telus, Kanika, a pileous bulge,
1:48:54Gerry Terry, David Rose, Snow fire, Sean Higgins, Davis Remmy , Naathan Hore, the spector of Commulism,
1:49:02Cafsile, Poggington Jones, Richard Pearson, Rebecca Washem,
1:49:07Soraka Vulcan, Ricard Heathersma ,Samael
1:49:10Brendon Mitri,
1:49:11LERV, Besotten Jenny, Garrett Mitchell, Justin Conquer Beard, Alicia Parker Martel
1:49:18Femininja, skeptical frog, Cav P, Robert Phillips and Sled. I swear to God when I start doing
1:49:25Several shorter videos a month, I will split the credits up. {Please do Hbomb, that was brutal}
1:49:29But honestly the fact these credits are super long is probably a good sign. I'd like to thank all of you for giving me the
1:49:36time and money required to
1:49:39watch and analyze
1:49:40Many hours of television and also to buy a small bear dressed up to look like Sherlock Holmes which I,
1:49:46Now keep by my bed at all times,
1:49:49It's actually incredible.

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