AralisJ

I just wanted to mark this occasion.

I’m truly grateful that anyone chooses to spend valuable moments of their life wandering about my gallery, and to think that this has happened 5,000 times… I can’t even imagine 5,000 apples all put together. Thank you!

I’ll be uploading more stuff soon, promise. The present (tempestuous) semester is about to come to an end and I have so many paintings and drawings already planned in my mind that I don’t know where to start.

Warm hugs, dark chocolate and lots of love for all of you!

We waited for two years, patiently (maybe not sanely but lovingly). Why? Because Sherlock proved to be the best show around, because it has great writing and it actually challenges you intellectually and the boundaries established by lazy television. Series 2 was better than Series 1 and that was great. I loved both and there was an improvement, a pace that was set and an aesthetic to follow. Taste was never a matter of worry.

Now, after seeing the Empty Hearse I can’t help feeling a bit let down, I’m sorry, but it is what it is. Maybe I set the bar too high, but I don’t think that’s the case.

Watching the episode I felt like I was being given what I hoped for but never expected to get, does that make sense? There was too much fan service, it was overdone, the plotline wasn’t strong enough to hold the episode together.

The purpose was to reunite Sherlock and John, explain the fall, fill the plot holes and that was it! They could play around it all they wanted and, sadly, they ended with a weak plot and messy character development.

[I truly believe the theory that’s explained to Anderson is as close to the truth as we’ll ever get. I’ll live through that. I don’t expect further explanation of this, none of us should, to be honest.]

I’ll elaborate:

1. The reunion. Go to any website that had speculated about it, nearly every theory goes this way: John will get angry (he’s made of wrath, jam and kittens), punch Sherlock and then, eventually, forgive him. I’ll just say this was overdone. He’s full of wrath, I get it. Sherlock’s an idiot I get that too. How many scenes does it take to get over that before it feels like a recycled joke?

2. The terrorist attack. I believe this bothers me because loads of people think this is a rip off from V for Vendetta. It’s based on the Gunpowder Plot, an actual historical fact that set the plot for V for Vendetta too. The thing is that this “mystery” didn’t develop properly and never captured my attention, it felt forced.

3. Moran. The character that got away. The one man we thought this episode would and could evolve around was set aside, forgotten so badly we don’t hear him utter a word. 

4. Mocking. I felt that it was all a big joke. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed, it was funny, but it was a bit much. I saw a video where they count the moustache jokes: nearly 20 in stacks of 3 to 7. Were all those really necessary? 5 good jokes would have sufficed. 3 great jokes would have been grand. But no, we had to take the whole draft.
Also in this category, can I mention the false theories? I loved them as fan service, but the show itself is that, you know? Both Gatiss and Moffatt admire and respect Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, and they always did what their inner fans felt was right. By treating an insanely loyal audience fairly and keeping things fresh you do fan service, and I missed that respect. 
It’s like when you go to a family dinner and you have this uncle who knows thousands of jokes and he starts telling them all. You appreciate when he selects the best for the occasion, you are grateful when he knows it’s time to stop, that it’s getting old, nobody is laughing or paying attention anymore. 

When you stop being absorbed by the fiction in front of you (something that never happened to me while watching the previous series) you start noticing the cracks  on the fourth wall, and now I’m scared that it will disappear completely.

5. Messy character development. The development of Sherlock was all over the place. No nice arc for him, that’s too ordinary. Let’s make it all wobbly and Doctor-like. No metaphor here, it’s so similar it’s scary. At times, he’s all compassionate and loving and human. The next second, it’s like he’s forgotten every single thing about human behaviour he’s learned over the years, it makes no sense at all. If he’s caring, then we go along with it. He’s still a sarcastic idiot, fine, I love House. He’s somewhere in the middle, I’ll take that. Just don’t pretend at your convenience that time hasn’t passed and he hasn’t learned. He’s a genius for the love of Doyle.

6. Slow motion and huuuge mind palace sequences. I love slow motion, the phantom camera shots in A Scandal in Belgravia were breath-taking. The mind palace was a highlight in The Hound of the Baskervilles. But when it’s overdone… It’s like… (I don’t wanna say it) Like… (Don’t make me say it) You know… (Fine, I’ll say it) It feels that the story is so poor and so small that they had to use it to fill the gaps and finish up the time. In every Sherlock episode in the past you get the feeling that the story is so big it won’t fit. I used to worry about that at times, that every episode would end with a cliff-hanger. With this episode, I only worried if we ever would get the actual explanation. It was a bit sad, actually.

Of course, there were bits I enjoyed. I loved Mary with all my heart, I loved the final explanation, I loved muttering Sherlock and the tiny nods to the canon. Sherlock and Mycroft was something I had been hoping for. Sherlock and Molly working together were precious.

Sadly, though, those bits don’t make up for the whole thing. I stumbled upon a couple of spoilers on Tumblr (Sherlock and Moriarty) and it was similar to the moment when I first saw the gifset of Obama and his Lion King birth video. It didn’t make sense, it was funny, of course, but it didn’t make sense. I dismissed that spoiler because I thought "Well, Sherlock is that show where everything works together, all makes sense and in the end you think "How was I so blind not to figure it out? It was all there"". After seeing The Empty Hearse I thought, first, “What?”, then, “What was that all about?”, and finally, “Was the script a collage of fan fiction?”

Bottom line, this episode was not what I was expecting, and I mean that in the worst possible way.