Rik Shepherd
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I'm mildly surprised no-one has commented on the start of the new series of
Sherlock last Sunday... and then I remembered I hadn't either :)
Overall, I reckon it was pretty much fun, but not totally satisfactory.
It's still stuffed with little snippets that fly past without mention and
are obviously only there for long term fans (Watson blogs about The Speckled
Blonde and The Geek Interpreter, and his hit counter appears to be stuck
permanently at 1895 - took me the best part of the week to catch that one,
even with Watson pointing out "it's forever 1895") which is good.
Irene Adler has been re-jigged for the 21st century as a highly paid
dominatrix who combines beating men with reading their emails or engaging in
lesbian romps (again on film) with minor royals. This may be a realistic
portrayal of a modern dominatrix; I wouldn't know. She seems a lot more
active and smart than Doyle's Adler, whose most notable skill, imho, might
be the ability to change clothes and arrive at someone's house before them,
which is okay. It's mildly unfortunate that she seems to have the same
relationship to Moriarty as she does in the Downey films, as that makes it
look as if someone is suffering from a lack of imagination.
Sherlock and Watson now appear to be living in a pretty exact replica of the
sitting room of the Holmes Museum on Baker Street, which I don't remember
from the first series.
But... A Scandal in Belgravia felt too long; admittedly because Holmes is
supposed to be moping and had to been seen to be moping. I'm not sure how
long he moped, but it felt like several years to me. That soured me for
what might have been a reasonable joke - summoned to a meeting, Watson
complains about Mycroft's power trips, at which point the camera pulls out
to show Watson entering the shell of Battersea Power Station (we saw what
they did there).
A minor problem was that the one element I disliked most about the last
series was Jim Moriarty, and, given the end of the last series, it was
pretty much inevitable that the second series was going to begin by being
irritating. And it did.
The main problem, for both me and Carol, was that after Sherlock has done
something stupid that's impacted badly on one of Mycroft's schemes - and
this has been the whole point of the episode - Mycroft explains the cunning
scheme, which makes almost no sense, especially if you think about
afterwards (seriously; two days later Carol and I were looking Googling
something and both, simultaneously, said "That plan of Mycroft's? It would
work, would it?").