One Year Later
Dec. 16th, 2018 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marsdaydreamSo, here we are. The Final Problem.
For a brief time, between eps 2 and 3 of S4, I remember feeling exhilarated, sure that we were about to hit some kind of peak when all would be made clear, and threads from all previous seasons would weave together in a brilliant and emotional climax. I sat down with a box of Kleenex to watch TFP, thinking I would need it for every minute.
I didn’t touch the Kleenex once.
I realized later that the Kleenex was only the first indication that something had gone very wrong with my personal viewing experience.
What is clear to me in hindsight is that due to BBC Sherlock’s monumental success, Moffat and Gatiss had the opportunity to make the show they’d always wanted to make. And It turned out that the show they always wanted to make was hugely different from the show I wanted to see. What’s more, it was hugely different from the show I was expecting to see.
There’s a lot to unpack here with regard to how that happened, but in the end we’re left with a pretty memorable and unprecedented pop culture moment: the ultimate Sherlock episode meant one thing for the writers and another thing for many of the show’s fans.
I’m actually not talking about any kind of romantic plot – seriously. I’m talking about a very basic disconnect in what kind of show Sherlock really was. Like many fans, I fell in love with Sherlock’s small moments: heated glances between Sherlock and John, the two of them by the fire in 221B. The writers fell in love with big moments: assassinations, car chases, explosions, supervillians. And so, given the chance, and the fame, and the budget, they didn’t want to write complex emotional arcs; they wanted to write a blockbuster film.
What I think was unique about Sherlock is that so many fans saw things in this show that the writers may not have seen or experienced themselves. And while this was incredibly fun to explore in fandom (meta, clues, theories, etc)… it contributed to the disconnect many of us experienced in S4. Fandom tracked down every elephant in every room, only to find out that the show itself was not even aware it had elephants.
Looking back, I can see that I began to look at the show differently when I started reading fic and interacting with other fans. The Sherlock fandom gave the show itself additional dimensions of meaning and depth, and with every new fic and long hiatus, our pile of ideas and fantasies got bigger and more interesting and more complex. Ultimately, the show I experienced through this fandom is the show I loved; it’s just not the show that aired a year ago today.
It’s hard for me to watch Sherlock now, because this disconnect is so jarring. It makes me angry – partly at the showrunners, but partly at myself for mistaking it for something other than what it was.
But I’m hoping that over time I can learn to see the show itself as an AU among many. Just because the BBC AU got the actors and the budget doesn’t mean it is the definitive version of Sherlock, and honestly, it doesn’t mean the creators know those characters any better than the fandom ever did. In my years in fandom I read many, many versions that I preferred, and I think that’s what I’m going to remember.
I just liked the version with the elephants.
526 notes
For a brief time, between eps 2 and 3 of S4, I remember feeling exhilarated, sure that we were about to hit some kind of peak when all would be made clear, and threads from all previous seasons would weave together in a brilliant and emotional climax. I sat down with a box of Kleenex to watch TFP, thinking I would need it for every minute.
I didn’t touch the Kleenex once.
I realized later that the Kleenex was only the first indication that something had gone very wrong with my personal viewing experience.
What is clear to me in hindsight is that due to BBC Sherlock’s monumental success, Moffat and Gatiss had the opportunity to make the show they’d always wanted to make. And It turned out that the show they always wanted to make was hugely different from the show I wanted to see. What’s more, it was hugely different from the show I was expecting to see.
There’s a lot to unpack here with regard to how that happened, but in the end we’re left with a pretty memorable and unprecedented pop culture moment: the ultimate Sherlock episode meant one thing for the writers and another thing for many of the show’s fans.
I’m actually not talking about any kind of romantic plot – seriously. I’m talking about a very basic disconnect in what kind of show Sherlock really was. Like many fans, I fell in love with Sherlock’s small moments: heated glances between Sherlock and John, the two of them by the fire in 221B. The writers fell in love with big moments: assassinations, car chases, explosions, supervillians. And so, given the chance, and the fame, and the budget, they didn’t want to write complex emotional arcs; they wanted to write a blockbuster film.
What I think was unique about Sherlock is that so many fans saw things in this show that the writers may not have seen or experienced themselves. And while this was incredibly fun to explore in fandom (meta, clues, theories, etc)… it contributed to the disconnect many of us experienced in S4. Fandom tracked down every elephant in every room, only to find out that the show itself was not even aware it had elephants.
Looking back, I can see that I began to look at the show differently when I started reading fic and interacting with other fans. The Sherlock fandom gave the show itself additional dimensions of meaning and depth, and with every new fic and long hiatus, our pile of ideas and fantasies got bigger and more interesting and more complex. Ultimately, the show I experienced through this fandom is the show I loved; it’s just not the show that aired a year ago today.
It’s hard for me to watch Sherlock now, because this disconnect is so jarring. It makes me angry – partly at the showrunners, but partly at myself for mistaking it for something other than what it was.
But I’m hoping that over time I can learn to see the show itself as an AU among many. Just because the BBC AU got the actors and the budget doesn’t mean it is the definitive version of Sherlock, and honestly, it doesn’t mean the creators know those characters any better than the fandom ever did. In my years in fandom I read many, many versions that I preferred, and I think that’s what I’m going to remember.
I just liked the version with the elephants.
526 notes
