Elementary 1x01-1x07

[oyceter]

Hey, I finally watched some TV! FWIW, the only Sherlock Holmes I have ever consumed is the first RDJ movie and The Great Mouse Detective. I.e. every thing I know about Sherlock Holmes I learned through fannish osmosis, and I'm not particularly invested in any reading or version of Holmes and Watson.

The show is a nice balance between the killer-of-the-week procedural mysteries and the ongoing mysteries of Holmes' and Watson's pasts. I am generally not one for mysteries, so the main draw of the show for me is the developing relationship between Holmes and Watson and how it is changing both of them. I rather like how much the show expects you to want to slap Holmes as much as admire him for his deductions, and I'm particularly fond of Lucy Liu's many facial expressions of "I am not impressed."

I'm not sure why Holmes and Watson works better for me than Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. Probably something about Watson not being under Holmes' pay, and the fact that she is clearly the costar of the show, even if she is a bit sidelined a la Scully with Mulder. And hey, Scully primed me very early to like emotionally contained women who raise their eyebrows at their male partners who are frequently behaving in odd ways. As previously mentioned, I want to smack Holmes most of the time, particularly in the episode in which he goes on about how Watson should simply sit there, a receptacle to his insight and wisdom. But so far, most of the times Holmes is a jerk, he is obviously being a jerk and sometimes even gets taken down a peg or two.

The mysteries themselves are good enough on a case-by-case basis, though I can clearly tell when twists (and usually a general direction of the twist) in the case are going to pop up by timing and by how well things are going. There have thankfully been not too many scenes of women being killed and tortured, which is my very low standard for anything involving crime and TV.

The show has also managed to pass the Bechdel test several times, and even between two women of color (!!), but I do wish it were a far more regular thing. I am also wondering how Detective Bell is going to do over the course of the show.

And on a completely random note, I love the opening sequence. (Mouse! Hello! You are almost like a rat!)

In conclusion: I heart Watson.

Comments

Re: My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies!

[cyprinella]

I was thinking of more recent versions like House and BBC Sherlock. My exposure to ACD Holmes is mostly through the lens of Laurie R. King so I'm sure that's not particularly accurate either.

Re: My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies!

[sanguinity]

Oh, absolutely! There has been a lot of unmitigated assholiness in recent productions. So it was quite a shock when I went back into canon and saw exactly how often he apologizes to Watson. Almost always unprompted, even. Canon-Holmes apologizes as freely as breathing, nearly.

Of course, when you take into consideration what Holmes had typically been doing just before he began apologizing... *eyeroll*

Re: My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies!

[oyceter]

Interesting! See, I vaguely know about House and BBC Sherlock, so I figured the interpretation of Holmes the asshole is from ACD? Is it one of those things that's there and people lately decided to run with it? I was also wondering about the somewhat non-neurotypical representation that I think some of them go with (I feel Elementary's JLM goes this way, but it hasn't been made explicitly canon).

Re: My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies!

[sanguinity]

In canon, he's... bipolar, maybe? He has both manic and depressive phases, and craves mental stimulation, otherwise he mentally caves in on himself: the cocaine habit is how he self-medicates between cases. (You see a bit of that driving need for mental stimulation in Elementary when Miller!Holmes is hatching the police scanner, quivering for a case.) There's an argument to be made that canon!Holmes is perhaps on the spectrum, too -- the way he catalogs all particulars, never generalizing -- but I don't really see any other parts of the spectrum's suite of behaviors in him.

Canon Holmes has a tendency to run roughshod over Victorian mores, and he's as rude as fuck about what people fail to observe/deduce, especially the Scotland Yard inspectors. Beyond that, though, he's not actually an asshole. (Well, things like The Dying Detective aside. His relationship with Watson is all fracked to hell and back, IJS.) He tends to be consistently solicitous of clients' pain, for example, and will go out of his way to not embarrass them. He does have the geek-boy thing where The Internal Logic of Being Right >> Social Convention, but he doesn't view that as a reason to eschew manners. (Again, with exceptions.)

Re: My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies!

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, Conan Doyle's Holmes sometimes gets impatient with Watson and says things like "You see, but you do not observe" when Watson fails to realize what allegedly obvious significant deduction his friend has just come up with. But he generally behaves much less inconsiderately and exploitatively toward him than BBC Sherlock does to his Watson or House does to Wilson.

On the other hand, Conan Doyle's Holmes is consistently rude and insulting to recurring supporting character Inspector Lestrade, whom he openly regards as an idiot. (As a result, I was pleasantly surprised at the mutually respectful relationship between Holmes and Captain(?) Gregson--who I think has the same last name as another Scotland Yard detective Holmes worked with less acrimoniously in some of the later Conan Doyle stories--on "Elementary.") To be fair, after having Holmes solve cases he was clueless about multiple times, Lestrade (who only calls in the consulting detective because his superior officers keep ordering him to) is still mouthing off to the guy's face about how convinced he is that Holmes is just a charlatan with improbably good luck. So Holmes does have a certain amount of provocation.

Holmes is portrayed as somewhat arrogant and less than impeccably polite--especially toward people whom he finds stupid or obstructive--to some degree in just about every version I've seen. However, the idea of Watson specifically as some kind of not-terribly-bright doormat was reportedly introduced at some point in the Basil Rathbone (Holmes)/Nigel Bruce (Watson) series of Sherlock Holmes Hollywood movies. The only one of these I'm sure I saw is "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and I don't recall noticing this tendency in that. But it's been literally decades since I last saw it, and I think the producers supposedly made Watson more of a dopey comic relief character in the later Rathbone movies anyway. So it's possible that Sherlock's asshole tendencies started to be emphasized more as a corollary of that.

Or it might be something that became a major theme in various movies, etc., satirizing Holmes, like the 1960's or '70's one whose title I forget in which the premise was that Watson was the real deductive genius, but he'd hired an actor to front for him as Holmes so people would pester or threaten the actor instead of him. Unfortunately, the actor was an egomaniac who soon became convinced that he actually was the world's greatest detective (Sherlock, not Batman) and went around acting like a condescending jerk to everyone else, including Watson, as a result.

Marfisa