BBC Sherlock, and a question

[starlady]

My sister finished showing me Sherlock last night. It's a fun show, as long as you can ignore all the things that are absolutely enraging about it. (On that note, listening to my sister yelling at the TV when the commentary video was playing was priceless. She hates what the show did to Irene Adler too.) I still can't do any better than two posts that magnetic_pole wrote when the show was originally airing:

• Neoliberal Holmes, or Everything I Need to Know About Modern Life I Learned From Sherlock
• A Scandal in the Blogosphere

I don't have a link handy about everything that was wrong with the second episode, but let me not omit to mention how Orientalist and racist it was. And if anyone can explain the nonsense with the planes and the dead bodies in 2x01 to me, that would be cool, because it makes no fucking sense. General protip: if you are more racist or sexist than Arthur Conan Doyle, you've got real problems.

Well, actually, I was thinking of melannen's posts on the show too: 

• Sherlock
• I'm bored, Sherlock, and your casefiles are boring

And this post, Modernizing Holmes by naraht, has some discussion that is still interesting.

We also got into a fairly heated argument about the following question.

Poll #12525 Sorting Sherlock and John

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

What Hogwarts House is Sherlock?

View Answers

Ravenclaw
25 (58.1%)

Slytherin
18 (41.9%)

What Hogwarts House is John?

View Answers

Gryffindor
19 (44.2%)

Hufflepuff
24 (55.8%)

Comments

[seekingferret]

I don't want to hide any of the sexism of Sherlock, I just think that mixed in with the misogyny and sexism of Belgravia is a whole pile of fascinating thoughts on gender and identity, and that's more than Bohemia gave us. The scene where John and Irene talk about how they're both in some fashion in love with Sherlock, but neither is attracted to him, almost saves all the show's no-homo jokes in Season 1. The Christmas scene ends with Sherlock humiliating Molly, but before that we see this amazing found family of Sherlock, John, Mrs. Hudson, and Molly sharing what is genuinely and recognizably a domestic, family moment. And Irene calling herself "The Woman" instead of it being the condescending name Sherlock applies to her is a fascinating and thought-provoking reversal.

And then there's a whole mountain of fail. And then there's the end of the episode. So I don't know, I don't blame you for rejecting it completely, but I do think there is a lot there worth trying to salvage, and I get frustrated when people compare it unfavorably to Bohemia.

[melannen]

Really? I see all kinds of fascinating stuff about gender and identity in Bohemia - most foregrounded, that it's about Irene choosing to move between the class/gender roles of Bad Girl and Good Wife, and what she has to do, to manage that, and the way then men's preconceptions about those two categories keep them from seeing what she's actually doing. The identities she moves between are roles that are not nearly as distinct in the modern day as they were in the late 19th/early 20th century, but it's huge in the context of where the story was originally set.