Sherlock: "The Abominable Bride"

Breaking up with the Joker.

An abominable episode of an abominable show, "The Abominable Bride" surprised me by not wholly falling into every prediction I'd outlined in my 2015 article disclosing my fears. That's not to say it wasn't pretty uneventful television, but it could have been worse. It could have been infinitely better, but it could have been worse. It's still pretty bad, like almost all Sherlock is, but in this case largely for different reasons.

Correct Holmes attire: the bow tie inexplicably tucked under the collar.

The overall premise of "The Abominable Bride", if you didn't know already, is that it takes the Sherlock characters and actors and places them in the setting of the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who seems to get a rather begrudging credit at the end of the title sequence after the "Written and Created By Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss" credit has made its rather doubtful claim - it's not as if they created the most important elements). Thus Holmes is a pipe-smoking sleuth who wears dressing gowns at home and a deerstalker and Inverness cape abroad, Watson is a moustache and bowler hat sporting Second Afghan War Veteran, Mrs Hudson is a housekeeper as well as a landlady, Lestrade is, well, Lestrade still but with mutton chops (this special overlooks his penchant for peculiar and affectedly fashionable outfits which Watson remarks upon in the original stories) and Mycroft is a fat bastard (actually in the original stories he was just a tall man of large build, probably overweight but not obese). To add their own flavour, Mary Morstan actually has a role instead of disappearing after The Sign of the Four, and Sherlock-specific character Molly Hooper works as a coroner disguised as a man.

Having a flashback to the Crimea.

This all works reasonably well and the characters can take on Victorian roles, that mainstay of British television drama alongside Jane Austen's era, quite competently. It is a little jarring to the trained ear, however, to note when the characters switch between the precise Victorian English of Conan Doyle's own writing, which is referenced heavily in this, and a flippant modern idiom which writers tend to use these days for the sake of humorous juxtaposition, which is to say characters in a historical setting speaking like modern people. Thus Holmes and Watson tend to slip into modern vocabulary to crack jokes, which doesn't particularly appeal to me. Nonetheless it's all presented reasonably convincingly, but to be fair Victoriana is very safe territory for the BBC.

T-shirts with these outfits printed on them soon for the BBC online store.

The plot, as is typical with Sherlock, is quite perfunctory and rather secondary to the main interest of the piece. Essentially, Holmes is investigating a woman who apparently committed suicide before coming back to life and murdering her husband. The resolution to this is all fairly predictable: a fake body was used during the suicide, then the woman actually had a friend kill her because she was dying anyway (which seems rather implausible for the time) and then a secret cabal of suffragists teamed up to enact vengeance on the evil men in their lives using her spectral reputation as a cover. This is more or less all stuff we've seen before in Sherlock, and it's not very surprising, but it's also not really the point.

"'But Holmes!' I ejaculated."

Time and time again I've outlined the fact that Sherlock has been constipatedly straining over two endlessly repeated points of dramatic interest for its entire existence: what is Cumberbatch's Sherlock really like? Are Holmes and Watson really friends? And of course the answer is always "An eccentric man, but fundamentally a good one" and "Yes." You'd better believe that this is once again the area of interest of this special, with time spent dwelling on Holmes' asexuality, his drug use and his isolation from the world. One particularly bizarre point is an inexplicable conversation Holmes and Watson have while staking out the mysterious bride in which Watson insists that Holmes must have some kind of carnal urges and bugs him about it until he is forced to utter one of Moffat's meaningless fake aphorisms: "I made me," whatever that means. Furthermore, in the final confrontation with Moriarty, Holmes is not alone - despite everything (like drug abuse and so on) Watson is there to help him. Hurrah.

Stop right there criminal scum.

So really in terms of character drama it's just the same old song and dance, apart from maybe a bit more affirmation of Mycroft Holmes' genuine interest in his brother's welfare and Holmes having some kind of unnecessary realisation that he and Moriarty weren't really equal and opposite and bound to each other and so on because he has friends whereas Moriarty was just some weirdo who shot himself. But it really doesn't leave one with much. The plot's simplistic. The characterisation is repetitive and simplistic. As such, the whole thing has to rely on gimmickry in order to do something interesting. Thus we truly enter spoiler country, in case you weren't already there.

"There are now parking spaces reserved for Spider-Man,
Doctor Bollocks and Rosemary West."

It turns out in the course of events that the entire Victorian scenario is just a sort of vision in the drug-addled Holmes' head as he returns on the plane from the end of Series 3, because he needed to re enact a cold case about a woman shooting herself and apparently surviving to see if Moriarty too could have survived. Surprise surprise: he can't. Moriarty's dead, but there's some postmortem plan or some other party is using his image or something. In any event, the entire thing takes place while Holmes is having some kind of hallucinogenic dream experience in a plane seat while Watson, Mary and Mycroft sit around berating him for his bad habits. Did you know that in the original stories, Holmes only ever used drugs when he wasn't on a case? The idea that they would assist him in a case is pretty ludicrous.

"Can I be shipped with someone other than Mycroft please?"

Thus, much like the 2014 Doctor Who Christmas Special, there are dreams within dreams, such that Victorian Holmes is in a dream of Modern Holmes in a dream of Victorian Holmes in a dream of Modern Holmes, before the ending establishes that there's also a Victorian Holmes imagining the modern day just as the Modern Holmes is imagining the Victorian era. Not only does this make the whole thing feel rather pointless - it's all in Holmes' head and conveniently for Moffat and Gatiss any plot holes or mistakes can be waved away with "it wasn't real" it only emphasises the absurdity of the ending of Series 3, in which Holmes was sent on a suicide mission after killing Magnussen, only to be immediately recalled moments later with no consequences whatsoever, an utterly ludicrous ending which Moffat and Gatiss presented to the audience with a straight face as if daring them to object.

Now with 30% more hot air.

Moriarty's presence in this episode is extremely unwelcome. I have nothing against Andrew Scott as an actor but I can't stand this portrayal of Moriarty, which is essentially just Christopher Nolan's version of the Joker with an Irish accent. Victorian Mycroft even describes him as a maths professor, but in the episode he's the same old creepy Moriarty, making gay jokes about Holmes and Watson, fellating his revolver barrel and acting like he and Holmes are in some kind of codependent relationship. There's that "cheekiness" I feared in my "concerns" article. Typical rubbish. Moriarty should never be more than a plot device to kill off Holmes, nothing more. Scott's version of the character has well and truly had his day and I sincerely hope that when Holmes says that he's really dead at the end that he means it.

"I'm as English as Queen Victoria!"

I also pointed out in my concerns article that Holmes shouldn't wear his deerstalker and cape in the city yet he does, despite Watson voicing concern about wearing the country tweeds he's still wearing from a rural adventure to the city morgue. On the other hand, Cumberbatch's Holmes does look quite snappy in the sequence at the estate of Sir Eustace (a desperate-for-any-work Tim McInnerny) in which he is wearing the deerstalker and cape with a snazzy tartan country get-up. That's probably the highest compliment I can offer it, however. The use of the Victorian setting just made me want to see these actors getting to do classic-style Holmes stories, perhaps with a touch of extra darkness in the vein of those tales Watson considers to be too sensitive for public release. To touch upon the cinematography for a moment, this special also features some dreadful spinning transitions which have been described as a homage but look totally out of place and jarring here.

Care for some crack?

Other than that, "The Abominable Bride" doesn't really even get away with being a sort of whimsical New Years' romp. It's the typical Moffat bag of tricks with some feeble efforts to bring in a gender theme in order to swat away accusations of sexism or misogyny. The women are nonetheless still heavily undermined, sidelined and used as shallow stereotypes and plot devices, however, so it hardly scores any points there. While this outing wasn't as bothersome as I expected, I nonetheless think that Sherlock has well and truly lost its way from the early days when there was some competence involved in balancing the mysteries with the exploration of character. These days it just seems to be narrative trickery intended to seem clever (without being clever) and a bunch of references for the sake of Holmes fans and, indeed, pure Sherlock fans, with the Victorian Holmes having confusing reminisces of the experiences of his modern-day counterpart. All the other stuff, like postmodern jokes about the illustrator and Holmes trying to use Watson's presentation of himself against him, fat Mycroft, the Reichenbach Falls and all the rest of it would be completely meaningless to the majority of the audience who apparently (to my horror) have never read any Sherlock Holmes, although to be fair, no one reads anything anymore. Much like Moffat's Doctor Who and its ongoing obsession with pointless references to bits and pieces of the old series, this is really just an exercise in self-indulgence, not written for a mainstream audience and not even really written for Sherlock's own diehard fanbase, but rather written purely for Moffat and Gatiss themselves, emphasising to a greater extent than ever the sheer irrelevance of this abominable production.

The 'Sherlock is Overrated' 1500 page views special

Whoa. Look at that! 1500 page views for 'Sherlock is Overrated' and 1600 for 'The Empty Hearse'! I know in the world of the internet that isn't really that many, but by Opinions Can Be Wrong's usual standard (given the regularly esoteric content) it's completely unprecedented. 1500 people who think that Sherlock is Overrated - or want to know why people think it's overrated, I suppose. I daresay some of them are repeat views and there's probably a bit of link jacking in there, but still. Still!

Now the 'The Empty Hearse' review doesn't count because it was linked on Twitter by a TV presenter here in Australia to whom it was shared by a friend of mine (quite without my knowledge) so it garnered a lot of views that way. 'Sherlock is Overrated' has succeeded purely on its own merits, I think by being an article with a title a lot of people were thinking but hadn't written about yet.

In hindsight I think the article is pretty imperfect, largely because it never actually explains how Sherlock is 'overrated,' just what I think is wrong with it. I suppose the logical conclusion is simply 'if it has this much wrong with it, it can't be as good as people say' but I ought to have made that more explicit in the article. In any event it's purely subjective, although I do think more and more people are admitting to themselves these days that the Emperor is walking about unclad. I just wish people would recognise that of a few more of the apparently unimpeachable touchstones of popular culture.

I sort of intend to compose 'Sherlock is Overrated 2; or, Sherlock is Still Overrated' but I haven't managed to do it so far because that would mean actually having to think about the show more, as well as trawling back through the episodes for screen grabs of Benedict Cumberbatch in the middle of sentences so he looks like he's pulling a funny face, and I simply could not be arsed at this point in time. Nonetheless it's good to see that I'm getting to someone or other out there who might otherwise be thinking "Why on earth does everyone think this show is so good?"

It's the same problem with current Doctor Who, really, especially given that they're co-written by the same man. These writers/producers have got good actors and a solid concept on their hands (even if both Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who are completely irrelevant in the modern day because they're products of radically different contexts to now). But they need to start realising that having a solid, substantial plot is just as important as characterisation. The problem with both of these shows is that they're so obsessively focused on character development that they don't achieve anything. Without both plot and character, they go nowhere, because pure characterisation doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. These elements should work towards some kind of thematic goal. Character studies only function within a broader text in service of themes. Otherwise you're just exploring fictional characters, and who cares about that? They're fictional characters, not real people.

But I won't bother getting into all that here. The point is, Sherlock is overrated. Actually, maybe it isn't anymore because people are starting to realise that it's a bit arsey. But we'll see what happens at the time of the next series. In the meantime, why not read the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? They're actually good. Well, most of them are.

Concerns before the Victorian "Sherlock" Special

If I know anything, it's that nothing gets people coming here more than me complaining about how much of a load of old wank I think Sherlock is. Nonetheless I must admit that, with a sense of disappointment in myself far greater than could be felt by any other towards me for saying this, seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in the Inverness cape and deerstalker with Martin Freeman sporting a bowler hat and moustache does stir something approaching guilty pleasure in the blackened recesses of my icy heart. I must confess, I'm a bit of a Holmes purist. I like my Holmes Victorian, and I don't think the concept actually works very well outside the confines of the late Nineteenth Century. Of course you can read all this and more on my extensive article on the subject.

In any event it looks like the next bit of Sherlock is an out-of-continuity piece set in the times of the original texts, and I'm all in favour of that, or I would be if I had any faith whatever in the two men who write the show, which I don't. One of my numerous issues with Sherlock is its insistence, like New Who, on "cheekiness." For instance, Holmes and Watson have to be mistaken for a gay couple a million times because "ooh wouldn't it be funny if we transposed their living arrangements from the books into the modern day, everyone would think they were gay." Or "ooh, wouldn't it be funny if Holmes met a modern person who was flirting with him, he wouldn't understand." And so forth. A result of all this "wouldn't it be funny" is that half the time characters in Sherlock don't remotely talk or act like people even do in real life in present times. Yet I'm sure we'll wind up with people cracking out fake Victorian euphemisms about Holmes being gay or whatever in the Nineteenth Century which will be even more unrealistic and jarring. So that's something to not look forward to.

Another element of course is the writing in general, the enormously laboured "drama" which characterises the writing of Sherlock and most modern "dramas" in general. What I mean is that "drama" these days mostly seems to constitute close-ups of characters staring into the distance while sad music warbles in the background, people giving big speeches full of hyperbole and slow-motion crying. Now as I stated in my review of The Empty Hearse, the Victorian age was an age of propriety. Emotions were to be expressed very privately, or not at all. Somehow I doubt that the writers will be able to manage this because it's not what gets viewers and sells DVDs in the age of the modern "drama." As a result I'll be incredibly curious to see how they handle that. The common argument is that Sherlock is "a show about a detective" and not "a detective show." That would make sense if the show, as I've said numerous times, didn't labour the same two points every single week: "is Sherlock Holmes a good guy?" Yes. "Are Holmes and Watson really friends?" Yes. Are we still going to get this in the special? It's a flawed premise. The concept of "Sherlock Holmes" as originally conceived revolves around the idea not of exploring the character of an eccentric detective, but of extraordinary crimes and mysteries solved by an eccentric detective. One of the reasons Sherlock never really says anything is because its "Sherlock Holmes," the protagonist it explores, is just some guy Moffat and Gatiss made up. He's based on Conan Doyle's character, yes, but he's far from being the same thing. Therefore too much exploration of his character borders on irrelevance. The transposition to a modern setting was presumably meant to shed light on the concept, but anything vaguely relevant to the original written character was thoroughly covered in the first series, and possibly the first episode. Maybe this 'special' is just going to be a "romp."

The third and final part of the unholy trinity of big problems with Sherlock is of course how incredibly smug the show is. As far as shows go, Sherlock has its head so far up its own arse that it's coming back out of its own mouth again. And now that you've digested that fairly disgusting image, consider this: we've already had tonnes of knowing nods to the old books, with puns on original titles, Holmes using the deerstalker as some kind of personal branding, and even awareness of its own fanbase in "The Empty Hearse." So how bad can we expect this to be in a show that fully embraces the smug self-awareness which consistently undermines the show's drama if it's set in the very era it so dearly loves to reference? Coy remarks about things that might happen in the future, perhaps? I dread to think.

I'll say this for starters: I hope to high heaven that the bits where Mister Cumberbatch is clad in the stereotypical Sidney Paget illustration gear (the deerstalker et al, don't you know) are set in the countryside, because as any right-thinking student of Holmes and Victoriana knows it would not have even crossed one's mind to wear such an outfit in the Metropolis. And I hope they tone down the cheekiness, the self-referentiality and the "drama" for the sake of the setting. On the other hand, of course, Victorian Britain had just as many drug addicts, perverts and public urinators as we have today, they just pretended that they didn't. So obviously there is room for Victorian-style Sherlock to be shocking... or, perhaps, Sherlocking? Anyway. It could be good. I'd like it to be good. I don't think it will be good, but maybe the fact that during Series 3 people seemed to wake up to the fact that the Sherlock Emperor was not wearing so many clothes as he first appeared has jolted Moffat and Gatiss out of their torpor. Or maybe they'll just do what this cabal of writers usually do - as recently witnessed in their associate Chris Chibnall's response to criticisms of Broadchurch Series 2 - and declare that all their critics are simply wrong and stupid and that there's nothing they could improve.

I really must make clear, and I know that this is a cliché thing to say, but if you want good, proper adaptations of Holmes stories that are true to the tone, setting and characters then you basically can't go wrong with the 80s and 90s Granada TV series starring Jeremy Brett as the Great Detective. I'd say Brett's Holmes is a little more flippant than the written character, but that's about it. Maybe this Sherlock special will approach that, but people have been making half-arsed Victorian Holmes telemovies for years and they never really seem to fully grasp the situation.

Urgh I just realised their Moriarty might be in it. Can't wait until December...

"No one's forcing you to watch it."

Piss off.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Wellington after the film industry collapses.

After "The Desolation of Smaug" my expectations for the third film in Peter Jackson's adaptation of "The Hobbit" were fairly abysmal, and the trailers, with all their Legolas and weaponised trolls, hadn't made me feel very optimistic. One might be surprised to learn, therefore, that my opinion of the final instalment is more positive than I expected because I actually felt like the first half of the film was reasonably decent. This of course puts me in the awkward halfway house, where I'm neither fully on board with those who think that the film was a non-stop disaster or with those who think that Peter Jackson and his team spew magic rainbows from their fingers as soon as they touch a camera. That's just the way it goes, of course, although it's probably only representative of how modernity's pillaging and misrepresentation of everything from its twentieth century heritage has worn me down, much like the armies in this film, in a war of attrition. My main issue with the film is similar to the one I had with the previous film, really: that there's too much drawn-out action in the second half of the film, in addition to some ongoing problems with narrative focus.

Who's this guy again?

It's recap time. As we all remember, at the end of the previous film Smaug wasn't having any of Thorin and Company's nonsense and as a result inexplicably decided that instead of turning them into Original Recipe Chicken right there he would instead piss off to Lake-Town and exact petty revenge on their allies instead. The depiction of the dragon's destruction of the watery city is fairly brutal and I did find the apocalyptic imagery reasonably confronting. I didn't really manage to comprehend how Bard escaped from his needlessly make-shift looking, tilted, over-the-canal prison, however, nor how Stephen Fry's Master temporarily survived his seemingly fatal squeezing in the rope used for said escape, but the main thing that struck me was the long focus on Tauriel and the plight of Bard's children: all well and good, but it is fairly odd to consider how all these invented characters (and Bain) get the spotlight here. I also must admit that the depiction of the Master of Lake-Town rather lacks Professor Tolkien's subtlety, does it not? He couldn't be more blatantly negligent and corrupt if he tried. In any event, Bard's method of slaying of the dragon is pretty ludicrous. It also ignores the foreshadowing of the ballista weapon depicted in the previous film. I don't know why these films, and action cinema in general at the moment, are so obsessed with weird contrived ways of portraying weapons and other devices. That being said, Smaug's death is pretty horrifying and all in all I thought this sequence was not bad as they go: the dragon's dead, but they're still in hot water, as it were.

"Do you have any bog roll? We're gasping out here."

Bard's unofficial assumption of the leadership of the people of Lake-Town was again portrayed reasonably. We of course have to deal with the issue of the rest of Thorin and company getting to Erebor, so they just grab a boat and piss off without bothering to help the people who sheltered them or anything, which I felt was a telling example of how in these films their efforts to both add to the story and retain the original storyline often mean things happen unnaturally or arbitrarily. We get some Kíli and Tauriel guff but I'll not dwell on that, because in all honesty it just didn't do anything for me. Legolas appears and disappears seemingly at random in these sequences, at first telling Tauriel that they have to go somewhere, then appearing again with the Lake Men later having not gone anywhere except with them. Eventually however they're informed that they need to head for Mount Gundabad although I can't remember how they figure out that it's important. One thing that annoyed me in all these sequences with the Lake Men was the invented character of Alfrid who kept showing up. Who cares? I didn't find him funny, and would have preferred if less screentime had been wasted on him - and by 'less' I mean 'no.' If they couldn't work Imrahil into "The Return of the King" this guy shouldn't get a spot.

"Get the barber, someone's going to think I'm a Dwarf."

The arrival of the remaining Dwarves at the Mountain means that we finally get a bit of time with Bilbo, who has barely appeared so far, although admittedly the book does indeed divert from him to dwell on the fortunes of the Lake Men at this point in the story. Thorin's dragon sickness is a pretty sudden change and I felt like it's another element which would have benefited from greater subtlety. I did appreciate the construction of the bulwark across the door of the mountain, however. Of course our main point of interest at this time is the rescue of Gandalf from Dol Guldur. It's a strange sequence, particularly insofar as Elrond and Saruman's fight with the Nazgûl seems rather pointless. Also, I don't know why the designs of the Ringwraiths were changed from the films of "The Lord of the Rings." Galadriel's confrontation with Sauron is interesting - it's nice to see him described as the "Servant of Morgoth" - but the way it's portrayed is confusing, especially because it seems to involve Galadriel's Elven Ring, and those were never really dealt with in the other films. In the books, of course, we learn that Sauron's departure from Dol Guldur was a ruse, but this just makes matters confusing. Is Sauron actually being driven away here, or leaving of his own volition?

"You can get the lot of us from Games Workshop
for the very reasonable price of £118."

The Lake Men come to Dale and meet up with Thranduil's forces. He's not very pleasant, is he? Nonetheless I liked Bard's failed parley with Thorin and the matter of honour. We see more of our Five Armies gathering as we see Azog's army marching in full armour without any apparent supply train towards the Mountain, and he sends Bolg off to Gundabad to get another army for some reason. Gandalf shows up in Dale, Bilbo gets horrified by Thorin's dragon sickness, has a chat with Balin, and pisses off to hand over the Arkenstone, we see more of the annoying Alfrid character and we get some more conversations about how they might avoid war. I know I'm rushing through this, but in all honesty I didn't find any of this particularly objectionable so really I don't have that much to mention. I liked that Bilbo was allowed to escape by the other Dwarves and the general sense of how irrational their situation was, thirteen of them trying to hold out against armies.

"I... think something just slid up the wrong way."

Then Billy Connolly shows up riding a pig. Here's another army with no supply train or anything just showing up for a fight. It's not very well established how Thorin was able to request Dáin's assistance, but we get distracted from this when Azog sets up a command post and brings forth his armies via... giant tunnelling worms. Uh huh. Right, well, this is the point at which I started to question things a little. Why don't the giant burrowing grubs just burrow straight into the mountain? Why don't they fight the Elves and Men and Dwarves? Who knows. What's more, loads and loads of different weird trolls with odd weapons show up like something out of Harry Potter. Don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but it's a different thing to this. Suddenly we have all these massive, weird, fake-looking CGI trolls running all over the place carrying on and it honestly rather spoiled things for me, because I feel like the more realistic depictions of battlefield tactics (besides Elves jumping on Dwarves' heads) were reasonably interesting and confrontational. Besides, we saw in the first film that Trolls are killed by sunlight. What happened? They don't look much like the Olog-hai from "The Return of the King," so how come they're not all turning to stone?

Elvish Ferrari.

Dale's getting overrun, we get more nonsense with Alfrid, stuff with Bard's kids, all sorts of strange trolls and a general sense of despair as everything goes to hell in a handcart with more and more Orcs showing up, as they are wont to do. Now I was starting to get a bit frustrated. Bilbo of course gets knocked out during the battle and wakes up when it's over, but we see everything here in all its gory detail, albeit sanitised in the sense that apart from a few scrapes there's virtually no blood in the film. Dwalin confronts Thorin, who proceeds to have a strange hallucination about falling into a squashy golden floor which allows him to overcome his dragon-sickness somehow. I honestly preferred the part when he saw the acorn Bilbo was keeping. He discards all his fancy armour and the thirteen of them sally forth to lend their aid, Thorin realising that they ought to kill Azog in order to bring things to a conclusion. I'm not sure how valid that really is, but there you go. Big rams materialise out of nowhere and Thorin, Dwalin, Fíli and Kíli all race off to have their showdown with the Orc leaders atop the icy Ravenhill.

"What conditioner do you use?"

The problem is, it's really an extended sub-battle between Thorin and Azog and Legolas and Bolg. Fíli, who admittedly has been pretty inconsequential, is anticlimactically killed by Azog to piss off the others. The two Elves show up and Kíli too gets killed trying to defend Tauriel. Meanwhile Thorin is fighting Azog and it goes forever, with Azog insisting on using an improvised flail. Simultaneously, Legolas has an extremely set-piece-laden showdown with Bolg, involving riding on bats, knocking over towers and using collapsing towers as staircases in ways which I'm fairly sure don't gel terribly well with the laws of physics. There's also a pointless bit where "Goblin mercenaries" show up for no reason. Dwalin disappears at some point in all this, failing to help anyone. Probably snuck off for a cheeky piss to write his name in the snow. Bilbo arrives with the use of the Ring to reveal that it's a trap, what with the Gundabad army on route, but gets knocked out by Bolg's mace.

"Series 2 of Vicious still isn't done?"

In any event, I thought that Thorin's duel with Azog and Legolas' with Bolg were just way too long and drawn out. The first half of the film had been contemplative, relatively dialogue-heavy and somewhat character and plot driven. This is just an extended action set piece, and I realised that there'd been very little significant dialogue for ages. Legolas finally kills Bolg, while Thorin sacrifices himself to kill Azog, who uses a predictable method of playing dead for a bit of a shock. I found all this stuff pretty boring, although Bilbo's final conversation with Thorin, taken as it was more or less from the book, was reasonable. I was more interested in this than Thranduil's conversation with Tauriel, or the rather naff reference to Aragorn when Legolas inexplicably decides to go journeying.

"You're not even my real father!"

After this, however, there is little to no closure. The Dwarves all rank up in two rows, which they do a couple of times in the film, to farewell Bilbo, who heads home. There's nothing about what happens to Dale or the Lake Men, nothing about the re-establishment of the Kingdom Under the Mountain and really nothing about what the consequences are for the plans of Sauron. All that happens is that we see Gandalf and an obvious small body double for Martin Freeman riding through some fields. Bilbo lies about losing the Ring, Gandalf's final words from the book taken on a sinister aspect, and we get the auction, which was a nice conclusion, although I felt like the shots of Hobbiton make it look barely inhabited. I don't know if that was intentional. Finally, we segue back into the early scenes of "The Fellowship of the Ring," in which Gandalf's lines about Bilbo having not "aged a day" are notably absent, because Martin Freeman quite clearly would have had to have aged a day or two to become Ian Holm. So ends the Hobbit trilogy.

"Hence my nickname: 'Nicey' Ackerman."

I won't dwell on this much longer because I've said my piece as far as the film itself goes. I'm more interested in discussing the deviations from the source material. Before I get to that, my concluding thoughts are that I feel like the one main issue with the film is that the action sequences are overwrought - there's another horrible one I neglected to mention about Bard riding a cart down a narrow street - and the film succeeds when it focuses on characters, conversation and conflict rather than simply on stunt fights and effects shots. As usual, the source material gets pretty mangled, but that's to be expected. Overall, I'd probably come away from this saying that "The Battle of the Five Armies" is the best of the three Hobbit films, but it's still very flawed and inconsistent. The invented characters and plots don't add enough to the story to justify their heavy focus, there are some fairly obvious plot holes, the tone of the film changes too drastically between the first and second halves and it ends, in my opinion, rather anticlimactically. If the character of Alfrid, the Tauriel material and the different silly monsters were extricated it would probably be a stronger product overall, but that wouldn't change the fact that the film is fundamentally undermined by its efforts to hybridise Bilbo's narrative with that of Thorin's, when his isn't inherently important. I note that in an interview for this film Peter Jackson said "The Hobbit is the story of Thorin Oakenshield’s quest for the Lonely Mountain." No it isn't. It's the story of Bilbo's character development. The Mountain is just a plot device. Thorin is a supporting character used to explore the theme of greed. That's why these films don't work: it doesn't matter whether you do or don't alter the source material when you don't fundamentally understand the source material in the first place. Maybe it's just marketing speak and he knows it's not true, because no one could possibly read The Hobbit and think it was about anything other than Bilbo at a fundamental level. My final thoughts are really the same as those for the previous two films: there's some interesting material in here, but like Thorin's kingly armour the true greatness is hidden among material which should have been cast aside.

This is how I felt just before it started.

Story Notes 3 - Some final major changes from the Real Story and the Original Text
 

1. Fire and Water

Smaug's attack on Lake-Town is reminiscent of the book. In the book, however, Bard slays Smaug alone with his bow and the Black Arrow, an heirloom of his family. Smaug certainly never speaks to Bard. Also, in the book Smaug's weak spot is a place on his underbelly which is not encrusted with gems, not a place where a scale was knocked off long ago. I'm unsure why they cut the element of Smaug being festooned with jewels in this film. Bilbo sees this weak spot and tells the Dwarves. This information is overheard by a Thrush, which relays this information to Bard. As heir of Girion, Bard is surprised to discover that he understands bird-speech and thus learns of Smaug's weakness. As most of the talking animals were cut for the film, the Thrush from the earlier films has no presence here.

2. The Master of Lake-Town

It's worth mentioning that in the book the Master survives the destruction of the town and indeed almost to the end of the story. Balin informs Bilbo much later, at Bag End, that the Master was given gold by Bard to aid in the reconstruction of the town, but absconded with much of it into the wastes, where he was abandoned by his followers and died.
 

3. Fíli, Kíli, Óin and Bofur

In the book of course these four were with the rest of the company the whole time, so there was no need for them to head for the mountain later. 

4. Bard's children

In the book, nothing is said of Bard's children. We know from The Lord of the Rings that he had a son, Bain, as the son is named in the film, but he's not mentioned in The Hobbit and may not have even been born by that time. Nothing is mentioned regarding daughters. 

5. Alfrid

The character and everything he does is an invention of the filmmakers with nothing very comparable in the book apart from vague mentions of the Master's servants. 

6. Tauriel

Once again, Tauriel is also an invention of the filmmakers with no precedent in the book. There's no romance with Kíli and during these events the only noteworthy Elf is Thranduil, the Elvenking. 

7. Legolas

The character wasn't invented until the writing of The Lord of the Rings. While he may well have been present at the battle, he's never mentioned. He obviously wasn't at Lake-Town fighting Orcs, because that never happened in the book. Needless to say no Elves (Legolas or otherwise) make a scouting expedition to Mount Gundabad in the book either. It's actually more heavily implied that word travels through the communications of birds in the book.

8. Mount Gundabad

This was an ancient sacred site of the Dwarves at the northern end of the Misty Mountains where Durin the Deathless awoke during the First Age. It had been lost to Orcs since the Second Age. In the book, the only Orc army comes from Gundabad, where Bolg was ruler. No army came from Dol Guldur. In the film Gundabad is presented as a sort of gateway to Angmar, the old kingdom ruled by the Lord of the Nazgûl, but it wasn't really. The capital of Angmar was actually a place about which very little is known called Carn Dûm, which lay at the other end of the Mountains of Angmar, a westward branch of the northern end of the Misty Mountains which began near Gundabad. 

9. Azog and Bolg

As everyone probably knows, by the time of the events of The Hobbit Azog had been dead for nearly one hundred and fifty years, killed at the doors of Moria by Dáin Ironfoot at the conclusion of the Battle of Azanulbizar. His son Bolg ruled the Orcs of the Mountains from Gundabad. It is actually Bolg who mortally wounds Thorin in the Battle of the Five Armies, before being himself slain by Beorn in bear's shape. It's worth emphasising as well that while in the film they dance around the issue of Azog and Bolg being family, describing Bolg as the "spawn" of Azog, in the book Bolg is quite literally his son. Of course we've seen in the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings this notion of Orcs being spawned out of amniotic sacs in some strange magical cloning facility. In fact, they quite simply reproduced sexually just like the Children of Ilúvatar (Elves and Men) of which they were corrupted versions. 

10. Dol Guldur, Angmar the Necromancer and the White Council

We know almost nothing about what actually happened when the White Council attacked Dol Guldur: if they came on their own, as happens here, or if they brought an army. Gandalf was not captured, of course - he'd been to Dol Guldur twice before, and came with the rest of the Council on this occasion. Nonetheless, we do know that "It was by the devices of Saruman," not Galadriel, that Sauron was driven from Dol Guldur, which incidentally was not a ruined fortress but rather a thriving stronghold of the Dark Lord. That being said, Sauron's departure from Dol Guldur was actually a ruse to lull the Council into a false sense of security. While Gandalf believed that Sauron wished to recapture the North and regain the lands of Angmar, it was actually his intention to depart for Mordor, which had been prepared for him by the Ringwraiths. As such it's also highly probable that the majority of the Ringwraiths, or perhaps all of them, were not present at Dol Guldur at that time, because they were busy down south at Minas Morgul preparing Mordor for Sauron's return. Later, when Sauron began using Dol Guldur again, at least two Ringwraiths were in charge of Dol Guldur, including Khamûl the Black Easterling. 

11. Gondor

Gondor's mentioned a couple of times in the film, the first being when Elrond states that they will need to be warned. Actually, Gondor had been in a state of limited conflict with Sauron's forces for about five hundred years since the Lord of the Nazgûl sent out an army from Minas Morgul to overrun Ithilien, Eastern Gondor. Minas Morgul itself had been conquered five hundred years before that, so Gondor had actually been dealing with Sauron's servants for a thousand years prior to this. Gandalf in the film claims that Sauron's reconquest of the North would threaten "even Gondor" but that's not terribly realistic. Angmar was very distant from Gondor, and Sauron's return to Mordor was a far more dangerous matter for them. It's also worth noting that from a writing point of view Gondor hadn't been invented when The Hobbit was written. Professor Tolkien at that point had not narrated the affairs of the Dúnedain after the downfall of Númenor, and didn't conceptualise Gondor, originally called 'Ond', until he came to write The Lord of the Rings. 

12. Legolas' mother and the War with Angmar

We know nothing whatsoever about Legolas' mother, and while Elves had been involved with the war against Angmar earlier in the Third Age, the Elves of Mirkwood weren't among them. There's never any indication in the book that Legolas' mother died or anything to that effect. 

13. Dwarves and Animals
In the film we see Dáin riding some kind of war-boar, and at another point Thorin and co take a leaf straight from Blizzard Entertainment and ride on big rams into battle. In actual fact, Dwarves are never described as employing cavalry. Furthermore, it's stated in "Of Dwarves and Men" if I recall correctly (in the final volume of The History of Middle-earth) that Dwarves weren't fond of animals in general, not even keeping pets such as dogs. We know they rode ponies for transport and used horse-drawn wagons but they never used cavalry or rode animals into battle. In any event cavalry in Middle-earth was true to history: people rode horses into battle. Showing people riding things like pigs and goats is a later Fantasy cliché. The only such unusual mounts in Professor Tolkien's narratives are when Orcs ride Wargs or wolves.

14. The Five Armies
While it's correct that three of the armies were Men, Elves and Dwarves, there weren't two armies of Orcs, and the one Orc army came from the Mountains, not from Dol Guldur. Rather, the other two armies were considered to be Orcs and Wolves, although admittedly some of the Wolves were being ridden by Orcs. Some interpretations argue that the Eagles were the fifth army and that the Orcs and Wolves were one. In any event, there was only one Orc army.

15. The Orcs of the Mountains
It's also worth noting that the Orc army, or Goblin army as it's called in the book, had actually come from the Misty Mountains, Mount Gundabad and the Grey Mountains to avenge the death of the Great Goblin and to try to claim the treasure. They weren't on a mission from Sauron. It's useful to explain that all Orcs at the end of the Third Age were, in one form or another, under Sauron's control, but Orc-realms like those in the Mountains still had their own leadership and waged their own wars independently from Sauron's commands. They were distinct from Sauron's personal "trained armies." At the same time, Sauron had united them in hatred of Elves and Men so they could be expected to serve his interests even when he wasn't telling them what to do. As a final note, judging by the Orc-captains seen and fought by the Fellowship in Moria over seventy years later, it appears that eventually Sauron did send Orcs of his own forces to take control of the Mountain Orcs so that they would more effectively serve his agenda.

16. Ravens
So how do Dáin and his Dwarves manage to show up at the mountain at that time? The reason is that in the book Thorin sent messages via talking Ravens to the Iron Hills. The Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain had enjoyed a long friendship with these talking birds. They lived, appropriately enough, on Ravenhill. In the book their leader is Roäc son of Carc, a very old Raven. He also serves as interpreter between the aforementioned talking Thrush (which spoke its own language) and the Dwarves to inform them of Smaug's death. Roäc counselled Thorin against aggression, but aided Thorin anyway because of his loyalty to the Dwarves.

17. Dáin Ironfoot
Dáin was indeed Lord of the Iron Hills and Thorin's cousin, his second cousin to be precise. They had the same great-grandfather, Dáin I. In the films he appears to be older than Thorin, but actually he was over twenty years younger than him. He didn't ride a pig and he wielded an axe in battle, not a hammer. We know this because the axe is mentioned when he kills Azog at the Battle of Azanulbizar. In the film Gandalf claims that he's less reasonable than Thorin, but in actual fact he comes across in the book as a good deal more wise, honourable and indeed heroic than most Dwarves, including Thorin. For instance, he had the wisdom to declare to Thorin's father Thráin after Azanulbizar that they would not re-enter Moria, due to the continuing presence of the Balrog, and after the Battle of the Five Armies he honoured Thorin's agreement with the Lake-Men. After the Battle of the Five Armies he, as next in line of Durin's Folk, became King Under the Mountain. Under his rule the Dwarves and their allies in the re-established Dale prospered again. He fell defending the body of King Brand, grandson of Bard, at the gates of Erebor when the Easterlings attacked Dale in the War of the Ring.

18. The Dwarves of the Iron Hills
The Iron Hills was what might be considered a "colony" of Dwarves a few days' march east of the Lonely Mountain. It was probably one of the easternmost points of "free" Middle-earth at that time. While it had been mined by the Dwarves for a very long time, it had become well-established as a settlement around the time of Thrór's re-founding of Erebor. In the Third Age, the Dwarves of Durin's Folk suffered many disasters. The first and greatest was losing Khazad-dûm, their ancestral city and kingdom in the Misty Mountains, to the Balrog, a demon which had hidden beneath the peaks since the end of the First Age. Afterwards they relocated to the Grey Mountains and the Lonely Mountain, but the original settlement in the Lonely Mountain was short-lived as the Grey Mountains were rich in gold and the Dwarves joined their kinsfolk there. Dragons, however, attacked the Grey Mountains from the North and the Dwarves were forced to flee another home. The dragons had killed King Dáin I and his second son Frór, so his first son and heir Thrór, Thorin's grandfather, led some of the Dwarves back to the Lonely Mountain, while the third son, Grór, Thrór's youngest brother, led the rest to the mines in the Iron Hills.
Eventually of course the Lonely Mountain was lost to Smaug, but the Iron Hills survived. Many Dwarves from Erebor resettled there, and the rest eventually settled far in the west in the Blue Mountains, which had also housed two Dwarf-kingdoms long ago in the First Age. Those had been destroyed at the end of that age. So Thorin was in the Blue Mountains, but the major Dwarf settlement was at the Iron Hills. Dáin Ironfoot became Lord after his grandfather Grór - Dáin's father Náin was killed by Azog in the Battle of Azanulbizar before the death of Grór - and seems to have spent effort in making sure their land was secure. Gandalf observed that before the Lonely Mountain was recovered, the Iron Hills was the only place of serious military strength in Rhovanion which would have been able to resist the forces of Sauron.
We get a description of the Iron Hills Dwarves too in the book which is rather different to their plate-armoured forms in the films. Note that there was no plate-armour in Middle-earth; this would have conflicted with the early medieval flavour of Professor Tolkien's writing, which evoked an age when mail was the best armour available. The Dwarves wore knee-length mail, metal mesh leggings, iron boots and iron caps, and each was equipped with both a two-handed mattock and a broadsword and shield as weaponry. Each also came bearing a heavy pack of supplies, a noteworthy contrast to the armies in the film which all show up from nowhere with no food or logistical equipment. The fact that Dáin was able to assemble an army of five hundred Dwarven soldiers, well-equipped and supplied, many of whom were veterans of the old war against Azog, suggests that he kept the Iron Hills in readiness for such evil days, further evidence towards the apparently extraordinary competence of Dáin.

19. Bilbo in Battle
In the book Bilbo is knocked out early in the battle and misses most of it. Incidentally, he spends it with Gandalf and Thranduil on one of the flanks, not running errands for Gandalf and the Dwarves.

20. The Final Duels
In the book there's no big multifaceted confrontation on Ravenhill. In fact that's where Bilbo and Gandalf were holding out with the Elves. Thorin actually fell to Bolg and his guards in a reckless charge through the valley between the arms of the mountain, after which  Beorn smashed through the Orc ranks, rescued Thorin, and returned to kill Bolg. While Thorin survived the battle and died later of his wounds, Fíli and Kíli were slain by Bolg and his guards while defending Thorin. The entire sequence with Kíli, Tauriel, Legolas, Thorin, Azog and Bolg in the film bears practically no relation to anything that happens in the book apart from the fact that Thorin is mortally wounded in combat with the Orc leader and his two nephews are slain defending him. In the book, of course, that leader is Bolg - Azog was long dead. 

21. Thranduil
In the book Thranduil and his Elves help Bard and the Lake-Men out of charity, not simply to recover some jewels, although he was interested in claiming the treasure.

22. Radagast
Radagast wasn't at the Battle of Five Armies, nor do we ever hear anything about him being involved in the attack on Dol Guldur. As I said in my article for the first film, there's no evidence that he was even a member of the White Council. He might have been, but it can't be proved. Personally I think he was probably a member "on paper," or at least was supposed to be a member, but never showed up to meetings. In any event, he wasn't around.

23. Were-worms
These are mentioned by Bilbo at the party at the beginning of the book, but that's the only time the phrase ever occurs. There's no evidence that they really existed outside of Hobbit legend, and they certainly weren't used by Orcs as a method of tunnelling, in the Battle or anywhere else.

24. The Return Journey
In the book Bilbo and Gandalf travel back to western Wilderland with Beorn and stay at his house before moving on to Rivendell and finally Hobbiton. Gandalf is still with Bilbo when he gets back to Bag End, although the book doesn't mention what he did when Bilbo discovered the auction and the declaration of his death. The book ends not with the events of The Lord of the Rings beginning but rather with Balin and Gandalf visiting Bilbo only a few years later, so that Bilbo, and by extension the reader, can discover what happened afterwards to the various characters.

25. 'The'
In the book it's just "the Battle of Five Armies." Not "The Five Armies." There's probably some lunatic corporate reason for that definite article. 

I think that's pretty much it. If I think of anything in the meantime I'll add it in, but nothing comes to mind. It appears that interest in these films has died down pretty rapidly in the public sphere since this final instalment, outside of the more enthusiastic film-fan forums. The thing I'm left with in hindsight is, I suppose, a vague sense of bafflement: one can only assume that Warner Bros.' interference was so substantial that the filmmakers had no choice, despite the vast resources at their disposal, to produce this ultimately unfulfilled trilogy. I know some people think they're as good as the earlier films (which I still happen to think are very flawed) and it's all a matter of taste but I just don't see it. There are characters ready for development who are never developed, while new characters are invented and given plentiful screentime. Plot threads are introduced that don't serve the interests of the main plot. Themes are contradicted by the manner of their representation. This is a badly fumbled trilogy, in my view, directed by a man who, at the end of the day, didn't really want to do it. As a consequence they're a messy, forgettable series of set pieces severely lacking in focus and conviction. Who knows what way Hollywood is going to repurpose Professor Tolkien's work next, but it wouldn't be a difficult job to learn from the mistakes of this lot.

"...a pit, a window into nothing."

"...I know you didn't like the film, but that's a bit strong."

Sherlock is Overrated

"Nothing ever happens to me, because we're
too busy making jokes and crying."

As one of the few people on the internet to think that Sherlock is highly overrated at best and a big bag of shit at worst, I feel the need to express this sentiment in a few succinct paragraphs for the sake of any fellow travellers out there who might be wondering what mass delusion the television viewing public falls under when the scowling face of Benedict Cumberbatch swims onto our screens for three weeks every two years. But of course that's just my opinion. I don't give a shit if you like Sherlock or not. Fair play to you if you do. Sometimes I wonder, would it be nice to be as easily entertained as so many people seemingly are? Then I think, no, I'd rather think stuff was shit than enjoy stuff that's shit and think it's not shit. Not that I'm saying Sherlock is objectively shit, I just don't like it. My point is, I'd rather have my own tastes than someone else's because I feel like it makes actually enjoying things all the sweeter. I feel like being uncritical and liking every other show, film and book I encountered, probably because I'd fallen into a marketing trap of manipulated expectations, would be like having sweets for every meal. It'd take the zest out of life, eliminating all those other flavours that make up a tasty meal, and you'd run the risk of getting entertainment diabetes. I sometimes see people who can't handle criticism of what they like going "Why would you be miserable and not enjoy things when you could be happy?" Well, for a start, I believe we don't choose our own emotions. Sartre claimed that we do, but that's bullshit. I believe we do have a measure of conscious control over our emotions, but it's more complex than that. Secondly, what would be the use of being happy all the time? I'm not saying it'd be great to be in constant mortal terror, to be abused or to suffer any kind of horrible ill treatment that people even in "Western civilisation" (oxymoron fnar fnar) suffer every day, but that being happy all the time is just a bland, shallow existence like the World State in Huxley. What kind of life would that be? Maybe a life of promiscuity and drugs appeals to you, but it doesn't appeal to intellectually masochist stuffed shirts like myself. Anyway, let's get onto my summary of the problems with Sherlock. I have five main categories.

Just pull the trigger and then we never have to see
the New Who Master's stupider little brother again.

1. It's imbalanced

Sherlock is too concerned with character at the expense of plot. In Series 3 in particular, a full two of the episodes were more about character drama than about crime-solving. I've seen people say "Sherlock is a detective show about the detective, not about the detection." The implication is that you can throw on a Jonathan Creek or Castle or something if what you primarily care about is fanciful detective cases with surprising twists and astounding feats of deduction. But isn't the whole point of Sherlock Holmes that he's the man that people call in when they themselves (or the police) are utterly baffled and they need a particular genius for investigation? It seems like every other instalment of Sherlock's pitifully small number of episodes is more concerned with one of the following questions: Despite being a bit weird, is Sherlock Holmes a relatable character? Or, What is the nature of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson's relationship? And you know what the answer is, every time? In the former it's "Yes, he definitely has a human side to him even if he doesn't fit society's arbitrary rules" and in the latter is "They're very good friends." They've made their point. Do they have to make it again every two years? Do they think we've forgotten or something? Of course the real answer is the viewing public laps up "human drama" at the expense of everything else. "Human drama" is fine when it's part of a balanced diet of exploring other issues in our society. Making a show about a genius detective and then purely focusing on the human drama element isn't exactly making the most of the opportunity at hand. This leads me to my second point.

2. It wastes time

"I'mmm going to say something in a looong, drawn out manner
to increase my limited sssscreeeentime."

As of my writing this there are precisely nine episodes of Sherlock in existence which have been made over the last five years. Even by the standards of British television, that's not many. Sure, each episode is ninety minutes in length, but that's hardly out of the ordinary for a lot of British crime dramas. So let's put ourselves in the place of Mr Steven Moffat and Mr Mark Gatiss. You've got the job writing a modernised TV adaptation of one of Western popular culture's most famous and significant texts. You've got three ninety minute episodes to work with, and your two leads are fairly hot property who are in and out of Hollywood on a regular basis. What are you going to do? Are you going to write a bunch of filler, set pieces, pointless comedy scenes and angsty melodrama, or are you going to crack out a script that's like a well-crafted wristwatch, precise and necessary in every detail? But then the realisation crashes down on you that you're actually a sitcom writer accustomed to producing thirty minutes of silly characters making knob gags and insulting each other, and so you realise you'd better plump for the former option, writing the only thing you know that isn't sitcom scripting, the thing that's given you attention at the BBC outside the world of comedy: writing Russell T Davies brand Doctor Who. That's all Sherlock is, really, except instead of the Doctor it's Benedict Cumberbatch and instead of some woman who wants to sleep with the Doctor it's Martin Freeman, and so people crack loads of gay jokes which is precisely what would happen in New Who if the Doctor ever travelled only with a male companion. Consider the opening of "The Sign of Three" which features "Holmes" interrupting a high-stakes arrest just to get advice for his best man speech, or those bits in "A Scandal in Belgravia" he's walking around Buckingham Palace with no gear on. What's the point of all this dead air? This was exemplified in "The Empty Hearse" when they offer multiple explanations for Holmes' survival, but made clear as early as "The Blind Banker" where they go to that magic show. Then again, that episode was just racist. My point is that the episodes are flabby, and the writing tries to tie everything into the half-hearted plots using a few glib remarks from Benedict Cumberbatch at the end to make it seem like it wasn't all a complete waste of time.

Wall-running in the Sherlock video game.
"Based on something we imagined Conan Doyle
might have imagined if he'd lived today, maybe."

3. It's self-obsessed

You know that bit in "The Empty Hearse" when Holmes gets all excited about putting his trademark jacket back on? That's exactly the problem I want to explore in this point. Why is this show so in love with itself? It's like the bit where Watson says something about Holmes' "cheekbones", which is just pointless self-referential nonsense basically involving them all saying "this show is popular and successful, we're so brilliant." Maybe if it was justified, but it isn't, because Sherlock is shit! But that's just my opinion. My chief issue is how utterly unsubtle they are about everything, as if the writers are saying "look here, didn't we write something clever." It's like Moriarty going on about how he and Holmes are so unusual, or Holmes describing himself as a "high functioning sociopath" or Holmes, Watson and "Mary Morstan" having a big argument about Watson's preference in friends. The show is constantly yelling from the rooftops that it's done something unusual, that it's drawn up these unconventional and edgy characters, completely overlooking the fact that this is just taken from stuff written by a Victorian gentleman over a hundred years ago. In the same way the show is incredibly smug about the lip service it pays to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original work, through puns on original story titles and Benedict Cumberbatch slapping a deerstalker onto his curly-haired bonce. This is a show that's so self aware that we can't possibly be expected to take it seriously. When Holmes appeared to make the leap in "The Reichenbach Fall" we know he isn't going to be dead because, as Gatiss and Moffat themselves said, part of the Sherlock Holmes story is that he seemingly died and later returned. This is a show that doesn't believe it has to try because it can get by on reputation alone, and that's what makes its writing and characterisation so frustrating.

4. It's exploitative

"I need to get naked for no real reason?
Oh right, forgot Steven wrote this one."

As I discussed in my review of "The Empty Hearse" the original Sherlock Holmes narratives were written primarily in the Victorian Age where strong emotions were usually not the business of everyday people apart perhaps from fainting women in rooms full of settees. Modern-day Sherlock, however, is constantly being "emotional", which is to say twee, mawkish, sentimental and melodramatic. There are regular shots of characters staring into middle distance, and moody music playing in the background. It's a cheap trick to keep people engaged by making them cry or feel sad or what have you. It's the most trivial form of storytelling imaginable, manipulating your audience's emotional gullibility to get them invested in the show at the expense of a sound or consistent plot. A good example would be Holmes' big freak out at Watson in "The Hounds of Baskerville" when he goes on about how he doesn't have any friends. But we know of course that they're going to kiss and make up at the end, and of course it's all pointlessly subverted when Holmes traps Watson in the lab with the fear gas just to be a dick. This is a show that doesn't care about actually doing its job as long as it gets its viewers sobbing into their hankies or laughing so hard that they need to post quotes about it on social media. Emotionality is not and never has been the heart and soul of nor the entire purpose and basis of drama, and it's the domain of trash like soap operas. This is not a show that cares remotely about exploring how the issues surrounding "Sherlock Holmes" might fit into a modern context, and this leads me onto my fifth and final point.

"You know what's really going to fit into our edgy modern-day Holmes?
A guy who looks like he's out of Disney's Aladdin wielding a scimitar."

5. It's irrelevant

You know when it made any kind of sense beyond a commercial one to write a series of novels and short stories about two middle-class white dudes who fight crime in London? In the 1890s, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing "The Adventures" and "The Memoirs." The world in which Holmes functioned and which gave rise to him was killed stone dead by the First World War. Why would it be even remotely relevant to British society a century later? That whole Victorian world: colonialism, Anglo-Americanism, masters and servants, it barely existed by 1918. What Sherlock really needed to do was clue itself into the vestiges and replacements of those ideas in the 21st century: the subordination of British power in the West to the United States, modern capitalist heirarchies, race relations and changing class divisions. In Sherlock, however, "Britain" is Mark Gatiss in a three piece suit with an umbrella talking about the Queen, the London metropolis is under threat by the diseased, the foreign and the insane, and the West needs defending from the evil terrorists who want to blow us all up in the name of causes we're too politically correct to divulge. This attitude made sense in Victorian Britain, but it was already starting to show its age then. It's utterly, laughably antiquated now. You might as well do an adaptation of Plato's Politeia and still have it fixated on Athenian cultural anxiety after the Peloponnesian War. As a historical exercise it might be interesting, but what's the point of the adaptation? What, indeed, is the point of adaptations at all? Instead of changing someone else's text for your own time, maybe you should come up with your own characters and stories. They can make it relevant, but then it won't really be Sherlock Holmes anymore, or it can be irrelevant, but it still isn't really Sherlock Holmes. So choose your poison. Benedict Cumberbatch and his supporting cast of overwhelmingly white, predominantly male, exclusively middle class characters saving Britain from terminally ill people, Chinese people, Irish people, empowered women, non-specifically "European" people and so on have absolutely no purpose or relevance in modern culture. It's backward-thinking, redundant and out of touch. This is Sherlock's biggest problem. It doesn't achieve anything. It doesn't need to exist.

Cumberbatch upon discovering Opinions Can Be Wrong.

So there you go then. Agree? Disagree? Good for you, go tell/complain to your friends about it. I thought I could make a point about the show having annoying fans, but that isn't really the show's fault, and all fans are annoying when you get right down to it, so I might as well have said that Sherlock Holmes is predominantly but erroneously depicted wearing a deerstalker cap for all the original information I would have been conveying. I suppose I ought to be grateful that this show isn't a bigger presence in culture due to its very sparse schedule, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it. I think people are out of touch, which is to say, that you can't have watched that much TV if you really think Sherlock is that special, or if you have it must have been shitty TV. But again, that's just my opinion. You know what you shouldn't do if you like Sherlock? Take this as a personal attack, because I don't know you and can't judge you. You're safe. You're not going to die if the bad man on the internet doesn't like your favourite crappy show.