An Epiphany and a Challenge

[neadods]

I need to stop making ebook covers and make myself a Sherlock icon. That said, I've figured out why I've fallen so hard for the show, and it's not just because I'm avoiding finishing the bathroom or I've mainlined episodes.* It's not even because I've been a moderate fan of Holmes for years.

It's because I fell pretty damned hard for this show 22 years ago.

In 1988, there was a short-run show nominally sponsored by an SF writer that could be more or less summed up as "autistic genius and normal sidekick. They fight crime!" (In a burst of sadism, I'm not going to name it just to see who recognizes what I'm talking about.)

Although Sherlock may be obviously based on the Holmsian canon... it also basically boils down to "autistic genius and normal sidekick. They fight crime!" -- and it's even written by science fiction scriptwriters.

The asocial hero who needs the point of view character to anchor him into reality is an attractive trope... so attractive that I'm wondering in advance how many people aren't going to like it when Moffat & Gatiss follow through on their proposed arc of turning Sherlock from petulant 5-year-old in an adult suit into an actual heroic adult. It's been my experience in fandom that people are far fonder of woobie heroes than they are of action heroes. (That BBC Sherlock doubles down by combining a Stoic Woobie** hero and an Iron Woobie sidekick and then has one of them point-blank discuss them as a couple, even if to turn it down, was pretty much a guarantee that the entire fandom's collective knickers were going to ignite. Taking that away, or being perceived as trying to take that away, ain't gonna be pretty.)


And now, I must leave you to go be a responsible adult. It's clinic shift in the morning & bathroom work all afternoon tomorrow. I need to get the bookshelf and the reading light up. (Admit it. Everyone wants a reading light in there.)


*Something that will always make you either the world's biggest fan or Never Care About That Show Ever. I call it the viral theory of fandom; either intensive exposure infects you or inoculates you.

**Yeah, TV Tropes links. I apologize now for the next four hours you're gonna spend on that site.

Comments

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Whatshisface in Moonlighting didn't sleep in a box with electrodes stuck to his skull. He also presumably had more than two friends in the whole world, both of them work-based.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Actually, what's funny is that I don't remember Bruce Willis' character having ANY friends on that show.

Also, having rewatched the pilot episode of Probe on YouTube last night, it's interesting to see a show from back when the paradigm was still "the guy is the rational skeptic and the girl is the intuitive believer," since by the time The X-Files rolled around, the opposite had already become a cliche in its own right.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I honestly wouldn't know - I watched one of the halloween themed episodes and the Taming of the Shrew one and otherwise ignored Moonlighting completely.

I'm going to roll two comments into one - There was still some gender stuff going on in Probe that's so far over now that it really shocked me to hear "Bring your secretary; I want to right something sexist on her cast." In '88 that was funny; by 2000 it verged on unthinkable.

But yeah - floppy disks, no cell phones, and my personal favorite - the modem that he used by picking up the telephone receiver and dropping it into a cradle!

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

And yet, CCTV everywhere, in 1988, including outside of a laundromat in the bad part of town!

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I never thought much about that. I figured there was CCTV because it *was* the bad part of town.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

In '88, though? Christ, CCTV isn't even that omnipresent NOW, especially since store owners in the REALLY bad parts of town are actually more likely to have cameras that aren't hooked up to ANYTHING, simply to serve as an inexpensive theft deterrent.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the plot did require *some* way to find them, and since CCTV existed, while traceable cell phone signals/built in car GPS didn't...

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

As I said upthread, it's odd in that it's a plot that's actually MORE plausible NOW than when it first aired. :)