the bbc sherlock series by the dr who 'bloke' and starring tim from the office

but yes. memory less appealing than observation. capacious high-recall memory feels like it's special - we can't do it, our memories don't work like that. reasoning from observation feels like we should be able to do it and indeed can do it to a lesser extent.

this has always bugged me but sherlock isnt really a sociopath is he? i thought sociopaths were supposed to be quite charismatic, very good at mimicking normal human interaction, and so on. i mean you could argue that he IS all those things but i think the point is that with sociopaths they appear in general to be "normal" at all times. sherlock presents as difficult from the start; he seems more autistic than sociopathic.

curious how long 'actually sherlock is a monster!' has been around. the first time i can remember coming across it was mark s here and then it kinda became the norm to have sherlock as clearly understood to be some asshole weirdo instead of just incredibly smart and observant (even the recent sherlock but not really precursors to the current wave had this eg house). seems like previously any revisionism of sherlock usually just focused on drug use or they'd have it turn out that watson was actually the smart one like some remington steele situation.

Yeah, Sherlock's condition is clearly Asperger's, I'm not sure why the writers keep on repeating the sociopath thing; "high functioning sociopath" is not even a real diagnosis, but "high functioning autist" fits Sherlock perfectly.

(xpost)

doyle vacillates in the stories, like yeah in 'study in scarlet' we encounter him beating up corpses and he doesn't know the order of the planets in the solar system but in a lot of the later ones he's just smart + forbidding

also worth noting if mb obvious that the axes along which sherlock might present as 'weird' in a late-victorian context are different to those along which he might present as 'weird' in 2010-date

curious how long 'actually sherlock is a monster!' has been around. the first time i can remember coming across it was mark s here and then it kinda became the norm to have sherlock as clearly understood to be some asshole weirdo instead of just incredibly smart and observant (even the recent sherlock but not really precursors to the current wave had this eg house). seems like previously any revisionism of sherlock usually just focused on drug use or they'd have it turn out that watson was actually the smart one like some remington steele situation.

Well, in the Conan Doyle stories Sherlock can be rude and antisocial and "weird", but he almost always shows high moral standards. It's often hinted that he gets more pleasure in solving the crimes than bringing the guilty to justice, but IIRC it's never ever suggested justice and morality wouldn't matter to him a lot. I mean, in "The Final Problem" he's willing to sacrifice his life if that also means the worst criminal he's ever met dies with him. (Unlike in Sherlock, in the short story Moriarty never threatens the lives of his loved ones, so protecting them is not a motivation for his sacrifice, it's purely justice.) So I don't really feel the canon supports this "Sherlock is a monster" revisionism.

Maybe the revisionists feel Sherlock's moralism is just something Conan Doyle was forced to include in the stories because of the era in which he wrote, and that if he had had a free reign he would've made Sherlock more ambiguous and less heroic, so they feel they're revealing the "real" core of the character... But I dunno, morality still feels like a large part of the character to me, it rarely feels superficial or tacked-on. (One of my favourite Sherlock story is "The Yellow Face", which is all about morality, and it's also one of the few cases where Sherlock's deductions actually prove wrong.) So the "heroic" Sherlock is just as real as the "monster" one, even if the latter is more popular now. I guess people just prefer different types of protagonists these days?

(xxpost)

I think morality matters a great deal to this iteration of Sherlock though - it's more like this version tries to paint him as someone who chooses to see himself as a monster, rather than him actually being one.

There's a bit in the Irene Adler episode, where Mycroft tells Watson that Sherlock had the brain of a scientist or a philosopher but chose to be a detective instead, and then asks Watson what that says about Sherlock. we're clearly meant to see him as someone who does have a strong sense of morality and justice, even if he doesn't care about conforming to polite social norms.

didn't realise it was a thos harris thing, just associated it with this:

http://studyplace.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/w/images/9/9c/Yates-1966-Art-of-Memory-excerpt.pdf

― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think it is 'a Harris thing' , it is something that Harris has had Lecter utilise but I think it is a much older means of structuring your memory so that you remember things.

Doesn't Thomas Cromwell use such techniques in Wolf Hall?

that's frances yates's the art of memory for those who don't like clicking unspecified links. follows the persistence of classical methods of mnemonics, particularly that of associating memory with place or abstract architectural structures, through into renaissance magic and thought.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 4:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

John Crowley works with these notions in his Aegypt-Love & Sleep-Demonomania trilogy, also

Have that yates book on my nook, one of many things I'm dying to read if I ever stop frittering

it's excellent, jon - stop frittering. also groundbreaking if i remember rightly - finding a continuity that wasn't a post-enlightenment retrospect 'progress of thought' narrative, but an examination of the sources and the use made of them, ie magic, and power, and renaissance humanism, was revolutionary.

It's really bugging me where I first heard about those facades, like a few months ago. Wee they in another film or documentary prog on UK telly?

i saw it on Britain's Secret Homes a few months ago. maybe there?

I am very late to the party and no doubt ilx is all talked out on the subject of this version of Sherlock Holmes, but...

Having watched all up to the next to last episode of season three, my basic take on it is that it varies from delightful at its best to merely competent at its worst, so that in spite of a great deal of unevenness, it delivers much more entertainment than the norm. The humorous moments are almost always genuinely funny. The fiddly clever plots are full of gaping holes if you take them at all seriously, but as with the original stories, to take them seriously is to miss their value entirely.

Watching them in relatively quick succession (compared to the pace of their initial release) reveals the extent to which the writers soon exhausted their first wave of inspiration based on a novel approach to the characters, then fell back on more elaborate gimmickry, and now are subverting the characters they originally created in order to give themselves new spaces to explore. iow, the usual evolution of successful tv shows. still worth a go, though.

The Christmas special is an odd idea in that it seems to be a period piece...

Yeah, I don't understand how the producers thought it would be a good idea. Are they gonna do the texting stuff - I guess not? Odd indeed. It's a bit of a gamble. Is this gonna turn the show into the other endless tv/film version of Holmes? I remember from my kiddy Guinness Book of Records days that Holmes is the character played by the most actors ever. I don't see how this could do anything interesting.

You don't see how a Sherlock Holmes story could be interesting?

Is this gonna turn the show into the other endless tv/film version of Holmes?

Since it's a one-off for fun and S4 will be returning to modern-day continuity, the answer to this is obviously "no"

but yes. memory less appealing than observation. capacious high-recall memory feels like it's special - we can't do it, our memories don't work like that. reasoning from observation feels like we should be able to do it and indeed can do it to a lesser extent.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3:34 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this has always bugged me but sherlock isnt really a sociopath is he? i thought sociopaths were supposed to be quite charismatic, very good at mimicking normal human interaction, and so on. i mean you could argue that he IS all those things but i think the point is that with sociopaths they appear in general to be "normal" at all times. sherlock presents as difficult from the start; he seems more autistic than sociopathic.

― max, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3:37 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

curious how long 'actually sherlock is a monster!' has been around. the first time i can remember coming across it was mark s here and then it kinda became the norm to have sherlock as clearly understood to be some asshole weirdo instead of just incredibly smart and observant (even the recent sherlock but not really precursors to the current wave had this eg house). seems like previously any revisionism of sherlock usually just focused on drug use or they'd have it turn out that watson was actually the smart one like some remington steele situation.

― balls, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3:42 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fyi in the superior product ELEMENTARY they make a lot of the above issues converge (no idea how well/where this tracks the canon) by making sherlock kind of a totally committed utility-maximizer, like if john stuart mill discovered that his greatest duty to the world could be found in performing investigations of murderers and then did everything he could to shape his life toward that end. so he's very smart and observant etc, but also constantly training himself with memory games and skill maintenance and relevant scientific inquiries. more than once he has floated the idea to others that essentially the normal rules, laws, etc. ought reasonably not to be applied to him in virtue of the greater good that is done by him being allowed to operate as he sees fit. thus his trying to murder M when he believes M to have killed irene adler, his defiant response to a police dept hearing aimed at canning him for recklessly causing his police colleague to be shot, lastrade's ominous warning to watson that seems to be connected to signs of sherlock's willingness to be utterly deceptive and manipulative to those around him (his doing 'voices'), etc.

i assume a lot of that is pretty normal. as they do it it comes across like sherlock is just an incredibly tense but subtly unstable balance of all the strengths and flaws necessitated by having shaped himself from the person he was born as, with the person with his biography, into the person he is. at times it makes it seem like he's an embodied interpretation of a nietzschean utilitarian.

How can anything with Lucy Liu be superior to a British production?

she's great!

can you have nietzchean utilitarians

are they a thing

right that's what i'm saying, it's weird. to feel a moral (in the customary sense) demand on oneself despite conducting oneself sort of as if no such demands had any claim on you.

perhaps the out would have something to do with the fact that sherlock really only seems to care about personal injustices. when he serves the state w/ his talents it's still in the service of catching muuuuurderers etc

fyi in the superior product ELEMENTARY they make a lot of the above issues converge (no idea how well/where this tracks the canon) by making sherlock kind of a totally committed utility-maximizer, like if john stuart mill discovered that his greatest duty to the world could be found in performing investigations of murderers and then did everything he could to shape his life toward that end.

FYI, this concept is introduced in the very beginning of the very first Conan Doyle story, where Watson tells us that Holmes doesn't know Earth revolves around the Sun, because information like that isn't useful to solving crimes, and he's committed to learning only things that help him in his detective work.

I agree that Elementary is underrated, and the way it explores Holmes' utilitarianism is intereresting (in ways Sherlock isn't), but I still wouldn't call it superior... Mostly because the actual mysteries in Elementary are almost never as clever as in Sherlock, and they rely even more on ridiculous coincidences, sometimes to the point breaking the suspension of disbelief. Also, while Jonny Lee Miller himself is good, the other actors simply cannot manage to make their characters as fascinating as those same characters are in Sherlock. Still, gotta give props for the makers of Elementary for avoiding the wiener-fest of the original stories, Watson isn't the only character who's a woman in this version.

there's a series called something like Doyle and Houdini on soon, which is Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini solving the crimes. him from Dirk Gently's in it, Mangan.

http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/itv-commissions-supernatural-crime-drama-houdini-doyle-itv-encore

ITV though.

xp i don't have room in my brain for mysteries, it's a waste of space i could be using for theorizing about police procedurals

this was godawful

To such an extent that i wonder how anyone let it get through unaltered. A horrible mess from start to finish.

It played like terrible fan-fic.

I was enjoying it in an unchallenged way* up until the point when Sherlock woke up on the plane and it became clear that Moffat was about to start Moffatting in a way that showcased all his worst traits as a writer and true to form it just deteriorated from there. The final stretch was an incoherent mess and the less said about the Suffragette stuff the better. A straightforward Victoria episode would have been so much stronger.

*Except Gatiss in the fat suit. Nothing in the history of TV has been made better by putting someone in a fat suit.

I liked the suggestion that Moriarty = nemesis = drug addiction, but otherwise bleh meh blurgh.

Gatiss in the fat suit was easily the highlight. The rest was pretty wretched. Preposterous premises. Half-baked profundities. Self-referential smirkiness. No one watching that as their first exposure to the series would ever watch another.

Despite prior misgivings about the pointlessness of a Victorian episode, I quite liked the purely Victorian half - a bit heavy on the injokes but I have a guilty childish habit of enjoying the little neural spark from spotting a reference, so I mostly enjoyed it right up until I didn't enjoy it any more with Moriarty's arrival, and then obv as Matt says it all went very wrong on the plane.

(I am trying to train myself out of that habit and luckily Moffatt zapping the viewer's reference-spotting aren't-you-clever neuron so relentlessly provides v. good training material)

Had a little tingling sense of impending wankery when Sherlock had a torch in the mansion but I somehow convinced myself that some kind of oil lamp happened to resemble a flashlight. Should've just turned it off then instead.

some kind of oil lamp happened to resemble a flashlight

a bullseye lantern?

it looked quite small and cylindrical (I see the first electric tubular flashlight was invented in 1898 but was presumably rather more bulky) but yeah, I was trying to tell myself it was just a small bullseye lantern, except I didn't know what they were called, so thanks!

Agree that this one would've been much better as a pure alternate universe Victorian mystery. Now all the meta-wankery at the end meant we didn't even get a proper solution to the mystery; at the end, Sherlock ask Lady Carmichael why she hired him if she was the killer all along, and the question is never answered. I did actually like the idea that a Victorian conspiracy of Suffragettes was behind the murders, so if they'd developed that into a proper story, this could've been a classic episode.

Seems to me that they added the modern-day bits because they thought people are tired of waiting until 2017 to finally get the resolution to the cliffhanger of "His Last Vow", so they had to add some bits that at least address that plot. But it was mostly pointless, and I think the stupidest part was that the one bit of new evidence about Moriarty we got didn't even make sense in light of what happened earlier in the episode... At the end, Sherlock says that no one could survive blowing their brains out, and that his mind palace hallucination proved that to him. But in the actual hallucination we saw how someone could fake their suicide like that, so why did Sherlock claim the opposite?

i enjoyed this, probably at least as much because of the silliness as despite the silliness, but moffat's tedious convolutions (here and on doctor who) wouldn't be nearly as tiresome if he were ever able to actually resolve them in a clever, honest way. the 'why did lady carmichael hire sherlock?' thing is this lazy trick he does where he thinks if he openly acknowledges the obv inconsistencies or problems maybe he can fool some ppl into thinking he's solved them. 'moriarty is really dead' is moffat conceding he can't think of a way to twist himself out of that plot development but when sherlock says 'i know what moriarty is going to do' does anyone actually believe moffat knows also?

Thought this was probably the worst of these nu-Sherlock episodes. And then there's that wedding one.

'why did lady carmichael hire sherlock?'

incipient alzheimers?

to make Sherlock feel smart.

Well she didn't *actually* hire him, she only hired him in his mind, in order to solve the case. Once the actual case was solved that little invented detail was irrelevant. n.b. I'm not trying to defend the ridiculousness, merely explain...

Had a little tingling sense of impending wankery when Sherlock had a torch in the mansion

Don't know if this was before or after the big giveaway, fat moriarty talking about 'the virus in the data'.

To me the first giveaway was the Bride using the term "shotgun wedding", which obviously sounded way too modern to be used in Victorian England. And later on Sherlock is using similarly modern terms while talking with Mycroft, and Mycroft comments on that, which I think was the point where you were supposed to figure out something's not right with the setting. "The virus in the data" was then the final nail in the coffin.

for the excitement of trying to fool sherlock/having their case heard/perpetuate the 'Bride' story to allow more killings? I dunno.

But if Lady Carmichael simply wanted to witnesses so the Bride legend could go on and she herself wouldn't suspected of the murder, she could've hired any random person. What was the point of hiring a legendary crime-solver who might, you know, actually solve this crime too?

to make Sherlock feel smart.

But this is the problem with inserting an "it was all a dream" twist into a series like Sherlock. The satisfaction the viewers get from Sherlock solving the crimes comes from the dissection of tiny, seemingly insignificant detail and how they fit into the solution, as well as from understanding how a seemingly illogical/inexplicable/impossible crime makes perfect sense. That's why you have all those big "Sherlock summing up how the crime happened" monologues in every episode. So taking away that and instead saying "all the details don't actually fit and it only makes sense because Sherlock wanted it to" removes the primary source of enjoyment people get from most Sherlock Holmes stories, including this series.

Even though it's horribly cliched, "it was all a dream" can be a satisfying trope in some types of stories, but not in whodunnit/howdunnit crime fiction like this.

you just displayed all the enjoyment you got out of putting together that it was SHERLOCK'S BRANE wot dun it, in your previous post! the inexplicable hiring was another one of those discrepancies (just not a very useful or satisfying one as a clue).

I said I spotted those clues, but who said anything about enjoying it? "It was all a dream" is one of the oldest, most predictable twists in the book, so realizing the story was heading for that direction was more groanworthy than satisfying. It certainly wasn't the sort of clever, unexpected solution better Sherlock stories end with.

Also, the fact hiring Sherlock was inexplicable wasn't even revealed until well after we found out it was all dream, so it wasn't even a clue, just an example of the writers trying to cover up their own ineptitude with a meta wink.

"the fact that hiring Sherlock"

straight dope gives the first recorded usage of 'shotgun wedding' as 1903 fyi (shotguns are pretty old!)

this was really enjoyable, if you would have preferred a straight up victorian murder mystery alternative entertainments are available, for boring people