Of Navajo cops and future arch nemesis
Mar. 15th, 2026 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakDark Winds, Season 3: continues to be both beautifully acted, thoughtfully and empathically written, and a visual feast. Also heartbreaking in the day it follows up on s2's conclusion for Joe Leaphorn and his wife Emma. Not since Vir got drunk after killing Cartagia on Babylon 5 did I see such thoughtful and touching scenes dealing with the death of a no holds barred villain. Which also turns the table a bit on the audience, because both the deaths of Cartagia in B5 and the impending demise of BJ Vines were greeted with an emotional horray. And the respective shows don't pretend the reasons for their deaths suddenly apply anymore - Cartagia would have gotten Centauri Prime torched, Vine due to all his privilege would have escaped legal consequences for his crimes once again and would have done more damage. And yet murder is murder is murder. Leaphorn struggling through most of the season with it instead of whistling Chicago's He got it coming continues to make him such a compelling character and makes the show a universe where heroes don't just shrug off the aftermath of killing bad guys if it happens not in self defense but premedidated and in cold blood. Also I was more grateful than ever that the show takes place in the 1970s and wasn't updated to the present because Bern's new job with border patrol would have felt very differently even before her subplot kicks in.
Young Sherlock: aka the one by Guy Ritchie which doesn't feel like a prequel to his Holmes movies and is the better for it. I mean, I didn't dislike his first Holmes movie, which was the only one I saw, but I wasn't crazy about it, either, and never felt the need to see it again. Also it was made at a time where all the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes seemed to lean into emphasizing his arrrogance. Now, this show is entertaining fluff with only the vaguest nods to when it's supposed to be set: female students galore in Oxford, 1870, for some reason a rich and high ranking visitor takes the carriage instead of the train to Oxford, while someone in the production team actually remembered the Paris Commune happened, they evidently forgot or ignored both the near starvation of the population part of that and that there was also the Franco-Prussian war going on, so everyone makes a trip to Paris for one episode with no armies in sight, but the Folies Bergeres being in business with dancing girls, etc., etc., etc. Not to mentiion nerve gas gets invented forty years ahead of schedule and not by Fritz Haber. But honestly, because the show doesn't pretend to be anything but fun fluff, I did not mind. What I do suspect is someone in the production team has watched at least some Smallville and thought, hm, that "Clark and Lex were bffs for a while when young before Lex went evil" premise is great, we should do that with Holmes and Moriarty". And proceeded to follow up on this idea. Young Sherlock, played by a member of the gifted Fiennes clan, and young James M, played by Mat (the second one) from Wheel of Time, have the necessary chemistry and homoerotic subtext, they hit it off famously, and at the same time the seeds for future supervillaindom in Moriarty are there. And the show does make it believable these are two young guys smarter than most others around them and on each other's level. Most importantly, though: this Sherlock Holmes is the first one in what feels like eons who is not introduced being a jerk to the people around him. (I love Elementary ! But while Elementary's Sherlock was never as extreme as Sherlock's Sherlock, he, too, started out being rude to his Watson and everyone else.) It might come with the much younger territory, but while he's cocky, he's not (yet?) abrasive, downright tender with his mother, and, lo and behold, civil to people who aren't awful to others in front of him. Otoh, it may also be that Guy Ritchie and his production team watched the last season of Sherlock and thought, hm, dysfunctional Holmes family drama, unexpected relations, we like it, we like it, but how about giving the women better parts? . So this Sherlock, too, has a childhood trauma connected to his little sister, only it is that he (and his mother, and his brother) think she has died when he refused to play with her near a river. But lo and behold, the sister (called Beatrice not Eurus or for that matter Enola) is not dead, because it was all part of a fiendish plot by Dad Holmes, played by Joseph Fiennes, so Dad Holmes could gaslight and lock up his wife in an asylum and get his paws on her fortune to fix his finances. This, btw, is probably the most Victorian aspect of this otherwise very un Victorian show. The Victorians loved sensational novel plots like this!) What's great here that Mom Holmes, Cordelia, once the fiendish plot is uncovered mid season spends the rest of the season as an active agent pursueing her villainous husband and his evil conspirators together with her sons and young Moriarty. No tragic death or permanent insanity for her! While Dad Holmes, Silas in this version, isn't an evil Dad in the traditional "you disappointment me, wretch!" mode, he's a far more insidious evil Dad in the gaslighting "you're my favourite, you're so great, no one but you understands me, it's just the two of us against the world!" mode. I would argue the show is a bit easy on the not so dead Beatrice revealed to be his sidekick, but then if Sherlock is nineteen in this show, this makes Beatrice 17, so it's more the problem of the actress looking more like a woman in her late 20s at best and thus fully responsible for her deeds. And then there's Xiao Wei/Shou'an, an escape of a C'hinese drama, on revengeful pursuit of four men who caused the deaths of her parents and most of her village. Her I had expected to either end the show dead or imprisoned, but no, she, too, makes it out of the tale alive and free, and Sherlock's attitude once he knows her reasons reminded me a bit of Kitty Winter in both Doyle and Elementary. Oh, and absolutely no one gets raped or threatened with rape. Like I said, this fluffy show with a heavy emphasis on the bromance manages to do very well by its female characters. Anyway, whether nor not this gets another season - which it doesn't really need for the story it has told - I enjoyed myself.
Young Sherlock: aka the one by Guy Ritchie which doesn't feel like a prequel to his Holmes movies and is the better for it. I mean, I didn't dislike his first Holmes movie, which was the only one I saw, but I wasn't crazy about it, either, and never felt the need to see it again. Also it was made at a time where all the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes seemed to lean into emphasizing his arrrogance. Now, this show is entertaining fluff with only the vaguest nods to when it's supposed to be set: female students galore in Oxford, 1870, for some reason a rich and high ranking visitor takes the carriage instead of the train to Oxford, while someone in the production team actually remembered the Paris Commune happened, they evidently forgot or ignored both the near starvation of the population part of that and that there was also the Franco-Prussian war going on, so everyone makes a trip to Paris for one episode with no armies in sight, but the Folies Bergeres being in business with dancing girls, etc., etc., etc. Not to mentiion nerve gas gets invented forty years ahead of schedule and not by Fritz Haber. But honestly, because the show doesn't pretend to be anything but fun fluff, I did not mind. What I do suspect is someone in the production team has watched at least some Smallville and thought, hm, that "Clark and Lex were bffs for a while when young before Lex went evil" premise is great, we should do that with Holmes and Moriarty". And proceeded to follow up on this idea. Young Sherlock, played by a member of the gifted Fiennes clan, and young James M, played by Mat (the second one) from Wheel of Time, have the necessary chemistry and homoerotic subtext, they hit it off famously, and at the same time the seeds for future supervillaindom in Moriarty are there. And the show does make it believable these are two young guys smarter than most others around them and on each other's level. Most importantly, though: this Sherlock Holmes is the first one in what feels like eons who is not introduced being a jerk to the people around him. (I love Elementary ! But while Elementary's Sherlock was never as extreme as Sherlock's Sherlock, he, too, started out being rude to his Watson and everyone else.) It might come with the much younger territory, but while he's cocky, he's not (yet?) abrasive, downright tender with his mother, and, lo and behold, civil to people who aren't awful to others in front of him. Otoh, it may also be that Guy Ritchie and his production team watched the last season of Sherlock and thought, hm, dysfunctional Holmes family drama, unexpected relations, we like it, we like it, but how about giving the women better parts? . So this Sherlock, too, has a childhood trauma connected to his little sister, only it is that he (and his mother, and his brother) think she has died when he refused to play with her near a river. But lo and behold, the sister (called Beatrice not Eurus or for that matter Enola) is not dead, because it was all part of a fiendish plot by Dad Holmes, played by Joseph Fiennes, so Dad Holmes could gaslight and lock up his wife in an asylum and get his paws on her fortune to fix his finances. This, btw, is probably the most Victorian aspect of this otherwise very un Victorian show. The Victorians loved sensational novel plots like this!) What's great here that Mom Holmes, Cordelia, once the fiendish plot is uncovered mid season spends the rest of the season as an active agent pursueing her villainous husband and his evil conspirators together with her sons and young Moriarty. No tragic death or permanent insanity for her! While Dad Holmes, Silas in this version, isn't an evil Dad in the traditional "you disappointment me, wretch!" mode, he's a far more insidious evil Dad in the gaslighting "you're my favourite, you're so great, no one but you understands me, it's just the two of us against the world!" mode. I would argue the show is a bit easy on the not so dead Beatrice revealed to be his sidekick, but then if Sherlock is nineteen in this show, this makes Beatrice 17, so it's more the problem of the actress looking more like a woman in her late 20s at best and thus fully responsible for her deeds. And then there's Xiao Wei/Shou'an, an escape of a C'hinese drama, on revengeful pursuit of four men who caused the deaths of her parents and most of her village. Her I had expected to either end the show dead or imprisoned, but no, she, too, makes it out of the tale alive and free, and Sherlock's attitude once he knows her reasons reminded me a bit of Kitty Winter in both Doyle and Elementary. Oh, and absolutely no one gets raped or threatened with rape. Like I said, this fluffy show with a heavy emphasis on the bromance manages to do very well by its female characters. Anyway, whether nor not this gets another season - which it doesn't really need for the story it has told - I enjoyed myself.
