Elementary 1.22

[selenak]

Only one more episode before the season is concluded. I'm both looking forward and dreading the finale, because I've grown to love the show so much, and going on for months without new adventures with this Watson and Holmes is going to be cruel.




Inevitably, re: end twist: it was guessable from the moment M established M's modus operandi for killing, that Irene was identified by her blood on the crime scene but that her actual body was never found. But I still would have prefered not knowing that Natalie Dormer was cast as Irene which confirmed it, and now I'm shutting up about this for good.

Now, you wouldn't guess it from 99% of recent Holmes adaptions featuring the woman, but Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia has a) absolutely nothing to do with Moriarty, who doesn't show up in Doyle canon until much later, after her one and only appearance, and b) at no point has a love affair with Sherlock Holmes. (This statement brought to you by still being irritated from reading someone's review of M which confidently stated Moriarty using Irene as a tool was Doyle canon. No, it isn't, and the fact both Ritchie's films and the BBC Sherlock included this doesn't make it so. This is why I'm hoping for either Irene-AS-Moriarty, which at least hasn't been done yet and would work with everything established about Elementary's Moriarty so far (the voice on the phone was clearly electronically altered anyway), or for Irene having done something like the equivalent of what ACD's Holmes is revealed to have done in The Empty House (i.e. the story in which Doyle conceded defeat to fannish demands and resurrected Sherlock Holmes, revealing he hadn't died in the Reichenbach Falls after all), i.e. faked her death and let Holmes believe she died just as Doyle's Holmes let Watson believe it, but to fight Moriarty, not to help him. This also hasn't been done before, but it would be tricky to explain just how Moriarty knew where she'd be in if he's someone else and she's not in league with him. Otoh, Holmes and Watson did find her in a literally empty house, which, given that the episode has Holmes quote the two opening sentences of Scandal in Bohemia adapted to the third person (i.e. "To me, she was always THE Woman" instead of "To Sherlock Holmes, she was always THE Woman"), isn't impossible to be a pun on Doyle's most famous dead character isn't dead story.

Either possibility (i.e. Irene-as-Moriarty, or Irene-faked-death-to-fight-Moriarty-and-his-network), however, would be much more satisfying to me than yet another itteration of Irene-as-Moriarty's-tool. Either would fit with this particular show and its female Watson as another genderbending take on Doyle canon. So here is hoping, until next week, and if you spoil me I will turn into a supervillain myself and magically ensure your least favourite pairing becomes the dominant one in all your fandoms. So there. :)

Back to the actual episode. Johnny Lee Miller delivered a powerhouse performance throughout, culminating of course in the last scene and his face when realising, from the moment Holmes sees the paintings, that Irene is alive and all that could mean. Incidentally, Irene is a painter/art historian/possibly art forger instead of an opera singer (her original Doyle profession) is a twist I really liked. Not least because a successfull opera singer would have been far too well known facially to successfully fake her death without major plastic surgery. Someone whose job it is to restore Renaissance paintings, otoh, would not be. Also, if they go the Irene-as-Moriarty road, the fact her job took her to many places world wide as Sherlock mentions would make for an excellent cover story for a criminal master mind. Oh, and it gives Holmes' responses in the episode where they deal with stolen paintings and the fact he kept one for the night before bringing it back yet another layer.

The Holmes and Watson partnership in motion is as wonderful to observe as ever. By now, when Joan asks him what Irene was like as a person, she doesn't get any bullshit in return but an honest reply. And they don't even have to talk about her taping Moriarty's calls, she does it instinctively. And puts it plus the whole "modern way of tracking someone is through their cell phone" to creative use. I love you, Joan. Gregson coming up with a sober companion job offer for her as he's worried doesn't come out of the blue for me if you consider that even without knowing about Moriarty's phone calls, in the previous episode Gregson saw how things went down with Moran and Gottlieb and thus knew the mysterious man Sherlock was obsessed with was active in New York. All the same, it's paternalistic, and I appreciate that the script lets Joan immediately call him on it with the "I'm a cop, I have a gun" - "And a penis" exchange. And best of all, that she and Holmes talk about the possibility of Moriarty coming after her, that they discuss it. (All too many films and tv shows rely on this "but zomg, who'd have thought the villain could come after the friend/girlfriend/partner of the hero instead of the hero in order to hurt him?" gambit.)

Case of the week: parallels to Holmes are obvious, and meant to be on a Watsonian (ha!) level as well as a Doylist one, since Moriarty sicced Holmes on the case specifically to make this point. Though there might be more in store, since we didn't yet find out who actually killed Leah Sutter. I also note that what Mrs. Sutter did - finding her husband someone to kill for the murder of his sister in order to give him peace, despite the fact that Wallace wasn't actually the culprit - is figured out by Joan because the episode parallels and contrasts her to Mrs. Sutter as much as it does Sherlock to Sutter. Joan, too, wants Sherlock to find peace: but not at the expense of other people's lives, that's where she always draws the line, and that makes her such a great character, and the relationship a good one. Similarly, Sherlock has been where Sutter was and almost went through with revenge violence & killing, and the temptation is still there, but in his case realising he had the wrong target in time kept him from committing murder. Sutter did not realise, which doesn't make him a worse man, or Holmes a better one, which is one reason why Holmes gives him the news in person, I think.

Now the one week torture of waiting begins. *looks at the clock*

Comments

[selenak]

Irene's a client, not a henchperson.

You're right that there is a difference. However, coming on the heels of the first Ritchie film (which had its Moriarty using Irene) and in a season that builds up to the Sherlock-Moriarty confrontation from Reichenbach, it still inevitably puts Irene in a context where to a lot of people unfamiliar with the ACD canon, if the internet is remotely representative, the impression is created that she's at least some subordinate of Moriarty's. I'm sure this was not intended by Moffat & Gatiss either for Scandal in Belgravia specifically or generally; it's just an unfortunately side effect. Which was all my observation intended to remark on.

(I actually liked Scandal in Belgravia - and the Irene in it - far more than most non-Sherlock fans seem to have done, as you'll see in my review at the time.)

[legionseagle]

Fair point.

Personally, I'm dying for a Sherlock adaptation which treats Irene in a manner which really is true to ACD-canon, namely as a minor and not very interesting female client woman encountered during a case, whose brief interaction with Holmes Watson chooses to exaggerate wildly, probably because he's co-opted her as an involuntary beard and he has to explain why no other woman could ever measure up, notwithstanding that her great defeat of Holmes consists of getting married and leaving town in a hurry once she spots he's taken the case.

[rembrandtswife]

*sporfle*

This is an idea whose time has come, most definitely.

[legionseagle]

In terms of equal opportunities, of course, Moriarty's also a character whose appearance in canon is much more restricted than fanon - and I'm including professional fanon in this - would justify, too. But every time I read A Scandal in Bohemia I just think, "Where is Watson getting this stuff from?" I mean, he goes on about Holmes always sneering about the weakness of the female intellect, when Holmes has, in the previous book, observed about Watson's own wife "She would have done well in our line."

[rembrandtswife]

You were the first person to point out to me that "A Scandal in Bohemia" is the first of the SH short stories, and that what Watson says about Holmes's attitudes toward women, throughout the canon, is more often than not totally unreliable. *g* Having just finished The Case-Book and thus read all the stories for the first time, I've been paying particular attention to Holmes's treatment of the fairer sex. I've concluded that what baffles Watson is that Holmes really doesn't treat women any differently than he treats men. He recognizes that they have weaknesses, risks, possible dangers that men aren't subject to, but on the whole he evaluates their characters on the same basis as he evaluates a man's. Is a woman resourceful on her own behalf? Does she use whatever intelligence she's got? Then she has his respect.