Sherlock (season two)
Summary:
Following last season’s harrowing cliff-hanger, Sherlock (with John in tow)
tackle three more mysteries, based and expanded upon the original Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle canon, but with Moriarty afoot there might be some things that even
Sherlock cannot work out in time.
The
Good: I'm not fond of villains like Moriarty, I like them to have more of a motive than what boils down to "I was bored" but here he was just so insane underneath it all, although his last scenes of the season felt a bit contrived, like Moffat and Gatniss had been written into a corner and didn't have a really good way to get out. All of the mysteries were interesting and stayed true to the spirit of the original stories and the new elements worked in well (especially in the case of the Baskervilles) and Sherlock's explanations for the cases make enough sense to be plausible. In short, if you liked the first season (and if you haven't you really shouldn't watch this one first) you'll enjoy this one quite well.
The
Bad: While Sherlock
is far from the first mystery series to have this problem it was tiresome after
a while to see just how dumb and incompetent everyone around Sherlock is and
they don’t even seem stupid by comparison, it really seems like the London
police force has exceedingly low standards for general intelligence among it’s
employees*. I had issues with Irene Adler as well, mainly
since she deviated so much from the original canon (where she was a clever and
quick thinking woman who was the one person ever to catch Holmes off guard,
here whatever cleverness she has is buried under UST with Sherlock^) and I’m also tired of the “sexually confident women can wear skimpy
clothes because they’re that happy with themselves!” idea, it just rings like a
hollow excuse for fanservice and that was supposed to be a plot point early on.
The
Audio: This may be just me but whenever I hear one of
the main themes played in Sherlock I
always feel as if it’s drawing inspiration from other Sherlock Holmes
adaptations. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all, and it’s possible that I’ve
seen so many series I’m trying to see connections that aren’t there (by my own
count I’ve seen roughly 60 hours of Sherlock Holmes tv series/movies), but the
music for this series has always seemed like a perfect and seamless fit here.
The
Visuals: The show has created a very distinct looking
style of cinematography with many quick shots, overlaid with text to give the
viewer insight into Sherlock’s methods, often in close-up with a very shallow
depth of focus, combined with some tilt-shift shots of London every now and then
as transition shots, which serves to re-emphasis that Sherlock has a strange
mind that sees the world in odd ways. As I believe I mentioned last time, I’ve
seen a few of these quirks appear in various Doctor Who episodes but never with the frequency that they are seen
here and they do keep the show interesting in a unique manner.
One thing that does puzzle me is that I saw a lot of praise for Molly online once the show finished it's British run and I'm not entirely sure why. People mentioned a speech of hers and I'm wondering if that was part of the 8 minutes that were cut, she did have a speech but it just didn't seem, well, strong enough to merit that much discussion I saw. My mom and I feel like a scene with her was also cut for a few other, spoilery, reasons, if anyone has a list of the cuts made to the US version (for any of the episodes) please share since I would love to know.
*I feel like I’ve had this problem with Moffat’s work before too, he
loves to build up his main characters but doesn’t quite seem how to flesh out
the side characters as well
^funny
enough I don’t have a problem with Sherlock being interested in her, mainly
because being asexual does not mean you can’t have romantic feelings for
someone and Mycroft says point blank in that episode that Sherlock was a
romantic. Holmes originally was certainly both asexual and aromantic but,
possibly this is after seeing the two recent American Sherlock Holmes films and
how they played with Irene Adler I’m willing to give the series a pass on that
point
