SHERLOCK: Punch me in the face.
JOHN: Punch you?
SHERLOCK: Yes, punch me in the face, didn’t you hear me?
JOHN: I always hear punch me in the face when you’re speaking, but it’s usually subtext.
Shit that is not sexist re: Irene’s portrayal in Sherlock:
- She is a sexual person
- She is a sex worker
- She is gay/a lesbian
- She is not 100% perfect 100% of the time
- She does not do literally every single thing on her own
Shit that is just generally not automatically sexist:
- A woman losing
- A woman needing to be helped/saved
- A woman being emotional, vulnerable, etc.
Shit that is problematic, if not downright sexist, re: Irene’s portrayal in Sherlock:
- The fact that she is sexualised in a way that specifically appeals to straight male fantasies when lesbians have a long history of being exploited thus in the media
- The fact that this is used to reinforce the harmful stereotype that lesbians ‘just need the right man’
- The fact that the way she was shown as being flawed was specifically set up to make her lose to a man in a way that reflects common stereotypes about women, i.e. they are more emotionally vulnerable than men, basically reinforcing the idea that traditional femininity = weak
- The fact that Moffat and co. went out of their way to add Irene being saved into a narrative where, originally, she needed no help, in a media which tends to need women to be saved disproportionately to men
- The fact that, again, they went out of their way to change it from a woman winning to a woman losing in a society where dudes typically end up the best off at the end of stories
Context, people. It’s all about context. If SCAN were a different story, then perhaps it wouldn’t have been the problem it is. But SCAN is a story about one thing, and ASiB a story about another, and the discrepancy between what Moffat read and what he wrote is the real issue tbqh.
YES. This is a great summation of the problems I had with this episode.
In the original Scandal in Bohemia, it is made quite clear that Holmes does not consider Irene Adler “The Woman” because he loves her, or even because he cares for her in any real way. She is The Woman because she beat him. She beat him, taunted him, and got away scott free to live out her life how she wanted, in a story written in freakin’ 1891. That is the POINT of Irene Adler.
And in Scandal in Belgravia, Irene Adler is only able to outsmart Holmes because Moriarty gave her the Cliffs Notes, and she STILL loses because of her lady!feelings, and finally she needs to be rescued (from the scary foreign-y foreigners, I might add) by Sherlock.
Yeah, that’s bullshit. That’s bullshit, and it’s NOT THE POINT of The Woman.
But then, when has Moffat EVER gotten the point of female agency?
A monograph on the chronology of A Scandal in Belgravia and the problem of dating via John’s blog. (Over-analysis, ahoy!)
TOGAS IS A NERD AND IS MADE OUT OF SHINY INTELLIGENT THINGS
Basically a longer version of that rant I had a couple days ago.
Also, I propose the theory that season 1 happened ‘in the future’ in 2011 rather than 2010, since John’s blog gave a happy New Year for 2012. We know Sherlock and John only knew each other for 18 months before John goes back to his therapist, so it can’t have been 3 years rather than 2 since they met.
Still irked about A Scandal in Belgravia and it’s not even because of Irene this time.
I want to know where the original fucking script is. There’s too much of a time gap for that to be the first product. Either Moffat fucked up or Lidster did because the timelines don’t match.
Irene says she gave Sherlock months to crack her code, but there was no discernible time skip between the time Sherlock got the phone to when she was in his room. There was roughly a week’s difference between her death on Christmas and her reappearance, since she was alive on New Year’s and Sherlock knew that. That’s confirmed by John’s blog (which, lol… so much for secrecy, huh?) which puts her return on the 31st of December. The unofficial transcript says there’s a ‘several month’ gap between the lab scene where Sherlock X-rayed the phone and the time he found Irene, but that doesn’t really add up…
John’s blog has Sherlock going to St Bart’s on New Year’s. His last comment on that post says ‘I think he’s more Sherlock’s fan than mine. Got to go. He wants me to look up some flight details.’ Presumably, this is when John looked up the information about flight 747 after Sherlock cracked the code and before Irene’s big reveal. It’s also dated on the 1st of January.
It is known that there was a two month gap between Mycroft meeting with John at the cafe and when Sherlock saved Irene in Karachi. John dated his post about Irene going into witness protection on the 12th of March, so that’s a reasonable time gap between these two events.
Which brings up the question: What the hell happened during the episode?!?!
We have Irene saying she gave Sherlock months to crack the code, when the information says there was only a week. Also, Sherlock fucking demolished that CIA agent who attacked Mrs Hudson on New Year’s eve, but he’s raring to go and making snide comments at Sherlock the next day without a scratch?
So what the fuck happened? Did Joe just fuck up the dates on the blog…? Or did Moffat lose track of time because he was too busy trying to prove he was clever?
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I kept replaying this part. John’s head and neck and his face and…… Why sexy even in this horrible situation.
oh look, the text is missing from the last gif.
sherlock: “Yes, when I said ‘every possible variant’, I meant ‘every possible variant’. Though, John made me beg three times, but that’s his army training for you.”
It will never cease to amaze me how people don’t see Irene missed the very point of getting Sherlock’s attention, even after she had got it. PRAISE HIM, WOMAN!!! HE’S BEGGING FOR IT!! He is actually TELLING YOU what to do, and you still don’t see it and insist with the sexually agressive woman who just elicited a disdaiful look from the man, the sort of look an unwanted dog gets at a park when he goes sniffing the wrong person.
oh, moffat moffat what am i supposed to do with you.
yeah, i mean, the thing i found most striking about the sherlock/irene interactions in ASiB was how unmoved sherlock was. the first time he stopped being utterly dismissive of her was on the plane. (i think her drugging and cropping him was, to him, no more a victory over him than the golem getting him in a headlock. it was a physical fight and she played dirty, i don’t think that touches sherlock’s core sense of self. which, y’know, makes the whole “the woman who beat you” read to me like irene has no fucking clue how he works.)
anyway. i run a version of ASiB in my head where irene is really frighteningly intelligent about people, and while sherlock’s attempting to deduce her, she’s absolutely ripping through every nuance of every glance between him and john, and she takes a couple of minutes to extract and render and recreate everything about john that makes john so acceptable to sherlock, with the added zest of letting sherlock know that irene wouldn’t just run with him and tell him he was brilliant, she would tell him he was brilliant and then be brilliant with him. sherlock outright tells her “stop boring me” at the beginning of the deduction by the stream scene; but at the end of that scene, she’s the one who’s obviously hooked, not him. gah. it’s so frustrating to me, because i don’t even ship sherlock and irene, but she’s still the only woman who ever stopped him in his tracks, and they’re not showing me any explanation for that beyond her constant, aggressive flaunting of her sexual availability, which he pretty obviously isn’t interested in.
for me, the most telling thing about ASiB is sherlock’s assumption that irene’s physical response to him by the fire is romantic sentiment. i know a lot of people didn’t like the idea that irene was ‘so in love with him’ that she used his name as her passcode - but i don’t see it as that at all. sherlock himself says she was ‘having too much fun’. i think irene used his name as a joke, a mocking challenge - something so simple that the great sherlock holmes couldn’t figure out - his own fucking name. and (i don’t think this is actually what the writers meant, but) i love the idea that sherlock, brilliant, beautiful, innocent, ignorant sherlock really believes that when a woman’s eyes dilate and her skin flushes and her pulse picks up, that means she’s in love with you. the possibility that she might simply be physically attracted to him doesn’t seem to be on his radar.
anyhow. i felt that overall the episode looked absolutely beautiful, but i didn’t feel the script did irene or lara any favors, she was left stringing together scenes that had no continuity of emotion or motivation or even characterization, which was a bit of a let down.
GAWD, John. GAWD.
I tweeted Gatiss and Moffat about this, but they didn’t respond. Whoever is writing the supplemental canon has no idea what they’re doing, seriously. Referencing Google+ weeks before it exists, for example. Implying that Irene turns up in their flat on January 1st (flight details?), despite an obvious time skip of multiple months (due to environment and Irene’s own dialogue). Christ almighty.
This seems to be one of challenges of having four different writers shaping the entire universe at once, rather than one or two. I wonder how often the four of them met to compare scripts (or is there one crewperson responsible for checking on all in-universe and real-world continuity?).
#you call it sexism i call it returning a favour
^^^ THIS.
Even it was probably not intended, Irene saved Sherlock’s life… So Sherlock did the same for her, even though she works with Moriarty.
As simple as that. They are meant for each other, in a way.
While I can appreciate the basic idea linking these two sequences (Character A saves Character B’s life at the beginning of a story, Character B saves Character A’s life at the end of it), the idea of returning a favor implies that you know someone did something good for you in the first place.
Nowhere in BELG is it stated or shown on screen either by Sherlock or anyone else that Sherlock knows that Moriarty was on the phone with Irene at the end of the pool scene. Yes, Irene says in front of Sherlock that she had help from Jim, but she never specifies whether Jim contacted her first or vice versa, never specifies a time frame, nor the method of contact.
Sherlock may have wanted to help Irene because he cared about her for whatever reason, but not because he wanted to pay her back for saving his life in the beginning (because we’re never shown or told that he knew about it in the first place).
