APPARENTLY Sherlock‘s Season 3 finale, “His Last Vow”, has achieved more acclaim than any other episode in the show’s run, & is set to make Steven Moffat the most successful writer in TV history. It’s a shame, because it was rubbish, a huge pile of illogical twists explaining, or failing to explain, other illogical twists. A major character is revealed not to be what they seem, in a way that has no buildup & adds nothing to their character; a new villain is introduced, one who the show simply informs us is the nastiest threat Holmes & Watson have faced so far (he isn’t; Moriarty is); several things nearly happen then don’t; & Sherlock yet again does something unforgivable to get his own way, which the show brushes over pretty quickly. It’s clear that Steven Moffat wrote this chaotic sprawl of a finale not as something satisfying & character-drived, that would stand up to repeated viewings, but as a sort of summer blockbuster, a rollercoaster ride of thrills & unexpected chills. & obviously, he succeeded, looking at Sherlock‘s ratings & its reviews. But it felt somehow like an unsatisfying episode, & I think it’s because you simply can’t raise the stakes continually.
The Sherlock Holmes novels & stories generally have very low stakes, & they’re one of the most successful bodies of work in all literature, one of the most influential creations in fiction. They’re just mysteries, very wellconstructed mysteries. There isn’t even always a murder in Sherlock Holmes stories, & the worst possible outcome is usually that Holmes would have failed. He was battling against frustration & boredom. Sometimes he was in danger of being killed, & in “The Final Problem” & “The Adventure of the Empty House”, which are as dramatic as the Holmes stories get, he was in danger of being killed and failing to stop criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty & his gang. I like these low stakes. Mystery, as a genre, requires its protagonist not to be in immediate peril; they need time to make deductions, follow leads, & so on. It’s telling that only “A Study in Pink”, Sherlock‘s first episode, is a genuine mystery. Ever since, Moffat & Gatiss have raised the stakes so continually that “The Sign of Three”, wherein Holmes must write a speech for Watson’s wedding, felt like a relief, despite some irritatingly wacky sitcomisms. There have been so many twists & masterminds & terrorist cells & state secrets & scandals that would rock the nation that Sherlock now feels more like James Bond. But it’s an unsatisfying sort of Bond because those movies never did Sherlock‘s superficial trick of artificially creating drama by telling us things have never been this deadly; for Bond, it’s all in a day’s work.
Sherlock‘s stakeraising is probably more indebted to American television dramas, the expensive & backstory-laden sort that the last decade produced so many of. Traditionally, television was premise-based, like a sitcom, so that viewers could miss several episodes – in an age without DVD, iPlayer or Netflix – & still enjoy the show. So Number 6 tried to escape, & failed, in every episode of The Prisoner, & it was impossible for viewers to fall behind. But since there’s simply no reason for a modern television viewer to ever miss an episode, shows are now more free to engage in complex plots without fear of alienating audiences, & while the result has been a golden age which has produced some of the best television in history, it has, on the other hand, created something of a demand for constant twists & surprises, because the characters simply having a normal, everyday adventure just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s like needing harder drugs.
& one of the shows hit hardest by this glossy American highstakesism is Doctor Who. In the show’s classic period, The Doctor could barely control his TARDIS & consequently just drifted through time & space, meeting people, getting into scrapes. It was a brilliant take on the classic Walking the Earth trope, & gave the show almost unlimited scope: if the producers felt like doing a Western, they could just do a Western. Steven Moffat’s time as showrunner, however, has seen a focus on mysteries, arcs, twists, & all of the hyperdramatic elements that have sucked the life from Sherlock. Because plot isn’t really what makes stories charming, or sad, or exciting, or addictive: it’s characters. Writers should use plot to get the most from their characters, but Moffat has it backwards: he’s happy to sacrifice a character’s integrity for the sake of a big, shocking TV moment. & such shocking moments, done well, can make for fantastic television. But when every single episode purports to be The Doctor’s most dramatic adventure yet, then nothing feels dramatic. As Nigel Tufnel puts it in This Is Spın̈al Tap, “You see, most – most blokes are going to be playing on 10. You’re on 10, here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up. You’re on 10 on your guitar. Where can you go from there?” Nigel Tufnel’s solution, of course, was to go to 11. It seems Moffat thinks he can do the same. It’s a shame, because he’s clearly a total fanboy of Doctor Who & Sherlock Holmes, but he has epitomised Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, & killed the thing he loves.
Fact, Conjecture, & Occasional Jokes 