Just go crazy in your own time…
…
Moriarty: ‘I owe you, Sherlock’.
Cut to close-up of badly-cast actor’s babyface.
Then, just in case we didn’t catch that: ‘I. Owe. You.’
A minute later, just in case we didn’t catch that, Sherlock picks up an apple with which Moriarty has been fiddling. Knife plunged into middle of apple. Carved into apple: ‘I O U’
Ahhhh… now we get it.
The first sign that the drama’s not working is that everyone has to scream at each other. (I call this ‘the Truly Madly Deeply moment’, as per Juliet Stevenson’s snot-laden grief-porn crying scene in that movie.) It’s a sign that the filmmaker has nothing really to show us. It’s drama imitating reality TV.
In Episide 3 of Series 2, the trivial-looking lunatic Moriarty and Sherlock both spend a lot of time screaming at people, including each other. Perhaps it’s because Moriarty’s supposed to be a psychopath (a real one, not like sexily dysfunctional Sherlock): but merely being a fruitcake isn’t enough to make him interesting. The screaming certainly isn’t making him look like a criminal mastermind. And if it’s intended to make us, the viewers, see that this episode is extra-specially tense – well, it doesn’t feel tense. It just feels a bit hysterical.
The second sign is this plodding need to say everything twice. Or three times. To explain the action as it goes along. There are a few possible reasons to use this device:
- You don’t think the audience is capable of keeping up
- You’ve forgotten that you’re in charge of making sure they keep up
- You’re not quite keeping up, and like to remind yourself as you write
- You can’t think of anything else to make them say
The third sign is that the drama introduces its meta-issues through the medium of the characters talking about them. Declaring the secret frissons is in my book the most common, and the worst, way to jump the shark. Simultaneously mythmaking, and discussing your mythmaking.
I began to worry in what might even have been the first episide of Series 1. The ploddingly dull policewoman describes Holme’s (we can still call him Holmes?) character, calling him psychopathic (or something), and predicting to Watson that he’ll go beyond his petty fixation on solving crimes and commit one himself. This is very boring and unearned. I remembered it because, in this last episode, this same pedestrian character says to Watson: ‘See? I told you he was going to commit a crime’. This is of course a sign that she’s been duped by Moriarty’s evil plan to make everyone think Sherlock has committed the crime – and I admit that it’s quite nice and clever to refer back to something from over a year ago. If her delivery hadn’t been so wooden we might have taken it for the bit of dramatic devil’s-advocacy it seems meant to be, but it just reminded me how lame that dialogue was last time.
And I seem to recall that in Episode 1 the policewoman also categorised Sherlock as ‘autistic’. Why spell it out? Why not just depict it, use a sort of ASD model for the character (a very interesting twist) and then leave us to draw our conclusions or not? Trendy sanctimonious label. Plod plod.
Jumping the shark in Series 2:
- The deerstalker. One gag, he grabbed out of the costumes in a theatre & wore it for five minutes? Fine. Several conversations in each episode? It’s too central to the iconography. To let Watson tell Holmes, ‘It’s just become a Sherlock Holmes hat now’? Appallingly bad.
- Watson’s worried people will think he’s gay. One joke: fine. Conversations in each episode? The boring girlfriend in Episode whatever-it-was accusing him of being a ‘good boyfriend – to Sherlock’? No.
- Everyone talking the whole time about Sherlock’s personality. First, we already had this when the policewoman said he was autistic. More problematically, it strips the jokes that are any good of their power: as in the bit of business where he gets given thank-you presents he doesn’t want, and Holmes has to tell him to say thank you. This comes back later when Polly the lab woman tells him he could at least say thank you, and he says it – but, brilliantly, he says it as if he actually has no idea why. Once we’ve seen this we really have no need to see Mrs Hudson blustering on about ‘what he’s like’.
I don’t know what ‘Renegade 3′ was, but this quote from the page I linked to above did resonate in the current context:
“Renegade 3 didn’t so much jump the shark as repeatedly jump up and down on the shark, whilst screaming, ‘Look at me, I’m Mr. Jumpy-Sharko.’”
— Stuart Ashen, Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, “Renegade 3: The Final Chapter”
A final word about Moriarty. That punky thing, I’m sure he’s meant to be a bit on the edge, a bit irrational, more evil because out of control – but it isn’t working, guys. He reminds me more than anyone of the troublesome-kid-gone-bad, Syndrome, in The Incredibles. And then he’s a nutcase. In the final screaming scene on the rooftop – where they’re both just screaming in each other’s faces like the least effective criminal and sleuth in the world – Moriarty screams into Holme’s face that he’s a ‘doofus’. Doofus! CLANK.
It’s even a word that Syndrome would use.But The Incredibles is sixties pastiche, so that would be fine.
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