Lustbox: Sherlock (and John)

Oh dear me, Irene Adler couldn’t have been more right when she said “Brainy’s the new sexy.” Though let’s be honest Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have not exactly been beaten with the ugly stick, have they?

Actually, I think what really earned Sherlock and John their place in the PLA Lustbox is their devotion to snark. Done properly, it will make me go weak at the knees and these boys go by the Official Big Book of Snark – leaving me struggling to stay upright.

Bonus points are earned for:

• their devotion to each other – Martin Freeman broke my heart in the closing scenes of The Reichenbach Fall (reviewed for you here by Inkface), though it hadn’t been left in a very serviceable state by Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance a few moments before.
• just enough residual militaryness (here and there in posture or phrase, not to mention his decisive action near the end of A Study in Pink) to remind us that John Watson was a soldier as well as a doctor (move over Irish Dr Greg)
• that coat! That hair! Those cheekbones…
• running. Lots of running (enhanced by The Coat)* *note this may just be conditioning from five years of watching Captain Jack and the Tenth Doctor running around in long coats…
• the odd bit of homoeroticism…

And yes, Sherlock gets the coats, the big brain and the cheekbones, but John is played by a man made of kittens (thank you TV Tropes) who is loyal, brave and a deadpan snarker. Separately they’re interesting, but together they are great.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to lie down on the sofa and have a little swoon while I wait for the postman to bring me the first series boxed set of Sherlock…

Posted by Jo the Hat

Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville

I'm up here, you idiot.

Sherlock invariably ends with me turning to Mr Qwerty and saying, ‘ But what about the bit where…’ in the hope that he will shine a searchlight into what looks like a large plot-hole and tarmac it over for me. In the case of The Hounds of Baskerville, in which Hound turned out to be a not very plausible acronym (after all, why would a group of dodgy scientists feel the need to give themselves an acronym, and what’s more get I’m-with-the-band t-shirts made noch?), I turned to Mr Q and said, ‘So why did the kindly bloke who was the baddie kill the posh bloke’s dad?’ And the best Mr Q could come up with was, ‘I guess he knew something bad they were doing.’ Well, yes. But what? It troubles me a bit that I don’t know for sure. Was it the paranoid gas thing (or lighter fluid as we called it when I was young)? Big slathering dogs? Fluorescent rabbits? (Actually a luminous bunny would be handy; you could nip out to its hutch at night and feed it without having to find a torch.)

Anyway despite not knowing exactly what the important-enough-to-kill-a-man thing was, I enjoyed this heavy-handed Freudian interpretation of the H of the B’s.  Or as I now think of it, ‘The Little Hans of the Baskervilles’, a not very amusing psychologist’s joke referring to Freud’s classic case in which Little Hans was scared of horses because they reminded him of his father’s penis. Or something. I graduated a while ago and the details are hazy. As indeed were Henry Knight’s of the night his father was killed – seemingly mauled by a huge slathering black beast with red eyes. Arrrrr-oooooooooh!

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia

The return of the telly (as opposed to the Robert Downey Jnr film) version of Sherlock had been hugely anticipated after the triumphantly brilliant trio of episodes a year ago. And A Scandal in Belgravia did not disappoint. Forgive me, I have to say it, it was a spanking good episode. Whipsmart in fact. Slightly more by way of raunchy undergarments and methods of restraint than I’d bargained for at 8.10pm on a Sunday evening, watching, as I was, with a nine year old, but it sparkled with fun and mischief from start to finish. Some possibly dodgy sexual politics too, more of which later, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy it.

It began where the last episode left off, at the beautifully lit swimming baths with a standoff between Moriarty and Holmes. Moriarty’s ‘bomb’ jacket is on the ground and red dot scopes from anonymous rifles are trained on the foreheads of Holmes and Watson. But the crisis gets literally called off when Irene Adler, whom Moffat has made into a dominatrix, phones Moriarty on his mobile, and he leaves.

And then we’re off, with so much to enjoy. Much playing with modern culture in a droll, witty way. Best use of a text alert ever. And Watson is writing a blog about cases, including a man dying mysteriously by a loch (the blog ‘exists’, you can see it here). The rapidly increasing number of blog fans leads to Holmes trying to hide his face from fans trying to take his picture as he leaves a theatre – grabbing a random hat from the props box. A Deerstalker, of course. And there’s a ‘real’ Twitter account for Irene’s dominatrix business (@TheWhipHand).