[on the segregation of the queen]
Oct. 20th, 2012 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tellitslantI wasn't particularly enthralled by the pilot episode of Elementary, the modern American Sherlock Holmes series, but the two eps since then have kind of changed my mind. It's not great, but it's certainly not awful - it's a procedural, with all the attendant good and bad qualities, and not everyone is a white dude.
So far I have two main take-away points:
1. Lucy Liu as Joan Watson is a completely awesome badass and I heart her
2. Joan Watson/Irene Adler (in order to recoup the awfulness of Adler in the BBC Sherlock)
(2a. My mental fancast for Adler appears to have become Gugu Mbatha-Raw, though I remain open to other suggestions)
So far I have two main take-away points:
1. Lucy Liu as Joan Watson is a completely awesome badass and I heart her
2. Joan Watson/Irene Adler (in order to recoup the awfulness of Adler in the BBC Sherlock)
(2a. My mental fancast for Adler appears to have become Gugu Mbatha-Raw, though I remain open to other suggestions)
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-20 01:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-21 09:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-20 03:30 pm (UTC)-J
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Date: 2012-10-20 07:27 pm (UTC)Irene in the books is awesome. She is one of the very, very very few (and I think the only one we actually see) people to soundly beat Holmes at his own game. There is no ambiguity about it, either. Basically what happens is this: Holmes has a client who asks him to get an incriminating photograph which is in Irene's possession. Holmes sets up a whole thing to find out where it is (which is a bit silly and at one point he is a witness at Irene's wedding to a dude, haha, but works in as much as Holmes knows where the photograph is). He goes past a young man who calls cheerfully, "Goodnight Mr Holmes!" Then when he goes to get the photograph, it is replaced with a picture of Irene herself and a letter explaining that the young man was her, in men's clothes, and she doesn't intend anything bad with the incriminating photograph but she is not going to stick around to be hassled, so she's gone to live a happy life with her new husband. And Holmes keeps the photograph and forever after calls Irene "the woman".
(Apparently. She's only in that one story. Oh and the 'the' is both grudgingly appreciative of her awesome and resentful, I think.)
In the show, Irene is a dominatrix who beats Holmes with a whip before he totally trounces her because she is a lesbian who is actually in love with him. I am not kidding. A bit more rambling here, and I didn't think it was quiiiiite as bad as that sounds, but it really was pretty bad.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-20 08:15 pm (UTC)Thanks for pointing me toward your old post, though; I can see how the changes would be annoying to someone who actually knows the original versions of the stories!
-J
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Date: 2012-10-20 08:53 pm (UTC)(And oh god I hate the 'Sherlocked' pun! And you know me, I looove puns.)
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Date: 2012-10-21 09:00 am (UTC)I found it far, far too facile that we got the deliberate play on Adler as "the woman who beat Holmes" being translated into "haha, she beat him with a whip, haha." I HATED that the end of the episode was Adler needed tobe SAVED by Holmes whereas in the original she outsmarted him. And while I like the idea of having fluid sexualities on screen - that she was a lesbian but did have an inexplicable attraction to Holmes - within the context of the way she was set up to be the damsel in distress and the further context of all these changes from the original, I found that too to be extremely problematic.
(...things I ended up ranting about when I taught on gender and sexuality last term, haha)
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Date: 2012-10-21 01:41 pm (UTC)-J
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Date: 2012-10-20 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-20 04:45 pm (UTC)