Sherlock: The Six Thatchers

Warning: spoilers. Dear lord if you haven’t seen The Six Thatchers then don’t read on because you will be spoiled so hard I’m not even joking.

Seeing Sherlock back in action again after so long has made me realise how much the show has changed since it began in 2010. When Benedict Cumberbatch’s black, moppy-haired iteration of Sherlock Holmes first appeared on television, Sherlock was more like the conventional adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, albeit with a generous stretch of artistic licence taken with Conan Doyle’s stories and a helping of character drama to spice things up, but to a great extent the show revolved around the cases, the mysteries, and Sherlock’s problem-solving. Watching Cumberbatch’s captivating Holmes solve mysteries was the heart of the show, and the formula worked excellently. It’s what drew the audiences in and made the show the cult phenomenon it is today. Hell, it’s what made Benedict Cumberbatch the A-list Hollywood actor he is today.

Now into its fourth series, nearly seven years running, The Six Thatchers is a testament to how far the show has moved away from the hard mystery/crime genre in the direction of character drama. Although mystery-solving is still the essence and the beating heart of Sherlock, it feels like the show is now moving into different artistic territory. Because The Six Thatchers was, basically, an episode about Mary Watson. As far we can tell, it was an episode written and produced for the sole purpose of moving along the character drama—in a pretty radical way, as the final shocking scenes demonstrated. There was still plenty of juicy mystery and problem-solving in this episode, but it was for the overriding purpose of the character drama. From what it looks like, this episode was for the sole purpose of moving all the characters to a new place in their relationships with each other.

I’m not necessarily criticising. As much as we fans complain that Sherlock takes forever to make and we only get three episodes every two years, we have to remember that they’re fairly long episodes—they’re practically movies, and the Sherlock team are practically making three movies every two years. But consider if Sherlock just stuck to the Series 1-and-2 style hard mystery-solving formula. I think it’d actually get old. It’d be like making twelve of the Robert Downey, Jr. Sherlock Holmes films in the course of seven years without altering the formula. The hardcore fans would love it, but a lot of the audience would get bored after a while. It’s basically the reason I stopped watching The Big Bang Theory. But in Sherlock‘s case, the character drama has almost dwarfed the mystery aspect of the show for much of the fandom. Some fans (you know who you are) seem to think Sherlock’s love life is the main point of the show. That’s a testament to the exceptional character writing on this show, not to mention the exceptional acting. But, for this fan, although I welcome playing up the character drama as a necessary and inevitable consequence of the narrative’s progression, I’d still like to see Sherlock keep a firm foothold in its roots. There should be at least one hard mystery episode per series, and I’m hoping that’s what we’ll be seeing tonight in The Lying Detective.

Otherwise, The Six Thatchers was a good episode, well made, although—and you can probably tell by my long discussion about character drama—I thought it was something of a waste to spend a whole episode dedicated to killing off Mary Watson. I think they almost tried to do too much with this episode: they were trying to bring Sherlock back in a big way as well as elaborate on Mary’s backstory, kill Mary off and setup the necessary new character dynamics as a consequence of that event, and establish the Moriarty arc, even if only in anticipation. It did a lot, and the result, I think, was a remarkably well pieced-together production for how much it was trying to do; but, for me, it still fell a bit flat. Mary’s shocking death and the character fallout in consequence notwithstanding, this episode was one of the poorer in the show so far, in my opinion.

For what it’s worth, I think what the writers were trying to accomplish narratively in this episode could have been carried out better if they played it as a regular mystery episode (another A Study in Pink or A Scandal in Belgravia type episode), but unexpectedly killed off Mary at the end—in the same way, with Mary saving Sherlock’s life. It would have come as a bigger shock (with the way it was done, I half saw it coming and wasn’t that shocked as a consequence), and it still would have worked equally as well to bring Sherlock’s hubris crashing down on him. The details about Mary’s backstory could always have been seeded in in a later episode.

But all that said, I think the character writing in this episode was very good—especially the writing of Sherlock. The way the ending was played, Sherlock’s overconfidence getting the better of him, only for his inflated hubris to be punctured in the most dramatic way possible—like a smashing of the Tower of Babel moment—was brilliant writing. It shows that it’s not just all fun and games on this show, that being Sherlock Holmes, Britain’s favourite hat-wearing detective, isn’t a lark, it’s fantastically dangerous and positively lethal to the people around him. It shows that there are consequences on this show, something John Watson seems to be coming to terms with, only too late. Seeing Sherlock visibly deflate in disbelief and humiliation over Mary’s corpse was almost as painful as watching John literally moaning with grief. If Gatiss and Moffat keep up the good work, it looks like the arrogant, superior Sherlock is gone. It’s getting interesting.

Thoughts on: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

In this desperate marathon of mine through all of New Who I’m beginning to get into the episodes with which I’m less familiar. I have only fuzzy memories of most of Series 7, having only seen them the one time when they were first broadcast three years ago. I especially had little recollection of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I was expecting a camp, extravagant, self-consciously ridiculous romp, forty-five minutes of heartily entertaining nonsense. By and large, that was precisely what we got: apart from the titular dinosaurs on the titular spaceship, there was Queen Nefertiti, Mitchell and Webb robots, a furious race against the clock, the Doctor riding a triceratops, and Mr Weasley. It all made for what I think is possibly the most fun we’ve ever had on Doctor Who. But what we also got was a very sober story about a truly loathsome man and what he made the Doctor do. For all its fun extravagance and larking about, this episode delved into some uncharacteristically dark themes, which makes it into something more than just a fun romp in my eyes.

The Doctor for some reason decides he needs a “gang” to tackle this conundrum, à la Scooby Doo, and we’re treated to amusing scenes of the Doctor conscripting his ace team from across time and space: he snatches a lusty Queen Nefertiti from ancient Egypt, Inspector Lestrade an Edwardian explorer called Riddell from the African plains in 1902, and, of course, Amy and Rory, along with a bewildered Mr Weasley Rory’s dad. The characters are all wonderful and add immensely to the enjoyableness of the episode. “Neffy” and Riddell are a joy to watch together, and their budding romance is too much for the screen. “You clearly need a man of action and excitement. One with a very large weapon.” Yowza. They made amusing “companions” to Amy, and it was fun seeing Amy have to deal with what the Doctor deals with from his companions.

Amy and Rory are surprisingly useful, Amy, in the Doctor’s absence, putting into practice what she’s learned from all her experience travelling with the Doctor (“press buttons”), and Rory coming across very clever and competent. He’s even quite badass when he’s enjoining the poncey robots to brush up their etiquette and threatening death by fiery liquefaction. Rory looked especially good next to his hapless, baffled father, although Brian, too, eventually got into the swing of things with his trowel and golf ball related initiative. There was an instance of foreboding foreshadowing where the Doctor tries to soothe Amy’s anxieties about his visiting her less often, promising “You’ll be there to the end of me.” To which Amy unthinkingly rejoins “Or vice versa.” The stupefied look on the Doctor’s face just about summed up the appropriate response to that moment. The message: oh, cripes, they’re going to die.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a genuinely hateful villain on Doctor Who, someone whom you have no qualms about despising unreservedly. Solomon, played to perfection by David Bradley, was entirely despicable, and it was obvious the show was inviting the audience to loathe him as much as the Doctor evidently did by showing Solomon committing various enormities such as threatening to kill Brian, his cruel murder of the triceratops, and his kidnapping and, in a particularly grisly line of dialogue, thinly-veiled threat to rape Nefertiti. We were made to hate Solomon to soften the shock of watching the Doctor effectively murder him by cruelly leaving him to die in his ship. The Doctor was quite scary in his last words to Solomon, “Did the Silurians beg you to stop? Look, Solomon. The missiles. See them shine? See how valuable they are. And they’re all yours. Enjoy your bounty.” The Doctor was cold and remorseless about sending a man to his death. I found that very confronting when I saw it originally. It was probably the one thing about this episode I remembered vividly three years later. Solomon was despicable, true, but what happened to the “man who never would”? We’re seeing an entirely different side to the Doctor’s character here, and it’s exhilarating. This builds effectively not only on the previous episode’s portrayal of the Doctor’s questionable morality, but also on the theme embarked upon at the end of Series 6 about the Doctor not being a hero.

Rating: 9/10.