BBC Sherlock Fan Forum - Serving Sherlockians since February 2012 » Why the fear of intelligence?

Liberty · February 13, 2017 6:09 pm

I didn't say that he was cold, I said that it "seems" cold (in answer to Susi's point), but he could still be doing it for the greater good. He uses Sherlock too, for similar reasons - they are both incredibly good at what they do (Mary/Agra too, come to think of it). I was saying that out of the two of them, Sherlock is the one who seems most motivated to save humanity, but Mycroft could also be construed as having the same motivations.

besleybean · February 13, 2017 6:10 pm

I think so, at least.

Kae Em · February 13, 2017 9:36 pm

Oh, then it seems we all agree

Liberty · February 13, 2017 9:56 pm

Yes, and I have to admit that I just love "soft" Mycroft in TFP!

besleybean · February 13, 2017 9:58 pm

Me too.
All the characters develop well, but he is one of the most pleasing.

Kae Em · February 13, 2017 10:09 pm

Me, too. Anyway I love all the glimpses of "soft" Mycroft we got throughout the series ("your loss would break my heart" / "oh Sherlock, what have you done" / "look after him, please!", just to mention the most obvious ones. Or even the one in aSiP where he admits to John that he constantly worries about Sherlock. Or the one in TBB where he forbids John to go out with the boring teacher - what was her name? Janette? - and orderes him to stay with Sherlock because it's a danger night. But I'm drifting off topic, sorry).

besleybean · February 14, 2017 6:30 am

Drift away, it's lovely...

Liberty · February 14, 2017 8:04 am

Even his introduction, the lengths he goes to with that elaborate setup and assessment of John, just to protect Sherlock!

besleybean · February 14, 2017 5:48 pm

Quite so.

Kittyhawk · October 4, 2017 10:37 am

nakahara wrote:
Throughout the whole show, intelligence was depicted as something dangerous and intelligent protagonists as criminal, predatory, unpleasant, unreliable, anti-social individuals. Even Sherlock´s intelligence was often introduced as something abnormal and unstabile, more a nuisance than an actual help to people.

Not once was intelligence depicted as something that saves lives or generally makes people´s life easier.

With Eurus, this theme was emphasised even more. She is more intelligent than Newton, but can´t use that immense mental power for anything better than murders and elaborate torture of people.

And I ask myself - why? Why is this show so afraid of intelligence, to the extent that it literally makes it into something pathological?

Funny, that's exactly what I thought when I watched TFP - especially when it ended with Sherlock being declared "a good man" after he had (hopefully only temporarily) destroyed his genius with drugs. It's as if for Mofftiss "evil" and "genius" were permanently connected.

Vhanja cites Sherlock and Mycroft as "good" geniuses - but with Sherlock the "good" part is as debatable (Donovan was half right with her prediction in SiP, not to mention Baskerville and the Tube) as is the "genius" part in season 4 (or even HLV - well, hospital is bad for the brain) and as for Mycroft - all we have is his word for being a genius! I just went through the transcripts, and we don't ever see him do anything very clever. He has done quite a few stupid things, though, and we do know that he's not knowledgeable about wine or animal fibres... Actually, I think he was always "the clever one" simply because he was 7 years older than Sherlock - so of course he would know more and be ahead of him!

As for why the show is so afraid of intelligence - I don't really know. But I suspect that dumbed down products sell better - it's a fact that the BBC cut total screen time by 25 % after seeing the much more intelligent Sherlock in the unaired pilot...

besleybean · October 4, 2017 12:27 pm

That's one of the things I like best about BBC Sherlock, its intelligence.
This is also why I feel a tad disappointed when they go for what I consider to be lazy TV: weddings, baptisms etc...
But everything they do, they always do well.

Kittyhawk · October 6, 2017 11:38 am

besleybean wrote:
That's one of the things I like best about BBC Sherlock, its intelligence.
.....

How exactly do you mean that? Because I see very little intelligence in the stories. Yes, the show is very-well filmed - I think everybody agrees that the production values are great. The actors are fabulous, the special-effects people, director and editor do a wonderful job (does anybody know how much of the final product is due to whom? Are the camera angles and cuts specified in the script?)

But as for what the characters do and say - good grief, I wanted to throw things at the screen right from the beginning of the first show! In the 21st century you don't beat a corpse to determine post-mortem bruising - everything you'd want to know is in books on forensic medecine, in medical databases or on the internet. And how stupid does one have to be to determine "freshness" from the arrival time in the morgue (the mouldy-green body I've seen on the slab didn't grow that way in a morgue drawer)? That "killed" Molly Hooper for me right there and then... And which kind of idiot therapist would recommend a PTSD sufferer to write a blog? A private diary, yes. But making ones life and suffering public and exposing oneself to all the hate and craziness out there?

Obviously I could go on like that for ages and through all the episodes, but equally obviously nobody would want to read it.

For me the show's beautiful look is like inspired interior decoration in a house without solid foundations with cracking walls. Which I find incredibly sad, because it could be so much better...

----------

Getting back to "intelligence": I also find that the writers have a very strange idea of what constitues genius, or how it's "made". For me, genius is some part talent, and a much bigger part hard work to put the talent to good use. As Pablo de Sarasate (violinist and composer) once said: "For 37 years I've practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!"

How can a child be a genius? The way I see it, at best s/he has the possibility to become one - if s/he will work on it.

Sherlock had the potential, he was interested in chemistry and crime, he got a degree in the former and studied the latter privately and by the age of around 30, i. e. after approx. 20 years of working on it, he's very good at it (forgetting for a moment that the show doesn't really show that because the writers have trouble coming up with good deductions) - some people call him a genius (hmm, actu.

But Euros? Spending the same time in prison without education or even normal human contacts? How could she have been a genius as an adult? That's just beyond the limits to which I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. I still like her, though...

Vhanja · October 6, 2017 2:15 pm

If you go that far into it, most shows won't hold up. The show isn't meant to be that realistic, and you set yourself up for disappointment if you go into it with that frame of mind. And that is a dead certain if you expect the writers to have the same opinions, views and understanding of terms as you do.

I personally don't care about all that, I take it for what it is and enjoy the ride. It's not meant to be a documentary, it's meant to be entertainment.

besleybean · October 6, 2017 5:27 pm

As I recently tweeted to Matt Haig: it's just a shame that some people don't quite grasp the concept of fiction!

Last edited by besleybean (October 6, 2017 5:28 pm)

Kittyhawk · October 6, 2017 6:33 pm

Well, for me there's a difference between crime fiction/character drama - wherever you want to put Sherlock - and fantasy. I love well-crafted fantasy and science fiction (because there's no point in comparing it to reality) - but I want it to be labelled as such. Which Sherlock isn't.

On the contrary, the production team makes an effort to make it look like the stories took place in our 21st century London - otherwise they needn't go there to film. And London skyscrapers don't have windows that are left open...

And Vhanja, do you seriously suggest that the writers of the show need less understanding of technical terms and processes than somebody for whom English is the second language? A tyre iron is not the same thing as a wheel brace (frankly, I found that embarrassing)! And a boomerang that's heavy enough to kill won't come back!

I'm not going "deep" into anything when I'm noticing glaring mistakes like that. Actually this forum has made things even worse because I've been told things didn't know (like City security measures)...

Vhanja · October 7, 2017 5:32 pm

To me, it just sounds stressfull to spend time dwelling on such things, not to mention how it must ruin the fun of shows. If you look for those kind of things, you will find them in every show. Just because a show isn't fantasy or sci-fi doesn't mean it's meant to be completely realistic. There is real life and then there is TV reality. I have no trouble making a distinction between those two.

I honestly don't care about mistakes like that, it means very little to me in a show like this.

SusiGo · October 7, 2017 8:33 pm

besleybean wrote:
As I recently tweeted to Matt Haig: it's just a shame that some people don't quite grasp the concept of fiction!

I am a writer of fiction as is Matt Haig. And what I think is this: You can create a fictional, impossible universe like Matt does in his novels, no problem there. The thing is that the logic within that fictional universe has to work. Which it does in the case of his books. Less so in Sherlock. (I love the show. And a metaphorical or symbolic reading of S4 works beautifully, it just does not work as a real story. For me and many others).
If S4 was a novel, every editor worth their salt would send it back to the author and tell them to rework it. Provided the author did not tell them that there will be a sequel explaining the things the readers do not understand.

besleybean · October 7, 2017 8:51 pm

S 4 is perfectly understandable to me and is the latest addition to the BBC Sherlock canon, my favourite TV show- to which this fan site is devoted.

Liberty · October 8, 2017 8:08 am

To be honest, I don't think any of it (from S1 on), is a "real story". There have always been things that don't quite add up, or don't fit with reality, or which you have to jump through hoops to make them fit. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't really matter. It's fiction and entertainment, and I don't mean that in fiction anything goes, but just that sometimes the meaning in the story is more important than realism. (I had great fun playing about with John's background and fitting it to the "clues" in the show, but in the end what matters is that he was a doctor who went to war as a soldier and how that affects his character).

The child genius thing, for instance, it's a popular concept and every so often I see some small child in the news who "has an IQ higher than Einstein" or whatever. It doesn't really matter that in reality it doesn't exist in quite the same way that people think it does - it's something that we, the viewers, recognise.

I do think that S4, and TFP in particular, goes a bit farther down the fantasy route, but that aspect has been there all along. The thing that really jumped out for me, personally, was that I would not have bought the idea of a celebrity having free run of the hospital and morgue while abusing the patients, if it hadn't been lifted straight from reality!

besleybean · October 8, 2017 8:32 am

Sadly, Liberty, of course your last point is chillingly true.
Well I suppose I have to understand some of this is about expectations.
Possibly I should also be glad that creative people are inspired to have their own head canons...after all, we all have them!
But the thing that gets me is any sense that somehow there was a right way for BBC Sherlock to proceed and consequently for some, the team failed.
I still find it hard to grasp that people can't quite see they either buy into an artistic vision or they don't.
Having said that, I accept that there have been four series in the show and I suppose as long as everybody loved at least two of them...they can technically still call themselves a fan- and I don't know anyone on the forum who doesn't fit in that category!
Or I suppose if you want to mess with stats, I feel to be a real fan, you have to love at least 50% of the totality that makes up the show.
Anyway...
I maintain that BBC Sherlock is one of the most intelligent, modern TV shows, but actually for me, the love of S 4 was mainly about the heart, the human side: the tragic story of the dysfunctional Holmes family that were gradually healed and reunited.
For 'ice man' Mycroft', by the end: Sherlock really appreciated everything his big brother had gone through and the weight he'd had to carry for so long, in attempt to take care of his siblings and protect his parents.
The love Sherlock feels to Eurus is striking.
Plus I personally love Eurus as a character and just want to see more.