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Yup, I gave this an academic-sounding title because this isn’t really a meta; it’s a meta-meta, that tries to diagnose what for me is the rottenness at the heart of Sherlock's most recent series, how it might reflect something larger than itself (consciously or not), and how it's changed the way I feel about the show (spoiler: I still love a lot that is in it, and I hold out hope that it can change course, and I love the fandom and can't wait to read fics, but the show itself has lost me—I can't recommend it to people as anything other than a 'fun-filled' few hours that they ought not think too deeply about.)
What’s written below is just my personal reaction to the show which people can feel free to disagree with. Negativity ahead.
"Psychopathy" or "Sociopathy" is referenced repeatedly in this seres of Sherlock, much more than in others, so I see it as a forming a central theme. What is "psychopathy"? Why do I keep putting it in scare-quotes? Because I don’t believe we’re supposed to see it in its clinical sense. The sociopathy/psychopathy of Sherlock is meant to be understood in a more casual sense as
people who use manipulation, violence and intimidation to control others and satisfy selfish needs. They can be intelligent and highly charismatic, but display a chronic inability to feel guilt, remorse or anxiety about any of their actions. [This article is actually pretty good at nuancing the definition from a clinical standpoint; this is the ‘broad’ definition they begin with.]
"Psychopathy" understood this way can often lead to, or co-exist with, criminality for obvious reasons (most studies of psychopathy according to this article are on prison populations); and while serial killers are understood to be psychopaths, not all psychopaths are serial killers.
BBC Sherlock would have us believe that Sherlock himself is a (high-functioning) sociopath, that Mary is a psychopath (her tacit acceptance of the term; and more on Mary in this excellent post), and that John too has psychopathic tendencies: we get Magnussen saying “Mr and Mrs Psychopath”; we have John walking around with tire-irons and guns and spraining wrists; we are told that he craves the thrill of violence. We also see him in TEH having no qualms about assaulting Sherlock more than once. In ASiP, he kills a man in cold blood and feels no remorse afterward, judging by his demeanour. One new piece of information HLV gave us about John is that this is not PTSD. While many fans have seen John’s character as exemplifying the experience of returning veterans with PTSD, Sherlock narrates John’s love of violence as beginning before his deployment: “You’re a doctor who went to war.” John’s decision to enlist is not portrayed as something he did for financial reasons, or because he wanted to protect his country, or because he comes from a military family: Sherlock has John’s enlistment as the first item on a list of things to show how turned on he is by risk, danger, and violence. Mr Psychopath.
As for Mary, I won’t go into it too deeply because the post I linked to above does, as does my response in this post as well.
As for Sherlock, though he is “humanized” (argh that idea is so ableist if what they think they’re doing is moving Sherlock from psychopathy —> “human”), the TRF-TEH arc as it is shown certainly does reveal a Sherlock that feels little guilt or anxiety about what he did to John in pretending to be dead, and then uses manipulation (rather than violence or intimidation) to get what he wants—which is to get John back. Others have pointed out that the other two episodes are Sherlock’s “penance” (sorry, I lost the post!) which I think is true, in a way. He seems to stop manipulating in SoT and HLV, and start giving John what he thinks he wants: space, and support. He may have little remorse about shooting Magnussen (once again reiterating the ‘fact’ of his sociopathy right before he does so), but he accepts the consequences of his actions, which is more than I can say for some other characters on this show (*cough*Mary*cough*).
So, what I think we viewers are being told in this series basically amounts to this: your three main protagonists are “psychopaths” (see definition above); they’re totally screwed up, but isn’t that fun to watch? Cue Moffat saying:
you are so relieved that she is up for the adventure. She can recognise a skip code, she likes Sherlock Holmes, it’s all there, right in front of you. She completely understands Sherlock – that line in The Empty Hearse where she says, ‘Well, he’d need a confidant.’ She’s completely there, with all of it – nobody would react like that. Except you’re pleased. You think, ‘Oh good, she’s not going to be a drag.’ She’s meeting two complete maniacs and she’s fine with it – she’s obviously a maniac….
And if you actually think this through, suppose Sherlock hadn’t blundered his way in that night? She’d just have shot Magnussen, gone back to being Mrs. Watson – and not only that, they’d have carried on solving crimes together, with this lethal killer nurse wandering along behind them, picking off anyone who might put them in danger. That would’ve been the show. (x)
My reaction to this? This is not at all, in any way shape or form, a show that I want to watch. Yes, I know, I personally steer away from comic-book-type media, both actual comic books and surfacey film versions of them. (Oh but Buffy…that was profound and deep and there were consequences and let’s talk about Buffy any time!). I don’t want a show about a “lethal nurse” offing criminals. But then it struck me: well, I do watch (and love) Hannibal. That’s about a psychopath. What’s the difference?
And that led me to a cascade of parallels I started to notice between HLV in particular and Hannibal, the show. (I haven’t seen this posted about but if someone has done this meta, forgive me…and point me toward it!) First, the Lars Mikkelson casting. And in the cold open, when CAM is talking about the 15 year old girl that Lady Smallwood’s husband was corresponding with, he says about her: “delicious” and “yum yum!” (I’m certain that was deliberate.) Later on, on Leinster Gardens, Sherlock says that he obtained the flat in a card game with the Clarence House Cannibal. So the parallels are there.
One of the things that’s so interesting about a show like Hannibal is the allure of the psychopath. A central figure who is a psychopath allows the viewer to indulge in fantasies of violence, in the fantasy of doing whatever we want without consequence—of feeling like a god. As Hannibal says in one episode: “Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time. Did God feel good about that? He felt powerful."
I was so reluctant to start watching Hannibal because I have an visceral distaste for media that seeks to romanticize immorality and criminality. But Hannibal (like other great shows like Breaking Bad and The Wire) both indulges these fantasies and pulls them away by refusing to shy away from the real consequences and horrors of what this fantasy means. Will Graham is the moral centre of the show: as psychopathic as Hannibal is, Will Graham is that empathic. Witnessing the horrific violence of multiple murders drives Will mad, and Hannibal tries to convince him that he too really loves murder, that he too has psychopathic tendencies, until the final scene in which Will draws a line in the sand: “I know who I am.” If Will was at all inclining towards believing Hannibal and believing in his own psychopathy, the season ends with him firmly stating: NO. I know the difference between right and wrong. You are the psychopath—not me.
I hope this sounds familiar, because this parallel got me thinking so much about what happens to John in HLV. John, John Watson, who has always been the moral centre of Holmes-verse, the upstanding gentleman, the “fixed point in a changing age.” John Watson is being told precisely the same kinds of things that Will is being told You like this more than you think you do. Sherlock says it. Mary says it. And even Magnussen says, near the end, “She’s so wicked—I can see why you like her.” The difference here is that unlike Will—Will, who is literally battling a brain disease—John doesn’t draw the line, doesn’t stand up for himself, doesn’t refuse the label. John doesn’t get to define who he is against these psychopaths; he seems to give in.
So I started thinking about why I want this moral centre so much. Why it gave me an absolute chill down my spine when Will asserted his self-knowledge of his own morality over and against Hannibal, and why I was left so bereft at the end of HLV. And I realized that Hannibal feeds into my fantasies: the fantasy in which people resist violence, criminality, and manipulation even though they might like it if they really thought about it, because it’s wrong. The fantasy in which who we are is defined by moral purpose, not “might makes right.” Will works for the FBI, and so he feeds the fantasy that there might actually be a moral centre somewhere in the police force, in the heart of American law enforcement, guiding the way.
BBC Sherlock might just be the more honest show. Mary is CIA, and she is portrayed as an unrepentant “killer nurse,” a psychopath. Isn’t that really more what we are now, Britain and America? We who kill with impunity and try not to think too much about it, try to remake our “image” into something more cuddly and loveable when in fact we use violence and intimidation to satisfy our (national) selfish needs, and don’t feel too anxious or remorseful about it? Has Sherlock Holmes, who embodied in the Victorian era a British sense of itself in terms of what it could be, justice that exceeded corrupt laws and incompetent enforcement, been turned into Sherlock Holmes the sociopath in our cynical age, where we solve crimes for fun and puzzles! and murder anyone who gets in our way because we can?
(Let me say here: I don’t think Moffat intended this parallel when writing HLV, but I still see it there.)
I want to take a page from Will’s book and say: NO. I know who I am, or rather, who I want us to be. I want my media to be hopeful, and the stories I invest in to show me the endless possibilities of what could be, how we could be better than we are, rather than ask me to accept and ‘have fun’ within the shitty parameters of what we actually are. That’s what Holmes always was to me: a man who, living in an era which embodied the height of ridiculous social conventions, a horrific shame culture, cruel and unjust laws, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and classism—cut through it all with the force of reason and evidence, and brought true justice to those who despaired of obtaining it. Maybe I’m too much of a hopeless optimist, but I want the stories we produce today to shine a light on a path towards what could be, just as Holmes did, rather than provide a tacit acceptance of the devastating psychopathy in our national culture today.