Self-publishing: a killer of standards?

Having sent books to agents a few times and been rejected, people have had the best intentions when telling me to ‘do what that bird did, or what that bloke did’ and publish my book(s) myself. Originally, I turned my nose up at this idea - paper books, real hard or paperbacks in a shop with my name on were much more appealing. However, after thinking I would be stupid not to check every avenue, I began to read up on all this self-publishing malarkey - and came across something that has made me re-think my plan to self-publish.


In a word: standards.

Now I don’t mean that your average hob-nob-snob variety of reader only goes for paperbacks on the train. In fact, it seems the whole eBook thing has exploded about 200% percent in the last two years alone. Amazon’s Kindle has its own apps for finding new titles and downloading straight to the device without needing a computer, and other e-readers (the Nook, the Kobo, etc.) have their own ways of getting readers their fix without needing a home computer. This is accelerating the market so fast, it seems online booksellers need to keep revamping their sales procedures to keep up, and keep the whole game as convenient and reliable as possible. If they don’t? They’re sacrificed for other eBook suppliers. Simple.

What I mean is purely the standard of the printed word that is digitally obtained by whoever takes a chance (or, in the case of Amazon, enjoys the free portion they get as a sample) and buys it. Let me be clear:

You could write a book about your holiday, save it as an ePub document (easy as pressing ‘export as ePub’ when using Apple’s Pages application), and then register as a Kindle publisher. Some ISBN trifles, a few DRM ticks or un-ticks, and you can upload your own stuff. Anywhere between 2 and 4 days later, your title is available to buy (or get for free, if you publish it as such). Easy, right? Easy.

While trawling the net for people who have blogged about their experiences with self-e-publishing, or those who want to help others out of the kindness of their hearts, I have stumbled across what I hope is a phenomenon: bad grammar. If the people writing these tutorials or the ‘it happened to me and I’m now a published author’ blogs can’t put a sentence together, what does that say for their saleable matter? Now I’m the last person to point fingers - I regularly blog here like grammar went out of fashion with Beatles’ boots, but that doesn’t mean I can’t proofread what I blog. When I’m serious about the subject matter, you’ll notice a distinct improvement in my grammar and urge to get it across in a clear, proper way. Just because these people blog using sub-standard grammar, as I do, doesn’t mean they can’t write properly when they want to. I accept that.


However - and this a big however - after following a link to find the free sample at Amazon, one, to check it was real and not a scam page, and two, to see what the results were and how your published eBook appears on the sales page, I was horrified to see that the grammar matched that of the blog.


I’m not going to name the blog, or the book, as that’s just rude and to be honest, unnecessary. What I will say is that I found this elsewhere, too. I then found that the odd author actually attacks people who leave less than rosy comments on reviews of their book. Unprofessional? Completely. Childish? You be the judge. Perhaps if that author had an agent or someone who covered publicity for them, they would conduct themselves more like a struggling (?) author and less like a five-year-old in the playground looking for a good scrap over the colour of the paint on their fire engine. Everyone who’s ever written has had ‘bad’ reviews - and by that I mean someone has attacked their work in a manner that does not provide an opportunity to learn from what someone else considers a mistake. Proper readers leave comments like ‘I felt the main character did more telling than showing’ or ‘perhaps I missed something, but I don’t understand why the main character did that in chapter three’, etc. Simply writing ‘that was crap’, with no qualifying reasoning, is a waste of everyone’s time. S/he may as well write ‘penguin marmalade’, all the good it does. I’ve had my fair share of bad reviews - but the people were all kind enough (or intelligent enough) to tell me where they felt I had erred. In six years of publishing fan fiction on the net, I can’t think of one time where I’ve left the kind of review I’ve just described, or treated anyone who I’ve Beta’d for in such a manner. I’ve even managed not to reply to snotty, ignorant or blatantly flaming reviews - there haven’t been many, but on the odd occasion you have to leave that review for a day before braving it again. And then you let it roll around your head, let yourself be angry with it, be childishly petulant (on the inside) that someone in the universe doesn’t like what you like, and then get over it like a normal human being and move on. Perhaps time spent on the net has trained me, Kenobi-style, to see the bigger picture. Or perhaps I stopped scrapping over beloved toys when I was five.

All that aside, it’s standards I’m worried about. If you have a publishing house take on your work, they have editors whose job it is to check these things. There’s a reason they’re still doing big business and large publishing houses are stocked to the gills with proofreaders and editors. When people self-publish, you should get the best that the author can achieve by themselves. I’m not saying that isn’t up to the same spec. as editors - these authors have no doubt used their brain and asked for either professional or at least semi-professional help in proofreading. And lest we forget, some of these authors work in publishing houses or the media industry and are qualified editors or proofreaders in their own right. However, for every person who either learnt grammar at school or asked for help, there are a hundred who haven’t and didn’t. And the worrying thing is, some readers can’t tell the difference. That’s what really concerns me; the downfall of proper grammar being used in society.

Go on, call me a grammar Nazi. But the next time you’re chatting with someone down the pub and they use the word ‘irregardless’, or perhaps ‘medal’ as a verb, don’t blame me. They’ve read it in a book, see, so it’s perfectly fine. It becomes accepted into society sheerly through digital osmosis, and the next thing you know, everyone is talking like rejected failures from A Clockwork Orange.

Ok, I’m taking the piss with that last one. But basically what horrifies me is that, in twenty years time, words we wouldn’t have tolerated before will be used all over the shop, and it’ll be impossible to stop it. Call me a snob, and call me out-dated and old-fashioned, but I still think that any book should be properly spelt. Books like Trainspotting work because they’re not ‘proper’ standard English, but that’s their hook, their angle. If every single book is written this way, then what hope is there for authors like Stephen King or Suzanne Collins? Will the future show the entire former empire use this bastardised English, to the point where grammar devolves into whatever people let slip out on the street, as if the language were a rain-drenched washed-out slimy Blade-runner street that no-one cares about any more? Sounds like a sci-fi novel waiting to be written. Ooh, hang on - I’ll be right back…

Seriously though, someone needs to be checking these things. Simply saying ‘If the grammar’s crap then no-one will read it and the authors won’t keep publishing’ doesn’t wash. Have you seen how many indie or self-e-published books are on the market right now? And that’s only set to rise. Funny how the woman who managed to sell enough books to get onto the New York Times’ Bestsellers List still doesn’t have a publisher. Then again, does she need one? I haven’t seen her work, and even if I did, who’s to say I have better grammar than her anyway?

I have two Beta readers - one for the story, one for actual tough proofreading. Sometimes I need to know someone else has seen what I’ve written, precisely because I can’t always trust my own grammar. (I keep the grammar checker on my laptop turned off - getting real British English to stay on a foreign-made computer and play properly is more trouble than it’s worth. The spell check, however, is always on and ofttimes double-checked against Oxford in case of dispute.)

The point is, I understand how I’m not infallible and because of this, I get my work checked - because it has to be the best I can make it, whether it’s off my own back or that of a man who can. But does anyone else? There is a reason that 90% of these self-published books are not touched with a bargepole by agents or publishers before they’re released on the net. Then again, there are hundreds of ‘instant hits’ out there that are perfectly formatted and produced, but agents or publishers will not deal with for fear of losing money.

Of course, every author thinks they fall into the latter category.

That’s pretty much it. There’s SOPA and ACTA and all kinds of shit going on, but in the meantime, I have a book to push to any agent that will take it.

Soopytwist.

Tags:
~ fan-fic ~ writing ~ self-publishing ~ publishing

Sherlock 2x03: The Reichenbach Fall

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Sherlock series 2 episode 3!


It was always going to come. Steve Thompson gives us a reworking of a cult classic. ‘The Final Problem’, the short story in which we are told, by Watson, that his friend Sherlock Holmes is dead, was always going to be a milestone in the updated series. Like the story of the Titanic, everyone knows the facts of the case. Hounded by Moriarty, Holmes will arrange for Watson to be drawn away so that he can face Moriarty alone. Later, when Watson discovers he has been duped, he’ll run back and find what he thinks is evidence of Holmes’ death. The question is, would the update follow the well-known chain of events, or would it be more of a mystery? After all, we’d just had ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’, which was more a nod to the original than a retelling. What were we going to get this time?

The episode wastes no time at all - within the first thirty seconds we get Martin Freeman being terribly British (English?) and refusing to cry in front of his psychotherapist as he tells her that Sherlock Holmes is dead. She simply asks what happened. And then we get the whole tale.

Sherlock’s huge successes have caught the media in the last eighteen months since ‘A Study in Pink', his last big case being the recovery of a certain painting by Turner depicting ‘the falls of Reichenbach'. Cheeky and in-keeping with the spirit so far. To keep the light-hearted mood going, we have the pair back at 221B going through the newspaper, talking about ‘death frisbee’s (his deerstalker) and the press’ nicknames for them both - Sherlock the boffin, and John the ‘confirmed bachelor’. While Sherlock seems oblivious to the newspaper’s attention, it’s John who foreshadows the story by telling him that the press will one day turn on Sherlock - because they always do. Here we have But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment #1:

Sherlock: It really bothers you?
John: What?
Sherlock: What people say - about me?
John: Yes.
Sherlock: I don’t understand - why would it upset YOU?
John: [pulls face of ‘you have no concept of feelings or in fact normal humanness’]

Jim the fish Moriarty shows up and commits ‘daylight robbery’, striking three places at once. He tells the world to set Sherlock on him, and successfully gets ‘the Reichenbach hero’ to testify against him. (Lovely use of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ here.) John, again, is trying to be helpful in But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment #2 as he tells Sherlock before the trial not to get up anyone’s nose:

Sherlock: You mean [I shouldn’t appear] intelligent?
John: Intelligent is fine - let’s give smartarse a wide berth.
Sherlock: I’ll be myself.
John: Are you listening to me?

There’s a nice shot of Moriarty asking for gum from the court bailiff as he’s in the dock - the look her gives her tells me that he looks at everyone the same way; like they’re test subjects. The next thing we know, Sherlock is being jumped in the toilets by a wannabe investigative reporter. The scene is especially interesting as the audience worries Sherlock’s missing something. He challenges her to read him, to see and observe, but she seems unable. Here Benedict Cumberbatch is dangerously charming on a Jeremy Brett level - not in the way he acts, but the way in which he waits for her to read him makes me think ‘tiger with eyes on a meal’. Back in the courtroom, Moriarty knows Sherlock knows him so very well. It’s much later, once the fun and games of the first day are over, that the pair retire to 221B and we get But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment #3:

John: Don’t do that.
Sherlock: Do what?
John: The look. You’re doing the look again.
Sherlock: What look?
John: The look.
Sherlock: Well I can’t see it, can I? [John nods to mirror.] It’s my face…?
John: Yes and it’s doing a thing. You’re doing the ‘we both know what's really going on here’ face.
Sherlock: Well we do.
John: No - I don’t. Which is why I find the face so annoying.

Sherlock’s got wind of what he thinks is Moriarty’s scam - but he can’t be sure. When the ‘master criminal’ is acquitted, John calls Sherlock to warn him that he’s free. What does Sherlock do? Make tea and wait. When Moriarty comes calling it’s all so terribly polite and so very well filmed - the expressions, the silences, the well-chosen words. (I notice that Moriarty’s left-handed. Diabolical swine!) He warns Sherlock that ‘every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain’, and to expect The Final Problem - of what to do about Moriarty and Sherlock. Coming clean about how he managed to get off when he had no evidence to prove himself innocent, he reveals he intimidated the jury (Are jurers allowed to watch TV during a case, then? I thought they weren’t allowed news or outside world goings-on whilst deliberating.), because all of his minions were so happy to please him:

Moriarty: Aren’t ordinary people adorable? Well you know - you’ve got John. I should get myself a live-in one. It’d be so funny.



Later he seems to do just that - but first things first. He warns Sherlock that he ‘owes’ the consultant detective. He owes him a fall. He makes a big thing about this - ‘I owe you’. Indeed, throughout the episode we see this written in the background, graffitied on walls or on show posters - it’s quite Harold Saxon of him.

Meanwhile, John is over at the Diogenes Club, and via Douglas Wilmer, who used to be Holmes in the 1960s, he finds Mycroft. It seems Sherlock’s big brother has been reading The Sun newspaper, which is threatening to expose Sherlock as some kind of fraud. On top of this, Mycroft shows John and Sherlock’s flat is surrounded by top international assassins, and that he should try to protect Sherlock for him. John’s attitude - that the two Holmes might be smart but they’re petty and childish when it comes to each other - is well-earned. On his way home, John encounters an envelope full of breadcrumbs, but is distracted by the news that Lestrade et al want Sherlock on a kidnapping case. During the course of their recovery, Sherlock finds a book of fairy tales and the audience shouts ‘Hansel and Gretel’. Sherlock’s own snippy comments are, as usual, excellent: ‘Brilliant, Anderson. Brilliant impression of an idiot’. John comes in with But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment #4 as he warns Sherlock - with good reason - not to be so happy about a complex kidnapping case.



Enter Molly. While the three of them are working away in St. Bart’s lab and Sherlock refers to her as ‘John’ whilst distracted, she proves she’s smarter than every single person in the world; she can see Sherlock for what he is, because she actually looks. Sherlock appears genuinely shocked by her ability, or perhaps that he’s missed it all this time. He is visibly shaken, but you just know he’s filing it all away for future reference.

Through some predictably clever sleuthing on Sherlock’s part, the children are found and all seems well. (The girl, as it turns out, is the actress used to portray young, run-away River Song. Which means Moriarty kidnapped River Song! His talents know no bounds.) Sherlock seems to understand what John’s been saying to him about not being his usual self. However, when he tries to talk to the young girl, her screaming gives the impression that Sherlock is to be feared as if he is a kidnapper, making people wonder… Exactly as Moriarty wanted?

Sherlock gets a taxi alone because he says he doesn’t want John to talk - but is it because he, as Molly has rightly pointed out, doesn’t want John to observe him deal with his worry over this predicament? We see that Lestrade trusts Sherlock, correctly calling him CSI: Baker Street and defending the record of arrests he’s helped them with. It’s Sergeant Donovan who bangs on about Sherlock being too good - has she missed all of his amazing cases over the last eighteen months? Dozy tart. Or has Moriarty somehow got to her? Left something in her flat, left Derren Brown notes on her desk to plant the idea in her head? Or worse - is she working for him?

Things take a turn for the worse when Sherlock gets Moriarty reading him a nighttime story about how he’ll soon be destroyed. When he’s nearly run down, one of the international assassins Mycroft warned John about actually lunges in to save Sherlock. This leads him to believe that they’re all there to protect him, to keep something he has safe. However, John must confront Sherlock about what’s going on - the police turning on him, in But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment #5:

Sherlock: I don’t care what people think.
John: You’d care if people thought you were stupid. Or wrong.
Sherlock: No. That would just make THEM stupid or wrong.
John: Sherlock, I don’t want the world believing you’re--
Sherlock: That I’m what?
John: A fraud.
Sherlock: You’re worried they’re right.
John: What?
Sherlock: You’re worried they’re right about me.
John: No.
Sherlock: That’s why you’re so upset. You can’t even entertain the possibility that they might be right. You’re afraid that you’ve been taken in as well.
John: No I’m not.
Sherlock: Moriarty is playing with your mind too. Can’t you SEE WHAT’S GOING ON?
John: No. I know you’re for real.
Sherlock: 100%?
John: No-one could fake being such an annoying dick all the time.

Lestrade, still believing in Sherlock despite being told by the Chief Superintendent to arrest him - calls John to warn him they’re coming. Now there’s another envelope containing a gingerbread man, burnt to a crisp, and the audience is singing ‘Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man! I’m the gingerbread man and I’m out of the pan!’ Sherlock takes this as a hint as to what he should do next, what Moriarty wants from him - the next stage of the Final Problem.

Sergeant Donovan unwisely chooses to gloat in front of Watson: ‘What kind of man kidnaps those kids just so he can impress us by finding them?’ If she actually knew Sherlock, if she had idea one in the useless head of hers, she would know the answer to her own question. You ignorant, brainless wonder, Donovan. Do you really think for one minute that Sherlock would waste time and resources making up cases just to solve them? Boring! What’s the stimulus for Sherlock if he already knows the end? Perhaps Lestrade has some inkling of this - John obviously understands. His reaction to the copper in charge being an insensitive twat is brilliant - and again Martin Freeman delivers lines like a BAFTA winner: ‘Apparently it’s against the law to chin the Chief Superintendent,’, an act which successfully gets John arrested along with Sherlock. Whilst on the run - as Sherlock believes Moriarty wants him to be - they discover the assassins knocking about Baker Street all want a computer code that Moriarty has apparently secreted somewhere in Sherlock’s flat. He’s killed for spilling this information, of course.

Knowing the net is closing in, Sherlock and John head for the investigative reporter’s place, only to find that Moriarty is her source on her Sherlock exposé. Except he’s calling himself ‘Richard Brook’ and appears to have a long history in telling children’s stories. Superb. There’s one problem though:

Why would a ‘just the facts mam’ investigative reporter have that on her wall? And Moriarty is standing right underneath it! In the same room as his live-in ordinary person, desperate to show she can help him. It’s a brilliant scene, as Moriarty strives to convince everyone of his clever lie.

However, the characters’ faces give it all away. We can see in their expressions how Moriarty is enjoying his latest role - we can certainly see Sherlock’s face, when he tumbles to the fake name, go from shock and horror to admiration and sly understanding.

They both know - they know - that if you give people an inch of truth they will swallow the big lie wrapped around it. Now Sherlock knows the last thing Moriarty needs to do to complete this Final Problem - his friends. He knows he’s on his own. So he goes to see Molly.

Sherlock: You’re wrong you know. You do count. You’ve always counted and I’ve always trusted you. But you were right - I’m not ok.
Molly: Tell me what’s wrong.
Sherlock: Molly, I think I’m going to die.
Molly: What do you need?
Sherlock: I wasn’t everything that you think I am, everything that I think I am. But you still want to help me. [Thinks: ‘Ordinary people are so attached to this ‘friends’ thing’?]
Molly: What do you need?
Sherlock: You.

What he neglected to add while the camera was watching was: ‘A bag of blood - about two pints should do and make sure it matches mine, a couple of paramedics you trust and a cadaver that could pass as me if you identify it for the records’.


Meanwhile, John goes to Mycroft to tear strips off him: ‘Your own brother and you blabbed about his entire life to this maniac [Moriarty]. This is what you were trying to tell me - ‘watch his back because I’ve made a mistake’. Moriarty wanted Sherlock destroyed. And you have given him the perfect ammunition.’ It’s fair to say that John’s gone from sidekick to BAMF extraordinaire - who else gets to stroll - I’m sorry, strut - into the private men’s club and tell the core of the British Government that he’s destroyed everything with his over-reaching ideas of serving the Greater Good. (As an aside: Mark Gatiss shouldn’t be a writer/co-creator and Mycroft - Mycroft should be smarter than Sherlock, but he doesn’t seem it in this update, perhaps because a writer can’t make himself cleverer than the lead. I’m reminded again how Stephen Fry should have been Mycroft in this adaptation, not the other one.)

Sherlock is stumped by this code thing. It’s John who taps his fingers whilst thinking - Sherlock observes and realises. And now Sherlock puts his master plan into action. He texts Moriarty to summon him to St. Bart’s rooftop. He organises the phone call that says Mrs Hudson’s been shot, successfully drawing John away. Although he accuses Sherlock of being heartless, he already knows that doesn’t compute for his friend:

John: Fine. Sit there, alone.
Sherlock: Alone is all I have; alone is what protects me. (He did not add for camera: ‘I know Moriarty is after my friends because people like John and Molly will never believe Sherlock is a fraud, and they’ll make others believe, and that would ruin Moriarty’s plan, so he has to kill them’).
John: But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment #6: Friends protect people.
Sherlock doesn’t say ‘Which is what I’m doing, numptie, by sending you away.’ He doesn’t need to.

And so to the big finale, the big ending everyone has been getting so worked up about:
Moriarty against Sherlock.
Jim the fish versus Mr Deerstalker.

Top entertainment, brilliant editing and camerawork, wonderful, wonderful performances. Moriarty is critical of Sherlock; he makes him out to be dull, boring, conceited and arrogant in his dismissal of the tiny facts: ‘You always want everything to be clever.’ He quite rightly says that newspapers are the new fairy tales. But Sherlock is not done yet - a bit of reverse psychology on Moriarty produces answers he needs. It seems Moriarty has only identified three of Sherlock’s friends - John, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade - as ‘all of them’. He failed to specify Molly. Sherlock knows that Moriarty has overlooked her - which is why Sherlock used her and her unique placement to help him with his plan B. As Sherlock’s plan A to get Moriarty arrested seems more and more unlikely, he knows he’ll have to switch to plan B after all. Not a problem for the consulting detective - he tells Moriarty as such. He’s willing to do anything - anything - to ruin Moriarty, including hurting the people that call him ‘friend’ to do so. Moriarty makes him look over edge of the rooftop: ‘Look - you’ve got an audience now’. So he has - wait, is that Molly in the coat by the bench? But ah, here we go: ‘You’re not ordinary - you’re me. Thank you, Sherlock Holmes. Bless you.’ Is that what Moriarty wanted? Validation? Someone to tell him he’s not ordinary? Someone to make him feel that all this running around and planning has been worth it? Is Sherlock’s seal of approval that important to him?

Moriarty allegedly commits suicide - he’s left-handed, he had a good grip on Sherlock’s in a gentleman’s handshake and still managed to shoot himself. Clever. This leaves Sherlock with plan B - make the assassins believe he’s dead, so that his three friends aren’t shot in retaliation. Here’s where it gets sticky - quite literally.

We’ve seen Sherlock fake tears a few times in the cause of a case, and he’s not above play-acting or getting John to smack him in the face to get what he wants. He tells John to tell the world that he really is a genuine fake - he lies through his teeth, sells it all with a Single Perfect Tear, and says: ‘Tell Lestrade, TELL MOLLY. Stay where you are John, keep your eyes fixed on me.’ He doesn’t say: ‘So you won’t notice other people on the pavement below me, won’t have a chance to believe I could have survived the fall I’m about to make. I need you to believe what you see, so that you tell the world with your best stiff-upper-lip face that I am a fraud, Moriarty was never real, and I’m dead as Queen Victoria. Because destroying Moriarty’s legacy is more important than me - and my friends’ feelings’.) He falls, from the rooftop to the pavement, right in front of John’s disbelieving eyes. It’s Sherlock who’s arranged for the cyclist to daze John so that he can’t get there before other people get in his way. All he can do is test for a pulse - and see the ‘dead’ body up close. Then he is gently moved away, muttering and looking like he’s about to heave up his breakfast, dazed, confused, blind-sided. A magic stretcher turns up before anyone’s called for it. And as Sherlock is taken away, it starts to rain - rain that continues right through to the end of the episode. A beautifully shot scene, without question - and skilfully edited.

Throughout the sad piano music and mournful colours we see Mycroft reading about it in The Sun. Was he in on it? Perhaps - Sherlock was very careful to keep up the idea that he would not ask Mycroft for help, and Mycroft, in turn, made it known he would not step in to help his own brother. Making sure their alibis were straight? Setting the scene well? Time will tell.

Purr wee John is back at the flat - and there must be hell of a gale coming down that chimney, the way the poker's swinging. He could well be turning it over and over in his mind, or just not wanting to think about how he’s lost his ‘best friend’. He sees his shrink and she urges him to get words out that he wanted to say - that he doesn’t believe Sherlock to be fraud? He can’t say that in public; it was Sherlock’s dying wish that he tell the world he was a fraud. He can’t tell anyone his real feelings - not yet. At the funeral he states he can’t go back to the flat ‘at the moment’; he’s angry. Mrs Hudson complaining about Sherlock’s habits is priceless, as is John saying he’s not actually that angry. Once she’s gone, he’s afforded the opportunity to put a few things straight: ‘No-one will ever convince me that you told me a lie. There.’ He does not add: ‘I said it’. He doesn’t need to. What he does add, in his final But We’re Friends, Damn You! Moment, is: ‘I was so alone and I owe you so much.’

There’s a lot of speculation surrounding that final scene; he loses it for a moment over Sherlock’s grave, then composes himself and leaves in a very military fashion. I don’t see someone who knows Sherlock is actually alive and is angry with him for pretending; I see a man broken by the loss and unwilling to accept it. I see desperation in those final words that John says to the grave, not belief.


I also see a whopping great beating on the cards for Sherlock when, in series three, he makes his re-appearance. How it will happen is anyone’s guess - rounding up the last of Moriarty’s gang? Solving a case and proving he’s innocent, that Moriarty was real? Who knows with this writing team - but when John finds out he’s alive, there’s going to be bloody hell to pay. Unfortunately, Sherlock has the right of it; John needs to believe he’s dead, or he’ll give it away somehow. He needs John to labour under the assertion until such time as the charade has served its purpose - and only Sherlock knows what that purpose is, right now. Hopefully, with series three starting possibly in 2013, we’ll know too.

So, in summation? My only gripe is that we see Sherlock at the end. Simply having a camera peer through the bushes to watch John from an unknown person’s perspective would have been affective - a shiny black shoe behind a tree would have been enough. After all, Sherlock was propping his feet up on every table available during the episode, so it’s not like no-one would recognise his shoes. I felt that showing us his face was unnecessary - except for the marked lack of an expression. That was interesting. As for the rest? Bloody good entertainment, and the best of British to boot. Don’t get me started on CBS’ plans to make an updated Sherlock Holmes series - that’s a lambast for another day. Suffice to say, where else in the world do you get ninety minutes of such high quality entertainment, where the dumbing-down is kept to a minimum and everyone’s capable of paying attention for an hour and a half without the need for adverts or breaks to let people catch their breath? If this isn’t the best BBC offering since Life on Mars, then I’ve missed out on some quality television and I demand to know why. I can’t wait for series three to start, but I understand Martin Freeman has to do some Hobbiting first, and Benedict Cumberbatch will be busy doing some villainous cackling in the new Star Trek film. I approve. Andrew Scott has given us the most immeasurably fun - and lunatic - Moriarty I’ve ever seen and I adore what he’s done with the character. Yes, I said ‘adore’. I don’t use the word ‘adore’ very often - but it’s warranted just this once.

And that, finally, is all the news that’s fit to print. I need to go get some fresh tea and hope that Moriartea doesn’t appear to spill it for me.

Peach and lube, people. Peach and frelling lube.

Tags:
~ BBC ~ Sherlock ~ Benedict Cumberbatch ~ Martin Freeman ~ Andrew Scott ~ Moriarty

Sherlock 2x02 - The Hounds of Baskerville

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Sherlock series 2 episode 2!


What’s the difference between a reboot and a remake, a re-imagining and a retelling? Star Trek (2009) gave us a clear reboot. Battlestar Galactica (2003, etc.) gave us a re-imagining. Life on Mars (UK, 2006) was the victim of a remake in 2008 as it went across the pond and ended up getting only one series in the US.

So what is Sherlock? Thus far, it’s been mostly a retelling. The short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have been trawled and shaped into modern-day versions - complete with chunks of dialogue taken straight from them. However, it’s been a straight-laced retelling of the main points of the stories brought to the screen in a way that means it happens pretty much as the originals went, but with some new flourish on top. A Study In Pink is a good example - right up until the cabbie is recognised, it’s all as it should be, apart from adding in Mycroft and his meddling.

Then we get to series two, and The Hounds of Baskerville.

Mixed reactions from me here - I loved the episode as a whole, but I had some doubts (‘doubt’ being a watchword of the episode). This was a departure from straight hanging-the-original-coat-on-a-new-hanger; for me it was the first story that’s been re-imagined. It’s not any less impressive because of this, it’s just not what I was expecting. Thinking logically, for me that’s a good thing because if you just retell every written story the same way, you run the risk of developing a pedantic series that’s just there to get through the backlog of stories written, not to entertain with the subject matter. It was a good break from the routine, and for that, I liked it. The problem is, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a firm favourite with TV movie-makers and series develops alike - not to mention viewers. Every incarnation of Mr Holmes so far has had a go at the legendary story. Mark Gatiss has given us a rewritten version that used all the major players but in surprisingly different places. I could list all the characters and how they were moved about, but that would be boring. Instead, I’ll say the inclusion of a few things had, at first, thrown me. And then I realised why.

So, beginning at the beginning: Sherlock out and about, riding the London tube covered in blood to show he’s actually (harpooning ‘dead pigs’ for experiments), keeping himself more or less out of trouble. However, it all breaks down and he displays typical manic tendencies as he’s all out of cases and so lost without them. The disappointment here was that, whilst he’s raging about not having anything to engage him, he’s ransacking the flat for cigarettes. Cigarettes? Mr Holmes (from the books) was notorious for cigarette and pipe-smoking so much that Watson frequently had to open the windows to Baker Street just to see across the room. Mr Holmes’ weapon of choice as far as alleviating boredom went was certainly not normal cigarettes - I think it was the beginning of A Scandal in Bohemia that Watson sits and berates Holmes for endangering his towering intellect with such stupid hobbies as cocaine - his seven percent solution, if you please. This is well known amongst Conan Doyle readers, so having Sherlock (the new update) in fits looking for a packet of normal cigarettes seems a little lame - especially in this day and age. It’s 2012, people. John Watson’s sibling ‘Harry’ is now a lesbian sister who’s also a drunkard and a failure at marriage. Would it really have turned the viewers against Sherlock if he’d been seen to have some other, softer, kind of recreational drug in his flat? It was hinted at in A Study in Pink - coppers bursting into his flat on a ‘dugs bust’ led by an impatient Lestrade. When John protests Sherlock’s innocence to do with all things drug-related, it’s Sherlock who makes him shut up and not delve too deeply into what he might have in his flat. Back then, I was pleased the writers weren’t simply sweeping all the nasty drug business under the carpet. Now, after seeing him go after normal shop-bought cigarettes, I’m not so sure. A few little unexplained bags of suspicious recreational supplies would have been harmless to the character (nowadays) and would have kept my faith in the ability of the writers to make even this aspect fly. Holmes’ boredom relieving habit was neatly referenced by Sherlock though, when Mrs Hudson offers to make him a cup of tea - but he simply says he needs something stronger: “Seven percent stronger.” A way to remind the viewers that we all know what he really wanted? Or are we supposed to believe he actually wanted tar-filled cigarettes over a cup of tea? This brings me to another point; Sherlock is much more petulant, much more cutting when he’s on the brink of shooting walls out of boredom than the Holmes I remember. I have no problem with this - for me, this teetering on the edge of engaged and desperate for stimulation makes him more of a manic depressive, more of a believable genius.

Once Mr Henry Knight (not Baskerville) brings them his case of a ‘gigantic hound’, Sherlock is Derren Brown’d into accepting the otherwise unappealing work. (And a word about Russell Tovey here - he’s ace, as always. A perfect trodden-down wee man in need of help, so helpless and harmless and endearing.) This taking of the case was interesting; it was the words, the description that piqued Sherlock’s interest, not the idea of the case itself. Off they go to Dartmoor, Sherlock driving the Land Rover in a way that made me giggle as I thought that the only time I saw Holmes drive the trap was during The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988). Upon arriving, they find a glow-in-the-dark rabbit that ties in with earlier thrown-away cases in the episode. As usual, Sherlock has failed to make a connection between the trivia he tosses away because he finds it boring and the main case. It’s easy for us, the audience, to put it all together because one, we already know huge dogs covered in phosphorous appeared in the original, and two, we’ve been trained by the last four episodes to expect the trivial cases he discards in the opening moments of the episodes to ofttimes come back and bite him in the arse.


We’re all itching to see and hear a giant hound that’s somehow got free of the experimental department at Baskerville base. Top secret labs, army presence - it’s all very intriguing and of course, leads viewers to believe there’s an escaped monster on the loose. A veritable Beast of Bodmin appears to be running around, apparently only attacking people once every twenty years. A clever moment ensues; Henry and Sherlock witness the hound itself, as John is busy jotting down what he thinks is a secret message sent via Morse code. What happens next could only have been brought so successfully to life by the two main actors: Sherlock, in the nice warm armchair of the quaint country inn, is practically shitting bricks in terror at what he’s seen. Unable to sit still, unable to come to terms with the fact that he’s feeling the horror, the fear, of what happened, he proves he’s still able to think clearly even though he’s scared out of his wits. At the time, he puts it down to his body betraying him - but he should have known better. On reflection, if he hadn’t been gassed with some hallucinogen and been suffering after-effects, then he would have realised it was an hallucinogen and its after-effects making him shake like he was about to fly apart. We get John, witnessing this, and, surprised by his friend’s ability to be frightened by what he saw, tries to calm Sherlock down. He gets rebuffed, of course - Sherlock no more knows how to deal with all this and accept the help of someone he trusts than John ever knows what goes through Sherlock’s head. This means we get the second reminder, the second countdown to imminent fan shittage re: the brothers who never were:

John: [pointedly] Why would you listen to me? I’m just your friend.
Sherlock: [angrily] I don’t have ‘friends’.
John: [Gets up to leave] I wonder why.

I did like John calling him Spock, especially after Spock in the Star Trek (2009) film directly quoted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’. Touché, Mark Gatiss.

Then, as this retelling confirms itself to be a re-imagining, we get John trailing the nightly Morse code lights to find not a hidden escaped convict, but a kind of Lover’s Lane spot with some inadvertent headlight-stalk malfunctions. At first I was not a fan of this departure from the original - no convict brother of a character? But then I realised; it’s a red herring. Mark Gatiss does like to remind us that this is the new series, doesn’t he? The fact that Sherlock then seems to have recovered some equilibrium and manages to get John to ‘interview’ Dr Mortimer (not the dog-keeper from the original, but a nice young lady who also happens to be Henry’s shrink) by showing him her picture made me giggle - John seems to have decided there’s nothing to forgive in Sherlock’s pissy remark about not being his friend. It’s Sherlock, after all - understanding the concept of friends is one thing, but actually experiencing it and seeing it for what it is is something completely different. To me, this moment shows how much John understands Sherlock more than probably anyone else on the face of the planet - including his own brother.

Sherlock pays a call on Henry and he’s checking his pupils whilst pretending to be concerned about him - checking for signs of being drugged? It seems Sherlock already has it figured out - it’s in the sugar, and everyone taking it is made very susceptible to believing rumours about gigantic hounds - and then seeing one. A great scene follows - which, again, could only work between those two actors. Sherlock looks to be making some kind of apology to John; it’s obvious Sherlock is troubled, or even uncomfortable by the effort he’s making, but he still needs to make things clear. But then Sherlock, being Sherlock, brings it back round to himself: he’s admitting he has doubt in his own perceptive abilities, and to him, that might as well be the end of him. John takes the opportunity to give him the cold shoulder, apparently unwilling to let Sherlock walk all over him. The viewers are treated to Sherlock trying to make amends - Benedict Cumberbatch may not have the heart-breakingly apologetic eyebrows of Jeremy Brett, but he manages to make you feel like you not only want to forgive him for his childish fear, but also his bipolar disorder lash-outs.

And then it goes all-out with dialogue adapted straight from the original book:

BBC:

Sherlock: John! You are amazing - you are fantastic!
John: Yes, alright. You don’t have to overdo it.
Sherlock: You may not be the most luminous of people but as a conductor of light you are unbeatable.
John: Cheers. --What?
Sherlock: Some people who aren’t geniuses have an amazing ability to stimulate it in others.
John: Hang on - you were saying ‘sorry’ a minute ago. Don’t spoil it.

Book:

Holmes: It may be that you yourself are not luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people, without possessing genius, have a remarkable power for stimulating it in others. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.

You’d think that this run-in with emotions might somehow change Sherlock, but thankfully, it does nothing of the kind. Putting sugar in John’s coffee to test the theory that it’s the agent used to drug people, and then locking him in the lab to see what nightmares John experiences only go to show how unbending Sherlock can be - it’s going to take a lot more than Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat to turn him soft, and aren’t we bloody glad.

The audience, meanwhile, has already clocked that it’s the mist that sets John off - the same mist in the hollow where wee Henry thought he saw his dad being mauled by a gigantic hound. Once John is ‘rescued’ by Sherlock - who never bothers to take time to check John’s actually physically and mentally ok because who wouldn’t be? - we get a lovely scene from John as he goes off on one about being wrong - he now believes he’s seen a real hound. Ironically, this is how Sherlock knows he’s wrong about being wrong - and how Sherlock is also wrong about the sugar.

Things come to a head and we all end up back where we started - in Dewer’s Hollow, the hound is supposed to be have been seen. Purr wee Henry is suicidal and it’s Sherlock that talks him down with cold, clear logic. The consulting detective spells out the ending for us, but I was a little disappointed that it took the entrance of the the actual ‘hound’ for him to realise it was the mist. But then, he had had a hard time of it this episode. I liked the moment when Sherlock believes he’s seeing Jim the fish Moriarty due to the mist - is he a nightmare then? Or someone that preys on his mind? Then we get Franklin dying the same kind of way as Mr Frankland - on the moor, hoist by his own petard. All that remains is for Sherlock to admit to John that he used him as a guinea pig to aid his investigation into the hallucinogen and for John to force Sherlock to admit that he was wrong about the sugar. Class.

The fact that we then get Moriarty let out of some kind of government facility by none other than Mycroft Holmes should tell us what’s to come. As a warning, or a dangling worm on a hook, it’s great. We hope to be rewarded with an explanation during the next part, and it doesn’t disappoint - but that’s a story for another post.

So this re-imagining: it worked for me. Once I’d got the hang of it, it was fine. I liked the small moments, the little bits that only Martin ‘I’ve won a BAFTA’ Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch can carry off to such effect. What the hardcore Sherlock fandom thinks of it, I’ve no idea. And as for the Robert Downey Jr movie: good rollicking fun - but it’s not Sherlock Holmes. This is the best Sherlock Holmes out today, this is stimulating, thought-provoking entertainment, this is what people pay their Beeb license for. And I approve.

Peach and lube, people. Until I get round to blogging about the final act.

Tags:
~ BBC ~ Sherlock ~ Benedict Cumberbatch ~ Martin Freeman ~ Jeremy Brett ~ Russell Tovey

Sherlock 2x01 - A Scandal in Belgravia

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Sherlock series 2 episode 1!




It’s about time I weighed in on this. Apparently, opinion has been divided re: the latest three instalments of the good consultant detective Mr Sherlock Holmes and to be honest, I’m a little annoyed by the wailing and gnashing of teeth that’s going on due to the last act. But more on that later. First we have:

A Scandal in Belgravia.

Cunning title. Seeing as Bohemia is mostly the Czech Republic these days, and Belgravia is one of the richest picking-grounds in Westminster, I think it’s fine. There was a lot of excitement surrounding this episode, as it would bring Ms Irene Adler into the update. I was worried it would be handled badly. I was wrong - this isn’t Russell T. Davies, this is Stephen Moffat. A little fanservice was on the cards, naturally - and it came in the form of rum bum shot from Mr Holmes himself. In Buck House. Nice. At the risk of making you (single reader) groan, I’ll say it was a cheeky bit of fun that, one, used sibling rivalry to point out the burgeoning understanding Sherlock and John seemed to have, and, two, set us up for the mind games that were to follow. Having a (tastefully) near-naked Sherlock at the beginning just made me think that perhaps it wasn’t just his clothes that were about to be stripped from him.

Then we find Ms Adler has photographs in her possession that she neither wants to sell nor use for blackmail - just for security. So far, so like the original short story. However, I believe the original had her using the photograph of herself and the King of Bohemia as security until she could marry her city friend. Once they were married (with Sherlock in costume as their witness), she threw the photograph overboard whilst sailing off to a new life. Cautious woman - with good reason. So how does this gel with the new Ms Adler?

Pretty well, I think. People seem to remember Ms Adler from the original as some kind of adventuring dare-devil, who took Holmes on and won by sheer cognitive ability. Funny - upon re-reading, I find the only reason she actually got away was that Holmes was so convinced she didn’t know it was him whom she’d met in disguise that he waited until the next morning to call on her house and retrieve the photograph (in the place she had inadvertently revealed when a smoke-bomb was thrown by Watson through the window). One, all she did was piece together that it was Holmes, so that, two, she could stroll by his front door that evening and bid him a goodnight, to make sure it was him. Once she’d Gordon Jackson’d* him in this manner, she simply went home, packed up her stuff, and left on the first train with her new husband. Not exactly out-smarting Holmes in some Moriarty-level chess game of death, is it?

I enjoyed the new Ms Adler much more. She was shown to be smarter, in it for herself and what she could get, and not averse to gleaning what she could from Sherlock before using him to her advantage. She lived by her wits and her PDA, which contained all the security she needed, should she get into hot water. (Just by-the-by - did you all guess the source of her safe combination, and then the password on her phone? I did. But then, when the fandom is full of phrases like ‘being Cumberbatched’ and ‘I’m Watsoning down the street like a boss’, it wasn’t hard. It just goes to show how much fun Stephen Moffat has trolling fans, after he’s read their various posts on different message boards.) When the idea of ‘smart being the new sexy’ was hammered home not once, but twice, I smelt a thread that could only mean one thing. Finding she was technically gay (apart from when men paid her enough for her services) and, after a few false starts, only lusted after barbed conversation and devastatingly genius repartee with Sherlock nearly made me faint with relief; the Beeb weren’t about to try to turn her or Sherlock into some love-addled puppy. Something Russell T. Davies might have thought about, but something the rest of the world, and I’m cupping my hands to shout this: DOES NOT WANT.

Anyway, she did a good job - and the way she used both Sherlock and John to get what she wanted was clever in the extreme. The mere fact that she revealed she’d been given suggestions by none other than Jim the fish Moriarty as to how she could use the contents of her PDA to her better advantage was, for me, interesting. Now I believe it was she who called Moriarty at the beginning; he gave up shooting Sherlock by the pool in favour of having him duke it out with Ms Adler and her photographs instead. How else could he get the plane code from her phone? At any rate, it wouldn’t have been “boring” entertainment for him.

The episode as a whole worked for me. I enjoyed it, I watched it again a few days later, and liked it more. Acting - a word about acting. Right from the start we get Sherlock and John (not Holmes and Watson - they’re the Brett set in my house) being as close mates as they could be with someone like Sherlock in the mix. You just know this is setting you up for something later - much later - but it’s fine right now. The supporting cast was excellent, as always, and Mrs Hudson was just brilliantly played. And Sherlock’s idea that if ever Mrs Hudson left Baker Street then ‘England would fall’? Priceless. In fact, a lot of the dialogue was good by itself - but these actors bring out the best in it. Sherlock saying ‘I’m not the Commonwealth’ and John quipping ‘And that’s as modest as he gets’ was well played and indicative of someone with a good handle on both characters. Settings, cinematography, editing and the smooth BBC drah-ma finish made it an excellent example of proper good telly. As a flagship series, this is probably better than Doctor bloody Who - but don’t get your knickers in a twist; I still watch that, too.

One gripe I had was - and this is a weeny one, mind - the dead man in the boot of the car had his UK passport ‘stamped in Germany’. Uhm… no, he didn’t. They haven’t stamped a ‘UK’ passport inside Europe since they went from black to the burgundy European ones. Sorry, Stephen Moffat - I thought you would have spotted that. The major gripe I had was Sherlock rushing off to the Far East to save Ms Adler from being beheaded. I didn’t need to see that - all I needed was Sherlock looking out of the window after John had apparently told him the news, and then a sneaky text message being delivered with its personalised text tone. But anyway, it all worked out fine in the end.

So that’s the first episode. I think I require a break before forging ahead with the next one.

Peach and lube, people.

* to get Gordon Jackson’d:
the act of passing yourself off successfully as something you’re not, only to have someone catch you out with an otherwise innocuous remark that reveals your true identity. See: The Great Escape, 1963, character of MacDonald as he gets on the train with his forged German papers.


Tags:
~ BBC ~ Sherlock ~ Benedict Cumberbatch ~ Martin Freeman ~ Irene Adler

Well shit



Apparently I am quite the waste of space.

Knowing I have two years left before my opportunity for applying for my permanent residency comes up, I had the fanciful idea that once I obtained it, I would get a job that didn’t entail teaching. This sounded great - until I remembered that I’m not qualified for anything (save teaching, and that’s only to learners of it as a foreign language) and I lack all those things like experience in any other field.


So it should have come as no surprise to learn, after three hours trawling the web for courses ranging from simple certificates to actual degrees, that I don’t qualify to get onto anything resembling a proper course. Living in a country where the Open Uni considers ‘English Writing for Public Relations Professionals’ an actual component of a degree, I am forced to look at online courses where you have to pretend to be interested in society, economics or numbers in organised uses. Meh.

Trouble is, I don’t even know what job I’d be fit for if I did get my permanent residency, and were therefore able to take any job I bloody well wanted. What is there for people like me? I’ve done customer service and I’d rather chew my own foot off than do it again. I’ve done training, and teaching, and I’d rather shoot someone than have to feign patience whilst showing/telling them for the umpteenth time how to perform a simple task. In fact, I’d love a job where people lock me in a room with nothing but an iPod, my MacBook Air and unlimited tea (and maybe cucumber or cheese toasties) so I could write without interruption.


Some days I think I could be in the army. I could shoot people. And the best bit is that they’d be shooting back at me, which would give me a brilliant excuse to shoot at them. And I'm not even joking. In fact, the more I think about it, the more a stint serving Queen and country might suit me. I wouldn’t even be doing it for the money, such as it is.

It’s one of those days when you realise that, even though you seem quite capable on a personal level - you can normally blag your way through domestic repairs or work kerfuffles, fix other people’s computers, guide them through tutorials, know just the bit of random information they need, or just generally be an amazing human being - you’re also one of the useless ones. Not happy anywhere, not interested in anything, not comfortable with people in proximity.

The only good course I found that was vaguely interesting was Science Fiction Studies - but that’s a Masters degree (and on-campus), and as such, about as attainable as Christian Bale from where I am. It would also be totally useless in getting a job - except for the fact that it is a Masters (bitches), and in the case of me getting a job relating to sci-fi, of course.

*sigh*

Guess I'll just keep on keeping on, then. Thanks, Noel.