The Six Thatchers Review
Not sure these will always be on Sundays – they might migrate to Tuesdays, which this week will be Build High for Happiness 5. Anyway, Sherlock‘s back as the Year of Moffat continues, albeit, you know, with Gatiss. Speaking of whom, and in a rare concession to spoilerphobes, let’s start by saying has written what’s almost certainly the best script of his career here, a position admittedly previously held by The Empty Hearse and The Hounds of Baskerville. It’s not labyrinthine; Gatiss has never done that, and that, as opposed to his usual problem of stultifying unoriginality, has generally been his weakness on Sherlock. But it moves in unexpected ways. The substitution of Mary for the expected Moriarty plot is in many regards just the same trolling as “eh, we’re not going to tell you how he actually survived,” but the last twenty minutes felt extraordinarily inventive, moving in genuinely unexpected directions. The revelation of John’s near-affair is unlike anything Gatiss has ever done, small and human and actually like a writer who exists in a post-Russell T Davies world. The end, particularly with the injunction to save John, is unmistakably also the season-plotting influence of Moffat, but the small, moment to moment decisions of how it’s structured are chosen with a care and weight that’s as much of a leap forward for Gatiss’s writing as Scandal in Belgravia was for Moffat’s. On the back of this, I’m actually curious what he’ll do for what you’ve got to figure could well be his last ever Doctor Who script this year.
More broadly, it’s an interesting place to put the season. Past seasons have had fairly self-contained first episodes that end in some vague tease of future weight – twice Moriarty, once Magnussen. But it’s never felt as though there was too much to clear up in the next three hours. This time, with the fractured Sherlock/John relationship, the strange musings about death, Sherrinford, Moriarty, and a trailer that’s focused on a character with no obvious relationship to any of this, it feels like a show that’s going for something it’s never done before, trying to push itself into a new shape. It’s a good feeling at the start of 2017; what it seems like we want from the return of Sherlock. More of this thrilling, exciting sense of possibility please.
And, of course, less of this “we fridged Mary” crap. This is, simply put, a fucking awful decision. Maybe – maybe – there’s some way to justify it that we’ll see over the next two weeks. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Steven Moffat to turn a decision this awful around. But the fact remains that Mary Watson was one of the best things Sherlock had going for it. The Abominable Bride rightly celebrated the female characters that the show’s modernized approach let it have. Now they’ve taken the best one out in a cheap and arbitrary way that offers nothing save for an opportunity for Martin Freeman to get to show off his dramatic range.…
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The fundamental problem at the heart of this is simply that Rorschach is an unsettlingly fascinating character. Even Moore, for all the reservations he would come to have about him, freely admits that “Rorschach was one of the characters I enjoyed writing most.” And no wonder – think of a classic line in Watchmen and the odds are overwhelming that you’re thinking of a Rorschach line, probably either a bit of his opening monologue or “none of you understand.…