Написала длиннющий отзыв на первый сезон Elementary. Чтобы добро не пропадало, выкладываю здесь. Чтобы не тратить на это еще больше времени, чем уже потрачено, оно без перевода.
I have finished the first season of Elementary. There were lots of things I wanted to say during watching this show so I decided to sum it up in one post. Brace yourselves, there are gonna be feels. There are also obviously going to be spoilers, particularly of the few final episodes, though honestly if you took longer than me to watch this show you probably don't care enough to bother.
First of all: I liked it. It's a decent crime drama though it would probably benefit from having 13 episodes instead of 24 (and some of the best shows I've seen had 8 or 6 episodes per season, just saying). Holmes is adorable, Joan Watson is fleshed out well enough (though I dislike her but this dislike has nothing to do with her gender or race, we'll get to that later) and the cases are smart until you watch long enough to figure out the writing pattern (which is why it could benefit from having less episodes – by the last one I could guess what was going to happen at the beginning of each scene).
Now to the complicated bits. First of all, it has very little to do with Conan Doyle – which isn't bad in itself if it wasn't sold as a modern Sherlock Holmes. I'm not even trying to say that it was ripped off BBC Sherlock though the timing – just when Sherlock Holmes from just a popular franchise once again became a fad – and the fact of how few things it has in common with Sherlock Holmes, as if someone was pitching a crime drama about a recovering addict and some shady CBS board of directors said "We'll okay it if you name the characters Holmes and Watson" makes me think that the unexpected popularity of Moffat's creation played some role in Elementary's existence. It's inspired by Sherlock Holmes, yes, but it is not an adaptation. For what are Sherlock Holmes stories at their core? They are not even the much beloved famous detective figure himself – there are many stories centered around a self-absorbed quirky genius solving riddles: the Doctor is Sherlock Holmes in space, Lincoln Rhyme is paralyzed Sherlock Holmes, Gil Grissom is Sherlock Holmes from a badly written show, the list goes on and on and depends only on which particular books and shows you are familiar with. So the thing that makes Sherlock Holmes stories what they are is the particular combination of plots and puzzles and this is something Elementary got rid of almost entirely.
Now that we've established that my refusal to accept Elementary as a Sherlock Holmes adaptation has nothing to do with Watson being a woman and Ms. Hudson being transgender let's get to even trickier subject.
Drugs! Before we continue you probably want to know my opinion on drugs as well (well, you probably don't care but it would explain much). I don't think drugs are great, I also don't think that they are an absolute evil, my opinion on them is like on many things in life – pro-choice. Unless you are doing drugs in the presence of someone who is pained by it, it's nobody's business but your own. Which is why it surprised me that Elementary painted drugs in absolute black, turning it from a compelling tale of a man struggling to overcome whatever issues he has in life into one of those "and here are the lungs of a man who smoked for 40 years and died of cancer at 35" pictures people try to spook teenagers with.
It wouldn't be that big of a problem if the writers also didn't immediately spoon-feed you the only answer to this scary drug problem. Apparently it's NA and group therapy. Yeah, I know, it works for some people but it doesn't work for everyone and not everyone needs it. But heck, even Watson, the most collected and sane character of the cast has a therapist – because that's the right and proper way to do! At the mid-point of the show Holmes says a surprisingly poignant thing - "You mistake the support group ethos for a complete system for living. It is not. At least not to a man like me." This phrase is probably the only reason I didn't quit watching the show by that point because it showed me that at least one of the writers understood.
But this is where I figure out what Elementary is about in a nutshell and this is where shit hits the fan. Because if you think about it, the only character with negative qualities besides the criminals in the show is… Holmes. Everyone around him – Watson, Gregson, Bell, Alfredo are so good they are almost cardboard. Consequently Holmes is the only character besides some criminals who is British, not American, an outsider. Let me make this crystal-clear – I am not a US-hater. I could list you qualities of my US friends as individuals and American culture as a whole I admire and I would run out of fingers on my hands to count them. But if there is one thing I can't stand about American culture and American tv-shows it's being sure of the only right answer for everything and force-feeding this answer to everyone around even if they beg to differ. It probably drives me up the wall so much because I've been at a receiving end of this so there's only so much of good Americans teaching a bad Brit how to live his life I can take.
But we're talking about Sherlock Holmes, so let me try my hand at deducing things for a bit? Writing can tell you about the writer quite a lot (I like to toy with the idea that you'll never tell much about me from my stories but maybe it's just wishful thinking). I think Elementary's writing team is mostly women – otherwise Watson wouldn't be Joan and wouldn't pass remarks about Gregson having a gun "and a penis". I think none of them were drug addicts – and if they dabbled they were brainwashed by NA – but some of them had addicts as friends or family for nobody hates drugs with such burning passion as someone close to a drug addict.
By the way, while the remark about Gregson's procession of a penis was in-character for Watson, the explanation of Irene Adler adopting an alias because of her gender (those who have seen the last two episodes know what I mean) and especially letting Watson – not Holmes – eventually catch Moriarty seemed to be pushing it. I know it's annoying when media objectifies women and makes them look helpless but it's not less annoying when media written by women gets back at that by making men look incompetent and stupid. I get that both are looking at the problem from different sides but a fence doesn't stop being a fence depending on which side of it you are standing.
People kept telling me that Elementary has "a healthier look on gender equality and psychological issues than BBC Sherlock". It doesn't. It just has a look that is similar to the look of the majority of people watching it. But "mine" and "good" and especially "right" are not always the same things. Something to think about.
PS. I am tagging this post "elementary" on tumblr but I am not tagging hate. This isn't hate, it's thinking on subjects mentioned by Elementary and what is the purpose of fiction if not to make you think and feel. I will probably watch more of Elementary if it happens and I don't completely dislike it. But I'm going through the process of analysing it and recognizing its faults same as I do with many other shows I watch. I'd probably be interested to talk about this and know what you think but I never reply when I see that a person demanding a reply didn't bother to read what I actually said.