"I'm the widow of a drug dealer, I own property in central London, and for the last bloody time, John, I'm not your housekeeper!"
The character of Culverton Smith is, at one level, the embodiment of an idea explicitly referred to in the script: what if all the serial killers we know about- mentally subnormal, odd and marginalised- are just those who get caught? What if, every so often, there is a rich and powerful serial killer who simply kills with impunity? There's a blatant subtext here: Smith stands for Jimmy Savile, and that obviously informs Toby Jones' (excellent) performance; he even has his "own" hospital. There's a reason why Sherlock Holmes declares Culverton Smith to be the very worst and most despicable adversary he's ever met.
This is a plot by Steven Moffat which is surprisingly straightforward and relatively free of his usual narrative tricks, although the camerawork remains as clever as is usual for Sherlock. It isn't really a whodunit, either; like Columbo, the tension lies in whether or not Sherlock can prove the guilt of the obvious killer.
No; the narrative tricks lie elsewhere, in the interplay between Sherlock and John, and in their interactions and slow reconciliation. And yes, Sherlock is almost... nice, at times here. He certainly reacts sensitively, for him, when John confesses that he is not the man Mary thought he was, and had been flirting by text with another woman. It is here, with the character stuff, where we see the more traditional Sherlock narrative cleverness. And it's good telly. And yet- it's about time we had a proper, clever whodunit, don't you think?
Nice cliffhanger, though,,with Sherlock's sister, whom I assume to be a baddie...
I remember some people thinking John apparently flirting with another woman and Sherlock reacting calmly to his confession to be out of character for both men. Sherlock, who respected Mary, even when she turned out to have had a double life, should have been taken aback and disgusted by John cheating. Plus, we know the backstory of John as when they're trying to make this big surprise. Notwithstanding that the flirting was a ruse by the sister, John has zero, absolutely zero motivation to have cheated on his wife because there's zero explanation why he did it or why he doesn't like his home life enough to want to do it. John might as well have not HAD a family before this, that's actually believable.
ReplyDeleteWhen you write a cheating subplot, you should be writing WHY you do it. If the affair seems to come across a non-entity in the entire product, there's nothing to cheat on from the viewer's perspective.
All that's very Moffat, isn't it? Very much clever plotting first, characterisation second, at least in terms of story structure. It's not that he can't, or doesn't, write characters very well indeed.... when he wants to. But he isn't good at dealing with the bits of necessary characterisation that arise as a consequence of his plotting.
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