magnetic_pole

Eh.

A clever riff on the original story, just as the previous two were: not the woman who beat Holmes, but the woman who beat Holmes. Not the killer hound but the terror-inducing H.O.U.N.D. Not the famous falls, but the Fall.

But the fall from what? Unlike the first two episodes, where theme was clear (Can Sherlock love? Can Sherlock feel fear?), this episode was muddled. A fall from a building, fine. Got that. But metaphorically? A fall from grace? That is, a loss of status or respect? There's very little dramatic momentum here; Sherlock doesn't seem to care until he realizes that Moriarty's playing an end game with him, and even then he seems more preoccupied with countering Moriarty's moves than preserving his name. The individual plot points are compelling, but the motivations aren't.

John might care if Sherlock fell, but that's not as simple as it seems. Is he concerned about the press turning on his friend? Fair enough. But when he erupts in the scene where they discuss the issue, he's concerned that Sherlock will develop a reputation as a fake, not that Sherlock will develop a reputation as a criminal. (Whatever happened to the John-as-moral-compass from the Great Game?) What's at stake in the "fall" of the boffin Sherlock Holmes, the fifteen-minutes-of-fame hero of John Watson's blog, anyways? We're all cynical about the media at this point. Why would a kiss-and-tell even mattered? Moriarty's gotten away with everything so far--why would it even matter if Sherlock had to shoulder blame for his dastardly deeds?

Is it a biblical fall, then, the end of a certain kind of innocence? (Or in Sherlock's case, the end of a cold, amoral rationality?) The heavy-handed apple reference certainly supports this, and I can imagine another episode where Sherlock becomes "human" by learning to lie and consider the feelings of others...but this wasn't that episode. We see an echo of that lesson watching Sherlock clearly upset at lying to John in the final scene, but the lie is pragmatic and contingent rather than a sign of emotional growth for him.

What of Moriarty's I.O.U.? The show did everything but emblazon those three letters on the screen (on the apple, on the windows, in the graffiti, with Moriarty repeating it and John repeating it in the final scene), but Moriarty doesn't owe Sherlock a thing, so far as I can tell, and we didn't see anyone struggle with repaying a debt, fulfilling a promise, or righting things. Was it a sign or code for something else? Did it allude to a debt we didn't quite grasp? (Something related to Mycroft, who's relationship with Moriarty so far is so ridiculous as to defy logic?) Was a "fall" something to be desired, somehow? By Mycroft, for Sherlock? By Sherlock himself? In the original stories he fakes his own death to bring down Moriarty and stays away from Baker Street to tie up loose ends with Moriarty's international network--not that convincing even the first time around--but this series has been about testing the limits of Sherlock's character, and I'm not sure where the fall fits in, either as favor or disgrace.

Thus far, Sherlock is essentially the origin story of a superhero, all of Sherlock's protests about heroes aside. We start with a young Sherlock and a beginning blogger. We see how the hero and the sidekick meet, why they get along, what their working methods are, how they complement each other, what they could do together. The series hasn't been especially subtle--we're just distracted by witty dialogue, the references to canon and pop culture, and the sheer momentum of the plot. Just as Sally Donovan planted the seed of suspicion ("One day we'll discover he put the body in the morgue"), Lestrade told us the arc of the next season ("He's a good man and may one day be a great one.") There we are--but how did "Fall" move us along? I'll probably be impressed when Series 3 shows us how Sherlock slowed his pulse, relaxed his muscles, and survived a five-odd story fall, but I really want to know what he learned about himself in the process.

To paraphrase Lestrade, Sherlock is good television, and one day it might be great. But not if it keeps going in the direction it's currently headed. It's possible to keep the dialogue witty and the plot moving briskly without actually letting us how how Sherlock works and without without thinking too much about what "knowledge" and "evidence" and "crime" mean in a wired, 24-hour city of fourteen million. Without thinking too much about Sherlock's craft--which is logic, not intelligence per se--and substituting, by slight of hand, the generic superpower of a big, muscly brain. The past few episodes have been dependent on genuinely ridiculous plot points (Sherlocked? Really? A key code that opens anything in the universe?) and over-the-top plays for audience investment in Sherlock's emotional development, which can only go so far. Can't we just let Sherlock be Sherlock, without a super-villain and a master plot lurking in the background? Boring. What do real people have in their real lives, anyways? Oh, right. Friends, people they know, people they like, people they don't like. Drama. Cases.

From the beginning, I've wanted a Sherlock that's slower paced, more nuanced, more realistic, and less enchanted with itself and its hero than the one we have, and that's fine. Sherlock doesn't have to be The Wire, and we're clearly never going to be able to steer clear of smart Alec entirely. But this series has great actors and enormous appeal, and I wish its creators would give it a chance to live and breathe. Have fun with the cleverness (Moriarty did that well in the first scenes last night, with his crime apps). Take the cases more seriously. Take the characters more seriously. Let them fall, or fly. What if, instead scurrying to fetch Sherlock his coffee, Molly Hooper had paused and then laughed at him--and we'd been given permission to laugh along? What if we'd been allowed to think, for just a moment, that Sherlock might be dead, or that Sally Donovan might be right?

That's when things might get interesting.