Sherlock - Non Spoiler
Jan. 11th, 2012 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightcastleI watched the first of the new series of Sherlock, and haven't yet watched the second. I'm not sure I like it. It feels like its trying too hard now, and I'm not sure why. There was nothing particularly wrong with it (except maybe the first and last scenes) but it didn't quite sit right.
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Date: 2012-01-13 03:52 am (UTC)Padding. Padding. Paaaaaaddddding. PAAAAAAAAAAADDDDIIIINNNNGGGGGGGGGGGG.
(padding!)
"A Scandal in Bohemia" is a short story originally published in a magazine: in a book, it's barely 30 pages. Inasmuch as "A Scandal in Belgravia" took anything at all from the story, they'd exhausted Doyle's material by about the 40 minute mark. If they'd ended the episode right then and there, I would have been pretty damn happy with it, modulo the OMG LESBIANZ fappery. But they didn't, and boy oh boy did it go on after that. And on. And on. Did I mention the padding?
I haven't watched S2E2 yet, but I'm very curious to see what happens when they're compressing one of the novels rather than expanding one of the shorts.
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Date: 2012-01-13 04:58 pm (UTC)That might be part of it, true. But more specifically I think (for me) it was the choice in which direction to pad. What makes Adler so memorable in the original is she wins. Here, they get to that victory in the 40 minute mark and then they undermine it. Why choose that direction? Why not pad earlier, and build to the same victory that makes her "the Woman"?
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Date: 2012-01-14 08:48 pm (UTC)Agreed strongly. Having Holmes rescue her from the mujaheddin at the end added nothing and took away rather more than I think they intended. :(
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Date: 2012-01-17 01:50 am (UTC)...and now having seen "The Hounds of Baskerville":
Huh, well, that was an interesting answer. On the upside: I can't accuse that episode of having any fatal pacing/padding issues, nor of having any completely ruined characters, so I guess that answers my question as such. On the downside, the actual plot of that episode was somewhere on the far side of stupid. So it'd be nice if they ever actually put all the pieces together, but at this point I'm getting less and less optimistic.
(On the upside: still better than pretty much the entire last season of Dr. Who.)