Spontaneous Musings

Finally some new "Sherlock" episodes. I think there are three to four that they filmed for 2017. Not positive.

Whether you like "Sherlock" has a great deal to do with whether you like this particular portrayal of the Great Detective, the actor, Benedict Cumberbatch, the writers - Moffat and Gatis, and Martin Freeman as Watson. If any of the above irritate or turn you off for any reason, you won't like Sherlock. It is what it is. (shrugs). And let's face it there have been numerous portrayals of Sherlock not to mention versions over the years to choose from. Which one you personally prefer has more to do with you than much else. One of my New Year's resolutions is not to argue over inconsequential things. Or people's personal preferences. It's a waste of time and not very good for my blood pressure.


Anyhow, I liked last night's episode quite a bit. Had some interesting twists and turns. That said Mark Gatis's plotting was a bit off in places, so I kept getting lost and having to rewind. The series has the irritating habit of skipping over stuff, then going back and showing it long after the fact and often when the audience has forgotten about it. Which is a neat narrative trick, but risks losing the audience if done poorly. They did a bit too much of it. (I don't think it was necessary in regards to John Watson. Mary and Sherlock, yes, possibly but not John too. That was overkill. ( spoiler ))

Also, at times, I felt the performances and direction was tad too manic. Such as the birth of Rosalind in the car and Holmes obsession with texting everything all the time. Humorous but over the top. Lacked subtlety. That said, I get why they did it, and it was to a degree effective satire of our world's obsession with cell phones and texting constantly. I've seen people texting all the frigging time as well. At the dinner table. In theaters. In cabs. At major events. I have no idea what they are saying or texting about that could be so vitally important. And I think that was the writer's point -- except here Sherlock is solving multiple crimes via text. We have John Watson's irritation with texting - and preference for blogging as a counter-point. Effective in places, but also over-done.

Other than that? I liked the episode a great deal and found the unraveling of the mystery interesting and sad. Not among the more uplifting episodes. Didn't realize how much I'd missed the series.
( spoilers )

The apartment hunting is not going well. It's become well complicated. And work, sigh, difficult and stressful. Windows 2010 reminds me a little of how Windows ME and Windows Vista - it's a nightmare. Things that used to take seconds take 20 minutes. And it's not the only new system they are implementing. The thing of it is, and bear with me as I attempt to find the words to explain myself, - is they are taking what was once simple and complicating it to the extent that it takes longer to do the work and when we try to fix problems, new one's occur. The reason this has happened is simple - the creators of Windows 2010 wanted to please everyone - they added every possible thing imaginable. They were in a nutshell trying to do too much. And as a result what once was a simple program, become complicated.

Been thinking about this a lot lately, because it is a recurring theme in my life of late. At the Haitian Forum it struck me that this was part of the problem - the forum felt a bit chaotic. All these ideas, all these solutions, all these problems, no consensus. It reminded me a little of
my old Legislative Class professor in Law School's speech about how government in a nutshell was organized chaos. Basically what happens is everyone picks out a problem and throws it into a hat, they don't agree on what the main problem is. Then everyone has a solution and throws it into a hat, because they do not agree on what the solution should be. And you just pick them out of the hat. What my professor did not know is that is basically true about most democratically run or for that matter large organizations where there is no clear guiding voice. At the forum - there were too many ideas and no real coherent solutions. I left it feeling frustrated and scattered. Overwhelmed. Drunk on information. Felt the same way after seeing four-five apartments this week and four to five last weekend. Overwhelmed and frustrated. Clarity gone.

If you know me at all, you'll realize how ironic it is for me to complain about people complicating things. For since I was a little girl, my parents used to say - your problem is you complicate everything. You are a complicator, sk. I try not to be. But my stories always got convoluted. And my papers in school - even more so. Instead of selecting something simple - I went after what was complicated. And most of the stories I wrote had that problem - convoluted plots.


Last night, I tried to watch the third episode of Sherlock a second time. Made it all the way through, even though I kept rewinding every ten to fifteen minutes because my mind wandered.
Spoke to a friend about it today, who'd also seen the episode. And also had difficulty following it. I thought it was just me. That my brain was on overload or something. No, said my friend, it was a confusing episode, drug in places, didn't make sense in others, ended on a cliffhanger and the lead character, Sherlock, was a bit too over-the-top - to the point in which he was almost not believable. In short it was a mess. I paused and thought about it. My friend was right - the writer and director of that episode was trying to do too much. The title of the episode was The Game - and it had two complex interlocking mysteries going on at the same time, plus this mysterious third character who may or may not be involved in both (my guess - just the one).

Also this weekend, I bought, read, and reviewed the latest Buffy Comic - Issue 38 - and after reading numerous metas and reviews, it hit me why the views on this comic, much like the Sherlock episode I described above are all over the map, and diametrically opposed. The comic has the same central flaw in structure that the Sherlock episode does. It tries to do too much and in doing so, falls flat on its face.
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