I remember getting angry when my favorite shows being preempted as a kid, but I’d like to talk about something that happened recently when I tried to get into a show.
Sherlock was recommended by a relative, and turned up on Quickflix, the Aussie Netflix knock-off. I watched the first episode and fell asleep. OK, not a fair trial. I started watching the second episode while doing the ironing one Sunday afternoon.
The show is silly. Sherlock would need eyes like telescopes to see the clues that he uses for his chains of reasoning, like scratches around the power inlet of a mobile phone he glances at for a moment. The actor who plays him is 37, which is around the age when you start needing to squint at the fine print or hold menus at arm’s length. No presbyopia for our hero, though.
Those scratches, incidentally, are dead giveaways that the former owner of the phone was a drunk. Yes, because when I’m drunk, I always make sure my phone is charged. Why couldn’t the former owner – or the current one – be just plain clumsy? Or suffered an injury to hand, arm, or brain, maybe. There must be a dozen possible reasons for those scratches, but no, it’s a tell-tale that allows Mr Amazing to impress the heck out of everybody. To be fair, the original stories had similar chains of reasoning based on unlikely assumptions that always worked out. One needs to set these things aside and get into the spirit of willing belief. Fine, no worries.
Speaking of impressing everybody, people never assume that Sherlock just looked them up on Facebook or Googled their names and thus knew about their past. That would be my first guess when encountering this guy. Actually, it is possible to pose as a psychic based off information gleaned from Tumblr, so maybe he’s just running into an unusually gullible bunch of citizens. It’s London, however, which is not, I gather, an unsophisticated place. Maybe that happens in a later episode.
Where I finally gave up was when Sherlock and Watson were searching for the hideout of the Chinese smuggler gang. Sherlock orders Watson to go get some information from the home of one of the gang’s victims. He then deduces the neighborhood of the hideout, and is wandering around trying to figure out which building is the one he wants. Who should appear but Watson, holding a book. Watson says the hideout is over there. What does our deductive genius say? Is it, “Ah good, that diary you hold in your hand, the one I told you to go get, why, it must have the exact information we need to progress in our task. How unlikely, given that we’re dealing with professional smugglers. What a stroke of luck. Excellent! Let us continue our investigation.”
No. He says (something very like), “Watson! What are you doing here and how do you know that?”