I think I'm going to wind up being the official harsher of squee for ELEMENTARY: Liu's giving as well as taking is solid -- maybe the most solid thing the show has done to date --but I can't go into the squee because I find myself really disliking the show. It's got that kind of weird TV-stagey vibe that I really dislike but associate with a lot of network TV and big-budget production, where they hit one tone and don't vary it even though the story would be much better served by their doing so. The last scene with the sister in ep 2 is a great example: the medically-induced coma gimmick was really dumb, but Holmes's asking, "Why was she still in her coma?" is a really great bit. Because it *turns* the scene, changes it from obligatory "I still love her" to chilling. Except the tone of the scene doesn't change at all, so it really falls flat. There are a lot of other things that bug me -- the characters don't feel like Holmes and Watson to me; there are bits where Miller comes off as more Holmesish, but very few where Liu, though I like her, really comes off as Watsonian. The sober-companion gimmick may be part of this, but even though they're starting to play up Liu's interest in cases, they're not showing her joy enough. And that's one of the things that's great about ACD's Watson, to me, one of the things that absolutely makes the character: Watson *loves* seeing Holmes do what Holmes does. He really enjoys it, tries his hand at it on occasion. But I don't get that sense from Liu's Watson yet.
Also: the low quality of Holmes's deductions are really, *really* painful to me. To be fair, it is extremely difficult to write very smart characters, and it is *extremely* hard to write good clues and deductions for Sherlock Holmes, and to come up with good cases for him, but the writers of ELEMENTARY are just going for the desperately basic in terms of deduction. They're trying to go for a weird mix of fairly convoluted cases and third-grade clues, and it doesn't pan out a lot of the time.
One positive thought: possibly my favorite character moment for Holmes and Watson is at the beginning of THE SIGN OF THE FOUR, with the pocket watch. I wonder if Watson's elder brother is going to figure in ELEMENTARY as a motivation for her becoming a sober companion. Consider his canonical fate, as deduced by Sherlock Holmes: "He was a man of untidy habits,--very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died." Watson's discomfort around corpses is, as lampshaded in episode two, a really dumb character trait for a surgeon, even one who lost a patient. So here is some fanon that fans of ELEMENTARY might find plausible: she's not upset over having lost a patient after all. The reason that Watson walked away from a highly technical specialty to focus on addicts is that her brother was an addict. He threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty, and, caught up in his addiction, he died. The reason that Watson does not like corpses has nothing to do with actual corpses as such, but because she got sick of dealing with her brother's crap, looked down at her parents for still caring about him, performed occasional wellness checks very begrudgingly, and then *she was the one to find her brother's body,* and every time she sees a corpse it brings the guilt and horror of that moment back.
no subject
Also: the low quality of Holmes's deductions are really, *really* painful to me. To be fair, it is extremely difficult to write very smart characters, and it is *extremely* hard to write good clues and deductions for Sherlock Holmes, and to come up with good cases for him, but the writers of ELEMENTARY are just going for the desperately basic in terms of deduction. They're trying to go for a weird mix of fairly convoluted cases and third-grade clues, and it doesn't pan out a lot of the time.
One positive thought: possibly my favorite character moment for Holmes and Watson is at the beginning of THE SIGN OF THE FOUR, with the pocket watch. I wonder if Watson's elder brother is going to figure in ELEMENTARY as a motivation for her becoming a sober companion. Consider his canonical fate, as deduced by Sherlock Holmes: "He was a man of untidy habits,--very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died." Watson's discomfort around corpses is, as lampshaded in episode two, a really dumb character trait for a surgeon, even one who lost a patient. So here is some fanon that fans of ELEMENTARY might find plausible: she's not upset over having lost a patient after all. The reason that Watson walked away from a highly technical specialty to focus on addicts is that her brother was an addict. He threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty, and, caught up in his addiction, he died. The reason that Watson does not like corpses has nothing to do with actual corpses as such, but because she got sick of dealing with her brother's crap, looked down at her parents for still caring about him, performed occasional wellness checks very begrudgingly, and then *she was the one to find her brother's body,* and every time she sees a corpse it brings the guilt and horror of that moment back.