'Sherlock' recap: Season 3, Episode 2, 'The Sign of Three' | Metro US

You guys, I was the toast of Tumblr last night after basically every BNF in Sherlock fandom linked to my Metro recap of The Sign of Three. I'm 99% fannish enthusiast, not creator, so the last 12 hours on the other side have been like one long fizzy high. I mean, I had a ton of fun writing these (here's The Empty Hearse, which IMO is funnier and just as ho-YAY!) and could say that's its own reward, but there is nothing more validating than the enthusiasm of hardcore fans.

PS. All fannish emotion aside, I could defend every word of it to my editor as an unbiased assessment of what happened in the episode. This stuff writes itself.

( Slight spoiler in the editing question. )

PPPS. This one time, South Korea was not exaggerating.

I'm not the comedian in my social circle. As the enthusiastic magpie, my forte is effusive bursts of emotion on the esoteric subjects I know a ton about. To that end, I've spent many happy hours between Tumblr and the AO3 "preparing" for the third season of Sherlock. Meta, fic, art - my fannish life of the last two years consisted of little else.

( Which was exactly the problem when it came time for The Empty Hearse. )

Back in September, as my newspaper's resident Sherlock expert, I agreed to write episode recaps, which we try to make amusing (nothing TWoP-caliber, but not everyone wants to read a few thousand words on a single episode of their favorite show, either.) The formula works: While I watch neither Homeland nor Scandal, our synopses are often so amusing that I almost forget people die with some frequency on both shows. So it was with that goal to find humor that I approached my recap of The Empty Hearse - and realized what I've been doing wrong from the first scene.

Summarizing something forces you to focus on what's happening in the story, and only that, while being funny puts the drama in perspective. I learned to love the episode by setting aside two years' worth of emotional investment (which still needs a good catharsis - this is the closest I've come). Take things as they happen. Let the characters react in their own ways. Instead of allowing a scene totally jar me out of the story, take a deep breath to consider that the people who made it probably weren't intentionally setting out to fuck with their audience. Allow things to unravel as the writers intended instead of imposing limitations and requirements. I know you're all rolling your eyes, but as a journalist I'm trained to look ahead and anticipate what's next - but the effect is prejudicial in the real world, and joy-killing in entertainment. With that in mind, the episode actually turned out to be damn good, accomplishing everything it needed to without becoming maudlin. I'd give it a solid B+.

tl;dr Sometimes the characters serve the plot, and sometimes the plot is determined by character development - and both are valid storytelling approaches.

More than anything else, The Empty Hearse ended up being about Mary Morstan for me (and Mycroft Holmes, but one appreciation post at a time). And it’s the height of hipster nonsense to say I liked her before she was famous, ( but it’s true. )

I know we all played this game almost two years ago, but from what Moffat and Gatiss have said in interviews (I’m spoiler-free for The Empty Hearse) there won't be much in the way of explanation for the events of The Reichenbach Fall. Which seems a shame, even if from a storytelling perspective John Watson is perfectly right in the Series 3 trailer to say it's not about how Sherlock did it, but why. (Though the audience already knows most of it: kill yourself or your friends die; John had to watch because otherwise he would've ended up ruining his life trying to find out the truth like Anderson(!!!) and coming with Sherlock would've given away everything.)

That doesn't mean I can't spend a few thousand words (>.>) ( tying up the loose ends. )

As an aside, this post would be more thoroughly sourced if more than half of the links I’ve come across weren’t inactive due to people changing/deleting their Tumblr handles. Such a black hole of fannish history.