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Perhaps the bar has been set too low for this show and I’m latching onto the first majority female driven plot a little too hard? Perhaps.īut the majority women driven plot wasn’t the only thing about this episode that surprised me. It’s complicated, and hard to justify murder regardless of the circumstances, but my feelings still generally land on the positive side. It’s unfortunate that this power has to come hand and hand with homicide, but even Mycroft Holmes seems willing to look past it and categorize it as a war they shouldn’t win. Even in this episode, which I think was so incredibly female power focused, the truth of the matter is that they all were a bunch of murderers.
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Tidbits of dialogue peppered throughout other episodes are also quite damaging, often using feminist slurs or outright dismissing women’s value to the plot. As much as I love Irene Adler, she was a highly problematic character. She fits in so well and she’s an absolute pleasure to watch on the screen.īut let’s face it – the depiction of women on this show has been far from perfect. Best yet, her personality meshes so incredibly well with the characters already on the show. She’s not just a prop or a way to check off a token female character requirement. She not only brings a vital and consistent female energy to the show, but she does so in a way that is extremely useful and relevant to the plot. Then when John says he’s “taking Mary home,” he quickly corrects himself to say “Mary is taking me home.” I am certainly on Team Mary all the way. She even shows up Sherlock by being completely unphased by his drug-induced tangents and hopping right in to help solve the crime. She shows up Mycroft by finding out where Emilia Ricoletti is buried. Every single bit of dialogue she has is her pretty much proving herself to be the most badass person in the room. When we flash forward to the modern day Mary is still amazing, even though she only had a few short lines. And then Mary, my beloved Mary, was badass in the past and badass in the present and I expected no less from her. The bride was willing to lose her life to protect other women, becoming a legend and basically sacrificing who she was as a person before her death to keep other women safe.
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Molly’s Victorian era counterpart was so set on furthering her career that she posed as a man to gain access to what was denied to her because of her gender. Every woman that popped up on screen was fiercely determined, intelligent, and badass without falling into the dreaded ‘femme fatale’ trope. Let’s start with the amazing parts of the women in this episode. While it was far from perfect, it was so out of left field for a predominately male driven show that I had to do a double take. Yes, the women turned out to be murderers, and no, I’m not saying that’s remotely okay, but the context was women protecting other women and going to extreme lengths to do so. Moffat does not have the best reputation for writing women, but somehow this episode was surprisingly female-focused. What I am surprised about is what made it good. It’s not surprising to me that an episode of Sherlock is good. I’m happy that we got something, though, because with Benedict Cumberbatch being snatched away from us by Marvel for Doctor Strange, we’re going to have to be more patient than ever before.
#Sherlock the abominable bride movie review full
We’ve had a new season every two years (2010, 2012, 2014) and now suddenly instead of a full season, we have one solitary episode all by itself. I wasn’t sure how, if at all, it’d fit in with the rest of the series, but I was grateful that we at least got this because this will officially be the longest hiatus between seasons of Sherlock since the show started in 2010. This time around I took the opposite approach and went into this only knowing that it took place in the Victorian era. In the past I’ve pretty much been the Queen of Sherlock Spoilers, knowing every little thing that’d happen in each episode and following #Setlock fiercely online.