(Too much?) This is fodder for another piece, but there’s so much to be said about how much iterations of Doyle’s characters are viewed as gay.īut gay aside, it also feels really good to see a Sherlock Holmes show that’s filled with non-white women. Spoilers for the end of the show: Sherlock risks her life for Wato because she’s the only person she’s ever cared for, and Wato is woken from her grief-induced hypnosis (something that the show’s Moriarty claims could only happen if she loses something greater than her conditioning) from the shock of seeing Sherlock’s apparent death.Īnd remember, this is a Sherlock series, which historically has always been ripe for the gay-ing. They end up living together (albeit unwillingly). (Fans of the show refer to this scene as “The Sniff”). The first scene in which Sherlock and Wato-san interact ends with Sherlock explaining that the reason she knew Wato came from a warzone is because she (and the camera gives us a view of Sherlock’s heels as she moves in closer to Wato) can smell the gunpowder off of her, and she sniffs Wato’s hair for good measure. Even if not intentional, the show is littered with sapphic undertones. (I know, for many of my generation, Bubbline was our gateway to figuring out our own sexuality.)Īnd watching Miss Sherlock, I’m reminded of that.
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Trying to find the gays and the bis and the lesbians in TV teaches you who it’s safe to come out to, who you can trust, who might not break your heart. And, when they finally kissed after nine seasons in the finale, I cried.įor many of us, the maybe-queers in straight shows is your practice for what would be a life-time of trying to figure out who else in a room is gay. For years, I’d watch episodes of them together, breathlessly marvelling at the gay-shaded clues I thought the writers were leaving in. And while many of the straighter folk chalked it down to something more banal as the end of a friendship or something just as innocent, I hazarded the guess of “bitter exes, not quite over each other” and nervously clung on to that. For years, ever since we first see the two characters sharing the same scene, many of us knew that there was something there. I’ll probably talk about this more in a next piece, but think about the relationship between Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen from Adventure Time. And in an era where queer women are so fucking visible, what good is it to “try to look for the gay” in pieces that aren’t, or at least don’t immediately start so?īecause it feels really good and illuminating and valid when you find it. In all kinds of media (TV, music, you name it), queer women are moving toward the spotlight, some of them sidestepping the closet entirely. In 2018, they had so many to choose from that they had to leave some out. In earlier years, they’d have to squeeze in movies that either weren’t so good or weren’t so canonically gay just to fill out their lists. Autostraddle pointed out in their 2018 Best-Of movies list that queer women representation is at an all-time high. It’s strange (some would say backward) to find gayness in the subtext of modern day pieces. There is no heterosexual explanation for this. It’s also very, very gay, despite it not being explicitly so. In all honesty, it’s an incredibly pleasant watch, with the first season often going into the strong bonds that motherhood, sisterhood, and even just female friendship forges. Stakes needs to be appropriately high enough to keep the audience caring, but not too high (except for the finale) that audiences get overloaded. It manages to traverse the unwieldy tightrope that all Sherlock adaptations (and really, detective shows in general) face: it’s not a crime drama, so it shouldn’t be too serious, but you can’t be too loose either.
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With the genderbending and location-setting, the show doesn’t so much adapt the original Sherlock Holmes series as it liberally takes chunks from Holmes and applies those chunks into a very, very different story about trauma, victimhood, and grief.Īnd it does so with a deft and lighthearted hand though the show very often goes into pretty dark places, it never becomes a downer. Sherlock is a consulting detective, and Wato-san is a volunteer doctor fresh from a stint caring for refugees in Syria. Starring Yukio Takeuchi as Sherlock and Shihori Kanjiya as Wato Tachibana (Japanese honorifics applied, her name becomes “Wato-san”-get it?), the show takes place in modern-day Japan.
HBO Asia and HULU’s genderbent version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s legacy-making character, Miss Sherlock, first aired on April 2018. It’s about time Sherlock Holmes became a woman