My sister and I worked out the perfect cast for Muppet Dracula

#the gonzo and rizzo dynamic this implies is rizzo being like ‘gonzo i think we should get out of here’ at every turn#while gonzo is like ‘rizzo don’t be ridiculous’#gonzo: haha wow this castle is so cool and count dracula is such a nice guy!!#rizzo (trembling like a nervous Chihuahua) oh god oh god oh god#gonzo: check it out this guy’s got no reflection! crazy!!#rizzo: gonzo. we are gonna DIE here.#dracula *crawling down the castle like a lizard*#rizzo: GONZO ARE YOU SEEING THIS- wait#gonzo: *crawling down the wall like a lizard too* wahoo!!! (penny-anna)

@re-dracula

finally, a dracula movie i would actually pay to watch! @nonasuch @victorianpining <3

The blue Victorian gown was first spotted on Amanda Abbington as Mary Watson in the 2016 special episode of Sherlock titled The Abominable Bride. The series was generally known to take place in the present day, but The Abominable Bride took its cue from the original settings from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, and this gown helped to lend a touch of authenticity to the period setting.

The gown later found a second life in Steven Moffat’s 2020 adaptation of Dracula, where Lily Dodsworth-Evans wore it in her portrayal of Lady Dorabella Ruthven.

Costume Credit: Anne81

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Re: Dracula is Dracula Daily for your ears! Listen to the story with a full cast of voice actors and immersive sound design - all for free on your favorite podcast app!

I am loving this podcast. The actors are perfect and they add so much to the story that you miss reading. They really bring home how freaking young and earnest Jonathan is

Update: THIS IS VERY GOOD. I've listened to hundreds of audiobooks and i wholeheartedly recommend this. The acting, the sound effects, the creative decisions, chef's kiss! I can't wait to get to the fucking COWBOY.

This is already in my top 10 list of audio drama podcasts, and its quality has eclipsed some well-loved classics like The Black Tapes. I can't BELIEVE how good the experience is, and I am floored by how much more accessible the text is when I hear Jonathan Harker's voice.

Absolutely phenomenal. Please listen to Re: Dracula.

Travels with Jonathan Harker, in pictures

If our good friend Jonathan Harker had sent us some photos along with his lovely email, here's what he might have included. All photos are as close to contemporary as I could find.

Left Munich at 8:35 P. M.:

arriving at Vienna early next morning:

Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets:

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh:

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals:

sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods:

The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them:

(on the left: the Romanian royal family in peasant cosplay in the early 1900s; on the right, a photoshoot of Romanian national dress in 1868)

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place:

Bonus: a postcard Jonathan might have picked up for Mina.

Parallels between the effects of Leprosy and Vampirism?

Reading the more recent entries I was struck by the way Mina describes and deals with her condition resembles the way people in medieval and early modern Europe dealt with leprosy.

“Unclean” was the shout along with the sound of a certain wooden instrument of which I only know the German name, with which the afflicted had to announce themselves when out in public. This way people were able to keep their distance, but also knew, that these people were in need of donations and often received them.

When Mina describes herself as unclean she likens her condition to a disease, that not only severs her from community, but also presents a danger to community. Like a poision the illness works its way through their bodies and well in medieval logic turns them into living, and horrifically already decaying, dead.

Thankfully nowadays much can be done for a leprosy paitent (yay for penicilin!) but back in the middle ages (and much later actually) all that could be done was to sent them to leprosy colonies. The patients were first kept under quarantine, the progession of their rash, the first symptom carefully watched and if the horrible suspicion was confirmed- they were declared dead.

They literally became living dead. And in their presence the priests would read and sing the final rites for them- they recieved a full Christian burial- except they were still alive and in many cases lived fo many years to come.

But to the community they were dead. Their partners could remarry. Their family would receive their inheritance. And they were sent away, now to live away from society as a leper, among other afflicted.

In many cases the leprosy colonies were actually quite humane. They were cared for by the community, a priest would read a daily mass from behind a wall, and in my local town musem we have a 16th century apparatus much like a confessional but with glass panes, through which paitents could talk to visitors regulary- we have evidence that often actually the spouses would come to visit even while already remarried for many years.

But no matter the living conditions, being sick with leprosy meant you were technically a danger to the “living”. You carried in you the germ inside you which threatened to turn the people you loved into fellow “living dead”, and the only way you could help them was by staying away, and becoming as dead as a breathing human could, giving them at least the freedom your dead can grant since you can’t spare them the grief from it anyway.

I’m tagging @oldshrewsburyian in this because I know medieval lepers are right in her wheelhouse and I want to know what you think of this.

Ah, well! As far as it goes as a description of what happened to those with leprosy (not necessarily Hansen’s Disease) in medieval Europe, and how they were regarded, it’s almost completely wrong. The leprous were not regarded as the living dead. The alleged ceremony of burial survives in one (1) French manuscript from the 15th century. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it’s true that the mobility of the leprous was often more restricted; crucially, this was an era after plague, and also in an era of increased anxiety about labor and local civic rights… but I digress slightly. The point is: none of this is true, basically. The clappers held by the leprous were used to attract alms, not drive people away. “Colonies” for those with leprosy were an invention of the 19th century. The thing about inheritance is true for those who chose to enter hospitals, but that is because of the institutional characteristics of hospitals, not because of leprosy.

However! All of this is an accurate description of what Victorians thought happened to those with leprosy in the Middle Ages. So I think it very likely – especially given the description of the mark on Mina’s skin, and the progressive symptoms – that OP is precisely right about what Bram Stoker is trying to evoke. And especially given the active debates about care and cure for those with leprosy/Hansen’s Disease from the 1870s onwards, in the time of the bacteriological revolution, I think it can also be read as a way in which Stoker is, as elsewhere in the novel, exploring the tensions between modernity and its (imagined) medieval other.

i've never seen jekyll either, not even on my dash that i can remember. but i had a housemate back in i think s2 hiatus era, who was a big dr who fan, and had some salient thoughts about the similar buildup with no payoff pattern in dr who. i had never seen any dr who at that point, and still haven't watched much of the moffat years, only capaldi's last. but it sure does sound like he has some deep writing grooves that he revisits over and over. some of them i like very much, like demonstering the monster (a handful of that last dr who series!), sort of wonder if folks see that in jekyll or dracula too. maybe tearing away the legend is a part of that, or vice versa?

Hello and good day to 2021...

(There is no baby, Johnny)

it does look like the same shirt and tie too. it's a little confusing (@clavery111 ) because they've put a pic of harker in the suit jacket next to watson in the topcoat, instead of looking just a little bit harder for a pic of watson having taken the topcoat off. that's why the visible lapels are different. i bet someone could come up with a better side by side comparison set.

I have just realized something that I am sure the Holmesians have already analyzed in a minimal part and that even here it has already been taken into consideration, but often I belive that I need to figure stuffs out on my own…so…ever in the Canon no one really sees Moriarty apart from Holmes. That not only sees him, but from which it is evidently obsessed. The idea that even Doyle himself had intended to write Moriarty as nothing other than Holmes’s homosexuality, at the time even more tinted than homophobia than it is even now, is incredibly tempting. The monster that accompanies the hero. The real cause of his fall. The same thing that his friend Stoker will write a few years later, writing about Dracula. The two also share the same prominent and bulbous forehead. And I’m still wondering what the hell ever will going to add the Moffits in Dracula … I look forward curiously

 @possiblyimbiassed @sarahthecoat @ebaeschnbliah @gosherlocked @tendergingergirl

hmm, interesting thought! If ACD used "moriarty" as a metaphor for, or avatar of, holmes' homosexuality, then that suggests that BBCSH, using not only moriarty, but many other characters as well, as metaphors, or avatars, or mirrors/foils, is well founded.

@a-candle-for-sherlock I recommended for @brilliantorinsane ’s book list Richard Dellamora’s ‘Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism’, a difficult but brilliant book on exactly this subject. You’ve just summed up its 223 pages in a paragraph.

Intensely homoerotic friendships, love, emotional passion, deep devotion between men were accepted - just - as long as they could be fitted into a paradigm where those men also were married, or were planning on marrying, or even had been previously married to a woman, and any sexual activity was male/female. Women were predicated as the gatekeepers of males’ sexual desires. And a large part of the discourse around what was acceptable between men was played out in those male spaces where women were absent: universities, the church, the army, political fora, clubs. It was there, in the absence of women, that men policed themselves and others most strongly to ensure that friendships remained acceptably pure. Reading the literature, it is quite clear that men who broke the rules - men such as Wilde, who were openly sexual with other men - posed a tremendous threat to all those who carefully constructed their lives to fit with the socially acceptable model. If Wilde could make it clear that sex and love went together, then what of those men who loved other men deeply, whose emotional lives were completely centred around other men, but who refrained from physical expression of their love? When society so strongly condemned genital expression of love, but allowed intense devotion, where does that leave men who felt their affections needed physical as well as emotional, expression?

(This is where my Watson in SFISYF is at the moment. He is deeply, intensely devoted to his Holmes. But where can he go with that love, when society applauds it as an essential aspect of male hegemony when it is chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion without sex, but condemns it as the most vile of sins if it is expressed sexually?

His is the dilemma faced by many. And Holmes’ dilemma is similar, in that he knows his own desires, but has been taught to consider carnality - the matters of the flesh - as incompatible with chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion.)

There was a lot of discourse centred on Greek concepts of love at this time. The Judaeo-Christian contempt for the body and its needs and wants, the neo-Platonist ideas of the ideal society, the Greco-Roman concepts of how men should achieve dominance through Empire, were in conflict with the actual evidence (written materials, art, ceramics) that, whatever Plato said about the best loves being pure, men in Greece and Rome engaged unashamed in genital activity with each other.

Judaeo-Christian tradition condemned sexual activity between males. Plato considered it to be a factor that detracted from the highest form of love. In Rome, sexual excesses and male/male activity were associated with the least praiseworthy emperors - Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus. For upper and middle class Victorian men taught to propagate and support the societal paradigm of Empire, the need to integrate these two aspects of male/male interaction - the strong homosocial bonding needed to make Empire work, and the intense emotional ties it required - with a complete absence of physical expression of love produced a psychic conflict that many of them struggled in vain to resolve.

This is one reason why when men such as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter did form happy homosexual partnerships, it was often with men of a lower social class - men unburdened by the neuroticism developed by education in public schools and its consequent mindset. It is why Maurice can be happy with Alec, but not with Clive. It is why the Dublin Castle Scandal, the Cleveland Street Affair and the Wilde trials happened: in all three of those ‘moments’ which tipped society into homophobic retreat, one of the things that was most strongly reprobated by judges, juries and public alike, was that there was a transgressive sexual relationship not just between men, but between men of different classes. These relationships between Gustavus Cornwall and the renter, Jack Saul, between Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston and their telegraph boys, between Wilde, and his street lads, struck at the basic of the social compact: that homoerotic devotion in the chaste Greek mode was acceptable so long as compulsory heterosexuality was also forcing men to marry and breed to maintain society. If society allowed for men to be devoted to, to marry other men, England might fall, and worse, the hegemony of the monied upper classes might be broken.

(And don’t even get me started on what that meant for women. Nobody even considers the life of Gustavus Cornwall’s childless wife, to whom he’d probably transmitted the syphilis that eventually killed him. Una Troubridge, lesian lover of Radclyffe Hall was treated all her life for the syphilis her philandering husband gave her as a wedding present. Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, forced into a marriage with him at an age too young to say no, had lesbian affairs all through her married life. And there are other examples.)

It is impossible for us to consider the relationship of Holmes and Watson, and what it might have been without considering its social and political context. Doyle wrote as a man of his time, imbued with its ideas and ideals and subject to its neuroses. To understand what he writes, it’s also necessary to understand where he’s writing from.

Wow, thank you for this detailed write-up. I was vaguely aware of these social dynamics, but this added a lot. It is fascinating to read Doyle through this lens. I at least get the impression that he may well be struggling with the conflict you describe: trying to write (or at least appear to write; I suppose its hard to say which) an intense homosocial bond between men, but never quite able to reconcile it with the sexless, woman-mediated requirements of his day. It provides a compelling way to read the sense of tension and half-disguised sorrow that periodically appears in the Holmes stories.

That “tension and half-disguised sorrow” is so poignant. It would make perfect sense in that context.

In fact, Victorians may have overlooked the possibility of a physical love between Holmes and Watson, but I’ve heard stories that those reading just a little later did recognize it. A former fandom member (@welovethebeekeeper) mentioned that her fathers were part of a Holmesian shipping community mid-century, and that they’d heard rumors of Holmes/Watson shipping communities as far back as the twenties, if I remember right. The last stories were published in 1926 and ‘27, so if my memory of her statement is correct, that means some contemporaries already saw them as romantically linked, once queerness came more into the public spotlight through turn of the century activism.

Actually, I read some time ago that as The Strand was considered a men’s magazine, although everyone still read it, that people automatically ‘got’ that the Holmes stories were Queer. But because it was so subtle, it was accepted. I might have read that on @weeesi blog. Here is sherlock-holmes-and-victorian-homosexuality , and an excellent blog dedicated to the Homoerotic subtext in Sherlock Holmes. http://nekosmuse.com/sherlockholmes/subtext.htm

@brilliantorinsane @sarahthecoat @possiblyimbiassed @ebaeschnbliah

Reblogging again because more wonderful additions

@a-candle-for-sherlock Just wanted to confirm that yes, my Dad’s were active in a Sherlockian group in the 1950s as young men, there they met several elderly members of that group who had been in the group 1910 onwards. These groups met in known gay pubs in many U.K. cities, some members were also in the mainstream Society, but were closeted and knew discussing Holmes/Watson sexuality was anathema in that organisation. In the 1950s and 1960s the shipping of Holmes and Watson was a major component of the gay literary groups, on a parr with the stories. However my Dads reported that many of the older members had been convinced of the ‘gay intent’ in the text during the time the stories were still being written. As far as they were concerned a story centred on a ‘Bohemian Bachelor’ in that era was basically a sign post that Sherlock was gay. My Dads said that the Victorians were far more relaxed about sexual preference than was ever possible in the 1950s, and that Holmes was a victim of the Hays Code which cemented his image in celluloid for millions of viewers to see him as the great mind, above sexual impulses, and stripped of any of his more flamboyant traits. Certainly stripped of his virile adoring Watson who turned into a jolly bumbler or a sidekick. One thing that my Dads used to say; you have to remove Watson or else the queer love affair overpowers everything else.

Thanks for remembering my story about my fathers.

Worth reblogging for discussion?

Always worth the reblog, because by the time my Aunt and her wife were raising my sister and I in the late 80′s and I was becoming aware of the differences between male and female relationships, love, affection, et al didn’t seem at all part of the equation when it came the media portrayal of gays and the mainstream folks were afraid of. IT seemed to me that it was the act of male on male sex that terrified them and grossed them out so much. Possibly due to the AIDS crisis? I was just thinking this morning that in order to truly appreciate fanfiction and that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have been having a love affair for 130 odd years, one has to believe that gay people are capable of loving one another. That it goes beyond genitals and HOW we have sex. That’s the part everyone gets so caught up in today. As we know.

There’s a wonderful interview with Michel Foucault where he makes this point exactly. The possibility of fulfilling love between same-sex people is what scares heteronormativity, not their sexual acts. 

RB for discussion.

I hope for their sakes that they haven’t tried to plan a series of Sherlock writing/filming under the direct cover of Dracula writing/filming. They would have to also mess with the production timeline.

with these bozos, anything is possible, but yeah, it would be a LOT harder to pull off now than it was in the 1980s with “blue harvest” (return of the jedi). And a few people even found that, they just didn’t have social media to blow it up. I wonder if any production has done that more recently, or if they just rely on NDAs and security. I can believe that they are writing sherlock while they say they are writing dracula, but once they start filming, unless they do all the studio work first in secret and leave all the locations to last, it would be impossible to hide.

Even if they managed to close the sets to the general public, how could they keep the crew quiet? Their track record has not been great with this.

The reason I mentioned writing is that it narrows the window of opportunity for filming. If they say, “Bye everyone, we’re off to write Dracula”… and then actually write Sherlock, then we’d be watching for them to film something when they return. If they say, “Bye everyone, we’re off to write Dracula”… and then actually film Sherlock, their chance of success might be higher. This could explain why they went to Morocco to write S4 in the first place. It makes any “going away to write” story more plausible.

Who knows?

yeah, i'm pretty much on the "i'll believe it when i see it" program, and saying isn't showing, but if there isn't an act five someday, then it's a failure of the writing. There is definitely a shoe-drop that's still missing.

When you eliminate the improbable…series five is coming soon.

Blah blah, no series 5 for forever because everyone is busy, right?

Except…mark and Steven have been “working on Dracula” for over a year and have nothing to show for it yet. And…since when do they tell people what they’re doing ahead of time?? And before they’d even written the script?? 🤨 that’s weird.

Benedict and Martin just got done with HUGE projects- both were involved in the MCU, Ben had Patrick Melrose and the IW tour, Martin promoted Cargo and Ghost Stories. And now?? They both appear to be in London, doing random interviews, small appearances, maybe a little voice work, some filming. But like…nothing huge.

Plus, HISTORICALLY, some pretty BIG DIRECTORS ( uhhh Scott Derrickson for Doctor Strange and PETER JACKSON!) rearranged filming schedules in order to allow Martin and Ben to finish filming Sherlock series

Finally, the specially recorded footage for the escape room sure seems like it would lend to some *other* filming, if necessary.

What say you? Time for series 5?

@thornypeach3 @88thparallel @ebaeschnbliah @inevitably-johnlocked @sarahthecoat @fellshish @gosherlocked @possiblyimbiassed @jenna221b

It’s late and I can’t think of anyone else. Feel free to tag others.

@elldotsee: You have indeed a point. I keep wondering about the Dracula project which seems extremely vague. It has not been mentioned since June last year except marginally in a some interviews and does not seem to excite either audience nor media so far. I am not a conspiracy theorist but imagine you have delivered series 4 of your big show and it has not had the enthusiastic response it used to have. However, you want to continue your story. So why not plan in secret used another project as a sort of decoy. If journalists ask about you current plans you can always answer you are working on the Dracula scripts. This is just an idea and I can very wrong but to me the whole Dracula thing felt weird from the very beginning. 

And there has been the tweet by Tim Diepenhorst about Martin and Mark working together. It is probably about the escape room but still, having Martin in something Sherlock-related again might be a good sign. 

So I have no idea if they could really be filming S5 soon but to me a continuation has become more probably than it was months ago. And as you said, I never understood the argument of Benedict and Martin being too busy. It does work for other shows and well-known directors have made concessions for the filming schedule. 

@ebaeschnbliah

Yes, @elldotsee @gosherlocked  all of this feels indeed a bit weird. May I add one of the strangest things to this list … the BBC Worldwide Showcase Event from 20 February 2017. It’s the world’s biggest TV export market hosted by a single distributor. And I still wonder about the same thing  …

This never made much sense to me.

Yep - I think you make several good points here @elldotsee, @gosherlocked and @ebaeschnbliah (even if I don’t want to speculate about exactly when S5 will come); that the Dracula project seems like empty words actually covering up for something else, that the escape room might also be a good opportunity for filming in general and that these ‘super-busy’ superstars have seen their other mega-projects adapting to Sherlock’s schedule before. And yes, of course: what’s the point of promoting a product now, of which the show makers have said themselves that they don’t know when it will air again - if at all? I don’t want to stir up any kind of expectations from anyone regarding Mofftiss’ intentions. But since the day these two gentlemen publicly declared that they are ‘lying liars who lie’, I don’t see why we should trust a single word that they say about their production. And I believe the show-makers’ whole conduct regarding S4 justifies that skepticism. I also suspect they have been playing with their audience from Day 1. And if they’re playing ‘the game’ with us, they’re certainly not doing it for playing’s sake, because what would be the actual point of that, if there’s no resolution to the game?

And, by the way, in that first interview Gatiss claims they “deliberately left it [the show] in a happy place”. Seriously, did any character look genuinely happy at the end of TFP (except for ‘Mary’-the-dead-assassin)? Did I miss something? It’s like hearing Sherlock tell John in HLV regarding his (shameless and totally fake) relationship with Janine: 

 Sure, Jan! :))

Ahhhhhh, I see now @possiblyimbiassed  Good catch!  The ‘happy place’ …. the show-makers must have got that from a book like ‘everyone’ else. 

Well, in this case rather from a script, it seems. :)))))))

oh my, yes! :D didn’t they also try to pass off some nonsense about the end of s4 bringing the characters up to the point where we first meet them “in the book”? Which never made a lick of sense to me, nobody who had watched any single episode of the show would buy that line.

Absolutely agree, the only place where they left us is outside of any canonical adaptation of Holmes, outside of Rathbone precisely. Ready for what must happen. And in my crazy twisted mind, stuck at the age of four, I suppose they’d also like to try and shoot as much as possible outside the setlock’s delirium. I know this sounds improbable and impossible, but we know what happens when we delete these things, they’ve been raising such a curtain of smoke for so long that now we’re no longer able to see anything. Not to mention my crazy headcanon for which they have already shot over the years at least half of what we should see … but probably I screwed the few neurons I had available ….

And Dracula … Dracula would be so fascinating if it were not such a damned really similar project …

@gosherlocked @ebaeschnbliah @possiblyimbiassed @sarahthecoat @elldotsee

Yes to all this, @raggedyblue, @sarahthecoat, @possiblyimbiassed, @ebaeschnbliah: What I never got about this “leaving them where they started in the book” is that they did just that, they told the story of Holmes and Watson meeting for the first time which is exactly what ACD tells us in his stories! If they had chosen to show us what Sherlock and John did BEFORE they met, fine. But they told us their version of Scarlet etc., not some prequel to ACD Canon. 

And as for Dracula - some things are fishy indeed. Like knowing you are going to do 90-minute episodes but having no idea how many of them? Not a shred of information about the cast, not even rumours. And then we had this vampire remark in TST as well …

I’m with you all… Dracula as some kind of cover up for continuing filming just seems almost to perfect. especially when we think of all the scenes (eg TEH) where they’ve put in something simillar…

and think about the possibility that we are in Sherlocks mind since maybe even after the fall, “undead but not in the world as whole” as a term is kinda fitting ;)

Yes - “undead” sounds fitting, @mathilderunout, since I think Sherlock is in coma since at least the end of S3, possibly longer. The latest ‘news’ I could find about this supposed Dracula project is from Digital Spy from about a week ago. Anyone hoping to know more about this Dracula series must have been disappointed, though; a year after publicly announcing the project, there’s still no cast, no crew and not even a script in progress. Basically there’s nothing, except for the reminder that Gatiss himself already is Dracula in a long audio adaptation from 2016 :))) (so why would he feel the sudden need to do basically the same thing again but as a screenwriter?):

I also agree with @gosherlocked that this has never been a canon ‘prequel’; there are other things entirely that makes this differ a long way from ACD’s books (like for example Holmes becoming a murderer or Watson raising a baby with an assassin). 

So, to summarize: at the end of S4 they left us outside the Rathbone adaptation, which is now called “a happy place”? But instead of exploring this ‘happy place’ and its possible new content in their mega-TV-show with millions of expectant viewers all over the world, these writers have decided to create another series together in between (continuing the horror theme from TFP?), which would further postpone the completion of a show they haven’t actually finished. I mean, who on earth would be happy doing such a half-hearted effort?

@raggedyblue @ebaeschnbliah @elldotsee @sarahthecoat

@possiblyimbiassed: Just read the article. The author must have learned from politicians - saying much without saying anything. We basically know nothing: when it will air, who will be in the cast, how many episodes … and I cannot remember BBC One themselves giving any statement about it either. However, there was this tweet by Ruther from a few days ago: 

Which would make it a 2019 release. It is from this article:

Just to get this clear: We know that Martin and Mark have been filming something, allegedly for the escape room. In February, the show has been promoted at a TV fair (sorry, @ebaeschnbliah, do you still have the link?). They are doing a Q & A on Tumblr next week, calling it the #SummerofSherlock. And then they want us to believe us that Dracula” about which there is zero information will air next year?

@sarahthecoat, @mathilderunout, @raggedyblue, @elldotsee

hmmmm, yeah, no, something very fishy about that!

Sherlock, Star Trek, and the Three Streams of Consciousness

(((This is Part 4 of my 18 part meta series (x) analyzing EMP Theory and evidence supporting it in TFP)))

While the vast majority of shows on TV today have no problem dropping pop culture references, Sherlock tends to stay above the fray in this regard unless it serves a purpose. It does not directly refer to current events, controversies, celebrities, music, TV shows, movies, or trends. In effect, it gives us the feel of it being modern without tying us to an actual time.

Modern, but timeless.

Which leads me to Star Trek. BBC Sherlock already had a track record of throwing out Star Trek references (John calling Sherlock “Spock” in HOB after a very specific quote, which I’ll get into later), so when Moriarty yelled “RED ALERT” over Sherrinford’s intercom system in TFP and the Governor referenced an “ear worm”, I knew there was a deeper Star Trek connection at play. It was only after I formed the roots of my theory and did a mass rewatch that I realized that the big thing I was looking for to pull it all together was this shot:

I had the proverbial Light Bulb Moment. The reason why Sherlock, John, and Mycroft’s characterizations were so odd in series four, and reached peak weirdness in TFP: they underwent a COMPLETE DYNAMIC SHIFT

They were all put in a position they were not used to nor thrived in. This realization and the overarching theory that series four, TAB, and half of HLV take place entirely in Sherlock’s mind led me to two well known Star Trek episodes:

I was also led to the original crew movies, specifically Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country because of the specificity of the Star Trek references we have been given. That’s when my Light Bulb Moment turned into a Holy Shit Moment because this guy right here:

Might be the smoking gun to understanding EMP Theory. This life ruiner might be the Holy Grail I’ve been searching for since I started this hell journey. He could single-handedly collapse this house of cards. I’m not even exaggerating; this guy could be it.

Below the cut is:

Keep reading

i just finished reading this, how did i not see it before now, this is brilliant! Thank you so much, wow!

The dynamic i always noticed in star trek is the "thinking, feeling, willing" pattern that got discussud a lot back when i was a waldorf school parent. (CF the wizard of oz), and it is one of the story templates i often try on for size. Thank you for laying out the parallels so clearly, especially how and why TFP feels so "off". In waldorf parlance, willing comes first, then feeling, then thinking, and IIRC, kirk (will) takes on Bones first, then Spock.

I love how you say everything went wrong after TRF, because that is how i have felt since s3 aired. It just looks prettier than s4, but it's just as riddled with nonsense. And as we know by now, nonsense in sherlock means it's subtext time!

Gem not being able to communicate with words reminded me of the line in TAB, where holmes says lestrade has been expressing his need for a drink by every means possible except actual speech. :)

Bones jockeying for position in the empath test by drugging kirk and spock reminds me of the "drugs=chemistry of love" correspondence that is emerging.

I remember that black set in the empath, it looked so much like a theatrical set, rather than a tv show set. @jenna221b and @toxicsemicolon there's another for you, on s4 as epic theatre/theatre of the absurd.

@asherlockstudy i thought of you in the parts about sherlock, moriarty and euros, and thank you again for helping me get over my moriarty squick enough to appreciate his role in the story structure/mind stage.

@a-candle-for-sherlock I recommended for @brilliantorinsane ’s book list Richard Dellamora’s ‘Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism’, a difficult but brilliant book on exactly this subject. You’ve just summed up its 223 pages in a paragraph.

Intensely homoerotic friendships, love, emotional passion, deep devotion between men were accepted - just - as long as they could be fitted into a paradigm where those men also were married, or were planning on marrying, or even had been previously married to a woman, and any sexual activity was male/female. Women were predicated as the gatekeepers of males’ sexual desires. And a large part of the discourse around what was acceptable between men was played out in those male spaces where women were absent: universities, the church, the army, political fora, clubs. It was there, in the absence of women, that men policed themselves and others most strongly to ensure that friendships remained acceptably pure. Reading the literature, it is quite clear that men who broke the rules - men such as Wilde, who were openly sexual with other men - posed a tremendous threat to all those who carefully constructed their lives to fit with the socially acceptable model. If Wilde could make it clear that sex and love went together, then what of those men who loved other men deeply, whose emotional lives were completely centred around other men, but who refrained from physical expression of their love? When society so strongly condemned genital expression of love, but allowed intense devotion, where does that leave men who felt their affections needed physical as well as emotional, expression?

(This is where my Watson in SFISYF is at the moment. He is deeply, intensely devoted to his Holmes. But where can he go with that love, when society applauds it as an essential aspect of male hegemony when it is chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion without sex, but condemns it as the most vile of sins if it is expressed sexually?

His is the dilemma faced by many. And Holmes’ dilemma is similar, in that he knows his own desires, but has been taught to consider carnality - the matters of the flesh - as incompatible with chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion.)

There was a lot of discourse centred on Greek concepts of love at this time. The Judaeo-Christian contempt for the body and its needs and wants, the neo-Platonist ideas of the ideal society, the Greco-Roman concepts of how men should achieve dominance through Empire, were in conflict with the actual evidence (written materials, art, ceramics) that, whatever Plato said about the best loves being pure, men in Greece and Rome engaged unashamed in genital activity with each other.

Judaeo-Christian tradition condemned sexual activity between males. Plato considered it to be a factor that detracted from the highest form of love. In Rome, sexual excesses and male/male activity were associated with the least praiseworthy emperors - Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus. For upper and middle class Victorian men taught to propagate and support the societal paradigm of Empire, the need to integrate these two aspects of male/male interaction - the strong homosocial bonding needed to make Empire work, and the intense emotional ties it required - with a complete absence of physical expression of love produced a psychic conflict that many of them struggled in vain to resolve.

This is one reason why when men such as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter did form happy homosexual partnerships, it was often with men of a lower social class - men unburdened by the neuroticism developed by education in public schools and its consequent mindset. It is why Maurice can be happy with Alec, but not with Clive. It is why the Dublin Castle Scandal, the Cleveland Street Affair and the Wilde trials happened: in all three of those ‘moments’ which tipped society into homophobic retreat, one of the things that was most strongly reprobated by judges, juries and public alike, was that there was a transgressive sexual relationship not just between men, but between men of different classes. These relationships between Gustavus Cornwall and the renter, Jack Saul, between Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston and their telegraph boys, between Wilde, and his street lads, struck at the basic of the social compact: that homoerotic devotion in the chaste Greek mode was acceptable so long as compulsory heterosexuality was also forcing men to marry and breed to maintain society. If society allowed for men to be devoted to, to marry other men, England might fall, and worse, the hegemony of the monied upper classes might be broken.

(And don’t even get me started on what that meant for women. Nobody even considers the life of Gustavus Cornwall’s childless wife, to whom he’d probably transmitted the syphilis that eventually killed him. Una Troubridge, lesian lover of Radclyffe Hall was treated all her life for the syphilis her philandering husband gave her as a wedding present. Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, forced into a marriage with him at an age too young to say no, had lesbian affairs all through her married life. And there are other examples.)

It is impossible for us to consider the relationship of Holmes and Watson, and what it might have been without considering its social and political context. Doyle wrote as a man of his time, imbued with its ideas and ideals and subject to its neuroses. To understand what he writes, it’s also necessary to understand where he’s writing from.

Wow, thank you for this detailed write-up. I was vaguely aware of these social dynamics, but this added a lot. It is fascinating to read Doyle through this lens. I at least get the impression that he may well be struggling with the conflict you describe: trying to write (or at least appear to write; I suppose its hard to say which) an intense homosocial bond between men, but never quite able to reconcile it with the sexless, woman-mediated requirements of his day. It provides a compelling way to read the sense of tension and half-disguised sorrow that periodically appears in the Holmes stories.

That “tension and half-disguised sorrow” is so poignant. It would make perfect sense in that context.

In fact, Victorians may have overlooked the possibility of a physical love between Holmes and Watson, but I’ve heard stories that those reading just a little later did recognize it. A former fandom member (@welovethebeekeeper) mentioned that her fathers were part of a Holmesian shipping community mid-century, and that they’d heard rumors of Holmes/Watson shipping communities as far back as the twenties, if I remember right. The last stories were published in 1926 and ‘27, so if my memory of her statement is correct, that means some contemporaries already saw them as romantically linked, once queerness came more into the public spotlight through turn of the century activism.

Actually, I read some time ago that as The Strand was considered a men’s magazine, although everyone still read it, that people automatically ‘got’ that the Holmes stories were Queer. But because it was so subtle, it was accepted. I might have read that on @weeesi blog. Here is sherlock-holmes-and-victorian-homosexuality , and an excellent blog dedicated to the Homoerotic subtext in Sherlock Holmes. http://nekosmuse.com/sherlockholmes/subtext.htm

@brilliantorinsane @sarahthecoat @possiblyimbiassed @ebaeschnbliah

i remember welovethebeekeeper's posts about their dads, and i wish i had made a tumblr years ago to have reblogged so much good stuff that has been lost.