Mick Hartley

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The Right Password

Sherlock returns: The Hounds of Baskerville. 

Last week I was underwhelmed. Holmes's key breakthrough was the moment when he entered the right password to access the information needed to break the case. As I said:

It's a reasonable rule of thumb that when you have a detective successfully guessing the vital password, then you have a writer who's failing his audience.

So what was the key moment in tonight's episode? Oh yes. Sherlock has to access the computer of a military man. This military man has a bust of Churchill in his office. He's a Falklands war veteran: a bit of a right-winger. So what's his password? It's….<sigh>….maggie. Jesus Christ.

So two successive episodes depend for their resolution on Sherlock guessing – sorry, deducing – the vital password. And then, tonight, the solution to the mystery of the horrid hound from hell involved – sorry, spoiler alert – a mind-altering gas developed by the CIA, which makes the victim especially suggestible. Which is, I believe, no. 1 (or possibly no. 2 after the double agent) in the Boys Own Book of Spy Story Plots. 

I wouldn't mind, except this series has been so extravagantly praised. For Caitlin Moran in the Times (£), for instance, last week's episode was "as good as it’s possible for television to be". 

I appreciate that this is Sunday night viewing. It's not King Lear or Crime and Punishment. It is, perhaps, aiming for that particularly British form of slightly camp tongue-in-cheek detective yarn for which the template was set years ago by The Avengers. Or something. I don't know. I appear somewhere along the way to have turned into a grumpy old man. 

Anyway, I've learnt my lesson: I'll not be tuning in to part three next week when Sherlock battles his nemesis Moriarty at The Reichenbach Fall. I expect it'll hinge on him guessing the password again.

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4 responses to “The Right Password”

  1. Noga Avatar
    Noga

    “It’s a reasonable rule of thumb that when you have a detective successfully guessing the vital password, then you have a writer who’s failing his audience.”
    This is the second Hartley rule I’ll be memorizing.
    The first was:
    “There should be a law – I’ll call it Hartley’s Law – that ignorance expands to fill the space available.”

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  2. Mr Eugenides Avatar
    Mr Eugenides

    I agree. I haven’t watched Baskerville yet, but I was underwhelmed by the first episode last week. Everyone raved about how great it was, but when I caught up with it a few days ago I found it curiously uninteresting, Irene Adler not nearly as attention-grabbing as she had been advertised (must be all the bromides in my tea), the plot pretty workaday and the ending just silly.
    I did think the first series was, broadly, terrific, and I don’t know whether my relative disappointment is due to a real falling-off in quality since the first three, or whether the novelty has simply worn off and it wasn’t that good in the first place. But I’ve seen a lot of reactions to the newest episode similar to yours.
    You are not alone!

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  3. DaninVan Avatar
    DaninVan

    So it’s not just me(?)…
    Over here on the other side of the pond, we get a lot of syndicated BBC productions. Last year’s models, as it were.
    I’ve definitely felt/noticed a deterioration in the storytelling as well as the acting. Sad; I really enjoy Brit TV.

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  4. David Thompson Avatar
    David Thompson

    The last episode of the previous serious was much better, I thought. Moriarty’s “game” was suitably alarming and sadistic and the poolside cliff-hanger was fun. But the first two episodes of series two have been underwhelming and bizarrely overhyped. The cliff-hanger from series one just… evaporated – waved aside with a phone call. And, as Mick says, there’s a lot of lazy writing, albeit with the odd amusing detail. At times it’s as though they’re throwing lots of bits in the air that don’t really add up to much and hoping it looks complex and coherent.
    And a gag about “dogging” doesn’t quite make up for that.

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