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fridgepunk) wrote2010-08-07 03:09 am
fridgepunk) wrote2010-08-07 03:09 am
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Thoughts on "the blind banker"
The whole opening 1st minute of the show was like Said's concept of orientalism and Mulvey's concept of the male gaze were having sex and managed to achieve simultaneous orgasms.
DIRECTLY INTO MY EYES.
This scene would turn out to be representative of the entire rest of the episode.
Maybe this orientalising gaze wouldn't have been so bad, if not for the way the lingering focus on this one particular non-white female character with lines seemed to serve the purpose of introducing a non-white female character who would, surely, play a crucial part in the plot and have characterisation and stuff. Surely! British-east-asian characters are almost as rare on british telly as asian american character are in american TV shows, so clearly what we were going to see was an update of this particular story, with the issues associated and relevent to the modern british-east-asian community!
Nope. This lady disappears for the first quarter of the episode, reappears, is killed after giving some backstory for another (male) asian character (a villain) who is the one what kills her, and he in turn is then killed by another asian villain (female). And so it turns out that the main non-white female character with lines in this show is actually an EEEVUL chinese dragon lady who spends most of the episode wearing giant and incredibly conspicuous sunglasses while stalking Sherlock & Watson, leading one to wonder why exactly London's Greatest Detective hasn't noticed that he's being stalked by a Kim Jong-Il impersonator as he wanders around Moffat & Gatiss' Asian themed Adventure Town of Exotic Adventure.
But why is this dragon lady evil you may wonder? What are her motivations, her dreams, her fears, her hopes, her family life? No idea, Because she's a stock asian villain with a very good aim with a hand gun. That's the major non-white female character with a major speaking role we have folks; she's chinese (though this is an informed attribute and doesn't matter), a member of the triads (though the actual name or ethnicity of the criminal organisation doesn't really matter as far as the plot is concerned) and has a good aim with a handgun (another informed attribute).
Why is the head of the central london branch of the Triads a small woman? Why is the head of the triads one person at all? Fuck, if ever there was an interesting story hook, the backstory to a little middle aged woman with an uncannily good aim rising to the top of the London triads is certainly a better one than the actual one Moffat and Gatiss gave us.
Some keen eyed readers may by now have notice I've used the term "Triads" throughout this post to describe the criminal organisation who's literally inscrutable machinations drive forward the plot. The show itself uses the term "the Tongs". This is because neither Moffat nor Gatiss spent the ten fucking seconds they needed to find out the difference between the triads and tongs.
Basically the tongs are the name for the type of organisation that emerged in the US among the chinese-american communities that had emigrated to the west coast, they are not ancient, they aren't an [colour] lotus society, and they wouldn't really be in a position to operate an elaborate fine art theft/smuggling ring, IF we ignore the issue of such fine art theft rings don't work in the modern world. There is no single organisation that is called "the tongs".
The Triads, given that they're a wider term applied by british imperialists to most chinese secret societies fit both by being frequently quite ancient (older than the templars would be if they were still around), especially as a triad organisation would be more likely to have the sort of international organisation that would be needed by the art theives we see in this episode.
But research fail, the horribleness of the orientalism and the bad characterisation, these are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Because I haven't explained the finale to this episode yet.
And boy howdy is it bad.
So here's the set up:
Watson and his date (who I shall refer to as Agatha L. Ady or A.L. Ady for short since I've forgotten her name) have been kidnapped and tied to chairs located in... an underground tunnel of some kind, you can't think about these things this is bat country.
The Triad Lady thinks Watson is Sherlock (because she's stupid and believes that people randomly shout their name and list their worst attributes sarcastically at the letter flaps of the doors of people they want to speak to). Triad Lady is demanding to know where the mcguffin is, watson has no idea the mcguffin exists so is baffled, so triad lady SETS UP AN ELABORATE DEATH TRAP, and threatens to kill A.L. Ady with it unless Watson tells her where the mcguffin is. He of course can't so she sets the death trap in motion.
Now you may think my objection is the damsel in distress trope, and that irritates me, but it's worse than that.
At this point the REAL Sherlock comes in and starts a rumpus that distracts everyone.
The trap itself is a massive and overly ornate crossbow (that must have been a pain to drag into the tunnel) that is activated when a weight falls on the safety and releases the bolt. The weight is slowly lowered due to a counter-weight sack of sand losing weight due to a hole in its bottom releasing sand. It takes quite some time to go off, and as it goes off no one is actively pointing the crossbow at Ady, so you'd think, as indeed I thought, that what happens here is that Watson, tied to a chair and unable to reach her, and sherlock, too busy punching mooks in the jaw, both preoccupied, the way Ady would avoid the trap by tipping her chair over and falling on her side at the last moment, leading to the bolt flying over her and hitting the last mook just before the mook strikes a final blow against sherlock. I mean, yeah, it's the obvious and least interesting way to go, but it's basically the best way of handling this sort of scene so you might expect moffat to pull off some sort of twist, but mostly you'd expect the damsel to save herself and in so doing save Sherlock and thereby inverting and subverting the whole damsel in distress tied to train tracks cliche.
And of course that's not what happens - instead watson hobbles over with the chair still attached to himself and bangs into it just as the weight descends onto the trigger, and swings the crossbow towards the final mook killing the mook and avoiding A.L. Ady. What did A.L. Ady actually do during this whole three to five minute long sequence? She sat there and cried.
So when I say this is a bad episode, please make sure to note that this is not merely bad, this is Torchwood bad. Because that's basically what this show is when you get right down to it, this is Moffat's Torchwood; hackneyed, poorly thought through, poorly researched, racist, sexist, stupid, cliche ridden plots, scripts full of odd bits of stilted dialogue (yes, this episode had bad dialogue, in a moffat written show! I know! *mind is blown*) all of which is tied together with odd bits of duct tape into a shambolic mess of a episode.
I'll watch the next episode, but only out of morbid curiosity more than because I think it might be anything other than bad at this point. This is the worst show Moffat has ever put his name to, and the finale... who knows? Given the wonders Moffat can do towards the finale of a show made of win, what new and impressive nadirs of terribleness he might reach in this failtastic show.
DIRECTLY INTO MY EYES.
This scene would turn out to be representative of the entire rest of the episode.
Maybe this orientalising gaze wouldn't have been so bad, if not for the way the lingering focus on this one particular non-white female character with lines seemed to serve the purpose of introducing a non-white female character who would, surely, play a crucial part in the plot and have characterisation and stuff. Surely! British-east-asian characters are almost as rare on british telly as asian american character are in american TV shows, so clearly what we were going to see was an update of this particular story, with the issues associated and relevent to the modern british-east-asian community!
Nope. This lady disappears for the first quarter of the episode, reappears, is killed after giving some backstory for another (male) asian character (a villain) who is the one what kills her, and he in turn is then killed by another asian villain (female). And so it turns out that the main non-white female character with lines in this show is actually an EEEVUL chinese dragon lady who spends most of the episode wearing giant and incredibly conspicuous sunglasses while stalking Sherlock & Watson, leading one to wonder why exactly London's Greatest Detective hasn't noticed that he's being stalked by a Kim Jong-Il impersonator as he wanders around Moffat & Gatiss' Asian themed Adventure Town of Exotic Adventure.
But why is this dragon lady evil you may wonder? What are her motivations, her dreams, her fears, her hopes, her family life? No idea, Because she's a stock asian villain with a very good aim with a hand gun. That's the major non-white female character with a major speaking role we have folks; she's chinese (though this is an informed attribute and doesn't matter), a member of the triads (though the actual name or ethnicity of the criminal organisation doesn't really matter as far as the plot is concerned) and has a good aim with a handgun (another informed attribute).
Why is the head of the central london branch of the Triads a small woman? Why is the head of the triads one person at all? Fuck, if ever there was an interesting story hook, the backstory to a little middle aged woman with an uncannily good aim rising to the top of the London triads is certainly a better one than the actual one Moffat and Gatiss gave us.
Some keen eyed readers may by now have notice I've used the term "Triads" throughout this post to describe the criminal organisation who's literally inscrutable machinations drive forward the plot. The show itself uses the term "the Tongs". This is because neither Moffat nor Gatiss spent the ten fucking seconds they needed to find out the difference between the triads and tongs.
Basically the tongs are the name for the type of organisation that emerged in the US among the chinese-american communities that had emigrated to the west coast, they are not ancient, they aren't an [colour] lotus society, and they wouldn't really be in a position to operate an elaborate fine art theft/smuggling ring, IF we ignore the issue of such fine art theft rings don't work in the modern world. There is no single organisation that is called "the tongs".
The Triads, given that they're a wider term applied by british imperialists to most chinese secret societies fit both by being frequently quite ancient (older than the templars would be if they were still around), especially as a triad organisation would be more likely to have the sort of international organisation that would be needed by the art theives we see in this episode.
But research fail, the horribleness of the orientalism and the bad characterisation, these are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Because I haven't explained the finale to this episode yet.
And boy howdy is it bad.
So here's the set up:
Watson and his date (who I shall refer to as Agatha L. Ady or A.L. Ady for short since I've forgotten her name) have been kidnapped and tied to chairs located in... an underground tunnel of some kind, you can't think about these things this is bat country.
The Triad Lady thinks Watson is Sherlock (because she's stupid and believes that people randomly shout their name and list their worst attributes sarcastically at the letter flaps of the doors of people they want to speak to). Triad Lady is demanding to know where the mcguffin is, watson has no idea the mcguffin exists so is baffled, so triad lady SETS UP AN ELABORATE DEATH TRAP, and threatens to kill A.L. Ady with it unless Watson tells her where the mcguffin is. He of course can't so she sets the death trap in motion.
Now you may think my objection is the damsel in distress trope, and that irritates me, but it's worse than that.
At this point the REAL Sherlock comes in and starts a rumpus that distracts everyone.
The trap itself is a massive and overly ornate crossbow (that must have been a pain to drag into the tunnel) that is activated when a weight falls on the safety and releases the bolt. The weight is slowly lowered due to a counter-weight sack of sand losing weight due to a hole in its bottom releasing sand. It takes quite some time to go off, and as it goes off no one is actively pointing the crossbow at Ady, so you'd think, as indeed I thought, that what happens here is that Watson, tied to a chair and unable to reach her, and sherlock, too busy punching mooks in the jaw, both preoccupied, the way Ady would avoid the trap by tipping her chair over and falling on her side at the last moment, leading to the bolt flying over her and hitting the last mook just before the mook strikes a final blow against sherlock. I mean, yeah, it's the obvious and least interesting way to go, but it's basically the best way of handling this sort of scene so you might expect moffat to pull off some sort of twist, but mostly you'd expect the damsel to save herself and in so doing save Sherlock and thereby inverting and subverting the whole damsel in distress tied to train tracks cliche.
And of course that's not what happens - instead watson hobbles over with the chair still attached to himself and bangs into it just as the weight descends onto the trigger, and swings the crossbow towards the final mook killing the mook and avoiding A.L. Ady. What did A.L. Ady actually do during this whole three to five minute long sequence? She sat there and cried.
So when I say this is a bad episode, please make sure to note that this is not merely bad, this is Torchwood bad. Because that's basically what this show is when you get right down to it, this is Moffat's Torchwood; hackneyed, poorly thought through, poorly researched, racist, sexist, stupid, cliche ridden plots, scripts full of odd bits of stilted dialogue (yes, this episode had bad dialogue, in a moffat written show! I know! *mind is blown*) all of which is tied together with odd bits of duct tape into a shambolic mess of a episode.
I'll watch the next episode, but only out of morbid curiosity more than because I think it might be anything other than bad at this point. This is the worst show Moffat has ever put his name to, and the finale... who knows? Given the wonders Moffat can do towards the finale of a show made of win, what new and impressive nadirs of terribleness he might reach in this failtastic show.