In my ideal world, this is how this series of Sherlock will end: we will find out that Irene Adler has in fact outsmarted Sherlock Holmes. We will learn that the password she gave him for the phone offered limited contents, not her full collection of secrets. We will learn that Sherlock made an assumption about the way she feels about him, an assumption that she loved him because that is how she knows she is expected to react (by both the audience and Sherlock). Irene will have done this because she knows that Sherlock wants to keep her alive, and that he will save her, and that her adventures will be able to continue. We will learn in the finale that Irene outsmarted both Sherlock and Moriarty—that she kept her secrets because the gentlemen underestimated her—and that she still has the best bits of information for herself. The third series will develop this plot. We will learn the kinds of dangerous secrets that Irene kept, and Sherlock will learn not to underestimate anyone. His ego will be his downfall in this case—because he really does think too highly of himself.
I’m not sure I believe that this is how Moffat is going to develop the plot of Sherlock. While I’d like to think he’s going to catch me by surprise like that, I doubt he’s going to. I’m not making him a villain for past mistakes—I’m drawing a conclusion based on what we know about Moffat and his writing, and Moffat and his opinions of women (these opinions are not high). It’s easy to look at “A Scandal in Belgravia” and be blown away by the whoosh of the storyline and the acting. Lara Pulver does a marvelous job of selling Irene Adler to us, and until the last bit of the episode, as a viewer and as a woman, I could have understood where Moffat was coming from with her character, but the ending seals the deal. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” Irene Adler outsmarts Sherlock Holmes. In Steven Moffat’s “A Scandal in Belgravia,” she doesn’t. That is where Moffat fails her.
Moffat is a good writer. I enjoy (most) of his plots. I think he’s had a lot of fun with taking the original series and bringing it into the 21st century. I’ve certainly had fun watching it. But it’s silly and to pretend that the misogyny isn’t in his writing—because it is. It’s in a lot of his writing. It’s entirely possible to enjoy an episode of Sherlock and still realize that there’s something inherently wrong with the direction Moffat takes Adler’s character. Her downfall is her feelings. Her, as Jane Clare Jones wrote in an article for The Guardian, “great big girly crush” on Sherlock Holmes is the reason that Adler gives up what she repeatedly refers to as “her life.” So, to paraphrase, viewers get the impression that Adler gives up her life for the man she loves. Well then. Not to forget that she tells Watson that she’s gay—and then falls for Sherlock anyway. I’ve heard it argued that theirs is an intellectual love, and I agree, but at the same time, the relationship between Sherlock and Irene certainly lends itself to the trope of the lesbian who realizes the error of her ways once she finds the right man.
Sherlock’s tirade on sentiment leaned too heavily on the condescending side. Sherlock is our hero, our protagonist, and at a moment where viewers should be applauding his victory, a good chunk of us are instead marveling at his cruelty. Sherlock’s emotional removal is an important characteristic, but at the end of an episode where we have been shown that he does in fact care about the people in his life (the scenes with Mrs. Hudson were both touching and revealing, and his apology to Molly was a pleasant surprise), it comes as a bit of a shock, and also a letdown.
In my ideal world, Moffat will prove all his naysayers wrong. Irene will be a fully developed, fully functional character outside of her love for Sherlock Holmes. She will outsmart him, not because she is a woman who knows “what he likes” or because she is a woman whose strings Moriarty is pulling, but because she is an intelligent, cunning, and capable person.
