i dont think ive ever been more excited to watch a 1:50 hour video
it starts off tearing into doctor who under moffat and hbomberguy i could kiss you i love you great video already
please watch this video if you care about or have cared about sherlock or doctor who on any level its cathartic
this is the third time i’ve seen someone discover this video and watch all of it despite it’s length because it’s… that good
anyway, how do i letterbox this
This video is an incredible rundown of the major problems with Moffat’s writing, both in Doctor Who and Sherlock and properly puts to words a lot of my frustrations with him.
Here’s a summary for those without the stamina for a nearly two hour video.
He starts off that given people to answer to and the constraints of a one-off episode that doesn’t majorly affect the plot, Moffat writes an incredible story, and I agree. His one-off episodes on DW and even his parody spinoff were well done.
However when given almost complete control, he just makes plots that are too complicated and full of themselves. Eg instead of having a reveal be a catalyst for major character development, the reveal itself is the draw and just leads to more cliffhangers which lead to more cliffhangers and the answer is always “just watch and find out”. His writing is filled to the brim with the insinuation that there is more beneath the surface, but never follows through on those hints making the audience increasingly frustrated.
He completely misses the point of the shows he creates, making the main character The Most Special and bending over backwards to make everything about him instead of actually telling a compelling story. In the original Holmes stories, and in every mystery story ever made, the audience gets all the same information as the characters and we have a chance of solving the case ourselves. The detective is the hero because they put together information we would not have thought to connect. Sherlock increasingly pulls information out of thin air and there is no way the audience can have a hope of keeping up as the explanations get more and more far-fetched. The show even explicitly demonizes the people who do this! The narrator goes through each season and how this tendency just gets worse and worse.
Another point of the Holmes mysteries was the fact that they were one-off stories. You could read one without feeling like you’re lost in a bigger narrative, and shows like House that also draw from that source material generally follow that plot-of-the-week style. Straight off the bat Moffat tried to spin this complicated web of intrigue that eventually gave even the most dedicated viewers whiplash from the constant BS plot twists. He talked about the fan conspiracy that there was actually a secret fourth episode of the fourth season because on its own it was so unbelievably bad that fans thought it had to be on purpose and there had to be a greater underlying reason to explain it. (There wasn’t.)
He also dips into how Moffat has a clear contempt for the source material and rewrites these characters to be completely different in all but name, mentioning the queercoding of the villains as well. What made the plots interesting or meaningful in the first place is completely erased. John Watson is turned from the everyman narrator into the guy who has absolutely nothing useful to do except get kidnapped or drugged or put in mortal danger for Sherlock to save.
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