Sherlock Holmes: Feminist
This contains several spoilers.
I am a terribly huge fan of Sherlock Holmes who is hands down the best detective, consulting or otherwise, ever conceived. Such a fan, in fact, that I am watching two concurrent series featuring him. The first is Elementary, and the second is Sherlock.
It may seem redundant to watch two TV series based on the same person, but what I love about them is that they are as different as day and night. Both are contemporary adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, but Sherlock works hard to stick to Sir A. C. Doyle’s original story, while Elementary uses his framework (characters and basic Sherlockian principles) and applies it to various modern-day-type situations.
Elementary happens to be my favourite of the two, and recently, I realised why: in it, Sherlock Holmes is a feminist. Or at least its writers are.
Watson in this series is a woman: Joan Watson. A former surgeon working as a sober companion when she meets Holmes. After the completion of his programme, he offers her the opportunity to stay on as his apprentice and learn how to be a detective, something she already has a knack for. She agrees, and we may be forgiven for expecting her to always play second fiddle to Holmes’ genius as it is in the books and all other adaptations. However, she becomes more of his equal - she is independent and solves her own cases. Sherlock accords her a level of respect that no other Watson has received, and he trusts her. He not only teaches her, he learns from her as well, severally.
Instead of Mrs. Hudson, we have Ms. Hudson, an old friend of Sherlock and a transgender woman hiding from one of her lovers. She is an expert on Ancient Greece, and she makes her living as a muse and a kept woman. She is an autodidact, and is quite well versed in ancient and modern literature. Unlike the Mrs. Hudson we are used to, a mother figure in Sherlock’s life who picks up after him, Sherlock and Ms. Hudson have no such relationship. The only reason she will be cleaning Sherlock’s home is because she needs cash to stand on her own, having decided to leave her work as a kept woman and muse.
The best example, perhaps, is Irene Adler, who is later revealed to be my favourite consulting criminal, Moriarty. We are introduced to Irene Adler as Sherlock’s dead love interest, the reason he went into the drug spiral he has just emerged from in the first episode. Several plot twists later, it is revealed that she is, in fact, alive. Apparently, she had been taken hostage and subjected to psychological torture, not killed by a serial killer as Sherlock had thought. She is shown as extremely vulnerable, and needing Sherlock’s protection.
Imagine my surprise when she is revealed to be Moriarty, Holmes’ arch-nemesis and the cause of most of his troubles. The greatest woman that Holmes has ever met and the so called “Napoleon of Crime” are one and the same person. In Sir A. C. Doyle’s work, they have both outsmarted Holmes, and it is no different here. The cherry on top is that it is our female Watson, and not Holmes, who figures out Moriarty and is able to catch her at the end of the season finale.
Three cheers to the creators and producers of this show for taking a work of art set in an earlier time and making it modern, relevant and so feminist. For not typecasting women as damsels in distress, virgins, whores or mummy figures. For giving them the spotlight, and for doing something very few people do: daring to be different.
