#the distress i had with the house explosion in s1 then s2 completely fucking me up

[ourlittlesister2015]

Almost 1am. I have to wake up at 5 and I just remembered russian doll and now i'm thinking about aunt Ruth

[desertchicken]

Lots of (non-Johnlock related) frustration re: TFP under the cut.

I don’t normally post about fandom-related things, and I normally don’t spend my time writing criticism or hating on fiction, but I just have to ask

What the actual living fuck was that episode? What kind of bullshit series finale was that utter mess of an episode? 

I mean sure, I should have seen it coming. I should have known not to trust in the series in S3E1 when rather than providing a satisfying, intellectually honest explanation of Sherlock’s faked death in TRF, they just kind of waved their hands around and did some weird sequence with Anderson’s conspiracy theories and had John say ~I don’t care how you did it~ in the end. I should have seen it coming when they never really explained what exactly Magnussen had on that disk that would be so terrible for Mary, when they pulled that weird inception-mind-palace shit that didn’t really even make sense with the Abominable Bride, when they never told us what John wrote on that note, when Lady Smallwood’s name keeps changing, and how did Culverton Smith never get noticed with him being as creepy as fuck all the time and what is up with the villain in T6T who basically only is relevant in the very end to provide a plot device for Mary’s death and so much more but 

But I still believed in them, I still always did, because of how much this show (in its initial S1 and S2 runs) meant to me in high school. How intelligent, well-written, and clever the plot was, how spectacular the acting was, how simultaneously thrilling and believable the stories were. I trusted in the writers to resolve the continually growing pile of loose ends. And then we get this as the ‘groundbreaking finale’. We get this steaming pile of bullshit.

Sherlock had 2 other siblings he literally straight up forgot about. ‘Who you are today, all the actions you’ve ever taken is just a memory of Eurus’??? I can’t buy that. His parents never mentioned them. His brother was able to keep them a secret for that long. Even more, there’s basically no mention of them, no foreshadowing, or even a hint of them, before the end of S3.

How the fuck did Moriarty collaborate with Eurus and plan everything out that far in advance, and he basically never alluded to anything related to her in any of his conversations with Sherlock at all? Moriarty worked well as a villain, an arch-enemy if you will, in S1 and S2 because of how slow-burn he was, how his plans were alluded to from the very beginning of S1, through to TGG, TSiB, and TRF. We don’t even know Eurus is a villain until the end of TLD. She works only as an episodic villain, not as some great groundbreaking-finale-to-tie-up-the-whole-series baddie that’s actually believable without making TFP seem completely disjointed and unrelated from the rest of the episodes in the series. 

How did nobody notice that things at Sherrinford had gone horribly wrong for that long? How can Sherlock and co. break in so easily?

Molly deserved so much better than that ‘love confession’ and she gets absolutely no screentime whatsoever at the end, only the Baker Street Boys are back at it again! wow!

That explosion, oh my god. The fucking clown. The almost comical B list horror movie tone of the entire Sherrinford sequence.

And speaking of resolution, what the hell was that bullshit resolution how could Eurus just have been sitting there upstairs and then was convinced and led away with a hug after all that intense scheming and setup like the emotional punch of the episode was such a complete letdown. This was a girl who’s literally a psychopath, who murdered her own little brother and burnt her house down and is willing to torture Sherlock to the point of making him kill Mycroft and drown John. I literally don’t understand how she could be placated with just a hug from Sherlock. What about her parents? Didn’t they ever hug her as a child? What’s so special about Sherlock at that moment that would just let her have some cute soft ~emotional breakdown~ that would lead her to abandon all the plans she’s made in the past 5 fucking years?

There was absolutely no genuine exploration of the relationship between John and Sherlock, or Mycroft and Sherlock at all. Sure, we find out that Sherlock cares a lot for his best friend, and cares also for his brother. But what about all those lies that Mycroft told over the years? Are they all just forgiven like *that*? Where is the fallout of that relationship?

More about the genuine exploration of relationships: I was never a Johnlock shipper, and I frankly don’t give a flying fuck about whether John and Sherlock are a couple, romantically, or whether they kiss or not at the end or Parentlock or whatever. But the resolution to that friendship is simply unbelievable as well. What about the emotional bullshit about Mary’s death and John beating the hell out of Sherlock, all the angst set up from T6T and TLD, Sherlock doing drugs when John’s gone, John having complicated feelings about ‘everything being about Sherlock’, etc. etc. and there’s not even a single one-on-one scene between them at all in this entire bloody mess of an episode, but rather we just have John obediently following Sherlock around like a dog without any question. Gone is all the previous relationship drama, like a snap, after that hug scene in TLD. It’s just gone. There is 0 development of the John/Sherlock friendship at all in this episode. John is actually literally there just to be a pet, like Eurus said, to do what Sherlock says and to be a damsel in distress and then to accompany him on crime-solving sprees in the end. No character development at all. I think this is what, apart from the plot holes, made me the angriest. I don’t know about queerbaiting, and I don’t need them to ~realize their redemptive gay love for each other~, which would be cool, but I’m first and foremost pissed about the fact that this show is primarily about their friendship and that that was just completely tossed to the wayside in this episode. 

There’s more but I’m just so done. I have school on Tuesday. The Final Problem was a complete, utter, letdown that I should have seen coming but still naively believed in. Benedict and Martin and the rest of the actors were lovely, as always, but everything about this, and about the turn this show has taken, is a fucking mess. They made a dripping ugly mess out of a series I used to love so dearly. I’m not even sure I want a S5 anymore, because nothing will redeem what they’ve done in the course of this season. Sorry for the hate, but I’m just sad. I’m just so sad.