Surely Not, Sherlock!

Well, I wasted two hours of my life last night.

No, not watching the snooze-fest that was Seattle's absolute trouncing of Denver in Superbowl XLVIII, although that might have been preferable. No, I watched the third season finale of Sherlock, the BBC's postmodern update and reboot of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson. I watched the first season of this show when it premiered on PBS in the United States a couple of years ago, wasn't especially impressed, and skipped the second and third seasons. I decided to give the show another look, however, when some recent late night pain and insomnia kept me up, and I needed something diverting to watch while waiting for the pain medications to kick in. Before I knew it, I was hooked—not on the pain medicine, but on Sherlock. With each "season" being only three episodes long, it was a fairly simple matter to get caught up. I plowed through seasons 1 and 2, and the two previous episodes of season 3 in order to prepare for the big finale last night. What a letdown!

For those who haven't seen the show, perhaps a few words of explanation are in order, but here there be spoilers. You have been warned. In this contemporary update of the Holmes universe, some elements and vestiges of the original stories remain, although often transmuted and transmogrified.  Holmes is still a brilliant but asocial, eccentric oddball, a violinist, and a sometime nicotine addict, residing at 221B Baker Street, London, and attempting to make a living as the world's only "consulting detective." In his day job, he's a pathologist at London's St. Bartholomew's Hospital, but he's forever running his own bizarre experiments on the cadavers to test equally bizarre theories that his coworkers find incomprehensible. His coworkers, however, are just as incomprehensible to Sherlock as he is to them. One of his colleagues, the timid, mousy Molly Hooper (brilliantly played by Louise Brealey) has a massive crush on him, but he's oblivious to her attentions. When Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade of Scotland Yard (Rupert Graves) calls Holmes a psychopath, Holmes snaps back, "High functioning sociopath. Do your research."

While Conan Doyle's original Holmes was definitely an asocial eccentric, he could, if need be, muster a modicum of social skills, and, on occasion, a kind of gallantry, particularly, if a woman was in danger. He could rally to the defense of a damsel in distress. For much of this new series, Holmes, as played by Cumberbatch, isn't that classy. He's simply arrogant and condescending to anyone he considers his intellectual inferior, which is to say most people. To put it bluntly, he's a jerk. For much of the series, Holmes insists he isn't really interested in questions of right and wrong, good and evil, and the needs of the people who come to him for help. People are merely ciphers, minor factors in a complex intellectual problem. However, as the series progresses, we see that despite his protestations to the contrary, he really does have a sense of right and wrong and a desire to help people achieve justice. In a way, the series is as much about Sherlock's coming out of his shell and learning to form normal social relationships as it is about solving mysteries. Sherlock matures as the series progresses, especially through his relationship with Watson, but with each season being only three episodes long, we don't get to see that relationship develop as much as we might like.

Sherlock's brother Mycroft, on the other hand, remains largely the same throughout the series. Brilliantly played by series co-creator Mark Gatiss, Mycroft "is the British government," a sinister and calculating spook and spymaster, holding a shadowy but powerful position in the British intelligence services. Mycroft does have a more human side, but we don't get to see it until the very end of the series. The long-suffering Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs), Holmes's housemaid in the original stories, is now his landlady, who owes Sherlock a favor: he saw to it that her drug-dealing, abusive ex-husband was sent to prison.

Watson, for his part, is a veteran of the current war in Afghanistan, who has been advised by his therapist to keep a blog as a means of treating his post-traumatic stress disorder. Holmes and Watson, both in need of a roommate, are introduced through a mutual acquaintance, and a legendary partnership is born. Watson blogs about Holmes's adventures, the website attracts new clients, and the two detectives battle an assortment of serial killers, art thieves, terrorists, assassins, and blackmailers, most of whom, it seems, are under the control of the psychotic master criminal Jim Moriarty (chillingly played by Irish actor Andrew Scott). Throughout the series there are all sorts of clever, winks, nods, and references to the original stories, from episode titles and names of characters to plot points and little passing observations Holmes makes. Often the writers will combine and update elements from two or more different Conan Doyle stories and give them a contemporary spin. Most of these references and updates are clever and well done, but not all: I wasn't a big fan of making Irene Adler, the opera singer who actually manages to outwit Holmes in the original Conan Doyle story "A Scandal in Bohemia" into a high class prostitute and dominatrix in the updated version, but I was willing to overlook it because the series up to that point had been pretty good.

I suspected the show was headed for real trouble, however, as season 2 ended and season 3 began. At the end of season 2, in an episode loaded with references to the Conan Doyle story, "The Final Problem," Holmes and Moriarty have an epic confrontation, Moriarty apparently succeeds in destroying Holmes's reputation, Moriarty apparently commits suicide, and Holmes likewise apparently leaps from the roof of St. Bartholomew's Hospital to a bloody, suicidal death right in front of a helpless Doctor Watson. As season 3 opens, however, we find that Holmes never really died and his apparent death was all a piece of remarkably clever stagecraft managed by British Intelligence. By this time, Watson has moved on and proposed to Mary Morstan, the love of his life (who originally appears in the Conan Doyle novel, The Sign of the Four), and is furious to find that Holmes deceived him. Since we don't get to see the relationship between Holmes and Watson develop in depth over time, and because Holmes is such a jerk for so much of the time we do see, Watson's emotional collapse at Holmes's apparent death and outrage at Holmes's fraud and deception, don't ring entirely true. The second episode of season 3, which takes place on Watson's wedding day, is little more than a clip show and a comic relief episode in which Holmes struggles valiantly to give a best man speech, recount some "humorous" cases, and solve a mystery that's taking place at the wedding reception itself.

The real deal-breaker for me, however came with last night's season finale. Holmes and Watson, having forged an uneasy truce after Holmes's deception, go up against a particularly loathsome blackmailer, tabloid magnate Charles Augustus Magnusson ("Charles Augustus Milverton" in Conan Doyle's original story). Mary Morstan Watson, John Watson's wife, is also going after Magnusson, because he knows that she—get ready for this—is actually a foreign intelligence agent and international assassin posing as Mary Morstan. Sherlock deduces the truth about Mary and tricks her into confessing to him and to John. John is again outraged, but somewhat incredibly, decides to forgive both Mary and Sherlock. Sherlock and John return to confront Magnusson, but discover that all the incriminating information Magnusson has about Mary is in his head, and only in his head—there are no paper documents or files on computer hard drives. When Sherlock points out that Magnusson thus has no proof of Mary's real identity, Magnusson coolly replies, "I don't need proof. I'm in newspapers."

Knowing that Magnusson will be a threat to John and Mary as long as he's alive, Sherlock calmly shoots Magnusson in cold blood. In order to save Sherlock from a long prison sentence, Mycroft proposes a deal: Sherlock can go to Eastern Europe and perform some high level espionage for the British government, or he can go to jail. Sherlock agrees to do the spy work, leading to what looks to a final parting between himself and John Watson. Just minutes into Sherlock's exile, however, Mycroft calls him back to England; it seems none other than Moriarty is alive and up to his old tricks. End episode, roll credits.

Will there be a fourth season? I don't know. Will I be watching it? After that turkey of an episode, I really don't know. I don't mind the secret agent stuff so much if it's done in moderation. From my reading of the original stories, I know that at times, largely because of Mycroft, Holmes is called upon to be as much a secret agent as a detective, performing certain highly confidential services for Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria and the other crowned heads of Europe, so there is that precedent in the source material. This reboot, however, really overdoes that whole aspect, transforming Holmes from a nerdy science geek who solves crimes into some kind of badass James Bond-style superspy. I like James Bond and superspy stories too, but when I tune in expecting one kind of genre and get something else, it really bugs me.

It would have been perfectly plausible to imagine what might happen if Magnusson knew something incriminating about Mary Morstan. It would have also been perfectly plausible to imagine what might have happened if she had confronted him about it; but that incriminating something should have been something believable. Maybe, years before, she had embezzled from her employer, or had an affair with an important married man. She should have been what she had been portrayed as up to that point, a middle-aged woman happy to find love at last, and desperate to keep an incriminating secret; not a spy or an assassin, or some ridiculous baloney like that! Come on! And the whole "Sherlock and Mycroft at home with their parents for Christmas" subplot? Please! Honestly, sometimes I think even I could write something better than that. Why don't I?

"The Closer" Closes

A couple of weeks ago what I think is the best show on television aired its last original episode.

The Closer, starring Kyra Sedgwick as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson of the Los Angeles Police Department's Major Crimes Division, ended its network run on August 13 after seven seasons as a limited run summer series on the TNT cable channel—— and I'm already missin' me some Brenda Leigh.

Perhaps from what I've already written, or if you've seen the show yourself, you can guess why I love The Closer so much. Kyra Sedgwick is absolutely spot-on in her portrayal of Brenda Leigh Johnson, a former interrogator for the CIA and former Chief of Detectives for the Atlanta Police who finds herself in the strange new world of L. A. Who would've thought that a nice Jewish girl from New York City could so perfectly adopt the persona of a li'l ol' Southern girl from Atlanta who turns out to be a "steel magnolia," far tougher than she looks? One of my pet peeves as a native Southerner and a lifelong lover of movies and TV is the way that Northern actors frequently overplay and caricature Southern characters. They exaggerate a Southern accent to a ridiculous, unrecognizable degree and present their characters as buffoons, psychopaths, religious zealots, or some combination of all three.

As played by Kyra Sedgwick, however, Brenda Leigh Johnson is none of these. She is tough, passionate, driven, intensely ambitious, yet also capable of great tenderness and vulnerability, despite the cruelty, brutality, and deceit she sees as part of her job. Kyra Sedgwick nails not only a Southern accent (you'd swear she was from Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta), but the whole Southern way of being, if you will. Brenda is tough as nails at work but otherwise constantly afraid of giving offense, and terrified of offending her parents, especially her sometimes overbearing father. The subtle, ironic twist she can give the phrase, "Thank you," or "Thank you so much," (which often implies just the opposite of what it says) has become the show's tagline. For those of you who haven't seen the show, here's the backstory:

After she is accused of misconduct and forced to resign from the Atlanta Police (but later cleared by an ethics inquiry), Brenda Leigh Johnson is approached by her former boss and sometime lover, Will Pope, who is now an Assistant Chief with the LAPD. He offers her the rank of Deputy Chief and command of an elite squad of detectives, at first called Priority Homicide and later Major Crimes. They will investigate especially sensitive, high profile murder cases that will reflect badly on the LAPD if they are not handled correctly and solved quickly. Chief Johnson acquires the nickname "The Closer" because of her unique talent for eliciting confessions from suspects during interrogation———confessions that close cases.

At first her fellow officers and even the detectives under her command dismiss her as a hick and a hayseed, or even worse, an interloper and a bimbo who got her job by sleeping with the boss. Over the course of the series, however, she wins the respect and loyalty of her squad and even the grudging admiration of her critics in the department as she proves she is a very good cop who knows what she is doing.

She's not perfect, however, either personally or professionally. At the end of Season Six, she makes a highly questionable decision regarding the release of a murder suspect that costs the man his life and nearly ends her career. In the series finale, she essentially sacrifices her career to trap the one criminal who has eluded her because she knows he's guilty but can't prove it. She's flawed, vulnerable, and immensely engaging and sympathetic right up to the end, which is a testament to the show's fine writing.

Thus far I've focused on Kyra Sedgwick's importance to the show as star and executive producer, but of course the writers and directors also deserve major credit for the show's success. The stories are compelling, full of twists and turns and tangled ethical dilemmas that leave the audience with something to think about long after the episode is over. The supporting cast is excellent; each detective is well-drawn, a fully realized personality. Some episodes move Chief Johnson somewhat into the background and allow the spotlight to fall on one of the detectives; other episodes have a lighter tone and allow the cast to show off their considerable comedic talents.

If you haven't seen the show, do yourself a favor and watch it now. All seven seasons are available on DVD for sale or rental, and perhaps even for digital download for you to enjoy. If you did, I'm sure Brenda would "Thank yew!"

Who Do You Think You Are?

I'm trying to find out.

I've started watching "Who Do You Think You Are?"  NBC's Friday night show in which celebrities discover surprising truths about their genealogies and family histories. This Friday's season finale will feature upscale, down home Southern chef and foodie Paula Deen. On the plus side, the show is sometimes interesting and thought provoking. It's motivated me to begin researching my own family history again, something I have tried to do, off and on, with varying degrees of success, for many years now. On the minus side, I do have several beefs with the show:

First, it's built on a formula. Every episode begins with Big Famous Celebrity who has a lingering question about his or her family history. What really happened to cousin Fred when he disappeared for six months in World War II? Was Great Aunt Ida really a show girl? Was Great Great Great Grandpa Leroy an escaped slave? So, Big Famous Celebrity traipses off across the country (and often around the world) to meet with historians, archivists, librarians, and genealogists who seemingly by magic and on command produce documents that provide another piece to the puzzle. There are twists and turns. There are dead ends. At the end, however, the mystery is solved by a Stunning Revelation that leaves Big Famous Celebrity choked up or teary eyed on camera. A sadder but wiser man or woman, he or she returns home to the bosom of his or her family to reflect on What We Have All Learned From This. Fade to black, roll credits, cue commercial.

Second, it focuses on celebrities. Why are the family histories of rock stars, actors, or pop singers necessarily more interesting than those of truck drivers, nurses, or teachers, for example? I 'm just a newbie genealogist and family historian, but I'll bet nearly everybody has someone interesting in their family tree if they go back far enough. My father flew fighter planes in World War II. His mother, my grandmother, had chronic, crippling arthritis that left her bedridden much of the time, but she still raised two children and helped support her family during the Great Depression by writing poetry, short stories, and advertising jingles in contests and promotions. One of my ancestors signed Scotland's declaration of independence— some 400 years before the American one. I think the show would gain, not lose, emotional impact if it focused on ordinary people rather than on celebrities. What if each week Joe or Josephine Average from Des Moines or Tampa or Buffalo found out that they were related to a scientist or a millionaire or a baseball player? Or that they were related to other ordinary good, decent, compassionate, quietly heroic people? Wouldn't that motivate other people across America to find out more about their families?

Third, it presents a distorted picture of genealogical research. At the beginning of the hour, the celebrity has a problem. At the end of the hour (less, if you deduct time for commercials), the celebrity has a solution. He or she jets around the country and around the world to meet with the experts who have just the information our protagonist needs.. At least once per episode, someone suggests that the celebrity consult Ancestry.com, the show's sponsor, and our hero always finds at least one useful nugget of information there. Again, I'm just a beginner at this, but I do have sense and experience enough to know that it can't be that easy for us mere mortals. I've just started using Ancestry.com and its Family Tree Maker software myself, and they are indeed wonderful tools, but they are not the whole story.

I 'd guess that each episode of this show took months of planning and preparation. Someone would have to research the historical and genealogical problems involved and figure out who had the documents, information, and expertise to solve them. I'm not a pop star with the resources and budget of a production company and a major TV network behind me. I can't fly all around the world to research documents and meet with experts. I expect that in my search there will be dead ends and disappointments. There will be documents I need that aren't at the county courthouse, the state bureau of vital statistics, or digitized in an online database somewhere. If they are, I might have to spend my own money and wait weeks for copies. Yet I'm willing to take those risks because I want to know more about my family. I'll just have to do genealogy the old-fashioned way.

Fire Flying

Ni hao! I may be the last gorram feller in the gorram 'verse to find out about Firefly, but I think it may be the best goram vid on the whole gorram cortex! Take a gander if you've a notion! It's shiny!

Translation: Hello! I may be the last person in the (ahem) gosh darn universe to find out about the television show Firefly, but I think it may be the best darn TV show available on the whole darn internet! Go watch it if you would like! It's excellent!

A high-speed internet connection is a marvelous thing; it allows me to waste time in ways previously unimaginable, visiting sites such as YouTube.com, CBS.com, and Hulu.com and watching classic (and not-so-classic) TV from years gone by.

My latest discovery is the late, lamented science fiction/Western hybrid Firefly which ran for only 11 of its 14 scheduled episodes on the Fox network in 2002 before it vanished from the network's lineup. There was such an outcry from fans that the show's producers decided to release the entire series as a DVD boxed set, which led in turn to a cast reunion and a big-screen movie, titled Serenity, in 2005. The movie was designed both to fill in crucial gaps in the characters' backstories and tie up loose ends created by the series's abrupt cancellation. The Firefly boxed set and Serenity movie are available for sale at Amazon.com and the Serenity movie is also available for rental and streaming internet playback to Netflix.com subscribers. I'd heard good things about the show for years but missed it during its original all too brief network run. When I saw it was available on Hulu.com, I started watching the pilot and was immediately hooked.

Firefly comes from the fertile, somewhat twisted imagination of Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off series Angel. I've never been a big fan of the horror genre in general or vampire stories in particular, so I was never a big Buffy watcher. The few times I did happen to catch the show while channel surfing however, I had to admire its truly original premise, smartly constructed plots, well-drawn characters, and some of the wittiest dialogue on television.

Those same characteristics are much in evidence with Firefly. As a brief prologue to the later episodes explains, in the 26th century when Earth's resources are exhausted, humanity begins moving out into space and converting other planets into replicas of Earth. The most powerful planets form a technologically advanced but corrupt and authoritarian Alliance and attempt to force all the planets to join. The "independents" or "browncoats" refuse, and a bloody galactic civil war follows.

After the browncoats are decisively defeated at the battle of Serenity Valley, the remaining independents move to the far fringes of settled space, where representatives of the Alliance are scarce and high technology is hard to come by. Hence, Firefly's vision of the 26th century looks and sounds a lot like the 19th--with a few twists. Characters speak a bizarre blend of Mandarin Chinese, slang invented for the series, and a rustic dialect of English that sounds as if it came from every Western movie ever made. In battle, characters are just as likely to reach for six-guns as they are for ray guns, and desperadoes on horseback coexist with stormtroopers in battle armor. The show's musical score is just as likely to feature fiddle, banjo, and guitar as it is the orchestral music or electronica that you might find in more conventional science fiction. The final image of the opening credits, a starship hovering over a corral, perfectly summarizes the show's blend of space opera and horse opera motifs:



Sergeant Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds is a survivor of the battle of Serenity Valley and an embittered browncoat. In an effort to start over again after the war, he's promoted himself to captain, bought a rusting, obsolete "Firefly" class freighter, dubbed her Serenity, and assembled a ragtag crew: former war buddy Zoe, as tough as any man, as his first officer; Wash, Zoe's wisecracking husband, as pilot and navigator; the eternally pert and perky Kaylee as ship's mechanic, who, despite her girlish demeanor, is a whiz with machinery; Inara, a highly trained and officially licensed "companion," or courtesan; and Jayne, the hired muscle, whose mercenary temperament leads him to try to betray his captain more than once.

In the show's 90-minute pilot episode, the starship Serenity picks up three more passengers: Book, a "Shepherd," or minister for an unspecified, perhaps pan-Christian denomination; Dr. Simon Tam, a brilliant young surgeon; and his sister River, a child prodigy whose mind has been cruelly damaged by horrific experiments at the hands of Alliance scientists. Simon has sacrificed his promising career to rescue River from the "Academy" where she was being tortured, and now the two of them are wanted fugitives. Somewhere in the deeply troubled recesses of her mind, River holds secrets that could bring down the Alliance.

Over the course of the series, characters grow, change, and reveal more sides of themselves. Mal, for example, has an almost Victorian moral code, and I mean that in the best possible sense. He can't stand to see a woman abused or mistreated; so much so that he'll risk his life and his crew to defend a bordello full of prostitutes who are being terrorized by a local bigwig. He hates the fact that Inara, whatever she may call herself, is a prostitute, and shows signs of being in love with her, feelings she may secretly reciprocate. When he finds he has stolen a load of desperately needed medical supplies, he'll risk his life to return the supplies to their intended recipients and willingly incur the wrath of the vicious gangster who hired him to steal the supplies in the first place.

Shepherd Book, for his part, seems to have more knowledge of military and security matters than a clergyman otherwise might, suggesting that he too has a troubled past. It's clear that Mal has lost his religious faith as a result of the events at Serenity Valley, and had the show continued, I would have liked to have seen the relationship between the two men develop further and the writers grapple more with issues of faith and belief.

In short, Firefly has a little bit of everything: plenty of action, quirky, unconventional characters, Emmy-winning visual effects, and--I almost forgot--bloodthirsty space-going zombies called Reavers--truly something for everyone :) If you like science fiction or Westerns or wonder what a blend of the two genres might look like, head on over to Hulu.com today and start watching. The browncoats need you.