Sherlock

Mulan and I finished watching the TV series Sherlock several days ago.  If you don't know, that's the version of Sherlock Holmes from a few years ago, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman playing Holmes and Watson, and set in modern times.

We watched all the way to the end of series 4, and the final episodes especially were a great opportunity for Mulan to learn a little more about history.

But I don't mean that Mulan learnt more about Victorian England and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Rather, I mean that Mulan (and Miya) learnt about jumping the shark.

We found a YouTube clip of Fonzie jumping the shark in Happy Days, and had a chat about the meaning of the term.

The way I see it, the central core of Sherlock Holmes is the reasonableness.  Everything else can be changed, but at heart Holmes is about step-by-step reasoning that may not be clear at first but is obvious (or at least extremely plausible) once explained.

The first half of Sherlock followed this format.  Even though it was set in modern times, and twisted the Conan Doyle stories somewhat ("A Study in Pink" instead of "A Study in Scarlet"), it was still recognisably reasonable.

But from series 3 onwards (at least in my opinion), the writers tangled themselves in knots trying to ever outdo themselves with complexity.  In the end they overreached, and resorted to mysticism.  That is, they abandoned the central core of Holmes -- the reasonableness.  In the place of reasonableness, they invented super-humans who could see and do things that were beyond comprehension.  We no longer got the step-by-step reasoning; in its place was teasing and hand-waving gestures to inexplicable higher levels of thinking.  It was drama without substance.

For both Mulan and me, series 4 was not so fun to watch compared with the earlier episodes, and we only wanted to finish it for the sake of completeness.

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A much better recent Holmes story, in our opinion, is the 2020 Enola Holmes movie, which we also watched recently.  Highly recommended, especially for teen and tween girls.