Review: Big Mama Stories by Eleanor Arnason

My review of Eleanor Arnason's new collection Big Mama Stories appears today at Strange Horizons.  I've been a fan of Arnason's short fiction for more than a decade, since reading "Knapsack Poems"--still, to my mind, one of the finest short stories in the field--so a chance to review more of her stories seemed too good to pass up.  In Big Mama Stories, Arnason tries to invent a folk figure for the technological age, and the result, as I write in the review, feels like a cross between Brer Rabbit and Doctor Who--which is to say, utterly delightful.

Surface Tension: Thoughts on Hannibal's First Season

The first time I read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon was more than fifteen years ago, in the white heat of having discovered and been wowed by its more famous sequel, The Silence of the Lambs.  Standing in such stark comparison to the later book, which takes the elements that Red Dragon innovates--cutting between the points of view of the killer and the FBI agent pursuing him, focusing on the psychology of, and extending compassion to, both of them, featuring competent, multifaceted female characters at every turn of the plot--and does them better, Red Dragon couldn't help but come off badly, and for years I've thought of it as a disappointing work (it probably didn't help that my favorite character in the Lecter sequence, Clarice Starling, does not appear in this book).

Coming back to Red Dragon this week in preparation for writing this piece, I discovered a much stronger book than I had remembered, a smart, engaging thriller with an undertone of melancholy that only seems to make its moments of tension and excitement more effective.  It's also a more conventional work than I was expecting, or perhaps a more accurate way to put it would be that what was unconventional about Red Dragon when it was first published in 1981 is now commonplace.  Harris focuses, in great detail, on the investigative and forensic procedures which enable the FBI to catch serial killers, and clearly takes a great deal of pleasure in showing off his research in these areas (he also seems to enjoy wowing readers with the space-age technology and resources at the FBI's fingertips: "Wired to a Gateway telephone, in minutes the Datafax was transmitting the employment roll simultaneously to the FBI identification section in Washington and the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles."  In minutes!).  Nowadays, that's the stuff of every cut-rate procedural, so it's probably not surprising that, when given the reins of a franchise that has never quite managed to live up to the iconic status of its most famous character (some might say, that has been dragged down by that character's popularity) Bryan Fuller, TV's most idiosyncratic creator, has taken another path.  His Hannibal draws its power less from the taut storytelling that makes Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs (and the films based on them) such a thrill, and more from visuals, and an atmosphere of dread and looming disaster.  The result is one of the most intriguing and unusual television series of the last few years, but also one of its most frustrating.  It's a series whose moments are frequently brilliant, but whose whole often feels empty.

Like a lot of prequels (the series begins some time before the events of Red Dragon), Hannibal draws its power from the irony of the audience knowing things that the characters don't, and like shows such as Smallville, or films such as X-Men: First Class, it roots that irony in a friendship between people who will one day become enemies--FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the protagonist of Red Dragon, and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen, in a performance whose reserve and undertone of dry bemusement put it in stark, clearly deliberate contrast to Anthony Hopkins's famously hammy turn in the role).  The crucial difference here is that unlike Lex Luthor or Magneto, Hannibal has no illusions about who he is and what role he plays in the story.  At the time the series starts, he has for several years been an active serial killer, dubbed the Chesapeake Ripper by the FBI.  His friendship with Will, for whom he functions as a therapist and a sounding board while growing more involved with FBI investigations over the course of the season, is thus both a means to track and obfuscate the investigation of his own crimes, and an opportunity to indulge his psycopathic impulses.  As they grow closer, Hannibal manipulates Will--who is described as suffering from an "empathy disorder" which allows him to get into anyone's head, including killers--undermining his sense of reality and of self, concealing the fact that he is suffering from a neurological illness, convincing him and his colleagues at the FBI that he's losing his mind, and framing him for several murders.

Despite telling a very different story, Hannibal draws heavily from Red Dragon (and, to a lesser extent, from The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal the book; for all I know the show also cribs elements from the fourth Lecter novel, Hannibal Rising, but I haven't read it), borrowing lines of dialogue, images, and even whole scenes, so that one wonders what the show will be left with when it does the Red Dragon story (Fuller has laid out a multi-season plan for the show in which Red Dragon will be covered in season 3).  This can sometimes be awkward, as when Will, quoting directly from the book, says that he sees the Chesapeake Ripper as "one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time.  They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies."  It's an uncomfortable turn of phrase in the book, which is clearly of its time, but it's almost impossible to imagine someone in 2013 expressing themselves that way. 

For the most part, however, Fuller's extensive drawing on his source material is playful, often deliberately contravening the expectations of viewers who are familiar with it.  He recreates several iconic scenes from the books, but in a way that reverses their meaning.  In one scene, a patient at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Lecter will eventually be incarcerated, fakes a heart attack and attacks the nurse who tries to treat him.  In the books, this is Lecter, as described by Dr. Chilton to Will Graham in Red Dragon the book, and to Clarice Starling in the film of The Silence of the Lambs, as a way of illustrating the danger posed by Lecter.  In Hannibal, the patient is a murderer played by Eddie Izzard who has been manipulated by Chilton into believing that he is the Chesapeake Ripper--so the danger becomes, as it will be for Will, not the psychotic murderer but the seemingly benign psychiatrist offering to help.  Another episode opens with Laurence Fishburne's Jack Crawford flashing back to a time when he recruited an FBI trainee, played by Anna Chlumsky, to help him pursue a killer, but the trainee isn't Starling but a new character called Miriam Lass, who preceded her.  Her existence makes Crawford, and the quasi-paternal relationship he forges with Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, seem seedy, as if Starling were just the latest in a string of trainees that Crawford uses and discards--or has discarded for him, as Miriam stumbles onto Lecter (in exactly the way that Will describes in Red Dragon) and is killed by him.

Perhaps the most intriguing play on the Lecter canon in the series is the character of Hannibal's psychiatrist, the improbably named Bedelia du Maurier.  Played by Gillian Anderson, whose most famous character was modeled on Jodie Foster's turn as Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, and who was widely discussed as a frontrunner for the role when Foster declined to reprise it in the film version of Hannibal, du Maurier is semi-retired after having been attacked by a patient referred to her by Hannibal.  We don't learn the exact details of the attack in the first season, but du Maurier does tell Jack that the patient died during the attack when he swallowed his tongue, and later implies to Hannibal that there is more to how he died than she has told--swallowing his tongue being the way that Lecter persuaded a fellow prisoner who had insulted Starling to kill himself in The Silence of the Lambs.  In one of the season's final scenes, Hannibal visits du Maurier in her home with a prepared dinner, which may or may not be the flesh of his most recent victim (one of the show's more interesting choices is that it rarely confirms whether Hannibal is feeding his guests human flesh or not).  du Maurier's hesitation before she takes a bite--as well as the oblique hints she drops that she's aware of Hannibal's nocturnal activities--are a reminder that eating a cannibalistic meal prepared by Lecter is how Hannibal the book signals that Lecter has succeeded in breaking Starling down, stripping her of her pesky conscience, and making her the companion he desires.  With that in mind, it's hard not to wonder if the season's end, in which Will is committed to the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane and visited by Hannibal, is less a Homeland-style downfall for the sake of a triumphant resurgence in the second season, and more an indication that in Fuller's upside down version of the story, the role of Dr. Lecter, psychopathic consultant to the FBI, will be played by Will Graham.

As fun as these riffs on the canon are, I can't help but wonder if Hannibal wouldn't have been better off without them, because veering into recreations of Harris's tight, purposeful plotting only throws into sharper relief the fact that Hannibal's own original plotting is nothing of the sort, often driven by a combination of coincidence and the characters' stupidity.  The entire premise of the series is rooted in the coincidence that the psychiatrist referred to treat the FBI's top profiler (Hannibal gets the job because his former student Alana Bloom, a gender-swapped character from the books played by Caroline Dhavernas, refers Will to him) just happens to be the FBI's most wanted serial killer, and the first season only shakes out the way it does because Will just happens to develop a rare, virtually undetectable form of auto-immune encephalitis at precisely the same time (Will's health issues are quite obviously drawn from the experiences of New York Post journalist Susannah Cahalan, whose article on her experiences is terrifyingly informative but also drives home just what an unlikely confluence of events this is).  As if that were not enough, Hannibal needs to throw random sociopaths into its characters' path just to make its season-long plot work--when Will insists that his symptoms could have a neurological origin, Hannibal, who has been trying to convince him that he is mentally ill, takes him to a neurologist friend who diagnoses Will's illness, and is then persuaded by Hannibal to conceal it so that they can "observe" Will's deterioration.  And then there is the simple fact that Hannibal spends the entire season surrounded by FBI agents who have made it their life's mission to catch him, and never arouses even a hint of suspicion in any of them--even Will, who is defined by his intuitive powers of observation, only sees Hannibal for what he is when the plot needs him to, and no sooner.

Writing in The Vulture, reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz acknowledges the ridiculousness of the show's plotting, but suggests that to get hung up on it is to miss the point.  Hannibal, he argues, proceeds with the logic of a dream, or rather a nightmare.  The excesses of its one-off killers (almost all of whom arrange the bodies of their victims into grisly environmental art, and frequently consume parts of them in a seeming homage to the series's title character), the apparent indifference of the FBI to anything resembling proper investigative procedure, the failure of any of the characters to acknowledge just how absurdly and improbably weird their lives have become, these are all, Seitz argues, in service of the show's project to put its viewers in a certain, deranged headspace.

I can't think of a better example on TV of Roger Ebert's famous dictum that what matters isn't what a movie's about, but how it's about it. Simply by showing us things in a particular way, Hannibal communicates (subtly, almost imperceptibly at times) that it's dealing in metaphor, and that the only thing we're meant to take at face value are the feelings expressed by the show's characters, in much the same way that the only thing we take at face value when dreaming are the emotions we experience as we toss and turn in our sleep. That doorway, that pit, that castle, that naked body writhing beneath us: none are real. But the fear, lust, and curiosity we experience as we encounter them is as real as the air you're breathing now.

To a certain degree, Seitz is obviously right, especially when he stresses Hannibal's execution of this effect.  The show's plotting may be lackluster, but its visuals and atmospherics are some of the most stunning and effective that I have ever seen.  They suggest, as I wrote about a very different show earlier this year, that television may be moving away from the primacy of plot, or even psychological realism, and dipping its toes into more experimental, less linear storytelling.  Hannibal draws its visual power from carefully composed interiors--Hannibal's cavernous, book-lined office, Will's homey, slightly rustic house, full of DIY and fishing paraphernalia, Jack's neat office with its ugly institutional furniture--and by situating characters within them in what almost seem like tableaux--when Hannibal has sessions with his patients, or with Dr. du Maurier, the camera frequently catches them sitting opposite one another, perfectly still while they converse.  It's a show that demands (and rewards) attention to detail, as the camera is focused on such seemingly impossibly wrought creations as Hannibal's dishes, or the grotesquely arranged bodies left behind by Hannibal and his fellow killers.  (That demand for attention is auditory as much as it is visual; unlike most network shows, where characters repeat themselves and spell out their conclusions and motivations to keep the viewers up to speed, Hannibal's dialogue is opaque.  Characters frequently make leaps in conversation that are rooted in professional knowledge or their own personal experience, leaving viewers who weren't listening carefully scrambling to catch up.)

From the season's first episodes, the show trades in dream imagery as well as its nightmarish reality.  As Will's grasp on sanity deteriorates, these interludes--they quickly come to comprise hallucinations and waking dreams as well as sleeping ones--become more elaborate, and more difficult to distinguish from the show's reality.  Recurring elements start to appear, and are left to the viewers to decode--who, for example, is the stag that Will keeps following in his dreams and hallucinations?  By the season's end the show has, as Seitz argues, taken on the tone of a nightmare, with viewers never entirely certain about the narrative's solidity, always ready for yet another scene to devolve into horror and be revealed as a dream.  

Where Seitz and I disagree is on the effectiveness of this approach.  To me it eventually collapses under its own weight, and is undermined, rather than bolstered, by "the feelings expressed by the show's characters," whom I find less well-constructed than Seitz obviously does.  Seitz classes Hannibal as a horror show (which is to say, a slightly different genre than Harris's books or the films based on them, which were mostly horror-tinged thrillers) whose power is in its affect.  But unlike, say, American Horror Story, Hannibal doesn't reach for feelings of disgust or outrage at the grand guignol that its characters witness (and, sometimes, perform).  Nor is the series's sense of horror achieved through the murders that Will investigates--which though initially grotesque quickly become too absurd to have any meaningful effect (by the end of the season, a killer of the week is digging decades' worth of murder victims up, chopping them up, and arranging their body parts on a totem pole)--or through our fear that Hannibal will kill the main characters--between the timeline laid out by the books and the series's relatively simple plotting, it's easy to guess which characters are safe for the time being and which are likely to be killed sooner rather than later (there are, incidentally, more women in the second group than the first).  

The horror effect in Hannibal is achieved through tension--the tension of knowing what Hannibal is while the rest of the cast remains oblivious, the tension of watching our heroes wander trustingly into Hannibal's orbit like sheep playing with a wolf, the tension of watching Hannibal tighten the screw on Will's sanity one more notch as we wait to see whether Will will snap or finally realize what's being done to him, the tension we feel every time Hannibal serves a meal as we wonder what the characters are putting in their mouths.  But humor is the mortal enemy of horror, and whenever Hannibal makes itself ridiculous--when Hannibal's ability to hide in plain sight is rooted not in his own cleverness but in the other characters' stupidity, or in a nonsensical turn of plot--that tension is dispelled, and the show's affect is nullified.  Hannibal may not care about plot, but it needs plot to justify the emotions it asks us to feel on behalf of its endangered, clueless characters.  Otherwise, the fact that these characters are endangered and clueless seems like nothing more than a consequence of their own stupidity, or worse, writerly fiat, and being asked to feel tension under those circumstances is like being asked to do the writers' work for them.

One of the surprises of Red Dragon is how little Lecter actually appears in it--only two scenes, and a few letters to Will--but nevertheless his one shared scene with Will has struck me, since I first read it more than fifteen years ago, as getting at the heart of the character in a way that none of the subsequent books or movies have managed to do, precisely because they're too enamored with him.  Trying to goad Lecter into helping him with his current case, Will tells him that "I thought you might be curious to find out if you're smarter than the person I'm looking for."

"Then, by implication, you think you are smarter than I am, since you caught me."
"No.  I know I'm not smarter than you are.
"Then how did you catch me, Will?"
"You had disadvantages."
"What disadvantages?"
"Passion.  And you're insane."

It is precisely that insanity, or indeed any sense of interiority, that is missing from Hannibal's depiction of the character, and that makes it impossible for me to accept Seitz's argument that the shortcomings of the show's plotting are acceptable because the characters remain real.  Hannibal's Hannibal is not real.  He's a collection of amusing, slightly exotic affectations, mannerisms and hobbies that amount to, as Dr. du Maurier puts it in her first appearance "a very well-tailored person suit."  This would not be a problem given what Hannibal is, but what is a problem is the fact that throughout the show's first season the audience is never given a glimpse of what lies under that person suit (or, indeed, if there is anything under it).  Even when we're privy to Hannibal's crimes, we never understand why he's committing them (or, for that matter, their purpose--at various points over the course of the season Hannibal appears to be trying to kill Will, kill Jack, drive one or the other of them crazy, frame them for murders, help them, or become their friend; it's finally most useful to conclude that he just does whatever seems most interesting at the moment).  Unlike Dexter, Hannibal doesn't give us an inside track on what's going on its title character's head, a view on his humanity or his monstrousness.  Given that almost every other character on the show is clueless and, in the case of Will, completely reactive--he doesn't work out what's being done to him until the season's final twenty minutes, at which point he quite accurately pronounces himself "self-aware"--the result is a little like what I imagine Dexter would be if its focus were solely on Deb and the other secondary characters as they wander around obliviously, unsure why their lives have become so weird and full of horror.  

While this is obviously something the show could address in later seasons, I can't help but believe that the reason Hannibal doesn't let us see inside its title character's head is that it can't find a way to make what's going on in there look cool.  This is, after all, a man who likes to kill people, chop them up, make meals out of their flesh and organs and serve them to his guests.  You don't do something like that unless you really get off on it, and the image that Harris, the movies, and now the TV show have created of Lecter, as someone urbane and sophisticated who likes good food and just happens to murder people he finds rude, can't accommodate something so ugly and perverse.  Like a lot of fans, I didn't care for Hannibal the novel, but looking back I can at least respect its attempt to give Lecter an origin story that stresses that something very bad had to have happened to him, and twisted him up in a truly horrible way, for him to do the things he does (though even then, it feels as if Harris wants us to feel sorry for Lecter--and thus to desire the ending in which Starling is destroyed so that she can become his keeper as well as his accomplice).  Hannibal does not even hint at this sort of damage, and treats Lecter as an inhuman devil--which, again, given that he is the only character in the first season with agency, leaves the show emotionally hollow.

If Hannibal works despite the problems with its handling of its characters--despite suffering from the same problem as too many other Lecter adaptations, and eventually the books themselves, of not being quite sure who its main character is--it is because of its actors.  Dancy and Mikkelsen's jobs are seemingly impossible, asked to portray, respectively, a man who loses himself in other people for a living and spends the season losing what little sense of self that occupation leaves him, and a monster hiding behind good manners and better suits.  If Mikkelsen can't quite find the humanity (or the true, ugly monstrosity) in Hannibal, he at least leaves us perpetually guessing about where it lies--is Hannibal crying crocodile tears over Will at the end of the season, or does he feel genuine affection for him?  Is his facade of detachment a true expression of his sociopathic nature, or does he feel genuine hate for Jack Crawford, and joy at his suffering?--in a way that promises that, if the series ever raises its game where the character is concerned, Mikkelsen will be able to take it there.  Dancy, meanwhile, cuts a more heroic, more compelling figure that is perhaps less complicated than the show needs him to be (unlike Claire Danes's turn in a very similar story in Homeland, he doesn't manage to make Will offputting as well as heroic, though the writing isn't really there to support that--much like Red Dragon, Hannibal tries to but can't convincingly argue that Will carries a similar darkness to the murderers he hunts).  But the vulnerability he brings to the role is heartbreaking, especially when Hannibal begins to take advantage of it, and makes it all the more heartening when Will finally discovers his core of self at the end of the season and manages to resist Hannibal's manipulation.  (Fishburne, meanwhile, is excellent in a role that is arguably the most successfully constructed and morally complex in the season, while Dhavernas is sadly wasted as a character who should have been the show's moral center but ends up being shunted into Will's romantic orbit too often.)

If there's a conclusion that I come to after watching the first season of Hannibal, it's that perhaps creators (and I include Thomas Harris in this group) shouldn't take a crack at Hannibal Lecter until they understand what he is and what kind of story they want to tell about him.  Is he a monster?  Then make him your villain, or commit to the fact that you are telling a story about a monster (something that could have been very interesting, especially in light of Dexter's increasing unwillingness to face up to that fact in its most recent seasons).  Is he a damaged man?  Then show that damage, and be willing to acknowledge how ugly and unappealing it should be.  Going by the first season they've produced, Bryan Fuller and his writers don't know the answer to this question, which is why Hannibal often feels as if it has no center, and as if it amounts to little more than its horrific, nightmarish affect.  That doesn't mean that there isn't anything here to watch for--the visuals are stunning, the actors breathe life into the characters no matter how flawed their construction, and that affect is impeccably achieved even if, to my mind, it often falters.  But the result is that I enjoy Hannibal while I'm watching it and then feel as if there was no substance to it when the episode or season have wrapped up.  It's a rich meal, but it leaves you feeling curiously unsated.

Star Trek Into Darkness

It's only the middle of June, but if there is, this year, another moment of unintentional comedy as richly hilarious as the putative climax of J.J. Abrams's Star Trek Into Darkness, I will be very surprised.  Going into the movie, I didn't expect that I'd find it funny.  Abrams's 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise left me genuinely outraged, and its sequel seemed to promise more of the same.  Perhaps because the film has opened so late in Israel, however, I've had the time to realize that more of the same isn't so bad.  It means that I knew what to expect (and what to steel myself against): a barely coherent plot, some fun but ridiculous action scenes, an approach to the original series and its appeal that runs the gamut from incomprehension to outright contempt, a vehement need to undermine and dismantle Vulcans despite the fact that the two films' best character, Zachary Quinto's Spock, is one, a borderline erotic fixation with Chris Pine's Kirk despite the writers' (and, I am beginning to suspect, the actor's) inability to imbue him with anything resembling gravitas, authority, or indeed a basic competence at his job, and a lot of lens flares.  Going in so forewarned, it was easier to appreciate the humor in a film that bills itself as a reinvention and modernization of a venerable but antiquated franchise, but turns out to have so little of its own to say that it resorts to slavish recreations of its source material's high points.

My ability to take Into Darkness a lot less seriously than I did its predecessor (which might still be a little more seriously than it deserves) is bolstered by the difference in the two film's reception.  Where Star Trek's success was taken as an indication that Abrams had restored the franchise to relevance (by, it was grumbled by me and people like me, stripping it of everything that made it what it was) four years later we can see that that hasn't been the case.  As successful as the reboot was, it did not confer upon Star Trek the kind of cultural currency that Christopher Nolan's Batman films, or the Marvel superhero movies, have delivered for their source material, and at least from where I'm standing, the film doesn't seem to have amassed the kind of fandom that those franchises have developed, made up of people who only know their world and characters from the movies.  Four years ago we were all so stunned by a film with Star Trek in its title opening at the top of the box office chart that we seemed to come to a collective agreement not to say what was plainly obvious--that far from revitalizing the franchise, Abrams was merely writing Star Wars fanfic in another show's universe because he didn't think he'd ever get hold of the real thing.  Now that he has, Into Darkness feels like an afterthought--a fact that is reflected in the film's lukewarm critical and financial reception.  Whatever the future holds for Star Trek, J.J. Abrams and his "vision" are probably not going to be a part of it, which makes it easier to view Into Darkness dispassionately, and makes its blunders--and nowhere does the film blunder more heavily than when it tries to pay homage to its source material--seem more funny than outrageous. 

Into Darkness is a remake--sometimes a straight one, and sometimes a mirror image--of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.  If you have any familiarity with that movie, you'll know right away what a dubious proposition that is.  Though arguably the best of the original series films, The Wrath of Khan is, fundamentally and unalterably, a film about old men--Kirk, who after a lifetime of joyously breaking the rules is finally realizing that even when you get away with it, you don't really get away with it, and that no matter who many times you cheat death it'll always be waiting for you just where you least expect it; Spock, who has spent his life in the shadow of a perpetual child; and Khan, so incapable of accepting that his superior nature did not guarantee him the bright future he set out on at the end of "Space Seed" that he chooses to blame, and take revenge on, the whole universe.  It's a film about old soldiers, who have nothing in their lives except revenge and duty, perhaps because they've never been able to truly love anything else, and perhaps because age, and time, and death, have taken everything else away.

If Abrams's Star Trek films were the best they could possibly be, they wouldn't have been able to tackle this story, not with their cast of fresh-faced youngsters who never miss an opportunity to mention that their adventures are just beginning.  But of course, Abrams's films are not the best they could be, and instead of trying to make the story of The Wrath of Khan its own and suit it to its setting, Into Darkness veers between slavish, lifeless fan-service--the predictable "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" is intended as a crowning moment of pathos but comes off, as I wrote at the beginning of this review, as simply ridiculous--and, when it tries to strike out on its own, utter thematic incoherence.  Kirk starts the film being told that he needs to learn humility, as the older Kirk did in The Wrath of Khan.  But in fact there is no such lesson in Into Darkness.  Instead, and just as in Star Trek, it's everyone around Kirk who has to learn that, despite his lack of experience, his self-confessed incompetence, his complete lack of interest in showing leadership or encouraging teamwork, his conviction that being a captain means running off on your own and expecting everyone under your command to back your play--despite, in short, being utterly unsuited for the job, Kirk is not only the stuff that great captains are made of, but has an inalienable right to the captain's chair.  In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk learns humility when he puts his ship into a situation that can only be gotten out of by his best friend laying down his life; in Into Darkness, it's Kirk who lays down his life, thus proving that he has no need for humility, and that his flaws as a captain don't matter because he Really Cares.  (Not to worry: the next film won't be The Search for Kirk.  His death is rolled back in a way that is so heavily signposted that it's only through Quinto's best efforts that Kirk's self-sacrifice has even the slightest bit of emotional effect.)

Into Darkness's broader themes are equally muddled.  At different points, it has Kirk express disdain for Federation values (as he did in Star Trek), defend them against those who would militarize Starfleet and foment war with the Klingons (something that Kirk, as established until that point, might reasonably have been expected to be in favor of), and lecture others about how it's important not to relinquish our cherished beliefs in the face of evil, with little in the way of an arc to support these shifts except for a 9/11 allegory that would have seemed trite and over-obvious in 2004.  (Not helping matters is the fact that the film seems rather vague on what Federation values actually are--this is a movie that very forcefully informs us that killing a suspected terrorist without trial is wrong, but doesn't expect us to have any problem with Kirk or Spock beating that suspected terrorist after he's surrendered or been incapacitated.)  Similarly confusing is the film's choice to draw a parallel between Kirk and Khan by giving them the same motivation--protecting the people under their command--since it appears completely ignorant of how deep that parallel runs, and what its implications are.  The way that Khan sees himself, as a superior being who by rights shouldn't be bound by conventions and the laws of other people, is exactly the way that Abrams's Star Trek films want us to see Kirk, so if Khan and Kirk have the same motivation, why is one of them the bad guy and the other the hero? 

For a while it seems as if the film itself is reaching for the same conclusion, since in its middle segments Khan is actually a sympathetic figure.  His terrorist attacks on Earth turn out to have been at the behest of the film's other villain, who was holding Khan's people hostage.  He helps Kirk save the Enterprise, and it's Kirk who betrays Khan once that goal is achieved, not the other way around (though Khan turns out to have been ready for betrayal and responds to it ruthlessly).  The reboot format has given Abrams the opportunity to play with some of the franchise's holy cows; just as the first act of Star Trek seemed to suggest that the film might end with Spock as captain of the Enterprise and Kirk as his first officer, during the middle segments of Into Darkness it seems likely that Khan will end the film as Kirk's ally or at least a chaotic neutral, allowed to make his own future as he was at the end of "Space Seed."  But just like Star Trek, Into Darkness views the letter of the franchise as far more important than its spirit.  The canonical order is restored precisely because the representative of canon, Leonard Nimoy's old Spock, demands it.  No sooner has he told his young counterpart that Khan is evil than Khan obliges, suddenly announcing an intent to eradicate all "inferior" life that had gone completely unmentioned until fifteen minutes from the film's end.  (Aside from the opportunity to play with the canon, making Khan an ally might have gone some way towards explaining the unconvincing prevarications, and finally outright lies, about who the film's villain would be.  As it stands, I'm somewhat persuaded by this argument, that the filmmakers declared Khan's identity a spoiler--despite having released trailer upon trailer that virtually crowed it--because they wanted to forestall the outrage over having cast the lily-white Benedict Cumberbatch as a character called Khan Noonien Singh.)

Even the things that work about Into Darkness--as in Star Trek, the actors, the characters, and their relationships--are warped by its hagiographic take on Kirk.  It's fun to watch Pine, Quinto, and Zoe Saldana's Uhura snipe at each other and emerge as the rebooted franchise's equivalent of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio (though again, their college kid antics only reinforce the sense that these characters would be much more believable as junior officers on their first assignment out of the Academy than they are as the senior staff of Starfleet's flagship).  But the emphasis the film places on Kirk's need for Spock to admit that they are friends--a motivation so powerful that there's a compelling reading of the film in which he steps into the irradiated reactor chamber merely in order to secure a declaration of emotional attachment, which is in fact what he gets--finally has the effect of making the trio seem like they're in a three-way relationship in which Uhura is by far the least important member.  More successful are the film's attempt to give Uhura a more prominent role in the plot, and along with her, Simon Pegg's Scotty and John Cho's Sulu.  (Anton Yelchin's Chekov remains a bad accent in search of a personality.)  There's never been anything to say against the casting of the reboot's main crew, but this only serves to make Into Darkness's fascination with Kirk seems less plausible--why are we paying attention to this whiny, daddy-issues-riddled man-child when there are all these more interesting characters (who are played by better actors) in the background?

Into Darkness ends with the Enterprise embarking on the five year mission that gave the original series its impetus.  The sudden shift to exploration feels unearned in a series that has had so little time for the concept in its first two installments, but nevertheless it's hard not to feel a little hopeful at its even being mentioned.  With Abrams gone over to Star Wars (and possibly, hopefully, taking Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman with him), is it possible that the next film in the rebooted franchise will be Star Trek in more than just name?  That it will try to capture the essence of the series, and not just deliver hollow recreations of its greatest hits?  That it will finally allow its lead character to start growing towards the man we know Kirk to be?  I know, it's not very likely--as much as I like to blame Abrams for everything, the fact is that his version of Star Trek is merely a particularly ham-fisted expression of preoccupations that can be found all over Hollywood's blockbuster movies--a craving for Great Men, a disdain for intellect, vulnerability, and empathy, a need for lead characters to be cool that is so powerful that it drowns out any trait that might actually earn these characters that epithet.  And the truth is, I can live with the Star Trek films being little more than unintentional comedy.  But deep down, I am still a Star Trek fan, and I would dearly love for that series to once again be about boldly going where no one has gone before.

Watson, I Need You: Thoughts on Elementary's First Season

A week or so ago, the US broadcast networks announced their lineup of new and returning shows for the fall of 2013, and since then the internet's premier TV sites have been abuzz with a flurry of analysis.  Trailers have been dissected, ratings and demographics calculated, schedules critiqued.  It's all a lot of fun, in an inside baseball sort of way, but in the midst of all this excitement, it's good to be reminded that in the end, nobody really knows anything.  Exhibit A: Elementary, a show that had absolutely no business being any good whatsoever.  On paper, it seems to epitomize all the worst failings of network TV, the kind that make us TV snobs sigh and complain that everything would be better on HBO.  Its genre is arguably the most overexposed, and dramatically inert, on TV, the procedural, and what's more, it's a procedural featuring a quirky, irascible detective surrounded by put-upon enablers, of which we've had far too many over the last decade.  It's based on an idiosyncratic, format-busting British series whose defining traits it seems to have shaved away, apparently in an attempt not to get sued.  And its pilot episode is unexciting, and creates the impression, as I wrote last fall, that the show is little more than a more dour version of Castle, with the NYPD inexplicably allowing a civilian to tag along and even take point on all their murder cases.  And yet, here we are in the spring, and Elementary is not only the only new show of the fall that I'm still following, but it's fast climbing the chart  of my current favorite series.  What's more, and completely unexpectedly, Elementary has found a new, meaningful take on Sherlock Holmes--or, more precisely, on the way that modern pop culture has perceived Sherlock Holmes, to which it offers a much-needed corrective.

For a character who has been modernized four times in the space of less than a decade (I'm counting the Guy Ritchie films as modernizations because they're essentially steampunkish SF)^[1], Sherlock Holmes is oddly unsuited to the preoccupations and preconceptions of modern pop culture.  The quintessential Victorian hero, Holmes is defined by control--of his surroundings, of his time and leisure activities, of his emotions, of the people that he or society define as his inferiors: servants, women, lower status men, anyone who isn't as smart as he is.  In the 21st century, we don't think as much of control.  We most certainly don't think as much of the intellect that is the reason--perhaps even the justification--for Holmes's control.  In most modern stories, a character like Holmes--cold, cerebral, calculating--would be the villain, not the hero.  So when called upon to modernize Holmes previous takes on the character have tended to vilify his intellect, to treat it as a curse, a double-edged sword, or something that makes him a little less human than the rest of us.  House is so perceptive of other people's lies and inadequacies that he can't form a successful relationship; Sherlock is an out-and-out sociopath.  Both shows stress that their version of Holmes solves cases not because of any moral imperative or compassion towards the people they're helping, whom they don't care about at all, but for the thrill of solving a challenging puzzle^[2].  At the same time, modern pop culture is arguably even more obsessed with Great Men than the Victorians were.  Holmes, the mere consulting detective, will not do as a hero; he has to be something grander and much more powerful.  So Guy Ritchie imagines Holmes as a superhero, who uses his intellect to plan out terrifyingly efficient beatdowns for his opponents and saves the world from Bond villain Moriarty's evil schemes, and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss imagine Holmes as, well, the Doctor, somehow a central figure in the battle between good and evil even if they can't quite articulate why or how.

It's almost a physical relief, then, to come to Elementary and find a Holmes who is much more down to Earth, a Holmes who is, in some ways, much closer to Conan Doyle's original, and in other ways, a much-needed contravention of Conan Doyle's assumptions.  Set in New York, Elementary begins with Holmes (Johnny Lee Miller) leaving rehab after a months-long stint for heroin addiction.  Watson--Joan Watson, in this story (Lucy Liu)--is a former surgeon turned sober companion who is hired by Holmes's father (who remains unseen during the first season) to babysit his wayward son through his reintegration into normal life.  Almost immediately after his release, Holmes reaches out to the NYPD--represented by Captain Gregson (Aidan Quinn) and Detective Bell (Jon Michael Hill)--and becomes a consultant on their homicide cases.  Dragged along on these cases, Watson soon becomes intrigued by investigative work, and when her period of companionship ends Holmes invites her to stay on as his partner and learn how to become a detective.

Miller plays Holmes with a jittery, almost manic energy, switching from moments of utter stillness to frenetic action and back again.  What's perhaps most interesting about his performance, and the way that the series presents Holmes, is how unconcerned they both are with making Holmes cool.  He's unkempt and unshaven, but in a way that suggests "junkie" rather than "rakishly disheveled."  His wardrobe seems designed to evoke a child who can't dress himself--shirts buttoned all the way to the top, sweaters in garish colors and patterns, layers that conceal Miller's impressive physique (meanwhile, the lovely Liu and well-built Hill are, if not quite on display, certainly dressed in a way that suggests that Miller's wardrobe is a choice, not a mistake).  He's louche and disdainful of authority, but in a fussy, almost old-fashioned sort of way that makes him seem like a man out of time--he says dorky, improbable things like "Poppycock!", "It is a conundrum," and "I shall keep you apprised of my progress via email" (there simply can't be enough said in praise of Miller's work to sell this kind of dialogue as the sort of thing that a real person born in the 1970s might say while at the same time conveying how weird and out of step such a person would have to be to speak that way).

It was only once I'd watched Elementary that I realized how much an obsession with coolness--in the middle school sense of never being impressed or taken aback by anything that doesn't come from you, and resenting the few things that do manage to pierce your shield of disaffection--had rendered previous Holmes modernizations inert and inhuman.  Sherlock pronounces himself bored by almost anything that isn't a thorny mystery; Elementary's Holmes, as he tells Irene Adler at their first meeting, tries hard not to be boring, to which end he allows himself to be an enthusiast--of art, of beekeeping, of tattoos, of, as he says to Watson in a direct quote from Conan Doyle "all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life."  He wins Irene over by taking her to a completely unknown Roman site in the bowels of London, and there is a sense of joy and wonder in that scene that is quintessentially Holmes-ian, and yet completely missing from versions of the character like House and Sherlock.

That willingness to let Holmes be man rather than superman extends to Elementary's handling of his deductive skills.  This is still a Holmes who can recognize a dozen different kinds of cigar and ash by sight, but part of his genius lies in knowing when a more specialized level of knowledge is required, and in collecting people who possess that knowledge and turning to them when a case requires it (this also means that over the course of the season Elementary amasses a body of supporting players who help to dispel the sense that Holmes is a lone genius).  The show also resists the temptation to conclude that Holmes is the only competent detective around, or that his methods are the only effective ones.  Gregson and Bell's competence is frequently displayed and commented upon, and when Watson begins to take her own cases she often cracks them precisely because she and Holmes have different skill-sets--in one episode, she finds an important clue when she visits a client to apologize for not being able to solve the case, something that Holmes wouldn't have done, while in another she realizes the identity of the killer by relating her own feelings to them.

The show even punctures some of the more famous Holmes-ian aphorisms, such as the notion that it's important to keep useless information out of the brain in order to keep useful, potentially crime-solving information in it.  "That's not even how the brain works!" an exasperated Watson replies, and later in the episode Holmes solves the case by imbibing some of the information he had previously dismissed as useless.  And, of course, Elementary's Holmes has a moral compass.  The show makes no bones about the fact that he derives satisfaction from his investigations in their own right, or that he regards the people he helps with professional detachment, but unlike House or Sherlock it doesn't stress either fact, or pretend that they make Holmes a flawed person.  What it stresses, instead, is the fact that despite his detachment Holmes does have compassion for the people he helps, and disdain for those who take lives or hurt people.  It's particularly gratifying when the show makes this point by referencing Conan Doyle directly, as it does in an episode in which Holmes expresses "a particular disdain for blackmailers.  They are in some respects more despicable to me than even murderers," echoing Holmes's words from "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (also the name of the blackmailer in the episode) that "I've had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow."

This is not to say, however, that Elementary's Holmes is a saint.  The show may not ask us to believe that being smart and observant makes Holmes a bad person, but it does present Holmes as someone who grew up rich, privileged, and smarter than everyone around him, and reaches the obvious conclusions.  As several characters point out, Holmes is self-absorbed and selfish, unaccustomed to thinking about anyone other than himself.  What Elementary doesn't do, however, is use Holmes's genius to justify his bad behavior, or the other characters' tolerance of it.  As Watson learns early in the season, the defining tragedy of Holmes's life, and the event that precipitated his spiral into addiction, was the murder of his lover, Irene Adler, and his inability to bring her murderer to justice.  In the season's lynchpin episode, "M.", Holmes catches the murderer's scent again (the architect of Irene's murder turns out to be, unsurprisingly, Moriarty), and lies to Watson and Gregson in order to get his chance at violent revenge.  It's a betrayal that has serious repercussions--in particular, Holmes and Gregson's relationship never fully recovers; though Gregson recognizes that he still needs Holmes's skills, his personal opinion of him is ruined, and for the rest of the season he is the show's most outspoken advocate against the notion that Holmes can change.  The show itself, however, is more hopeful--when Moriarty resurfaces again later in the season, Holmes refrains from going outside the law, explicitly stating that this is because he realizes that there are things he could do that would cost him his relationship with Watson. 

What's most interesting about Elementary's handling of Holmes, however, and what to my mind makes it not only an excellent Holmes adaptation, but a necessary and almost revolutionary one, is its handling of addiction and recovery.  Arthur Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes a drug addict, and his handling of addiction in the Holmes stories and novels is surprisingly in line with contemporary attitudes towards drugs, especially considering that Holmes's drug of choice, cocaine, wasn't even illegal at the time^[3].  Nevertheless, the Victorian attitude towards addiction and the modern one are opposed in ways that touch on the very heart of the character, his control.  A Victorian gentleman seeking to shake off an addiction might be exhorted to control himself, but in the modern narrative of addiction and recovery, control is, at best, an illusion.  The very first of the twelve steps is the recognition that an addict has no control over his addiction, and the serenity prayer urges acceptance of that fact.  At the core of the recovery process as practiced in organizations like AA is the willingness to humble oneself, whether that means surrendering to a higher power or facing up to the damage you've done and the necessity of making amends.  That humility is completely antithetical to what Sherlock Holmes, as created by Arthur Conan Doyle and as reimagined by people like Guy Ritchie or Steven Moffat, is--a character who, even at his finest moments, acts from a position of strength and authority.

As a result, recent modernizations of Holmes have found his addiction impossible to cope with^[4].  If Ritchie's Holmes is an addict, then the point is mentioned so briefly that I don't remember it, and while Sherlock pays lip service to the notion that its title character has a history of addiction, in the show's present that addiction is essentially cured--when Mycroft tells John, after Irene Adler's alleged death at the midpoint of "A Scandal in Belgravia," that Sherlock is in danger of falling off the wagon, does anyone in the audience believe him?  House, meanwhile, acknowledged almost from its outset that its main character was an addict and showed how addiction soured his life, ultimately destroying almost everything he cared about.  But it could not face the possibility of recovery, and the humility required by it.  To do so would be to take apart too much of what House was (which is probably why, when the character does enter rehab in the sixth season, the result is utterly generic--all the familiar platitudes of recovery, but the person imbibing them is completely unrecognizable as House).

Elementary is the first Holmes modernization I'm aware of to not only take addiction seriously, but to suggest that, even for someone as proud and self-regarding as Sherlock Holmes, recovery is possible^[5].  "I've finished with drugs.  I won't be using them again," Holmes tells Watson when they first meet, and a lifetime of imbibing not only Sherlock Holmes, but the characters inspired by him, and in fact all of pop culture, tells us to believe him.  Of course Sherlock Holmes can just decide that he's not going to do drugs anymore.  Isn't the very definition of a hero someone who doesn't have unappealing weaknesses like an uncontrollable compulsion to take drugs?  When Holmes denigrates Watson's efforts to get him involved with the apparatus of recovery--attending NA meetings, finding a sponsor--we're similarly inclined to be on his side.  Surely Sherlock Holmes doesn't need the same depressing crutches as ordinary people?  Surely he isn't anything like those other addicts?  Surely he's special?  And indeed, even when Holmes acquiesces to Waton's demands, he does it in a Holmesian way, regaling his support group with tales of his previous cases, and taking a case that involves his former drug dealer because "You mistake the support group ethos for a complete system of living.  It is not; at least not to a man like me."

And yet, over the course of the season Elementary consistently chips away at the notion of Holmes's specialness.  When Watson tries to explain Holmes's reticence to his new sponsor Alfredo (Ato Essandoh), he tells her to be patient, because "Newcomers like him don't always understand the scope of the work involved."  In one sentence, the show dismantles Holmes's view of himself, even within the process of recovery, as somehow unique.  Instead, he's just another newcomer going through the same motions as millions before him, including the belief that his process is different to everyone else's.  Later in the season, Holmes resists receiving his one year chip, and after giving a lot of excuses for that resistance finally admits that the date of his anniversary is wrong--he actually relapsed the day after entering rehab.  When a confused Watson points out that even 364 days of sobriety are an accomplishment, an almost tearful Holmes answers that that isn't the point: "I decided to stop using drugs, yes?  I decided.  Me.  And yet twenty-four hours later..."  It's an admission of what the season has been hinting at all along, that even someone of Sherlock Holmes's caliber can't simply decide not to be an addict--that he will, as he admits to Irene in the season finale, always be one.  "I'd like to promise you that if I find a syringe of heroin tomorrow, I won't shoot it into my arm," a wiser Holmes tells Watson near the end of the season, and then admits that he can't make that promise.

Images of addiction recur throughout the first season, often in the cases that Holmes and Watson investigate, and sometimes in roundabout ways--in one episode, a figure in a case accuses Holmes of being "a fellow addict," and then clarifies that she means crossword puzzles; later Holmes is able to prove that she is the murderer through the presence of a solved crossword entry on a piece of paper used in the murder, but the solved word is the suggestive "Novocaine."  As the season draws on, however, and as Holmes's sobriety comes to seem more steady and reliable, the show begins to introduce the concept of dependence, the idea that rather than learning to live sober, he's replaced his need for drugs with a need for Watson.  "That guy is always going to need someone," Gregson tells Watson when he tries to persuade her to move on from Holmes, and Holmes himself calls Watson, and his partnership with her, the main reason for his determination to stay clean (and keep from killing Moriarty).  Even the pun in the title of the season finale, "Heroine," in which Watson is instrumental in outsmarting Moriarty, seems to point towards a transference of Holmes's dependence.  At the same time, the show isn't necessarily suggesting that that dependence is a bad thing--for one thing, it seems to run both ways.  When Watson's friends find out about her second career change, they express their concern by staging an intervention, and as noted, Gregson tries to detach her from Holmes for her own good.  By the end of the season, though there have been voices expressing concern about the healthiness of Holmes and Watson's partnership, there have also been those--like Watson's mother, who despite being branded by Holmes as "conventional" is the first to recognize that his unconventional way of life suits her daughter--who have encouraged it.  Given how often the Holmes-Watson bond is treated as a matter of course, even when it proves destructive (on House, in particular), it's nice that the show is questioning it, and at the end of the season it's still not clear whether this relationship will prove codependent or nurturing.

For all the praise that I've heaped upon it, it's important to acknowledge that the one way in which Elementary is not a great Holmes adaptation is the trait that is arguably most closely associated with the character, the mysteries.  Many of the season's early episodes are bog-standard murder investigations that wouldn't have seemed out of place on Castle or Law & Order, and for all of Holmes's alleged brilliance, his solutions are often arrived at less because of his intellect or deductive abilities, and more because he has access to advanced forensics techniques and law enforcement databases.  The show improves on this point later in the season, when Holmes and Watson begin to detach from the NYPD.  Though it would be a shame to lose Gregson and Bell (as well as Quinn and Hill's strong performances), Elementary is a stronger show when Holmes's cases come to him in something like the idiosyncratic ways that Conan Doyle imagined, and not always in the form of a murder scene^[6].  Nevertheless, even that stronger show isn't a particularly strong mystery show--Moriarty, for example, makes several mistakes in the season finale, breaking lifelong habits of secrecy and anonymity, in order to allow Holmes and Watson to spring their trap.  As much as I admire Elementary's handling of Holmes's flaws and weaknesses, I can't help but wonder how worthwhile that handling is if the thing that makes Holmes worth reading about is missing, or watered down.

Another point worth making is Elementary's handling of female characters, and particularly Watson.  Given the low bar set by Sherlock, it's pretty much impossible for a Sherlock Holmes adaptation to look bad on this front, and the fact is that by making Watson a woman, and a true partner to Holmes, Elementary makes a powerful statement that it only reinforces through its introduction of other interesting, intelligent women over the course of the season^[7].  I can't help but wonder, however, whether the comparison to Sherlock doesn't end up giving Elementary too much of a pass.  This is a show that, in keeping with the conventions of its genre, has few compunctions about displaying the bodies of murdered (or terrified, about to be murdered) women, and in the early stages of Holmes and Watson's relationship he is all too eager to goad her with casual references to her gender and sexuality (speculating on the last time she had sex, charting her menstrual cycle) that are not made any more tolerable by the fact that Watson explicitly comments on their misogyny.  And then there's Watson herself.  While I admire Elementary's choice not to make Watson a quintessential tough girl--that she is squeamish about the sight of murdered bodies and a bit of prude when it comes to sex doesn't undermine her strength of character or her courage--the fact remains that she enters Holmes's life as his caretaker, and that despite becoming his partner in detection she still plays a caretaking role in his life, worrying about his sobriety and even assuring Gregson that she will manage him when his pursuit of Moriarty threatens to fly out of control.  While this is not an uncommon role for Watson to play in Holmes's life (again, see House), it takes on a very different meaning when Watson is a woman.

While these concerns have marred my enjoyment of Elementary's first season, they don't undermine the fact that this show still feels like the most thoughtful, most progressive modernization of Sherlock Holmes in a decade that has seemed obsessed with him (I haven't even said anything about the impressive diversity of the show's cast--though to my mind still not diverse enough for a show set in New York City--or the fact that Mrs. Hudson is a transwoman played by Candis Cayne).  It's often seemed as if the people trying to bring Holmes into the 21st century decide to discard and keep exactly the wrong things about him.  Elementary is a show that seems to admire Holmes's intellect without accepting it as an excuse for bad, or self-destructive, behavior.  It's amazing how badly it was needed.

---

^[1] Another Holmes modernization that falls outside this time period and is not widely remembered nowadays is Jake Kasdan's 1998 film Zero Effect, starring Bill Pullman as Holmes, Ben Stiller as Watson, and Kim Dickens as Irene Adler (though none of the characters are called by these names).  As those casting choices suggest, the film far from follows the letter of the Holmes stories, but to my mind it captures their spirit far more successfully than many more obvious homages.

^[2] It's almost fascinating how thoroughly this perception has permeated the modern understanding of Holmes.  In this review of the Elementary episode "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs" at the AV Club, for example, reviewer Phil Dyess-Nugent, who by his own admission has never read Conan Doyle's Holmes stories--in which Holmes frequently expresses moral outrage at some of the crimes he learns about or prevents--opens by parroting it as if it were the gospel truth.

^[3] In searching for information about the canonical Holmes's drug use, I came across this article discussing it, which suggests that Conan Doyle's experiences as a doctor may have given him a first-hand glimpse at the horror of addiction, and thus informed Dr. Watson's anti-drug stance.

^[4] Though it is interesting to note that most Holmes modernizations have taken care to switch his choice of poison.  Conan Doyle's Holmes is addicted to cocaine, a stimulant which he says helps his already nimble brain make connections and solve cases.  Sherlock is silent about its title character's drug of choice, but both House and Elementary posit a Holmes who is addicted to analgesics.  In House's case, a literal painkiller, Vicodin, which dulls the pain of his mangled leg.  Elementary's Holmes is addicted to heroin (which House also dabbles in).  As he says to Watson about another addict, "Heroin users are looking for oblivion," a point later made more strongly by Moriarty, who posits that Holmes uses heroin because he's "in almost constant pain" from the burden of seeing so much all the time.

^[5] It is, however, not the first Holmes story to do so.  Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per-Cent Solution revolves around Holmes going into rehab--presided over by Sigmund Freud, no less.  Meyer, however, seemed to take the view that recovery was a one-time event.  Once Holmes undergoes analysis and uncovers the root cause of his dysfunction, he has no further need for drugs.

^[6] Something that a lot of people seem to forget when decrying Holmes's alleged indifference towards the victims of the crimes he investigates is that in many of Conan Doyle's stories, there isn't a murder victim to begin with, and sometimes not at all.  People apply to Holmes because something strange is going on in their lives--they've been hired to copy out the entire Encyclopedia Britannica; weird drawings of dancing men have started appearing in their garden--but they're not always in distress about it.  Later on, some of these cases become matters of life and death, but to begin with they are merely puzzles.

^[7] It's also worth noting that the show seems determined to undercut any sense of Holmes and Watson as romantic or potentially romantic partners, to the extent that Liu and Miller hardly ever touch one another, and only once--and that very fleetingly--as a show of affection: in the closing moments of "M.", when Holmes is at his lowest, Watson briefly rests the very tips of her fingers on his arm.  That, however, is something that could easily change in the future--I can't help but recall the early seasons of The X-Files, a show with which Elementary shares some traits, when the idea of a romance between Mulder and Scully seemed vaguely prurient.

Recent Reading Roundup 33

The last recent reading roundup chronicled several months of slow reading.  This one covers several weeks of fast reading (a period that also included the Clarke shortlist, reviewed elsewhere).  There are several books here that I would have liked to write full-length reviews of, but I read them in such quick succession with several others that any chance of disentangling my thoughts enough for that is now lost.  Here, then, are some shorter reactions.

• Anno Dracula by Kim Newman - Newman's much-loved vampire novel, originally published in 1992 and reissued, with a snazzy new cover design, a few years ago, has a crackerjack premise that is simultaneously the best and worst thing about it.  Best simply because it's so much fun: Newman posits a world in which not only do the historical and literary figures of the Victorian era rub shoulders--in which Fredrick Abberline serves on the same police force as Inspector Lestrade, for instance--but the ending of Bram Stoker's Dracula is radically altered.  In this world, Van Helsing and his allies failed to defeat the Count, who cemented his hold on England by seducing and turning Queen Victoria.  When the story opens, a few years later, vampirism is openly acknowledged and running rampant.  The rich turn in order to curry favor with the vampire ruling class, while the poor are turned as a result of predation, and often starve because of it.  Newman does a good job of folding the supernatural into Victorian poverty and misery--in the novel's world, a person can turn into a vampire if they're drunk from too often, so East End prostitutes who open their veins to their customers can find themselves turning, cut off from that income stream just as they develop a new thirst for blood that they can't afford to slake.  Being a vampire, in this setting, isn't a ticket to power and control as it is in other stories, simply because there are so many vampires, and the privilege of the rich and powerful still applies.  This is still a world of law, even if that law is unfair and exploitative--none of the newly-minted poor vampires, for example, are running wild feeding off their social superiors, no more than the real Victorian London played host to a class war--and Dracula's influence is merely exacerbating the inequality that ran rampant in Victorian London.
  
  This intricate worldbuilding also feels like the book's greatest weakness, however, because Newman often seems not to be interested in anything else, and especially not in a plot.  Anno Dracula was expanded from a novella, "Red Reign," in which one of the defeated characters from Dracula turns out to be Jack the Ripper.  But in doing so Newman doesn't seem to have expanded or complicated the story, so his characters--Charles Beauregard, a proto-James Bond employed by the Diogenes Club, and Geneviève Dieudonné, a vampire not of Dracula's line who is trying to alleviate the suffering he's brought to London--spend most of the novel in a holding pattern.  The readers find out who the Ripper is in the novel's prologue, but the characters don't even seem to be working hard at their investigation until a few chapters from book's end, and the actual conclusion, exciting as it is, feels disconnected from the novel's action, most of which seems to exist mainly so Newman can introduce characters who will recur in Anno Dracula's many sequels (two of which have already been published, with another coming later this year).  It's tempting to say that Anno Dracula has such a great premise that you wish someone had done something better with it, but that's obviously the thinking that got Newman to expand the original novella to begin with, and the result is a fascinating world and a lackluster story, so maybe keeping it short and sweet was the way to go.
  
  
• Child of Light by Muriel Sparks - The chapter on Frankenstein in The Madwoman in the Attic left me curious to find out more about Mary Shelley, and though I'm not quite sure who pointed me at Muriel Sparks's biography (originally published in 1951, revised and republished in 1987), I'm glad that it's the one I chose, and not just because of this recent article in the Times Literary Supplement arguing that it is partly responsible for the modern recognition of Shelley as a major figure in the history of the novel.  Sparks's short biography is split into two segments, a biography of Shelley's life and a critical reading of her major works.  The first places Shelley in the context of her reformer parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and moves on to her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and her life after his death.  Sparks is perhaps a little sentimental about the marriage between Percy and Mary--to the extent that the bulk of the biography segment seems dedicated to this marriage even though Mary lived for decades after Percy's death--but she does make a compelling argument for its having been a genuine marriage of equals, who respected and encouraged each other's intellectual and literary pursuits, and does a good job of sketching not only Percy, but the other important figures of the Shelleys' married life, such as Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and of course Lord Byron.  The criticism segment feels less grounded to someone who has only read Frankenstein, but it did leave me interested in reading more of Shelley's writing, in particular The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic novel that, according to her foreword, was out of print until Sparks drew attention to it.  I'm sure that in the intervening decades there have been more in-depth, less fond biographies of Shelley, but as an introduction to her life, and as a work of advocacy for a writer who has too often been dismissed as a footnote to her husband's accomplishments, Child of Light was exactly what I needed.
  
  
• The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates - This sprawling, baggy novel has got to be one of the most delightfully weird things I've read in years.  It's also almost indescribable, and the closest that I can come to explaining its loopy charm is to compare it to the similarly indescribable House of Leaves.  Like Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental novel, The Accursed is a multithreaded, metafictional horror story that often seems just on the cusp of solving itself--of revealing some underlying original sin that will explain the terror and misfortune that have infected its characters' lives, or some act of appeasement or redemption that its characters can perform in order to bring the story to a neat conclusion--only to veer off again into chaos, and the sense that the characters are trapped by forces too great to even notice them or their feeble attempts to fight back.  Where Danielewski played with the basic building blocks of the novel, however, down to the font and writing direction, Oates has written an outwardly more conventional work, a piece of historical fiction and literary pastiche, comprising letters, journal entries, and newspaper reports as well as straightforward narrative.  It's in the substance of what she describes that Oates lets the madness of her story shine through.
  
  The setting is Princeton, New Jersey, in the early years of the 20th century and the drawing rooms of the town's rich, aristocratic, almost incestuously interconnected ruling class.  Over the course of a year, the influential, respected Slade family experiences a stream of supernatural misfortunes, ranging from a "demon lover" who steals the oldest Slade granddaughter from her wedding to her young cousin being turned into stone.  Meanwhile, the friends, neighbors, and relatives of the Slade family also find themselves at the mercy of supernatural forces, seduced, driven mad, and murdered in ways that the community, so intent on not seeing and not speaking about certain things, can only barely acknowledge.  Oates draws a connection between the unspeakable hauntings and other transgressions which the aristocrats of Princeton will not see or speak of--lynchings just at the edge of town, the kidnapping and murder of a poor girl, the unhappiness and misfortune of servants which their masters remain oblivious to--but this is to suggest a relatively straightforward tale of supernatural comeuppance, of demons and ghosts appearing to claim the justice they were too weak to demand in life.  The Accursed is much weirder and more slippery than that, and at the points where it seems about to reduce itself to such a simple story Oates takes care to veer off into historical recreation (figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain rub shoulders with the fictional characters) or literary pastiche (virtually no major work or author of the late 19th century escapes being namechecked by the characters or referenced by the narrative, with the notable exception of Dracula, which seems at points to be the novel's template, and at others its antithesis).  The result is that The Accursed is never one thing or one story, and that even at the moments where it seems to wrap up its narrative it takes care to unravel a few loose ends that leave the reader wondering and uncertain.  It's a baffling read, and as I've said already almost indescribable, but it's also a hell of a lot of fun, and especially recommended to readers who enjoy scratching their heads over a novel long after they've turned the last page.
  
  
• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes - If I had to pick a single word with which to describe Lauren Beukes's third novel, it would be "calculated."  A much more tame version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with heavy lashings of The Time Traveler's Wife thrown in, it seems to have been designed to cash in on the success of both works (and is certainly being marketed accordingly).  This, in itself, isn't a point against the novel--a good, effective thriller is worth reading even if it's derivative, and to my knowledge the meeting of serial killer thriller and time travel story hasn't been attempted before.  Beukes's execution, however, leaves too much to be desired.  As a thriller, The Shining Girls is no more than serviceable.  Serial killer Harper Curtis is moved to destroy women who "shine"--who have some potential for greatness, such a talent for art or science, or who try to change their community for the better.  It's a broad message that the book does very little with, as if merely laying out its fundamental misogyny would be enough.  The victims themselves tend to blur together--since they're all introduced shortly before Harper kills them, it quickly becomes obvious that it's pointless for the reader to invest in them.  This tends to reflect back on Harper, whose MO with almost everyone he meets, not just the shining girls, is to kill them almost immediately, which quickly makes him seem more boring than scary.  The book's other protagonist is Kirby Mazrachi, a shining girl who survived Harper's attack and is now trying to leverage an internship at a newsroom into an investigation of her case.  She's clearly meant to be the novel's Lisbeth Salander--edgy, punky, a little unbalanced--but Beukes's construction of her is too tame, too obviously intended to be outrageous without ever really crossing the line of audience identification, that Kirby comes off, at her worst, like a brat, and at her best, like a plucky girl reporter (which, given the kind of character she's meant to be, is probably worse than a brat).  It certainly doesn't help that her main relationship in the novel is a romance with a much older colleague.
  
  As for the time travel that gives the novel its unique edge, this comes from a house that Harper discovers in the 1930s, whose door opens onto various time periods where he can find the shining girls.  For this reason, the police don't connect his various murders, and even when they happen in close succession don't realize that they could be the work of a single killer because the regular pattern of escalation and specialization that is common to serial killers has been jumbled up.  Beukes uses the time travel conceit to jumble up her story as well, giving us Harker and Kirby's narratives in a relatively non-linear fashion, but this is actually a lot easier to follow than you might think, and given how by the numbers the thriller story is it's hard not to suspect that the non-linear narrative is there mainly to obscure that fact for as long as possible.  There's certainly no attempt in the novel to address time travel as anything more than a McGuffin that makes the plot possible and a little more complicated than it might be.  There are none of the fun closed loops, or scary questioning of free will, that you tend to find in good time travel stories.  In one scene, Harper dumps a body in the future, and finds the body of another person he knows already in the same spot.  You might expect Beukes to make the story of how the other body got there a circuitous tale of predestination, of people achieving certain results by trying to avoid them.  But instead, Harper simply meets his future victim, whom he doesn't really care about, and, since he's a psychopath who has already killed half a dozen people by that point, kills him with no compunction, and dumps him where he knows he'll be dumped.  Instead of playing with causality and free will (something that a serial killer story might very well find some interesting things to say about) time travel is merely a way of making it a great deal easier for Harper to do exactly what he was going to do anyway.  When Beukes finally reveals what's special about the house, it's similarly underwhelming (and not at all SFnal)--the house exists because it needed to exist, because otherwise Beukes wouldn't have had a story.  Or rather, she wouldn't have been able to conceal how familiar her story is, and how run of the mill her execution of it.
  
  
• Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson - Wilson's well-received debut novel takes place in an unnamed Emirate, where a young hacker called Alif is dumped by his girlfriend and then receives from her a manuscript that turns out to have ties both to the world of the spirits from the One Thousand and One Nights and to computer programming, unlocking a language that allows him to hack reality itself.  The setting, with its focus on the intersection between Islamic dictatorship and computer hackers, is vividly described, and though I can't speak to its accuracy Wilson's handling of the position of women in such a society is intriguingly nuanced, presenting characters who work within the limitations of such a society and others who even draw power from them, while also acknowledging how precarious a woman's position in the novel's world is.  The freshness of the setting doesn't quite do enough, however, to make up for the predictability of the plot, which is essentially a less vibrant, less fun recapitulation of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (albeit, and despite the centrality of computer hacking, from a fantastic perspective, as more emphasis is placed in the novel on magical creatures, and the plot is moved more through their powers than through Alif's hacking).
  
  Alif himself is a familiar figure, a callow, self-absorbed young man who is too busy feeling sorry for himself to notice how much the people (mostly women) around him do to make his life easier.  That he grows into maturity over the course of the novel never quite makes up for the fact that I wasn't that interested in reading a story about such a character to begin with, especially since that growth includes Alif learning to reject one "bad" love interest--the girl whose breakup with him precipitates the novel's plot, whom he learns to think of as shallow and greedy--and to love the "good" one.  This character, Alif's neighbor Dina, is the most interesting in the novel, strong-willed, resourceful, and possessing an unerring moral compass that is rooted but not summed up by her devout Muslim faith.  But she spends too much of the novel either working to help Alif or completely sidelined from the story, and the way that the novel contrasts her and Alif's other love interest--who at the end of the story returns to beg Alif to take her back, only for him to turn her away with superior detachment and go back to Dina--plays into some very poisonous virgin/whore narratives.  When the uproar about the all-male Clarke shortlist erupted a few weeks ago, Alif the Unseen was one of the titles most frequently mentioned as a deserving potential nominee that could have prevented the problem.  There are two or three books on the shortlist that I disliked enough that Alif would have made a reasonable replacement for them (even though it is only barely SFnal), but I don't think its presence would have made the shortlist much stronger, and it certainly wouldn't have deserved to win.
  
  
• The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord - For a while now I've been trying to put into words my reaction to Lord's second novel, and the best I can come up with is "puzzled."  Not so much because of the novel's project--a sort of quasi-Le Guin-ian, episodic social SF story whose disparate segments are tied together by a romance--as by its execution, which is steeped in romance tropes that leave me almost entirely cold.  The setting is a future in which several sub-species of humans coexist more or less peacefully and have colonized many planets (Lord is rather vague on the history of this setting or its broader shape outside of the one planet we see, but the story is so insular to that planet that this lack of detail isn't a problem).  In the novel's prologue, one of these sub-species, the Sadiri, who are renowned for their intelligence, emotional control, and powerful psychic powers (as several reviewers have by now pointed out, the Sadiri are essentially Vulcans), suffers a near-genocidal attack in which their home planet is rendered uninhabitable.  The novel's narrator is Grace Delarua, a government functionary on a planet that plays home to several genetically and culturally distinct types of humans, where the surviving, and mostly male, Sadiri arrive looking to intermarry into a community sufficiently similar, genetically and culturally, to their own, so that they can preserve their culture and way of life.  The novel's structure, then, is a wife search, as Grace joins a delegation made up of Sadiri representatives and her fellow bureaurcrats, who together visit various communities looking for one where the Sadiri can find suitable wives.  That search, however, seems intended mainly as a justification for throwing Lord's characters together.  Her focus is more on sketching the communities the expedition encounters and on the trouble they get into along their journey, and even more so, on a romance that develops between Grace and her opposite number, a Sadiri called Dllenahkh.
  
  My core difficulty with The Best of All Possible Worlds is that a lot of its emotional beats make no sense to me.  I understand why Grace falls for Dllenahkh--he is, in many ways, the epitome of the romance hero, stoic yet wounded, emotionally reserved except where our heroine is concerned--and if the reasons for his attraction to her are less obvious, Lord does a good enough job of positioning Grace as the heroine of a romantic story that it's obvious that someone--someone central and interesting--is going to fall for her, and Dllenahkh is the novel's top prize.  But aside from the fact that they are obviously intended for one another, Grace and Dllenahkh aren't a terribly compelling couple, and almost everything that happens around them, in the tangled interpersonal relationships that build up in the expedition, or in the communities they visit, is opaque and unconvincing.  Grace narrates the novel in a brisk, chatty voice, frank about her own foibles and obsessive about the details of the expedition, but her alleged perceptiveness, especially where emotions are concerned, doesn't come through the page.  Too often, Lord has characters interpret a line of dialogue, or an action, as conveying deep emotional turmoil, but the even, lighthearted tone of her narration (which tends to report speech, but drown out or downplay inflection and body language) means that this interpretation, though it always turns out to be accurate, isn't persuasive.  The characters come off as ridiculously oversensitive, and the author as telling rather than showing.  In one scene, for example, the expedition's security officer says something sarcastic to Grace, to which she responds that he has never liked her and is now riding her even harder.  But this is a novel in which all the characters (except the Sadiri) are sarcastic to one another all the time, and despite this exchange happening near the end of the novel this is the first we've heard that the security chief doesn't like Grace, so her sudden reaction to a throwaway and, ultimately, rather gentle prod feels completely overblown--at best, it makes Grace look bad; at worst, it drives home the feeling that we've been missing most of the story.
  
  For all that, the reason that The Best of All Possible Worlds leaves me merely puzzled, rather than straight-up disappointed, is that I'm pretty sure that Lord is deliberately reaching for reading protocols that I don't possess.  I've encountered the same style before in other romance stories (and been baffled by it there as well), which makes my inability to connect with the novel seem more like my problem than Lord's.  That said, I have other problems with the novel that can't be explained by its genre.  Lord's emphasis on Grace and Dllenahkh's relationship has the effect of drowning out the questions raised by her premise--what do the Sadiri mean when they say they want to preserve their culture?  Is that kind of chauvinism really an uncomplicated good?  Should they be more open to new ideas and customs?  Is it even possible for these not to seep into Sadiri culture as a result of intermarriage?--and of obscuring how problematic the Sadiri project, which often seems to view the sought-after wives as merely the means to an end, can come to seem (for example, the fact that hardly any Sadiri women were off-planet when the attack occurred, or the tossed-off reference to a project to grow Sadiri women from frozen embryos so that they can become the second wives of the long-lived male survivors after their human wives die).  Even when it comes to her main characters, Lord can be surprisingly casual about revelations that feel as if they could have fueled a novel in their own right.  In one interlude, Grace visits her family, and through Dllenahkh's interference realizes that her ex-fiancee, now her brother in law, has undisclosed psychic powers and has been using them to control her, her sister, and their children.  The revelation itself is one of the most successful in the novel, because for once Grace's opaqueness and inconsistent emotional reactions are deliberate signs that something is wrong, but the aftermath is handled almost glibly, with Grace continuing her journey while the rest of her family have (completely understandable) nervous breakdowns.  And towards the end of the novel, Grace discovers that Dllenahkh's first marriage ended because his wife was unfaithful to him, and that he broke her lover's jaw in response.  You might expect a woman--especially someone who has been described as level-headed and even-tempered, as Grace has been--to be taken aback by the revelation that her lover has such a propensity for violence, but Grace's reaction is merely to feel sorry for Dllenahkh for experiencing that kind of betrayal.  There are aspects of The Best of All Possible Worlds that I'm willing to excuse on the grounds of its genre even though they don't work for me at all, but the way that Lord leaves vast, and often very troubling, swathes of her premise and characters unexplored in order to give the romance room to breathe is, for me, a dealbreaker.
  
  
• Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker - Barker's 2007 novel Darkmans was another work, like House of Leaves and The Accursed, that I loved despite not being able to say why, or even having a very strong sense of what happened in it.  It left me eager to read more of Barker, but also a little nervous--what could possibly measure up to Darkmans's zany goodness?  Burley Cross Postbox Theft is thus a perfect place to start with Barker's remaining bibliography.  It's not as good as Darkmans, but it's so different from it that the comparison seems less urgent.  It's also a much more straightforward novel, one that not only unravels itself in the final chapter, but whose structure seems designed for ease of consumption.  As the title suggests, the central event is the theft of the contents of a postbox from the small English village of Burley Cross.  The local policeman charged with investigating the crime presents his report in the form of the letters themselves, recovered from a nearby dumpster, reasoning that one of them might provide the motive for the theft, but this framing story doesn't seem to hold even Barker's interest for very long (for one thing, as the constable himself points out, if the purpose of the theft was to retrieve a letter, then it's unlikely to have been recovered).
  
  The actual purpose of the novel seems to be to paint a highly satirical portrait of Burley Cross, and by extension of the English village, riven by family feuds, failing businesses, local politics, and sordid affairs.  The tone throughout the letters is relentlessly comedic and exaggerated.  In one letter, a villager spends pages upon pages detailing his feud with a neighbor over whether he should pick up his dog's feces from the moor.  Another is a translation, commissioned by the police, of a letter written in French by an African ex-pat, whose translator transforms a melancholy family reminiscence into a planned drug deal.  It's all a bit much, but Barker's satire is so brazen and over the top, and her ability to switch styles and tones so expert, that even her exaggerations are a delight.  It's a bit of a shame, then, when the framing story reasserts itself, and the investigating policeman presents a solution to the mystery that not only ties the letters together but simmers the novel's satire down to a more naturalistic, and almost sentimental, conclusion in which order is restored to the village.  That same benevolence underpinned Darkmans and made its excesses palatable, but in Burley Cross Postbox Theft, a novel that until its final chapter seemed merciless in its skewering of the villagers and their petty disputes, Barker's sudden shift towards sentiment feels less grounded, and maybe even like a loss of nerve.  Still, finding Barker writing something so conventional (for certain values of conventional that would still be quite weird for any other writer) leaves me a little less nervous about exploring the rest of her bibliography.  Even if none of it lives up to Darkmans, there will certainly be some worthwhile reading there.