Post by mllemass on Aug 6, 2018 13:09:34 GMT
I watched The Six Thatchers on tv last night, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I knew the story by now, so I paid attention to other things, and I think I figured out what bothers me about it. It’s not the writing or the story or the acting - it’s the pace of it. I think “frantic” would describe it best. It’s all so incredibly rushed for the most part, until it comes to a stop for a few seconds before rushing off again. Some of the lovely slower moments - like John and Mary in bed discussing whether baby Rosie is more like the devil in The Exorcist or the Antichrist in The Omen - get completely lost in the frenzied pace. And the baby’s birth and christening seemed to flash by in just a few seconds.
I kept remembering other episodes that lingered in those kinds of moments - for example, all the time spent in silence while John waited for Sherlock’s reaction to being asked to be best man, or at the end of Scandal in Belgravia when Sherlock put Irene Adler’s phone in his desk drawer before looking out the window at the rain. Of course, all the episodes have their frantic moments. In The Sign of Three, they quickly showed us a bunch of Sherlock and John’ cases during Sherlock’s best man speech. And in Scandal, as well as in other episodes, we saw Sherlock listening to and quickly dismissing a lot of clients he found boring.
I have a theory that might explain why TST seems so frantic to me! There is so much screen time taken up by the transitions from one scene to another that they had to make cuts somewhere. And I have to say that many of those transitions were not only unnecessary, they ended up being a distraction from the show itself. It seems strange for me to complain about them since they were some of the few slower moments, but I just didn’t need to see any more sharks swimming past as we moved from one scene to another! I think they could have made an exciting episode without that frantic pace. A Study in Pink took place in one day and was exciting while still slowing down and being thoughtful. And as Mofftiss have often pointed out, Scandal took place over a year and didn’t even have a crime for John and Sherlock to solve, but the episode was fabulous and that SHERLOCKED scene was thrilling!
So that’s my new analysis of The Six Thatchers!
I kept remembering other episodes that lingered in those kinds of moments - for example, all the time spent in silence while John waited for Sherlock’s reaction to being asked to be best man, or at the end of Scandal in Belgravia when Sherlock put Irene Adler’s phone in his desk drawer before looking out the window at the rain. Of course, all the episodes have their frantic moments. In The Sign of Three, they quickly showed us a bunch of Sherlock and John’ cases during Sherlock’s best man speech. And in Scandal, as well as in other episodes, we saw Sherlock listening to and quickly dismissing a lot of clients he found boring.
I have a theory that might explain why TST seems so frantic to me! There is so much screen time taken up by the transitions from one scene to another that they had to make cuts somewhere. And I have to say that many of those transitions were not only unnecessary, they ended up being a distraction from the show itself. It seems strange for me to complain about them since they were some of the few slower moments, but I just didn’t need to see any more sharks swimming past as we moved from one scene to another! I think they could have made an exciting episode without that frantic pace. A Study in Pink took place in one day and was exciting while still slowing down and being thoughtful. And as Mofftiss have often pointed out, Scandal took place over a year and didn’t even have a crime for John and Sherlock to solve, but the episode was fabulous and that SHERLOCKED scene was thrilling!
So that’s my new analysis of The Six Thatchers!