[Elementary] quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[kaberett]

(Who guards the guards themselves?)
Spoilers and speculation up to 3x22! Content notes for discussion of racism and rape.

sebastienne & I were talking last week, after 3x21, about where this season is going and what its arc is (beyond, you know, All The Racism, because wow has this season been good at All The Casual Racism). The topic we kept circling around was ethics; Sherlock's done a bunch of unethical stuff over the past few episodes, from gaslighting Joan's mother (but calling Joan family in the process, augh, my conflicted little heart) via siccing Everyone on a woman of color to stealing a bunch of cars via lying to Alfredo (while asserting that he is a friend!) etc.

Except then sebastienne convinced me that actually Everyone is a whole lot more harmless than Anonymous; that Everyone and the Church of Atomic Scientology Pastiche are both very broad-brush intro-level synecdoches for their roundworld counterparts... and they're both organisations that could stand to make the lives of everyone involved in the show extremely unpleasant (and possibly endangered), whereas the Julian Assange Is A Rapist episode had the Assange stand-in also commit murder to make it completely unarguable that his work does not justify his actions... because actually there isn't much Assange can reasonably do about or to them. So.

Ethics.

This is the season in which we've had the creepy NYPD-solidarity episode. And we've just had an episode in which Bell blew up at a member of the Internal Affairs Bureau and broke up with her over her being a member of the "rat squad" rather than protecting fellow cops... and her pointing out to him that he's got a history of turning in corrupt cops. And these showmakers know what is going on in the USA, they're generally pretty on-the-ball with Cultural References, I just... don't quite trust them to actually be doing the thing I hope they're doing after all the fucking racism this season. (The Native Americans running a corrupt casino! The Indian actors playing Arab characters! The characters speaking completely implausible languages for their ethnicity! Joan being derogatory about doogh!)


And meanwhile we've also got the ongoing thread of poly, which they keep just... casually emphasising; and we've got the ongoing thread of Sherlock talking openly about having friends and wanting friends -- his "working definition of friendship", his looking out for people in ways that continue to be peremptory and high-handed but are actually done out of genuine love, and so on, and so forth.

Augh, I have such high hopes for this show, I just... I just really hope it does the thing I think it's going to semi-competently.

Comments

[silveradept]

Us, too, even though I may not be following as well on what that is. Perhaps I'm just too interested in watching it to notice the strange stuff. It wouldn't be the first time.

[ironed_orchid]

I was pretty happy with where Marcus's story ended up last night. Like, obviously he does have those feelings about the IA, but he's realized that maybe they are prejudices.

I'm still a bit dubious about the Everyone thing, probably because I know people who think Anonymous do more good than bad, which I really struggle to understand. All of said people are cis het males with very few reasons to ever end up on the wrong side of Anonymous.

[damerell]

I am not that far along, but really, I said to S. beforehand "I will be very annoyed if Kitty is just written out when all this is over" and bingo, now I am very annoyed.

I know burning his face off with acid is a nod to the canon but really, she could have cut his head off, spat down his throat, and dummied-up an alibi.

[trinker]

...adding you to my reading list because cosmolinguist noted that you were writing entries about Elementary, which I've just started binge watching.