Sunday nights are chock-full of great television, but last night marked the long, long-awaited return of Sherlock, Steven Moffat’s brilliant update of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story about an Afghanistan veteran, his brilliant-but-off-kilter flatmate, and their adventures in a London full of shifting social norms, new technologies, and criminals both diabolically brilliant and accidentally malign. And the show came back with a bang, bringing the previously asexual Sherlock up against Irene Adler, an opera singer with a scandalous secret in the stories turned into a thoughtful, melancholy dominatrix in the update. I spoke to Moffat about our contemporary obsessions with sex, watching Sherlock grow up, and how to interpret Moriarty, the world’s first supervillain, in a way that’s not a cliche given all the characters who were based on him.

You’ve adapted both Sherlock Holmes and Jekyll and Hyde, stories from the turn of the century. Are there parallels you see between that time of technological develop and social change and our own?

Not on purpose. And to be honest, this hasn’t been a long-term plan that I’d adapt victorian fiction. I just like both stories. It wasn’t my idea to do Jekyll, it was a guy called Jeffrey Taylor who approached me about it, and I liked that because I’d always liked the story, and I’ve always been a Sherlock Holmes fan. Is there something particular? I think probably any era is analagous to any other era. People don’t change that much. We’re always doing the same sort of thing. So I think that probably just works. When you’re looking at what causes a scandal in Bohemia as opposed to Belgravia, you have to up the ante a bit, and Irene Adler doesn’t really qualify as a bad girl anymore. She’s an opera singer who married a man and moved house, as far as I can see. As far deadly femme fatales go, she was a little bit on the limited side. I remember when I was reading that story as a kid, Sherlock goes on and on about The Woman, the only one who ever beat him, and you’re thinking, he’s had better villains than this. And then you click: he fancies her, doesn’t he? That’s what it’s about.

I loved that line where Irene says to Watson, ‘you are a couple.’ They’re not sexually involved, but they are partners. Given that there’s always been this speculation over Watson and Holmes, I thought that was an interesting way to resolve the tension.

It’s always definitely a love story. I don’t see why that means that sex has to be involved. What a weirdly sexualized world we live in where you insist they much be having sex as well. Why would they? John isn’t wired that way, whatever Sherlock is. But I think that whole scene, when Irene Adler has to say she’s mostly gay, she has had relationships with men as well, it’s not what it’s about. Sherlock Holmes is indifferent to sex. So is Irene. She uses sex to get what she wants, and John Watson happily has a string of girlfriends. Sex is not really the issue among any of these people. Love is. Infatuation is. I think John Watson is infatuated with and fascinated by Sherlock Holmes. I think Sherlock Holmes absolutley relies completely and utterly on John Watson and is devoted to him. I think Sherlock is infatuated to the point that he can barely function around Irene Adler. And Irene Adler isn’t initially fascinated by him and then falls for him completely, thinks, ‘There’s another person in the world as damaged as I am, how brilliant.’ Who says any of them are having sex with each other?
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As soon as I can embed the chat here, I will. but I’ll be talking this week’s episode of Girls and beyond with Anna Holmes in a live chat at the Guardian starting here at 2PM.

I’m glad we’re going to be having this conversation on the day that Lena Dunham finally speaks up about the criticisms of the show’s approach to diversity in a long interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. On the question of the core cast, she says:

I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.’ And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.

I think this is precisely the kind of attitude that both comes from a place of deep respect and concern about speaking for others, and can end up being deeply limiting for a writer. It’s a very complex path to walk between avoiding appropriating someone else’s life experience and treating that life experience as if it’s so potentially different that you couldn’t possibly understand any aspect of it. Respectful difference, taken too far, can get a little fetishistic. I’m not saying that’s what Dunham is doing here, but it’s definitely a dynamic that I think could lead to white writers feeling hesitant to write characters of color.

The bridge is yours.

-TV’s best gingers.

-Reflections on Adam Yauch’s death.

-David Tennant might be in the next Fast and Furious movie.

-Having the guy behind Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine working on the Catching Fire script sounds exciting.

-Sandra Day O’Connor gets into the video game business.

“Why The Avengers was so exciting to watch,” Ben Kuchera wrote in his review of the movie at Penny Arcade, “was that once you have every character set up and properly introduced by their previous films you can do anything. The script doesn’t have to spend time and dialog explaining who everyone is and where they came from…They each arrive on the screen fully formed, without the dullness of a well-worn origin story weighing them down.”

I think he’s right, and he’s nailed something important about where we are in the development of comic book movies. Some, if not all, movie franchise are finally fully behaving like comic books, giving us extended explorations of individual characters that intersect with and then diverge from other characters we’re spending time with in parallel, and examining new iterations of characters before the memory of the last version of the same figure has faded. To some critics, that means we’ve succumbed to an efficient, corporatized entertainment system that hits the same beats over and over again. Certainly, one of the reasons Spider-Man is rebooting is so Sony keeps its rights to the character and doesn’t let them revert back to Marvel. And if the lesson Marvel takes from the massive success of The Avengers is that pure repetition is a gold mine, that would be too bad. But I also think that the willingness by Marvel to give us more than six-odd hours over three movies with a set of characters presents an opportunity to demand richer, more unusual, deeper explorations of characters, to turn action movies into the kind of meditations we’re more accustomed to getting from television.

Previously, we’ve been used to superhero movies that come in three parts: a rise, a challenge, and a fall or a redemption. That’s a fine, sturdy structure for storytelling, and I fully expect The Dark Knight Rises to be a powerful deployment of that very reliable format. Previously, when a franchise has been kept alive past three installments, as with the Alien movies, it’s often less because the people involved have an overarching story to tell or set of ideas to explore than because a character is popular and profitable.

Marvel, on the other hand, has planned from the beginning to use these characters for a long time. Samuel L. Jackson’s contract with the company ties him to nine films so they can use Nick Fury as a through line in The Avengers franchise even if only in cameos. Even though at the time he came on board as The Hulk, Marvel didn’t plan to make more stand-alone movies based on the character, Mark Ruffalo was locked up for six movies, and now that his version of the character has become so definitive, the studio has him to work with.
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In the wake of George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, Fox pulled some advertising for its upcoming comedy Neighborhood Watch, in which some overly-vigilant patrolees discover they’ve got an alien invasion on their hands. Now, they’ve changed the movie’s name to The Watch, and released a trailer that suggests the movie is more R-rated comedy than an affirmation of a power grab:

I tend to think movies like these are always somewhat dicey, since they’re built on the proposition that things that in the real world would be extremely dangerous or morally compromised—like getting overly zealous about guarding your neighborhood to the point that you start treating people in threats in ways that can escalate, or, say, torturing people—end up getting the results you want, whether it’s beating the bad guys or eliciting accurate information, both outcomes that in those cases would be rather unlikely. I thought it was problematic, for example, that in last week’s episode of Scandal, Olivia asks one of her employees to torture a suspect, aggravating what appears to be a severe case of PTSD, and then was rewarded for asking him to do this terrible thing by getting the information that she wanted. One bad message, that torture works, was wrapped inside a better one, that asking people on our side to do terrible things harms their humanity.

The Watch could end up validating macho nonsense that does real harm off-screen. Or it could end up arguing that most of the time, the people we assess as threats are no danger to us, and in fact are common allies in larger projects, the people we need to help make our communities better rather than the people we need to fear.

This post contains spoilers through the May 6 episode of Game of Thrones.

There’s a lot going on in tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, but many of the developments shared a common, nasty thread: the lack of real control people have in Westeros over their bodies and sexuality, whether they’re high born or low, in King’s Landing or Beyond the wall. For a number of the female characters, there’s an ugly coming to terms with what men believe is valuable about them, and with their ability to control what’s so crudely reduced to a commodity. Cersei cannot save her daughter Myrcella from the same kind of arranged marriage she found so odious, and tells her brother Tyrion, who has brokered Myrcella’s marriage into Dorne, that she hopes he becomes vulnerable by loving someone as Cersei loved her daughter so she can wound him in the same fashion.

Joffrey, if he hasn’t demonstrated how much he hates Sansa by stripping and beating her before the court, only reinforces how little he values her continued well-being by telling his guards “Let them have her” after Sansa is chased off by men who mean to rape her. It’s the Hound, a man who insists he stands apart from chivalric tradition, who returns to save Joffrey’s ostensible lady, telling Tyrion when the Hand thanks him, “I didn’t do it for you.” There’s pleasure, it seems, in not reducing a woman to a womb, to a piece of dismembered meat as the rampaging crowd does to a septa in Joffrey’s entourage. And the fate the Hound saves her from is a shock to Sansa, even after everything that’s been done to her by the man who was once her ideal. “He hated me, the man who hit me,” Sansa tells Shae. “I saw it in his eyes. I never met him before, but he wanted to hurt me.” And it’s the former prostitute who’s left to explain to Sansa the intersection of seething class rage and misogyny. “You are everything he will never have,” Shae explains to Sansa. “Your horse eats better than his children.”

Dany isn’t assaulted the way Sansa is. But as she tries to first command and then bargain her way into the ships and armies she needs to launch an invasion, she’s presented with a stark economy in which the currency is units of her body—a night in her bed for a ship, a lifetime for untold riches. “Does he think I’ll whore myself for a boat?” she asks bitterly. The spice merchant who cuttingly informs Dany that “I admire your passion. But in business, I trust in logic, not passion” may be turning her down, but he’s at least doing her the compliment of asking her to bargain with something other than her body.
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