(Note: This is largely going off a college paper I wrote back in 2013, although I expanded on my points and dropped any academic pretenses. I also haven’t watched the episode in question since 2013, because I don’t feel like subjecting myself to it again. Having watched it several times before and having written about it before, I trust that my memory of events is fairly accurate.
Also, I wrote this in 2019, but haven’t posted it anywhere before, and I figured I might as well put it here. I was fairly drunk and angry while writing it, so I apologize if any parts are less than coherent.)
BBC’s Sherlock has a lot of problems, and now that it’s 2021 I feel like I can say that without getting flack from anybody about it. When I first got into this show, in late 2011 / early 2012, it was insanely popular on Tumblr, which I had also started using around that time. It was a perfect time to start watching given that season 2 was about to air after a long wait. I was initially a pretty big fan, and I’m not going to lie about that or attempt to downplay it; I binge-watched season 1 and then rewatched it a few times while waiting for season 2, I got friends into the show, I read fanfiction and reblogged fanart and generally participated in the (at the time, highly favorable) discussions about the television series.
It’s generally agreed-upon now that Sherlock suffers from a plethora of issues. Much has been written about the show’s treatment of women, about its queerbaiting, about its treatment of its few characters of color, about the poor writing, about how the show misunderstands what made the original Sherlock Holmes stories so great, and so on. I’m not going to talk about all those issues, or even about the show as a whole. I’m going to focus in on season 2, episode 1, “A Scandal in Belgravia,” and specifically its treatment of the character Irene Adler.
When I first watched this episode, I hadn’t read the original Conan Doyle story upon which it’s based, A Scandal in Bohemia. If I had, I might have been pissed enough to give up on Sherlock right then and there. To explain what I mean, let me quickly explain A Scandal in Bohemia.
In this story, the third installment in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Holmes is employed by the king of Bohemia because he (the king) is worried that a former lover of his will blackmail him using compromising photos of the two of them. This former lover, a woman named Irene Adler, is an independent young lady with a career as an opera singer, which you have to understand was somewhat scandalous in Victorian times (a career-driven woman who isn’t tied to any particular man?). The king is about to be married and is worried his bride-to-be, who is also royalty, will find out about his prior affair and the marriage will fall through; since it’s a political marriage, this is a potential Big Deal™. He wants Holmes to ensure that Adler won’t blackmail him, and promises him an inordinate sum of money for completing this job. Notably, the king is not a terribly sympathetic character here, and by extension neither is Holmes; Holmes is also confident he’ll be able to outsmart Adler because she’s just some woman, and he displays levels of sexism typical for men at the time.
Holmes and Watson proceed to trick their way into Adler’s home during a party she’s holding, planning to cause a diversion so that they can access the safe she’s using to store the compromising pictures. The diversion goes off as planned, but when they open the safe the pictures aren’t there, forcing them to leave empty-handed. While they don’t see Adler at the party, on the way out they’re greeted by a young lad who says “Goodnight, Mr. Holmes,” which surprises Holmes as he’s in disguise.
After the failure of his plan, Holmes receives a letter from Irene in which she explains how she outsmarted him. Her tone is cordial and she makes it clear she’s a fan of his work and respects his intellect. She tells him she plans on holding onto the pictures not because she’s actively attempting to blackmail the king, but because she’s currently in a relationship with a man whom she loves and doesn’t want her ex (who obviously has a lot more power than she does) messing things up. She also reveals that she was the boy who said goodnight to him after the party. Holmes comes away from this experience with a great respect for Irene and a realization that underestimating her because of her gender was a huge mistake on his part. He views her as an intellectual equal, which is probably a first for him. The story is notable within the Sherlock Holmes canon for being the only time Sherlock was legitimately bested, not by a villain but by a woman simply protecting her own interests in a way portrayed as entirely justified.
Because of her small but important role in the original stories, Irene Adler has shown up in some form or another in many adaptations. Often she’s portrayed as a love interest for Sherlock, despite no hint of this in the original canon. With that history in mind, it isn’t really surprising that BBC’s Sherlock did what it did, but, given the context of both its canon and the Conan Doyle canon, “A Scandal in Belgravia” is still a massive disappointment — and an outright offensive one at that.
As Sherlock is a modernized adaptation and being an opera singer is no longer a controversial career move, its version of Irene is instead a professional dominatrix and a lesbian. I’ll admit that as an LGBT teenager desperate for anything even vaguely resembling representation in fiction, I was extremely on board with this writing decision at first. In this version, Irene comes to Sherlock’s attention because she has compromising pictures of a female member of the royal family, who was one of her clients. In fact, the first shot of her during the episode is of her on the job, so to speak, entering the client’s bedroom; you can probably guess how this looked. On its own, I’d probably be fine with it. BBC’s Irene is sexy — cool.
However, in her first encounter with Sherlock, Irene decides she’s going downstairs to greet him while fully in the nude. She does this in an attempt to flummox him, to stop him from making deductions about her based on what she’s wearing. This makes no sense if you actually think about it, because he’d still be fully capable of making deductions based on her body (not to mention on her home in general), but for some reason this works, and Sherlock ends up drawing a complete blank. It’s impossible to read this as anything other than Sherlock being so flustered by the unexpected sight of a naked woman that his capacity for deductive reasoning shuts down. Again, on its own this could be fine; funny, even. However, in BBC’s Sherlock, sexuality seems to be Irene’s only weapon and only defense. Some attempts are made to portray her as clever on a level approaching Sherlock’s, but they end up falling flat and even being directly undermined by later events in the episode. We’ll get to that. The important takeaway from this scene ends up not being that Irene is able to outsmart Sherlock, but that she knows how to work her sexuality to her own advantage, which is an incredibly tired trope when applied to female characters. You might not call this scene fanservice — after all, we the audience do not get to see any naughty bits, just Irene from the shoulders up — but it’s still a bad take on a character who in the original story was legitimately just as clever as Sherlock without having to rely on distracting him with sexy.
Throughout the episode, Irene flirts with Sherlock. I was initially taking this as simply more attempts at distracting him, which on its own would still be less than great as it has the effect of dumbing her down; after all, Irene is gay, and there’s no way she’s legitimately just flirting with a man, right? Yeah, no, that’s exactly what she’s doing. And now we arrive at The Scene.
The Scene, as I like to call it, is the absolute nadir of Sherlock for me. I’m sure the series had plenty more nadirs after this one, but I quit after episode 1 of season 3 and I’m not currently feeling masochistic enough to sit through anything further, so this for me is the ultimate low point. This is the point in the show where I was forced to acknowledge the queerbaiting that had been present throughout and that I would have picked up on if I was as cynical as the writers.
In this scene, John and Irene talk, alone. Irene makes a joke about John and Sherlock being boyfriends. John says, in frustration, that he’s not gay. Irene replies — and this line is burned into my brain — “Well, I am. Look at us both.”
In the hands of writers who weren’t homophobes, this could have been an excellent moment. John is straight, or so he says, but his relationship with Sherlock doesn’t read that way, and the writers did that on purpose. There’s a reason the fandom is overwhelmingly obsessed with Sherlock/John as a pairing; it’s being teased constantly. They live together, they hold hands, save each other from danger, have romantic candlelit dinners together, are admittedly the most important person in each other’s lives. This isn’t a situation where the fandom just saw two white guys being friends and decided they were boyfriends; the show itself teases that interpretation nonstop. Meanwhile, in this particular episode, Irene, an openly gay woman, is showing clear signs of being attracted to Sherlock despite her established sexuality. Having these two characters simultaneously realize they might be bisexual could have set up an excellent parallel between the two. It’s incredibly common among bisexuals for us to initially assume we’re either straight or gay, then suddenly wind up attracted to someone of the gender we don’t usually like and have to rethink our entire sexual identity. John and Irene both dealing with an unexpected attraction to the same man, in spite of their established sexualities as straight and gay respectively, could have been wonderful in the hands of a writer who was actually on board with the idea of writing two bisexual characters.
But this is BBC Sherlock, so no. That’s not what happens. Instead, while Irene gets to be explicitly attracted to Sherlock, it’s not framed as a bisexual realization on her part but rather that Sherlock is just so damn alluring that even a lesbian could fall for him. This is an incredibly common homophobic trope about lesbians — that they’ll “turn straight” for the right man — and in real life a great deal of male violence towards lesbians stems from this very idea. John, on the other hand, does not get to have his attraction towards Sherlock canonized, and the queerbaiting continues. The authorial motivation is clear: the writers are fine with writing lesbians, as long as they cater to the male gaze, are used for fanservice, and are ultimately still available to men, but men loving men is icky and only to be used as bait to keep the fans invested in a relationship that will never actually come to fruition.
The insulting treatment of Irene doesn’t stop there. It turns out that she’s been working with Moriarty, and that’s where her ability to stay a step ahead of Sherlock comes from. She’s no longer a woman with her own agenda, using her own intelligence to protect her own interests. It’s amazing how a story from the 1800s did a much better job at writing a quote unquote strong female character than an adaptation of that same story written during and set in the 2010s, but that’s the beauty of Sherlock, baby — it manages to be regressive despite all odds.
And then, of course, there’s the elephant in the room, the part of this episode you’ve surely already heard about if you’ve heard any criticism of it at all. Because it’s the modern day, Irene’s compromising pictures of her royal client are stored not as physical photographs in a safe, but as files on a locked cell phone. She gives Sherlock this phone to taunt him, trusting he’ll be unable to figure out the four-digit passcode and unlock it. The lock screen reads “I AM _ _ _ _ LOCKED.” It turns out not to be a random four-digit passcode — which, as Sherlock points out, he wouldn’t have been able to just guess or brute-force in the time allotted to him — but a pun: the code is “SHER.” Irene was crushing on Sherlock so hard, despite being gay, that she let her feelings override common sense and used a passcode that was pretty damn easy to guess. And thus, he bests her. In an episode based on the only Sherlock Holmes story where Sherlock gets bested.
That’s not even the end. If Irene hadn’t been thoroughly humiliated enough by this point, if canon hadn’t been thoroughly spat upon enough, the ending scene is Irene being captured and Sherlock having to save her. I guess the writers figured their handling of Irene might not be misogynistic and insulting enough if they didn’t find a way to work the damsel in distress trope in there.
Anyway, that’s my rant. I advise everyone, including myself, to watch better television going forward.