guys guys guys most angsty reasoning for why sherlock’s button-ups don’t fit:

he bought them when he was using cocaine and never bothered replacing them after he was at a healthier/non-cocaine weight.

Ehm, everything under a cut because spoilers.

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I’ve gone through watching Scandal in Belgravia twice now and i have a lot of mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it’s brilliant. On the other hand, oh please.

So let’s start with the good stuff. Firstly, I love Irene Adler. As a character, as a woman. She’s clever and she’s good at what she does. Undoubtedly, she outwitted Sherlock by using the one language he doesn’t understand. Throughout the episode Sherlock is genuinely surprised every time someone implies that there is any sort of sexual chemistry between them. He really is; why would he act surprised? There was never an advantage to acting surprised, he just really was. From his perception something else entirely is happening because he is attracted to her. But not sexually. It’s the same thing that happens when people confuse him and John as romantic partners (and therein a standard of sexual implication). But the thing is, in canon, their relationship is not sexual either. But because we do what we do and we do it so well we try to figure out what it is because we can’t stand to have things that we don’t understand lying about. He is attracted to John. John is stability, a man who makes a point of making himself plain (because let’s face it, life is crazy all on its own and doesn’t need us making it worse), but remains nonetheless meticulous and most importantly, John says that everything is fine. Besides he‘s all sorts of his own buckets of clever (re: multiple types of intelligences). But again, unless it’s fandom Christmas, it’s not sexual. So Irene Adler. He’s attracted to Adler because she’s creative, confident, self-interested and she’s a formidable intellectual opponent. Even Mycroft values that and respects it properly as a danger. There’s not really anything worse than a ‘double-agent’ character because that self-interest carries little concern over which side it damages more because there’s only one side for them and that’s their self. Which is interesting and not at all boring because it makes it that much more difficult to predict just what they’ll do and if you can figure it out, well that’s something.

So, next, the scene of Sherlock’s big reveal when he finally figures out the pass code for the phone. I don’t think there’s been a single scene thus far that so brilliantly illustrates just how cruel Sherlock is. Yes, he’s been terrible to John, to John’s string of girlfriends, to Mrs. Hudson, to Molly, to Lestrade but this scene of being terrible to Adler really took the cake. Granted, they were “playing the game”. But it really was, at least the second time around for me, a moment that shows just how human Sherlock can be and how it can be terrifying.

If we are to accept that Sherlock has absolutely no emotional or sexual sentiment for Adler, this scene is tremendously callous. For the record, I don’t think that’s it’s wrong of Adler to have had a sexual attraction to Sherlock. We can’t blame her for that. Even being a lesbian, no one can blame her for having an attraction outside her more regular proclivities. These aren’t rules. I mean, I sure hope they’re not. Besides, this is a woman that lives outside the rules anyways, breaking her own ‘rules’ wouldn’t really phase her. But what she does have are routines and that’s something that you can study and that‘s important for this scene. Her profession is a sexualized one and it’s a language she’s comfortable using. It’s a brilliant tool if you can use it because we‘re simple monsters. It certainly confounded Sherlock, until he thought of checking for the physical signs of an attraction to determine if she did have one towards him; that he got to turn it against her is incidental. He would collect this information in the event that it may become useful but also because it’s interesting and even more so because it specifically pertains to him. And it’s all a part of a study at close range. He’s studied her language and now he can use it and because he’s Sherlock he turns it on her because he’s a genius and needs an audience. And it comes out as retribution; he takes her language and adapts it to his own. His is intellect, his is cold logic. It’s retribution because Adler embodies a puzzle he’s struggled with understanding his entire life and it’s a symbolic retribution because this language that everyone holds so holy isn’t the only one and he wants to show that his is just as functional, if not more. He asks her to beg because know he knows her language and what it would mean to her to have it turned against her. It doesn’t matter to him if it’s a game, especially not in that moment; he nearly betrayed his brother’s confidence through his ineptitude. And it’s not the fact that it was his brother’s confidence was involved, it’s just that he can’t stand being made to feel stupid.

Normally, when I watch someone getting dished what they deserve (and she did deserve it) I’m grinning. I definitely wasn’t this time. He was just scary. Seeing her cry hurt because I can’t help but imagine what that would have felt like and well, not good.

So it was all definitely interesting and it’s a very complicated episode for the viewer and/or the fandom, particularly the slash fandom. And that’s a pretty good segue into the problems I had with the episode;

What I didn’t like was that it ends up being another battle of the sexes, but more importantly, a battle of binaries. Sherlock has always been canonically sexist and Irene has always been the exception; but even as she’s the exception she still ‘succumbs’ to the weakness of letting her heart rule her head. The heart being emotion; emotion being a woman’s flaw and emotion also being illogical and then by extension woman as the illogical. This is a very primitivist and Victorian idea. We tend to excuse it from Doyle’s text because we can address it as problematic but symptomatic of it’s time. But come on, darlings! this is a modernization! we can use a bit of modern thought, yes? It’s not like we haven’t been developing feminist and gender queer thought for a while now. I find it so hard to come to terms with shows like Sherlock that have this fantastic platform to work from and just show and then goes on to so magnificently squander the opportunity. And one of the best opportunities here was Adler.

How they handled Irene Adler once they decided who and what she was interesting and even masterful. But what they decided upon Adler being is problematic for me. Why a dominatrix? Was it to illustrate that Sherlock is in effect an asexual dominatrix? That sounds crazy. Wouldn’t it have been enough for her to be clever? And when Sherlock condemns her for falling victim to sentiment is that to highlight that he’s just as guilty or to suggest that he has none? And then why an attraction to Sherlock? Why a lesbian? To prove that Sherlock does not fall into conventional relationships? Or are we just playing with the apparent absurdity of two men possibly being in love and one of them being entirely asexual about it and then poking fun at John for needing more than what Sherlock can give?

Anyways, in the end, I hope that if there is anything that Sherlock can learn from this as a person is that this heart that Moriarty threatens to burn is just as much a weapon as his intellect. Because he does have one, and Irene Adler proves that it can be used to his advantage as much as it can be used as his disadvantage.