*Scandal in Belgravia* Part 2

Since the first three episodes of this Sherlock streams from netflix, I indulged by re-watching the third, "The Great Game," which introduces Moriarty. It was extremely squicky to realize that Molly had been involved in some way with Moriarty via the lab, introducing the lab IT kid that Moriarty played, to Sherlock as her suitor ("office romance," she chirps) in hopes that this might jolt Sherlock into noticing her as a potential romantic partner. However, this was a brilliant bridge then, into the opening of "Scandal in Belgravia," which I then immediately watch again, via PBS streaming.

Upon re-watching it also seemed wrong that Sherlock beat that CIA agent who roughed up Mrs. Hudson. That's not how Holmes has ever behaved in canon.

Now as far as I was wrong -- my imagination in retrospect completely made up Holmes using a digital gizmo to unlock Adler's phone. There was no gizmo. What there was, was me, wondering during those scenes why they didn't use a gizmo. So I now wonder why there was no digital gizmo, but nevermind
The more I've been thinking through the Adler scenes again, the more I'm not liking how Irene Adler is handled by the writers. They were under a compulsion to make it absolutely clear to the audience that Sherlock Holmes beat HER, is on top, in charge, won -- SHE's love with HIM. Further, the dominatrix aspects were poorly handled. Particularly the posing with the riding crop over Sherlock's photo was clunky, indicating the writer(s) were thinking, Hey! Nifty concept! while knowing little of either the profession of dominance, or the dynamics of power exchange, and uncomfortable with thinking of them on a personal creative, imaginative level too.

OTOH, it is really nifty that Adler's older than Sherlock. This is something you hardly ever ever see in television, movies or novels.

Still, I'm not all together happy with the compulsion to make some larger erotic-romantic arc for Sherlock. We never needed it in the canon Holmes or in the Brett Holmes. It gets so confining to make every kind of entertainment and story have to have a Big Sexual Thang, instead of all the other relationship things you can explore if you don't plug Big Sexual Thang into that slot every time. Still, as  amiga CB-S observes, "the fascination was mutual and unrelated to the whole dominatrix aspect, though not unrelated to Irene's tightrope walk with political power."

I’m becoming concerned though with the perspective of super intelligence and its lack of sympathy for the rest of us -- it's Holmes, Adler, Moriarty and Mycroft -- and how this will play out in future episodes.  The rest of us are of no interest to their sort,  unless we are their ‘pets,’ as Moriarty threw at Watson, and among whom the pets would be included Mrs. Hudson and Molly.  And the rest of us aren't even that.

I have problems with supers of any kind anyway in entertainment, and the superintelligences more than any other. Their actions are right and unquestioned, because they are smartest.  The consequences are decisions like Coventry decision, that is reduxed in "Scandal." That's not good enough, as Watson, our spokesperson reminds Holmes at every turn.  That's why this episode works so well -- Holmes wasn't always so super, but was getting a sense that there is a wider world than what's in his brain, and that matters as well, which was set up again, with the astronomical universe role in "The Great Game."

In any case I'm looking forward to Baskerville this coming week.

EDT:  Now I get it.  The writers are Dr. Whoians writers, producers, etc..  As I have always had zero interest in Dr. Who to the point of having never ever seen a single episode of any of the incarnations of Dr. Who and never will see one, I didn't realize.  And now, considering how they did Irene Adler in this series, I understand how my instinct repelled me from Dr. Whoing.