Sherlock and Joan

I am not really doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month, I’m trying to sort of sit down and do editing work on the thing that was my project a couple of times back? Job hunting is pretty terrible, so I’ve got to do something, and by golly it’d be pretty sweet if I had a finished, polished novel on the resumeh, wouldn’t it?

There are a lot of posts I can cite about how Elementary’s Sherlock relates to the people around him, but there are less about his relationship with Joan, especially in view of the last season or so. And so I thought I could get away with writing this.

Maybe.

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Sherlock and Joan

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a crime procedural with two leads. One’s a man, one’s a woman. One of them (probably the man) is famously eccentric and kind of weird; hard to get along with except for his/her partner/handler and a bit of a jerk sometimes, if unintentionally. But he/she is also wickedly smart and an essential asset to solving mysteries at the local police department. Although the pair has their hang ups about each other in the beginning, over time they become closer than anyone could have expected.

What happens next?

If you said, “They fall in love,” then congrats! We’re no longer talking about Elementary.

There was quite a bit of conversation when Elementary cast Lucy Liu as Joan Watson about how gimmicky it was that the show was genderbending Watson into a woman (and particularly, an Asian woman). There was this assumption that Sherlock and Joan would become a couple; after all, the BBC series Sherlock thrived and pushing ship tease between Holmes and Watson, and in any given piece of media it’s assumed that if the two leads are a man and a woman, they will, at some point or another make out, unless they’re siblings or cousins or something. 

[Which won’t stop the fans from shipping it, and that’s just.. ew. No.]

Given that it was being made for CBS, a network with a reputation for being more conservative than others, people took it as pretty much written in stone. I don’t like using the phrase ‘enforcing heteronormativity’ because it tends to be brought up to complain when someone’s favorite ship doesn’t become canon, but in popular media it is a thing: male lead + female lead = seasons worth of sexual tension before a hookup. They must get together, or the Ancient Ones will rise from the depths of the earth and destroy this world for forswearing the ritual they demand.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find an article from the producers, before the show premiered, that insisted that there were absolutely no plans at all to write Sherlock and Joan into a romantic relationship with each other. And hey, look, we’re on the sixth and final season, and there’s not a sign of that happening.

[If we get to the finale and this changes I will eat my words. I will also be very, very angry and I’ll go to the writers’ office and sit on them.]

Sherlock and Joan are not an Item. They are not dating. They have never expressed the desire to become romantically or sexually involved with each other. There is ship tease, sure, but it’s almost played as a joke or to mess with expectations. For instance, when they first meet, Sherlock gives a monologue about love at first sight, only to reveal that he was memorizing something from a movie while ten other televisions are playing at the same time. At another point, Sherlock suggests that Joan’s going to sleep with his brother Mycroft, because deep down she must really wish to sleep with him and because this is as close as she’s going to get. Joan reacts with not a small amount of disgust at this hypothesis.

And yet they are very obviously two people who are very close. When one is threatened, the other is often on his or her feet to go deal with it. They talk out their problems whenever something comes up. When Joan is considering adopting and becoming a mother, she’s sure that Sherlock will have a major role in the child’s upbringing as a sort of ever-present uncle. The two of them share custody of their pet tortoise, Clyde. And Joan forgives Sherlock for constantly barging into her room and waking her up in increasingly annoying ways.

All of this culminates in the finale of season six, both Joan and Sherlock utter the words, in explanation for the lengths they’re going through to protect each other “We’re two people that love each other.”

HOLY FUDGE I cannot begin to explain how much this line shook me. Because here we have two leads in a television show that’s been running for six years, one male and one female, outright admitting that they love each other, but at no point is the notion of that love being romantic for even a second! They’re not “more than friends;” they’re friends, and that’s more powerful than most people, especially the show’s antagonists, could ever imagine. They are not related by blood, but they are family, and that’s what matters to their character dynamic.

The makers of the show very easily made their story some sort of romance, and they didn’t. They very easily could have made half the jokes in the show be about how there’s perceived sexual tension between the two, and they didn’t. Both of those would have been cheap ways to build a show. Instead they moved forward with this series thinking, “These two people live together and solve mysteries that no one else can, and what does that do to their friendship?”

Theirs is a glorious dynamic to behold, both fun and touching, and it’s one of the things that makes Elementary not just one of the best crime shows on television, but one of the most entertaining adaptations of the Holmes stories.

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