Hop On The Mystery Machine

I’ve seen Sherlock and I can see how this text inspired the final episode of the second season, fittingly titled The Reichenbach Fall. On both occasions I assumed - or was assigned to assume - Watson’s vantage point, which in this particular text the character claims to be the absolute and most elaborate retelling of Holmes’s rivalry with Moriarty and their alleged deaths. After all we’ve read so far in the semester, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not.

On a different note, looking at them on their own, both the show and this text are entertainment for entertainment’s sake - they make their own puzzles, solve them and tag their audience along for the ride until the final riddle which they leave their followers alone to solve on their own (whether Holmes actually died or not). Whatever happened to Holmes in both fictional universes, such method primes the audience for their own versions of an ending, hence their own versions of closure. So, in a way, after latching on to a character’s narrative for a while, we finally have an opportunity to form our own. This sounds as though we now can become decision makers with the same rights and powers as the original author (and the character we’ve been following). But the truth remains that our will is still very much dependent and conditioned by what the text fed us with.

But the show and this text are not on their own. They participate in at least two other literary traditions: one of the mystery/ crime procedural genre, and one of this class, hovering over OAOCB, CC, TTTC, and GM. With respect to the first, having seen Psych, Scooby-Doo, Memento, The Departed, and other works whose name escape me for now, I am confident that I have nothing else intelligent to say about this genre other than the things I’ve said. Or at least something critical. The argument in the previous paragraph is probably as close to anything inquisitive as it can get. With respect to the second, I can only say that I look forward to class discussion tomorrow for a more in-depth, comprehensive comparative analysis. But if we’re going to get all meta about this anyway, I guess the million dollar question is that of Conan Doyle’s ulterior motive in ending this body of text the way he did, and how it correlates to those of the previous people we’ve read and watched.