We Are Family: Why I Like Elementary’s Version of the Holmes Clan
If you check out fanfiction.net, you’ll notice it’s strong fanon that Holmes’s father was abusive to him as a child.
Without wishing to minimize real-life child abuse, which is horrible, in some types of (fan)fiction, parental abuse is used as a way to explain a character’s emotional issues or bad behaviour, or as a way to include hurt/comfort tropes with a canonically strong character, or both. Holmes tends to prompt both uses: the audience likes seeing Watson as the dominant friend for a change, and the Great Detective also has tendencies that read as antisocial. He’s strange and scared of feelings, and the audience often wants some explanation deeper than “that’s the way he is.”
A lot of modern versions of the Holmes/Watson archetypes seem aware of this potential narrative shorthand and work to avoid it. Dr. House seems to have been abused by his father, but the show points out that there’s no easy, cause-and-effect answer for why he’s such an asshole. In a humorous lampshading moment from Sherlock, Watson learns that the Holmeses, senior, are an embarrassingly ordinary upper-middle-class couple who “torture” their genius sons by carting them to such plebeian pleasures as Les Miserables.
Elementary, on the other hand, seems to play the cliché sincerely at first. All we learn of Morland Holmes is that he is paying for his son’s lodging under the condition that Sherlock hires a sobriety coach. We are given the impression that Holmes, Sr. does this to protect his own reputation, further solidified by his threats to evict his son in the case of wrongdoing.
As the series progresses, Morland seems to neglect his sons: Sherlock correctly warns Watson that his father’s “impending” dinner is likely never to materialize, suggesting this has happened many times in the past. We learn from his shenanigans regarding said dinner that Sherlock has been in conflict with Morland since he was a little boy.
And, true enough, when we finally meet Morland, most of what Sherlock says seems to be true: he is estranged from his son, he is suspicious of Sherlock’s intentions and behaviour, and he toys with Sherlock’s feelings. But Sherlock invites Watson — and through her, us — to assess his father’s behaviour for ourselves.
At first, she and we agree with what he’s said. Morland constantly offers overtures of attention to his son and then withdraws them at the last moment. He veils his real actions and motives with a super-conspiracy-fingers-in-all-pies rhetoric of deliberate mystery and menace. Watson rightly tells him off for jerking Sherlock around and lays down the rules for his interactions with his son.
But over the run of the season in which he appears (and despite some misdirection from the writers), the audience comes to appreciate that Morland isn’t a Monster Abusive Dad, and that the conflict between the two runs both ways.
We learn in one of the latest episodes that the onset of the conflict has to do with the tangled family drama surrounding the death of Sherlock and Mycroft’s mother. In contrast to Sherlock’s eight-year-old impressions, we (and he) learn that both parents made some mistakes out of love for each other and their children. Nobody is really right or wrong, and the whole mess shaped Sherlock and Morland’s relationship for the remainder of their lives.
Why is this interesting? Well, this is the first time I’ve seen Sherlock struggle to heal a relationship, with all the emotional strains that come from it. To what extent can Sherlock forgive his father? To what extent should he forgive his father? What kind of relationship between them is healthy? How can he build it?
One of the things I’ve come to love about Elementary is its ideology: the show sometimes feels like it’s about deconstructing the underlying tropes of Sherlock Holmes, the ones that hype a pseudo-Enlightenment masculine empiricism at the expense of other, equally valid views.
When we believe that Morland abused Sherlock as a child, that he hates his son and thinks he’s worthless, we get to make Sherlock the 100%-right good guy. But when we see that, actually, Sherlock and Morland pulled away from each other, that Morland really does love his sons, and that Morland and Sherlock share the same problem of needing to be the first to run away to avoid the emotional pain of being abandoned–well, things get murky.
Maybe Sherlock is not right about his father, the same way he wasn’t initially right about Watson, or Bell, or Irene Adler. Maybe there is no way to be 100% “right” about other people, because the way you believe they are affects how they behave, and the way you believe you are affects the way you believe they are.
Maybe there is no objective inner “core” of yourself, let alone other people, that you can describe and predict with the accuracy of a Newtonian physics elastic collision. And maybe learning that will help Elementary‘s Sherlock Holmes become a better detective and happier person.
I guess we’ll see as the season wraps up, and I’m excited to find out.