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This scene also — in an episode which deliberately hearkened back to the show’s earliest days — recalls the scene at the end of the pilot where Clark daydreams that Lana has visited him to give him a dance she had promised him at a homecoming he never made it to. When you realise that in “Homecoming” Clark gave Lois a romantic fantasy he had nurtured as a teenager the degree of love implicit in the act is almost breathtaking; — in the pilot he had wanted acceptance and love to be bestowed on him by his High School crush, in “Homecoming” he wants to bestow those things on the woman he loves. He loves for the joy of loving, and he feels free to do it. This scene is not just about making up for all the dances Clark has missed with Lois for various reasons; it’s also a culmination of the emotional journey he has been on since the show’s very first episode — the journey to love and be loved in return.
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I know it’s been a couple of days but I still haven’t come to terms with the emotional/aesthetic devastation wrought by the BAFTA results. Andrew Scott, you guys. He’s single-handedly dismantling the credibility of acting as an art form. And he subsists on the blood of infants.
Well, like. Ben Whishaw, Idris Elba, Romola Garai, Cillian Murphy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ruth Wilson, Matt Smith, Michelle Dockery, Sophie Turner, Rebecca Hall, Lara Pulver, Elizabeth Olsen, Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Cate Blanchett, Jared Harris, Rooney Mara…
underdogfanny: You surely doesn't know what you're talking about when you say Andrew Scott can't act. What's really your standard for good acting? Because if what he had done with Moriarty was not a exceptional acting then I think I should give up on my filmmaking career...
If Andrew Scott is your standard for exceptional acting, I don’t know, maybe you should.
I feel like you really should watch Young Americans because it is really glorious when Ian Somerhalder’s character falls in love with a woman dressed as a man and convinces himself he must be gay.
latxcvi: What has Andrew Scott done now? I mean, besides be a terrible actor.
HE WON A BAFTA. AND HE WAS THE ONLY PERSON ON SHERLOCK TO DO SO. LIKE.
Anonymous: wow get out of the andrew scott tracked tag, if you don't like him fine it is your opinion but shut up waving it in front of people who do and shooting down other people who defend him by saying it was a waste of time for them to defend him? i really don't get people like you but i guess this was a waste of time too
Don’t tell me what to do, anon, this is a very trying time for me!!!
Anonymous: don't be so rude. Don't tag your bitching
I’ll tag whatever I want to tag and you’ll just have to live in that reality.
I don’t often talk about acting but Andrew Scott’s turn as Moriarty deserves special mention as one of the most cringe-worthy, embarrassing performances I have ever seen from a television actor. His decision to play Moriarty as a campy and flamboyant Doctor Who-style villain clashed with Benedict Cumberbatch’s still and serious approach to Sherlock and with the whole tone of the show. The whole overarching threat of Moriarty disintegrated in the moment that Andrew Scott revealed himself in that final scene of “The Great Game”: a character who up until that point had been presented by the show as a sinister, mysterious, shadow-dwelling figurehead of evil was reduced in an instant to a clownish buffoon by one man’s acting choices. There is a way to play a theatrical and over-the-top villain and make it genuinely threatening — but that requires an understanding of theatricality: of timing, and drama, and stillness. If Andrew Scott understood any of these things, if he understood that acting is about inhabiting a character rather than displaying a set of tics — and having watched him in other things I can say with a relative degree of certainty that he does not — he could have turned in a performance which would have engaged me in the relationship between Holmes and Moriarty; instead I am left with this sense of faint embarrassment on Sherlock’s behalf that he has been saddled with such an impotent ‘arch-nemesis’.
THEME BY PARTI
