The show has always been fascinated by Holmes’s callousness toward those who love him, his tendency to abandon and exploit them: like Bones, House, and other dark TV geniuses who are his unacknowledged offspring, Holmes sees connections but can’t connect. He’s like a Google algorithm, if it were sexy and wore dashing wool coats. Halfway through his best-man speech, he describes a case in which a number of lovelorn women have had one-night stands with a “ghost” who disappears the next day. Sherlock gathers these lonely hearts in an elegant auditorium, where he interrogates them, searching for a pattern. It’s only gradually, as the camera toggles from closeups to dramatic shots from above, and then abruptly to images of Sherlock in his office, that we recognize what we’re actually seeing: a poetic representation of a virtual experience—Holmes is online, meeting the women through a discussion board. When his conversations end, the women vanish, and he closes his laptop.
The show is at its best in such moments, these sequences that capture the semi-virtual, semi-real ways that we think, and feel, and meet, and connect today. It’s a rare attempt to make visible something that we take for granted: a new kind of cognition, inflected by passion, that allows strangers to think out loud, solving mysteries together.
via Emily Nussbaum: “Sherlock” and Its Audiences : The New Yorker.
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