There’s a funny sequence in Sherlock’s first episode back from its two-year hiatus. For those who don’t follow the show, the last episode before the break saw—spoiler alert!—Sherlock committing a fake suicide, but the audience sees him alive and well as the show ends. That reveal, necessary to assure the fans they didn’t suddenly witness a series finale, stirred a huge storm of speculation as to just how he managed to pull off such a huge con. That storm raged for the entire two years the show was off the air, seeing theories (and theorists) flying left and right, one after the other, all over the Internet.
The return episode lampooned those diehard fans not only by offering possible explanations spanning the entire spectrum of plausibility, from the practical and real to the wildly fake, but also including the fans as an actual part of the narrative. (The real solution, however, has purposely been left ambiguous.) These varying theories are framed as the different possibilities of Sherlock’s con according to his onscreen fan club, a very thinly-veiled representation of those who’ve spent the past couple of years going insane over trying to find out how he did it. The funny thing was that they’ve made it to the very show they’ve been obsessing over for so long, all becausethey were obsessed. Whether they’re proud of it, however, is a different question.
Last Friday on SmackDown (because of course this piece is about wrestling!), Batista, the #1 contender to the WWE World Heavyweight Champion, calls Daniel Bryan a mere “fan that was let into the locker room.” It’s the latest entry in the long list of corporate-approved insults designed to antagonize Bryan and build up his underdog legend until someone devises something new in this week’s episode of Raw. Wrestling fans know that what Batista said was not just an onscreen knock against Daniel Bryan the character, but also an indictment against vocal wrestling fans who think they know better than the people running the company (regardless of whether they actually do know better).
From WWE.com
Pro wrestling had always been a form of entertainment laced with subtext which pointed to real life, but it’s never been so deep in subtle winks to the camera until now—this particular period in its history, the so-called Reality Era, born of the fallout from CM Punk’s original pipe bomb. In this day and age, the fourth wall has been demolished and left barely rebuilt, and the secret of wrestling is no longer a secret. The business entered into this age, as many have written and recounted and parroted, because the power of the Internet simply made the move inevitable.
That’s how fans muscled their way into the story. It took a while, but I think we’re finally here. The Internet has finally managed to do what its inhabitants always thought it could do: make the fans’ collective voice just too damn loud to ignore. The Sherlock and the WWE fanbases respectively represent two different ends of the spectrum here: the former is only benign with its desperate curiosity, while the latter is hostile with its deafening clamor.
And both shows have chosen to respond to this devotion by assimilating the devotees into their respective universes. But there’s a catch here, almost worthy of Mephisto: the audience gets to be in the story, but the storytellers get to throw shade on the audience. I’m pretty sure that it’s gods looking down on mortals and laughing at their mortal feelings, and the shade is directly proportional to how loud, and how bitterly, the Earthlings talk.
But the Earthlings, for everything they’re worth, do not belong in the story.
Their interactions are crucial, but in no way does the volume of their buzzing make them deserving to be part of the action, whether it’s in the text or the subtext. Propping up the fans as a straw man—whether the storyteller is genuinely annoyed with them or is merely in the mood to humiliate them—is a lazy move that betrays the inability of the teller to come up with something better.
I’m sure there was a way to play on the different Sherlock theories without using and lightly mocking the fanbase. I have always campaigned that basing Daniel Bryan’s (or any underdog wrestler’s) odyssey on backstage politics—things which don’t embody the idealized narrative of sports and competition, the tenets of sports entertainment (you know, the product Vince McMahon is selling?)—is uninspired and unimaginative. These are all pieces of a different puzzle, pieces that don’t fit in these realms of fantasy.
And we hit the heart of the problem with that realization. Anything that brings in the audience, as the audience and no one else, to become a living, breathing part of the story suspends the suspension of disbelief. We’re now in here, we’re now part of this, and we can’t disbelieve ourselves. Such a notion inherently makes no sense. Why should it?
These are things that don’t need to happen overtly for you to feel their effects. Why was the main story of John Cena vs. Daniel Bryan for the WWE Championship at SummerSlam last year more compelling than the looming story of the McMahon family’s disapproval of Bryan’s main event aspirations? Why is the Sherlock/Irene Adler story in A Scandal in Belgravia a purely better watch than the entire game of speculation that was The Empty Hearse?
Easy. It’s because they were stories spun from the simplest, yet strongest themes of fiction. Sherlock and Irene were two people who were more enraptured with each other than they’d like to admit, and the chemistry that comes from such a mix is beautifully volatile. Cena and Bryan were telling the tale of David and Goliath, a tale that has been told in wrestling and sports infinity times over. They are simple because they are uncluttered, and they are strong because they stir the deepest of feelings.
Again, the fact that writers have to muddle the brew in the pursuit of being “clever” and “groundbreaking” proves that they’ve lost sight of what needs to be done, wandering too far. Something is only clever and groundbreaking when it works, when it doesn’t evoke frustration; a trail is only blazed when it leads somewhere.
Ironically, when the Daniel Bryan/Triple H feud culminates, the chances are high that Bryan will come out victorious. When that happens—and it’s the only logical route to take, what’s best for business—it’ll be vindication for the fans; not only is Bryan good enough to be champion, but it will also mean that the fans were right about him. Meanwhile, The Empty Hearse will remain in a vacuum; the mockery and existence of the fictional Sherlock fan club still means nothing in the bigger picture and will continue to mean nothing. That is, of course, unless Anderson snaps and commits his own crime.
But the truth is all of that should’ve been immaterial. Tell better stories, and nobody will have to drag a fan into anything.