If you didn't spend last night feeding fistfuls of lukewarm spaghetti to your lover at a fine chain restaurant, or throwing down a tarp in front of a fireplace and setting up the equivalent of a Cold Stone Creamery toppin' bar to incorporate into your lovemaking with your significant other, then you were best off watching Elementary, which steered clear of conventional Valentine's Day themes to center on the two kinds of love that touch me the deepest: unconditional filial loyalty, and the weird "meeting of the minds" vibe that characterizes Sherlock and Watson.
Sherlock, in a teary stream of whispers, told Watson he was better with her, more focused, and maybe he'd eventually figure out why. While it was all in a soap opera tone that I doubt the show would have used if Watson was being played by, say, John Krazinski, I'm glad the writers cleared the air about Watson not being an official sober companion anymore and essentially lying to him. I'm glad they made the point that he encouraged her to move on while still admitting that he'd like her in his life. I'm ECSTATIC that they are Watson and Sherlock, crime-solvers, now, 300 episodes in. But as much as I wanted to just squee out and enjoy the season's most heartfelt moment (embedded in an episode where JLM had previously thrown tennis balls at her and chased her across the house posing as a masked invader), I felt really vigilant, as a critic, about detecting and therefore calling out any romantic threads present in the exchange. Because that mustn't ever, ever, ever happen.
It feels desperately important to me that Watson and Sherlock in their male-female incarnations never take on a romantic angle for reasons that are hard to articulate but hey, that's my job, so here they are as syllogistic treatise if you will:
1. It's very rare that a platonic female character appears in any kind of "buddy" genre TV or film. If there are two friends who stay friends all the way to the end, 99.9 percent of the time they are either both male or both female.
TO READ MORE: http://www.tv.com/news/elementary-details-review-why-watson-and-sherlock-can-never-hook-up-30628/
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