Amazing Spider-Man #17

The Return of the Green Goblin!

Villain:
The Green Goblin

Supporting cast:
J. Jonah Jameson, Betty Brant, Flash Thompson, Liz Allan
+ Liz Allan’s Dad, “Seymour”, “Charlie”, and night club staff.

Guest Stars:
Human Torch, Dorrie Evans

Observations

Page 3 “Ixnay! Here comes puny Parker”
This is Pig-Latin; a game where you put the first letter or consonant sound at the end of the word and add a meaningless syllable. (Iderspay-anmay iderspay-anmay, oesday atwhay erevay away iderspay ancay.) As with rhyming slang, certain Pig-Latin words seem to have become slang in their own right. Seymour is simply saying “Nix!” — stop talking everyone! It’s a fairly childish thing for high school seniors to be doing.

P 10 “If the club’s a success that web-spinning clown could become as popular as the Beatles.”
This comic came out in or about August 1964 — just before the Beatles completed their second US tour with a two-night engagement at (where else?) Forest Hills Stadium,

Page 11: Avenue Dinner Club
Liz Allan’s father owns a “dinner club” — a restaurant with an a cabaret stage. Liz has not previously been represented as particularly wealthy.

Perhaps the “Avenue Club” is on 71st Ave?

Flash refers to Liz’s dad as “Mr Brant”, but this is a simple lettering error.

Page 11 — “Bite your tongue, Seymour”
A boy in a bow-tie has been a fairly consistent member of Flash Thompson’s entourage since the comic started, but this is the first time he has been named. The name Seymour, in conjunction with the habit of wearing a bow-tie to school, suggests that he is a little bit posh and preppy. (Hold on to that thought for few more issues.) Later continuity has given him the name Seymour O’Reilly.

The Goblin’s Bag of Tricks
The Green Goblin is substantially re-invented this issue, with a more explicitly Halloween themed arsenal:

• Electrically charged frog — Breaks Spider-Man’s webbing 
• Goblin sparks — We don’t find out exactly what they do, but Spider-Man thinks they are “pretty dangerous” 
• An electrically activated mechanical bat — Gives out black smoke to blind Spider-Man 
• Jack o’lanterns — Low yield explosives 
• Ghost — Creates an airtight seal around the Human Torch 
• Crescent Moon — We see him load this up, but don’t find out what it does. 
• Exhaust from glider – Creates black smoke which stops the Torch from breathing. 
• The Goblin’s flying machine is said to be a bat glider on page 18 a goblin glider on page 14, and a jet powered goblin glider on page 2. It’s definitely nothing to do with witches, though.

The “thought balloon” is one of the unique features of the comic book. Prose novelists are generally advised to only look inside one character’s head at a time. If the reader is allowed to know what Harry thinks about Hermione, she shouldn’t — certainly not in the same chapter — be told what Hermione thinks of Harry. But comic book readers find it perfectly natural to have a window into their heroes’ minds; to eavesdrop on everyone’s internal monologues at once. 

Perhaps comic book writers find themselves using internal monologue and soliloquy because so many stories involve secret identities and dual personalities. Or perhaps superheroes keep on having secret identities because the thought balloon lends itself so well to ironic clashes between public actions and private thoughts?

It is hardly possible to think of Spider-Man without thought balloons. Take away his worry, his self-pity, the celebrated “problems of Peter Parker” — all expressed entirely through thought balloons — and all you’ve got left is a strong kid who likes to go out in his nightwear. It is the visual grammar of comics which allows his conflicted personality to express itself. 

Spider-Man is not just two people; he is three people. He is shy, nerdy, Peter Parker; and he is also boastful, arrogant Spider-Man. (Peter Parker looks an awful lot like Steve Ditko and Spider-Man sounds more like Stan Lee with every issue.) Over the past year — ever since Parker stopped wearing his glasses — he has started to reach a golden mean between the two sides. Peter has become a good deal less anti-social, and much less whiny. Spider-Man has become less of swaggering braggart; his playground sarcasm has evolved into genuine wit. There have been scenes — when Aunt May and Betty Brant are teasing him at the end of the Annual — in which Peter Parker actually comes across as a decent human being. 

But however cool Peter Parker mostly pretends to be; and however funny Spider-Man usually is; beneath the surface is a third voice which only we readers hear. It's the real voice of Spider-Man which speaks through thought balloons and asides. “It’s not fair.” “Everything I do goes wrong.” “Why don’t I have any friends?” “Why is everyone against me?” It’s this nagging voice which hates being Spider-Man, which wants to throw the costume away, and which, in the Sinister Six story literally wished Peter Parker’s powers away and rendered Spider-Man physically helpless.  

The more consciously you repress an emotion, the more unconscious power that emotion will have over you. The more determined Spider-Man is not to be the kid from Amazing Fantasy #15 the more the voice of Puny Parker will nag him. “I wish I’d never gotten my powers.” “I wish there were no such thing as my costume.” “I wish I was a normal teenager.” “Some day they’ll be sorry”. 

So: there is only one story which could ever bring the tragedy of Spider-Man to an end. It would be the story of how the Spider-Man/Parker gestalt finally silenced the child Peter. At which point, The Amazing Spider-Man would stop being strictly the history of a boy and become the history of a man. 

The Amazing Spider-Man issues #16, #17 and #18 sets out to be that story. Individually, they are three of the best episodes of the original run. Considered as a triptych, they are are the definitive Spider-Man tale. In the remaining months of their collaboration, Lee and Ditko will produce at least six bona fide classics, and the single most iconic page in the history of superhero comics., but they will never do anything quite this good again. And neither will anybody else.

The first part of the triptych, The Return of the Green Goblin is very nearly a farce, built around a mounting series of misunderstandings between Peter Parker, Spider-Man and the five characters who know him in both roles. Each lie or misunderstanding creates a worse one, until, at the moment of maximum confusion, an out-of-the-blue denouement cuts the Gordian knot. 

As a piece of plotting, it is very nearly perfect. 

Flash Thompson, who hates and despises Peter Parker, is Spider-Man’s biggest fan. This has been a given almost since the comic started: this issue, he actually starts a Spider-Man Fan Club. Liz Allan wants Peter to go to the club meeting, because she like him, and also because it will annoy Flash. Flash wants Peter to stay away, because he's a nobody from dullsville. Although it’s a proper meeting in a proper night-club with tuxedos and press reporters, Flash persists in acting as if it’s a schoolboy pow-wow in a tree house. (“This is my fan club. I didn’t invite puny Parker to come.”) But he is desperately hoping Spider-Man will attend. Only we and Peter see the joke. 

Betty wants Peter to take her to the meeting: although quite why she wants to go to a fan-event when she can’t bear thinking about Spider-Man is never tackled. J. Jonah Jameson also wants Peter Parker to go and take photos; and poor Aunt May wants him to take the mysterious Mary Jane Watson. (It seems that M.J “just loves Spider-Man”, which, in the light of what is going to happen over the next few years, is just as well.) But Peter can’t go with Betty or Liz or Jonah or Mary because he has decided that he will indeed be there as Spider-Man. So Betty — who by this point has no discernible personality left apart from her jealousy — assumes that he is standing her up for Liz.

Just to add to the fun, Spider-Man’s arch rival Johnny Storm turns up. Johnny, whose identity is not a secret, can openly take his girlfriend Dorrie Evans, and chat to her about being the Human Torch, which is slightly rubbing salt in Spider-Man’s hang-ups. Finally, Spider-Man’s newest enemy, The Green Goblin, decides to gatecrash the party to fight Spider-Man. The Goblin has no particular motivation: he’s coming to the club to fight Spider-Man because, as a super-villain, that’s what he does. 

The cover is a subtle variation on Ditko’s favourite motif: the crowd looking up at the hero. At the top of the page the Torch, the Goblin and Spider-Man are engaged in a chaotic melee; while at the bottom Jameson, Liz, Betty, Flash and some less familiar faces look up with various levels of shock. This is a story about a fight: but it's also a story about how the people in Spider-Man’s life react to the fight. At no point in the story is Peter allowed to put on the mask and simply become Spider-Man: in every panel we are reminded that he is Peter Parker as well. This is nicely underlined on the first page: Peter Parker sits at his school desk, with a huge thought-balloon above his head, showing him battling the Green Goblin as Spider-Man three issues ago. He is Peter Parker on the outside; but he is Spider-Man on the inside. Peter Parker’s life literally encloses Spider-Man’s. 

Amazing Spider-Man #17 is probably the first story plotted wholly by Ditko without input from Lee. We complained that stories like Marked for Destruction by Doctor Doom and Unmasked by Doctor Octopus were spoiled by Stan Lee’s tendency to regard the “plot” as something you gallop through to get to the “action”. Very good ideas like Flash Thompson pretending to be Spider-Man and Mysterio making Spider-Man doubt his sanity were wound up in the first ten or eleven pages, so that the second half of the comic could be wholly given over to a fight. The Return of the Green Goblin does to some extent follow the Stan Lee formula — a lot of the plot does happen in the first half, and the fight does break out on page 12. But Ditko — assuming he is indeed the onlie begatter of the episode — continues to ratchet up the Parker-centric confusion all the way through the Spider-centric fight. All the set-ups in the first half have pay-offs in the second; several of them have consequences over the next few issues. 

We might have expected that, once the Green Goblin arrived on the scene, the Human Torch would have joined the fight on Spider-Man’s side. But Ditko chooses to make the situation more complicated. The Torch rushes through the fight to stop a separate crime (three burglars are trying to rob the safe). As a result, he gets webbed by Spider-Man, who was aiming at the Goblin. 

Two consecutive panels from Spider-Man 17...

Note how Ditko pulls the "camera"
 back to show the scene from
Jonah and Betty's view point.

Then, Spider-Man hears Liz Allan uttering the immortal words “I wonder why Peter Parker is never around when Spider-Man appears” and realizes that he will have to make a quick change back to Peter Parker to allay her suspicions. Peter’s hair is mussed up (because of the fight) and Liz (who we know isn’t much of a respecter of personal space) slicks it back for him, producing the expected fireworks between her and Flash. But then Ditko (in a single panel) pulls off an audacious change of perspective; pulling the “camera” back so we see Jonah and Betty looking at Liz and Peter — from which point of view it appears that Liz is romantically running her hands through Peter’s hair. (“Oh, no!” thinks Jealous Betty.) 

So: the Torch is put out of action by the Goblin’s anti-Human-Torch smoke; Betty is crying; Jonah is mad with Peter for not bringing a camera; Flash is mad with Liz for flirting with Peter; Spider-Man is getting the worst of the fight with Gobby… And completely out of the blue comes the overheard phone call. And what a good job that the maitre d’ narrates the call for our benefit as well as Spider-Man’s. “His Aunt? Suffered another heart attack? Asking for him at the hospital?”

This could have come across as a bit of a cop-out. The romantic entanglement around Betty and Peter and Liz and Flash, to say nothing about J.J.J’s annoyance that his favourite photographer has once again turned up without a camera, are left unresolved. Spider-Man simply walks away. But in fact, it is the perfect ending to a perfect episode. Every single complication has arisen because Spider-Man is also Peter Parker; so at the final moment, Spider-Man leaves the fight because Peter Parker has to be somewhere else. 

Possibly my favourite panel in possibly my favourite comic-book comes straight after Spider-Man has left the building. Jameson is rushing back to the Bugle offices

“We’re putting out an extra!” he tells Betty Brant “I’ll tell the whole world what a coward Spider-Man really turned out to be.”

“And I feel like telling the world what a fool I am…for thinking Peter Parker ever cared about me!” thinks Betty Brant. 

A lot of narrative is crammed into that one tiny panel. Jameson is going to tell the world Spider-Man is a coward; Betty wants to tell the world that Peter Parker is a cad. The readers can see the irony: that they have both leaped to the wrong conclusion — about the same guy. Jameson is happy — with a ridiculous grin; Betty is sad — wiping her eye with a handkerchief. Jameson is all motion, Betty is still. And the frame defines what the next two issues will be about. The combined bad opinions of Betty and Jonah will bring Peter Parker to the brink of quitting.

The famous theme tune of the 1960s Spider-Man TV show contained the line:

“Wealth and fame he’s ignored: 

Action is his reward”

This is just about the wrongest thing anyone has ever said. Peter Parker’s relationship with J. Jonah Jameson indicates that he is at least somewhat interested in wealth. And he is intensely concerned about fame. He goes to the fan-club meeting to please Flash; and because the irony of the situation appeals to him; but mostly, he goes because he wants to be popular. “This is my big chance! If I make a good impression in there maybe people will stop distrusting me and start liking me the way they like the Torch.” For him, life is a great big performance: he markets his image to newspapers, he began his career as a variety act; in the last few months he has tried to break into movies and the circus. Doing the right thing is not it’s own reward; neither is action. What Peter Parker wants is for people to like him.

But when it comes to it, and he has to choose between doing the right thing and doing the heroic thing, it’s a literal no-brainer. He doesn’t agonize or soliloquize: he acts. He would rather be a nephew than a superhero. It barely even amounts to a choice. Spider-Man runs out on a fight so Peter Parker can be with Aunt May. 

But having done the right thing, the whining child-voice immediately starts to accuse him. Whining-Peter doesn’t care that Spider-Man has done what is morally right: he is concerned about his public standing. “Everyone thinks I’m yellow and I’ve probably lost any fans I might have had.” He asks not what good Spider-Man has done for the world, but what profit the role has brought to him “A lot of GOOD it does me to be Spider-Man!” And he petulantly throws the costume across the room. “Spider-Man…sometimes I wish I had never heard that name!”

And so, we are right back where we started. The very first panel of Amazing Spider-Man #1 showed Peter Parker throwing his costume across the room, crying “My Spider-Man costume! I wish there was no such thing!”  And now he's doing it again. "Why don't things ever seem to turn out right for me? Why do I seem to hurt people now matter how I try not to? Is this prince I must alway pay for being...Spider-Man?"

Costume thrown on floor; head in hands; dark shadow: 
the end of Spider-Man?
from Amazing Spider-Man #17

Stan Lee has only handed the reins to Steve Ditko for one issue, and Ditko has come very close to destroying the character. Is there any way of moving forward with a hero who quite clearly doesn’t want to be a hero any more?

Deflection

I am in favor of using words correctly. I don’t think that you should say “depressed” if what you mean is “sad”; I don’t think you should say “bipolar” if what you mean is “moody”; and I definitely don’t think you should say “autistic” if what you mean is “shy.” It’s insulting and patronizing to people who are actually depressed or bipolar; and it’s also a kind of linguistic inflation. (If you say “depression” when you mean “sadness” you have to make up a new word for when “depression” is what you actually do mean.) It would have been better if we’d never started using “poxy” to mean “small” or “lame” to mean “inadequate” or “psychotic” to mean cross. In fact, you probably shouldn’t say “surreal” if what you mean “silly” or “existential” if what you mean is “gloomy” or “random” if what you mean is…whatever kids mean by “random” nowadays. 

But I don’t want to go too far in that direction. Otherwise I’ll turn into one of those boring people who says that “decimate” only ever means “divide by ten” and that “gay” only ever means “brightly colored” and that “literally” can never mean “figuratively”. And that’s literally the thin end of the wedge. 

I believe I am correct in saying that “mad” no longer has any medical meaning, but does retain a legal meaning. And it definitely has a lot of colloquial meanings. I’ll get mad if you are rude about Star Wars because I’m on mad on Star Wars. The original meaning of “crazy” was “cracked”: if I say that my garden has crazy paving, I’m using it in the older sense. It was applied to people by analogy. (I remember the original Star Wars craze: people went crazy about it.) 

If my friend tells me that he has met and spoken with a fairy (which, as previously mentioned, at least three of my friends have in fact done) there are basically three possibilities

1: There really are fairies, and I need to expand my view of reality to encompass such creatures or 

2: My friend is lying, or telling fairy stories, with or without the encouragement of Mr Conan Doyle. 

3: My friend is mad, crazy, delusional or hallucinating. 

If I went with 3, I don't think I would be providing an amateur diagnosis, or patronizing my other friends who have to cope with mental conditions every day. I think that mad, cracked, crazy, or two land cards short of a Magic deck is a word we use to describe people who see stuff which isn't actually there. 

"What do you think about the people you say claim to have really met fairies, Andrew?” 

“I think that one of them was describing a spiritual experience — ‘In a particular location, I felt something I cannot explain, and “fairies” is the name I am going to give to that experience’ If he’d come from a different background, he might have said that he’d encountered the Blessed Virgin. I think that one of them was talking about faith: I think that fairies form part of his neo-pagan belief system. I think the other one had done a lot of drugs.” 

It seems to me that there comes a point at which a person — a politician, say — denies facts — about vaccination, say, or climate change, or the number of people who attended an inauguration ceremony — to such an extend that the rest of us are entitled to say “Either you are lying, or your are crazy.” 

*

The famously sane Tony Blair used to claim that it didn’t matter whether a particular policy was “left wing”, “right wing”, “conservative” or “liberal”; as Prime Minister he would do “whatever worked”. 

This is, of course, bullshit.

You can only tell if something has "worked" if you know what result you wanted; and the result you want depends greatly on whether you are left wing, right wing, conservative or liberal.  Someone might think that a law and order policy worked because it resulted in lots of criminals being punished; someone else might think that it was a failure because there was no overall reduction in the amount of crime. You might think that schools sports policy worked because Team Little Britain won lots of medals in the Tokyo Olympics; I might think it was a failure because hardly any non-elite athletes were still taking exercise ten years after they left school.

But “whatever works” does admit the possibility that something might not work. In theory, we can look at what did happen, and say "I don't think that what you did worked".

*

The new American dictator said yesterday that he was in favour of torturing people because "torture works". It isn’t immediately clear what “works” means. Does it mean that if someone knows a secret they will definitely and automatically tell it to you provided you hurt them badly enough? Or does it just mean that if the goodies are doing some torturing, the baddies will stop doing so much terroristing? "If only we had been torturing people in the 1990s, the Twin Towers attack wouldn't have happened; once we started torturing people after 2001, the London bombing didn't happen. Or if it did, it would have been worse without the torture. Or it only happened because we weren't doing enough torturing. Or something."

Someone is said to have asked Auberon Waugh how a horrible person like him could possibly claim to be a Christian. "But if I wasn't a Christian" he replied "Think how much worse I would be."

A man who tells jokes for a living cited the famous “ticking bomb” thought experiment on twitter, in the following terms: 

Your baby is tied to a timebomb. 

You have the terrorist. 

He tells you you have 1 hour. 

Do you torture him to find your baby or let it die?

He got extremely cross when anyone suggested that this was a silly scenario: you wouldn’t have a single terrorist, there wouldn’t be a single piece of information that would save the victim, and you have no way of knowing if the person you are torturing is a coward (who will blurt out anything to avoid being hurt) or, a fanatic who positively wants to be hurt in order to be martyr.

I proposed a couple of alternative scenarios:

Your baby is tied to a bomb. 

The terrorist is a colossal pervert. 

Do you let him spend 1 hour with your 12 year old son or let the baby die?

Your baby is tied to a bomb. 

You have 99 innocent people and 1 terrorist.

Do you torture all 100 of them or let the baby die?

Your baby was tied to a bomb by a Jehovah's Witness. 

Do you arrest and torture all 226,000 Jehovah's Witnesses or let the baby die?

Of the 226,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses 1% give in and scream, "I'll tell you where the baby is." 

Which of the 2260 confessions do you follow up?

There is nothing wrong with asking purely hypothetical questions; there is nothing wrong with thought experiments. "Don't be silly, I'm not on the moon" is not a very good answer to the question "If you dropped a feather and a one kilogram weight on the moon, which would hit the ground first? I suppose the ticking bomb fantasy establishes whether your objection to torture is a moral one, or a practical one: do you say "No, I wouldn't torture the guy, even if it totally would save the little'un life?" or "Yes, if in some magic way, torturing the guy would get my baby back, then I would torture him.".

But it occurred to me that the scenario we really needed to consider would be something like:

Your baby is tied to a bomb. 

Would you sacrifice a white goat to Aphrodite in order to bring your baby home in a golden chariot pulled by winged horses?

To which the answer is: yes, if sacrificing the goat would summons up the magic chariot, yes I would. But it wouldn’t. So it’s a silly question. 

In these scenarios, it's always a Really Bad Guy who is getting tortured; not a basically pretty harmless guy who happens to know the codes. And one cannot escape the suspicion that when someone says "torture works" they are adding, under their breath "and even if it doesn't, the really bad guy had it coming to them." Torquemada, Matthew Hopkins and Donald Trump all know in advance that Jews, women and Muslims are "baddies", and the search for heretics, witches and terrorists provides a pretext to hurt bad people.

If your baby really was tied to a time bomb, and if you really did torture a terrorist, or a suspected terrorist, or a Brazilian electrician who looked as if he might be a terrorist, and if the guy holds out under torture; or tells you that they’re on Dantooine when they’re really on Yavin… and one way or another the bomb goes off and the baby dies…

Everyone who believed in torture would continue to believe that torture worked. 

Because the baby would quite definitely still be alive. The photos of the pathetic little corpse being taken out of the burning building is FAKE NEWS produced my MAINSTREAM MEDIA which is run BY cultural Marxists who yes want the terrorists TO win.

If I saw some very powerful people actually looking at the dead baby, and saying "the baby is still alive", I would say that they were either mad or liars, and you would say that things weren't always as black and white as we Trotskyites like to pretend. You would write long think pieces in the Guardian about the interesting controversy of the exploding baby.

And years later, the story about the baby chained to the time bomb who saved by the torturing would be one of those things which everybody knows, like Alfred and the Cakes and the school that sang baa baa green street and weapons of mass destruction. Everyone would say that horrible as torture is and obviously we’re not in favour of it and it’s a great shame that we inadvertently castrated that kid whose dad had a name quite similar to the person who almost definitely knew something about an outrage that hadn’t actually happened yet...but you have to admit, torture stopped the baby from exploding.

And I'll point to the pathetic little gravestone and the autopsy report, and you'll say “Ah, still  going on about the dead baby. It’s political correctness gone mad. Fake news, fake news. Social Justice Warriors always lie.” 

*

Fortunately, no-one has attached any bombs to any babies. But my country is about to sacrifice its place in the world on a Quixotic whim. And it will be impossible ever to ask the question "Did Brexit work? Did it do what it was supposed to do?" 

If as expected, Theresa May lights the blue touch paper next month, then for decades to come, every media outlet but one will contain nothing but stories about how everything is rosy and wonderful: stories about factories opening, stories about people with new jobs, stories about nasty Polish restaurants being replaced with proper 1950s English cafes that sell burned steak and blue nun wine. 

And if anyone says that this isn’t true — that inflation is high, the pound is sinking, people don’t have jobs, every media outlet but one will say “That’s what you would expect the remoaners to say. Why do they run this country down? Why do they feel it necessary? Don’t quote statistics at me. You can prove anything you want with statistics. Anyone can SEE the country is doing brilliantly. Except Social Justice Warriors, who always lie.” 

And if, by some chance, sanity prevails, we will have another 50 years in which people stare at big, yellow, curved bananas and say “of course, you aren’t allowed to buy curved bananas any more. It’s political correctness gone mad."

(It is just about possible to imagine the Remain camp, ten years down the line saying "well, that wasn't nearly as bad as we feared." It is impossible to imagine the Leave camp, even in the face of Armageddon, saying "We're afraid that didn't work as well as we'd hoped.")

Which, in a sense, makes life a bit easier. 

We don’t, in fact, know whether the September 11th attacks would have been averted if some CIA officers had put some black guys balls in a vice in a camp in Cuba. To know what would have happened, child? No-one is ever told that. But we still know what is moral; what is right; what is wrong.

We don't know what works, because the crazy people will see whatever they choose to see. But we know what is moral. What is right and wrong. Big people don’t hit little people. You can’t have sex with anyone without their consent. The rich help the poor. You don’t hurt other people, however much you might sometimes want to.

In a “post truth” world, that may be all there is to hold on to. 

*

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Donald Trump: I may not like his policies, but he’s no different from any other right wing politician. 

But a man who said the sorts of things that Donald Trump has said would not be merely a right-wing politician. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. 

You must make your choice. Either this man is genetically superior to the rest of the human race, or else he is a madman or something worse. 

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can believe everything he says because he’s such a smart guy. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being merely a right-wing politician. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. 

Sherlock, redux

Sherlock Holmes is about the idea that you can start with an absurd set of data and work backwards, through a series of logical steps, to a completely reasonable starting place. (Many people have spotted that Sigmund Freud had roughly the same idea at roughly the same time.) Neither Freudian nor Holmsian methods would work in real life: Sherlock admits as much, though Sigmund never does. The cases that Holmes solves (or at any rates the cases that Watson bothers to write up) are exclusively those cases which Holmes methodology happens to work for. Which generally means closed-systems with something weird — or as Holmes always says, singular — about them. Give him a guy whose been killed in a remote country house after swearing he saw the ghost of a hell hound, and Holmes has a fair chance of sorting things out. Pull John Doe’s body out of the Thames three months after it got there, and boring old forensics are a better bet. 

Deduction is where you start from a premise and work out what the conclusion will be. Starting from a conclusion and working back to the starting point is induction. You would have thought Holmes, or at any rate Watson, or at any rate Doyle, would have known that. 

Not all the stories work: but in the ones that do, there is a real joy in seeing Holmes impose order on chaos; in saying “Of course: the club which you can only join if you have a particular kind of hair; or the bedside drawer with the hair of two previous occupants in it now makes complete sense. Clever Sherlock.” There is a similar joy in reading Freud’s case histories. Who cares if he never actually cured anyone. 

Holmes is a remarkable chap, obviously; Watson calls him the best and wisest man he ever met, which is not insignificantly what Plato said about Socrates. But he isn’t a superhero. Part of the point of the stories is that his deductions are plausible; anyone could do it if they kept their wits about them. We are inclined to think that Watson is a bit of a twit for not keeping up. A detective story wouldn’t be worth reading if the detective were that good. Ideally, Gentle Reader should get to the conclusion just after Holmes and just before Watson.

Holmes often has information that we and Watson don’t have, which a classical Whodunnit writer would regard as cheating.

The Moffat / Gatiss  Sherlock TV series has always been a slightly odd confection. It uses the now-superhuman inductive skills of Holmes in much the same way that the now-infallible navigation of the TARDIS is used in Doctor Who: as a pretext for (on a good day) brilliant, non-linear narratives and (on a bad day) for just abandoning cause-and-effect storytelling as a lost cause. Cumberbatch plays a kind of parody or race-memory of Jeremy Brett’s Holmes, which was itself a parody of Holmes as he is in Study in Scarlet and hardly anywhere else: crazy, misanthropic and not yet humanized by the arrival of Robin the Boy Wonder. It correctly spots that the real fun in Sherlock was not the bobbies and the fog and the hansom cabs; or the funny pipe and the funny hat and the slippers. It was all about the logic and the mysteries. 

But convincing, Doylish mysteries — crazy end-points to which Holmes can provide convincing back-stories — are hard to write. Not impossible: the sub-plot about the dead son in the car in the Six Thatchers is the sort of thing I would like to have seen more of. But Moffat and Gatiss increasingly fall back on the lazy writers' worst cliche: the clever guy solving bizarre riddles which an even cleverer guy is consciously setting for him. 

Doyle’s Moriarty is a brilliant man turned into a brilliant criminal. Moffat's Moriarty is simply a lunatic. From Don Quixote to Hannibal Lecter, fictional lunatics can be the subjects of interesting stories. But they are a very lazy plot device. Why is he is doing this? Why is he going to all that trouble? How did he escape from the escape proof prison? He doesn’t have to have a reason. He’s a lunatic. Moffat’s Moriarty could very easily be imagined painting clown make up on his face and releasing poisoned balloons over Gotham City. 

The Final Problem (TV episode) produced newspaper headlines about “How the TV phenomenon became an annoying self parody” and “Missing persons inquiry launched as Sherlock vanishes up own arse”. But it seemed to me to have very much the same strengths and weaknesses as all the other episodes. It sets up a very interesting villain whose only function turns out to be to set up problems for and experiment on Sherlock Holmes. In a proper story, some believable chain of events would lead to a situation where Holmes has to choose between killing his brother Mycroft and killing his best friend Watson. Having a super-villain put them in a room and say “You must now choose between killing your brother Mycroft and killing your best friend Watson” is barely a story at all. It’s more like a Dungeons & Dragons puzzle. (The solution is straight out of the Hunger Games.) The deductive power of Holmes and Moriarty and Mycroft and the Mysterious and Unexpected Villain Who is Even Cleverer Than Any Of Them is not something that any normal person could keep up with.

The cleverness of Holmes has become another manifestation of our old friend The Plot. Anything that the writers want to happen can happen because Holmes can make it happen because he is so clever. Add a non-player character who is as clever as he is, and then another one, and then a third one, and what you are watching is no longer detective fiction; it's a competition to see who has the biggest Sonic Screwdriver.

"Annoying self-parody" isn't a bad description of the whole project actually: maybe I'd have gone for "clever, engaging but annoying self-parody."

Most of us now expect a TV series to have some sort of forward momentum. Gone are the days when the BBC could put all three seasons of Star Trek tapes in box, shuffle them up, pick one out at random, show it on a Monday night and no-one would notice the difference. We now expect characters to die and get married and have babies (not necessarily in that order), partly because soap opera has replaced the novel as the dominant genre, and partly because verisimilitude. If our hero doesn't have the scars from the end of last week's thrilling adventure at the beginning of this week's thrilling adventure we won't be able to suspend our disbelief.   

Sherlock Holmes had a brother. He had an arch-enemy and a landlady. These characters are so peripheral to the canon that we could very nearly say that they don’t exist. Moffat and Gatiss create entirely new characters with similar names, and present us with something that superficially feels a good deal like classic Holmes: Mycroft is clever and mysterious, Moriarty is evil, Watson misses the point and writes it up on his blog, and Mrs Hudson makes them all a cup of tea. But once you have shouted “go” and allowed events to start happening they stop being clever 21st century takes on 19th century ciphers and end up as the sum total of the last thirteen episodes. Which gets us very quickly to a Sherlock which has nothing much to do with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. You may or may not have a problem with that. 

A similar process killed off the Marvel Comics “Ultimates” line. Issue #1 of Ultimate Spider-Man re-imagines Peter Parker as a 15 year old computer nerd from 2001; and we all said “wow, you’ve come up with a precise 21st century analogy for what made Spider-Man so great in the 1960s”. By issue #75, New York has been destroyed, J. Jonah Jameson is a goodie and Spider-Man is member of the X-Men, dating Kitty Pryde, on the run from SHIELD and dead. You can barely recognize him as Spider-Man any more; and the comic is just as hard to "jump aboard" as the fatally compromised Marvel Universe version. But the alternative is a 1950s sit-com where nothing ever happens and no-one ever gets any older.

I suppose that Sherlock was always going to be the kind of series that some people would over-love, and, therefore, when it started to disappoint, the kind of series that some people would over-hate. I never loved it that much (apart from the Victorian special, which was genuinely clever) but I never hated it that much, either. It is clear that Stephen Moffat can only write one character: you could swap the Cumberbatch Sherlock with the equally interchangeable Smith and Capaldi Doctors and no-one would really notice. But that one character is a lot off fun. Matt Smith was my favorite non-canonical Doctor Who, after all. The clash of Cumberbatch’s over-the-top theatricality with Martin Freeman’s toned down naturalism (so underdone it’s practically not there at all) makes for consistently good scenes. The two of them would be riveting in any context: apart, obviously, from the Hobbit. 

Kudos to Gatiss and Moffat for realizing that Holmes could be taken out of Victorian London and still be Holmes. But how typical that when the smog and the urchins and the rats were cleared away, what was found to be left was not a man who cleverly worked backwards from the end of the story to its beginning; nor even a man eschewing emotion but guided by rationality. No: what Sherlock Holmes turned out to really be about was the friendship between Sherlock and John.

It’s like one of those trailers where some Hollywood luvvie has been persuaded to appear in a low budget docudrama about William Ramsay and the discovery of the nobel gasses.

“Oh,  but it’s not about chemistry” they always say “It’s really about love.”

There is a thing which Moffat and Gatiss do: and Sherlock Season 4 is Moffat and Gatiss continuing to do that thing. Disappointment, or even anger, seems curiously misplaced. It is what it is.