The Johnlock Conspiracy
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2018
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Who gets to decide if Sherlock Holmes is gay? For over a century, fans of Sherlock Holmes have been analyzing, debating, and creating new texts with Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters. Decoder Ring explores the Johnlock Conspiracy, a fan theory about the BBC TV show Sherlock, positing the inevitability of a gay romance between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. With interviews from historians, journalists, and fans at the heart of this controversial idea, this episode explores this theory, how it played out in the real world, and whether this kind of fandom is a meaningful way of interacting with fiction.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:07.1 | When I was a kid, maybe in the sixth grade, I went to a friend's house. |
| 0:11.7 | Her older sister was watching TV in the living room, and I heard something amazing. |
| 0:19.6 | Beverly Hills 902.1 was a primetime soap opera about the trials and tribulations of well-heeled high school students. |
| 0:26.5 | I loved it instantly. In the episode I saw Brenda Walsh, a sassy Minnesota transplant, and her boyfriend, the bad boy, Dylan McKay, were spending their summer vacation sneaking around because they had been |
| 0:37.5 | forbidden from dating by Brenda's overprotective father. |
| 0:40.5 | I'm not leaving Daddy. |
| 0:43.2 | You get your bags, young lady. |
| 0:44.8 | We're going home. |
| 0:45.9 | No. |
| 0:47.1 | Not until you except Dylan is part of my life. |
| 0:50.1 | I don't know quite what it was about the two of them that I liked so much. |
| 0:53.1 | The kissing on the beach, the naughtiness, the intensity of it all. |
| 0:56.9 | But it became pretty obsessed. |
| 0:58.8 | In high school, I recorded a couple of Brenda Dylan heavy episodes on our VCR, |
| 1:02.7 | and I would fast forward all the other stuff just to watch their scenes over and over again. |
| 1:08.2 | Soon after, and not for the first time, Dylan and Brenda broke up. He started |
| 1:12.2 | making out with her best friend, Kelly Taylor. Meanwhile, the actress who played Brenda, |
| 1:16.5 | Shannon Doherty, got fired from the show, and Kelly and Dylan became the series' grand romance. |
| 1:21.8 | I never bought it. Actually, I hated it. Brenda and Dylan belonged together, and there was nothing |
| 1:27.1 | anyone, even the writers, could do to convince me otherwise. Even now, and I'm not going to get super worked up about it, if you were a Kelly and Dylan fan, what was wrong with you? |
| 1:43.9 | If this sounds juvenile and girly to you, for a long time I felt the same way. |
... |
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