Yes, if they really do want to confirm a homosexual relationship, then they have to make the gesture. Not doing so is just a way of hiding behind the “Well, you can imagine it happening if you want it” veil.
It’s also possible, though, that they could run with a non-sexual queer relationship. Those get even less press than homosexual ones. Except…well, 1: I don’t know that the writers would even really know what they’re doing on that front (though that doesn’t rule out the possibility of stumbling into it) and 2: I don’t know how you’d go about really differentiating that from friendship in a way that most people would understand. I dunno, I can only imagine that the best way of going about that would be what they’re doing now: the blow-by-blow parallels to how romantic male/female relationships are typically fed to us on-screen.
😛
It’s all so weird, it really is. This show INTENSELY rocks the queer vibe. I mean there’s so much subversion of the way gendered symbolism is used in, like, every other TV show or narrative ever. On the one hand it seems…honestly practically batshit at this point that they would try to claim they mean anything else.
And yet, I can still only doubt they’ll take that last step that’d cross from “plausibly could be happening” to “definitely is happening.” It wouldn’t be something the BBC has never done before or anything, but the bottom line is that this show has never really given us an indication that it’s conceived as a boundary-breaking piece of visual media. And I’m not going to try to make claims about what Gatiss might think or want, but going by his record, Moffat at least tends to have a more traditional conception of his male heroes.
But even if I can’t muster faith, I do have hope. ^_^
(And if Mary dies…well. Then we’ll see what we see. If they really go there, then something extraordinary is almost bound to fall out somehow.)
