is there already a thread on this? its fun!
watson was in AFGHANISTAN
― max, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:47 (thirteen years ago) link
as he was in the conan doyle stories
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:48 (thirteen years ago) link
though i guess watson was in AFGHANISTAN in the stories too eh
xp
― max, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:48 (thirteen years ago) link
"Cumberbatch's Sherlock uses modern technology, such as texting and internet blogging, to solve the crimes"
some talk on the bbc iplayer thred:
SHERLOCK
starring martin freeman and bernard cumberbatch
first episode has been and gone and was surprisingly... actually alright
― the tape store called... (cozen), Monday, 26 July 2010 08:20 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Holmes texting and using 'tinternet seemed really natural. Also LOL at "three patch problem". Running around central Loldon with a map overlaid on the screen = DUD though. Wish it were slightly less nu-Who like, but it's a Mark Gatiss thing so inevitable.
― ninjas and lasers and gold and (snoball), Monday, 26 July 2010 09:05 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Gatiss totally played the brother as Panto Mandelson.
― the phantom flâneur flinger (suzy), Monday, 26 July 2010 09:55 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Wish it were slightly less nu-Who like, but it's a Mark Gatiss thing so inevitable.
You don't blame this on Moffatt at all? I really liked it.
― ailsa, Monday, 26 July 2010 16:40 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
read that as new-wu and got confused and excited.
― a hoy hoy, Monday, 26 July 2010 17:42 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
xp I got confused. It's a freaky Moffatt/Gatiss joint all the way...
― ninjas and lasers and gold and (snoball), Monday, 26 July 2010 17:50 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
This was good. Very good. Although Martin Freeman's basically playing Martin Freeman.
Intriguingly their 221b baker street set has a near identical layout to the one in the Granada/Jeremy Brett version.
― no, you're dead right, it's a macaroon (ledge), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 11:35 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Yeah, it's hard to imagine anyone looking at the pasty, pudgy Freeman and thinking 'hm, there's a military man, not long back from under the Afghan sun'. This was okay though. Cumberbatch great, Gatiss grates.
― Born too beguiled (DavidM), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 11:39 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Yeah Cumberbatch was terrific and this series has fantastic potential.
Didn't think a modern Sherlock would work but they somehow pulled it off, the GPS and laptops aspect didn't feel shoehorned in but where they nailed it was getting the atmosphere. The way it was filmed really helped give a claustrophobic and menacing Victorian feel to modern London, lots of dark back alleys and very little of the visual clutter you associate with this city. They should keep the series out of gleaming office buildings and keep it in the realm of dark streets and snug old pubs IMO.
― Matt DC, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 11:44 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Liked this a lot, and I'm a bit of a Holmes traditionalist. Only bit that felt a bit LOLmodern shoehorned was the continued references to them being in the gayXorz. Or is that an in-joke about 'Sherlock', the game for the Spectrum and C64?
― Hey Jabulani! Pope of four four two. (aldo), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:42 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
I thought martin freeman was really good; surprisingly so, in fact, but granted I've not seen in him in anything stand-out since the office
― cozen, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:45 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
The way it was filmed really helped give a claustrophobic and menacing Victorian feel to modern London
also the way my PS3 auto screen dimming kicked in after about 30 mins and i didn't notice for another 30 :/
― no, you're dead right, it's a macaroon (ledge), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:47 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Only just caught up with last week's, good stuff. I like the fact they included a puzzle without an explanation right at the end (Sherlock's comment re how to tell a good restaurant, with the answer presumably being lol Chinese people are short)
― if, Sunday, 1 August 2010 19:45 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Am quite enjoying Sherlock, I have to say. Thought the last episode was a bit laborious, but among other things I like a lot - the configuring of London topography in a way that reminds me strongly of Machen, Stevenson (funny sort of London but still a version of it), and Conan Doyle (museums, small out-of-the-way shops, abandoned houses, dark side-streets); all the emphasis on hidden information - again a sort of reconfiguration of the London environment, whether it's mobile communication or graffiti; the way it patterns Victorian sensational fiction themes (such as the sax rohmer yellow peril stuff of the last one) on to the 21st century; + all the comic book stuff (a touch of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen about it, again perhaps not surprisingly) and, you know, a proper fight! behind the curtain of a stage! Great!
That last one was extremely indebted (presumably deliberately) to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, not at all a bad thing imo.
I don't watch a lot of tv so maybe there's a few programmes doing interesting stuff like this, but yeah, good stuff.
― Hide the prickforks (GamalielRatsey), Tuesday, 3 August 2010 12:34 (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
thought sherlock was p.dece on the whole
― cozen, Monday, 9 August 2010 08:54 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
i never made the sherlock holmes / dr who connection before but so many things about holmes and watson are so VERY who, aren't they
i thought the first episode was tremendous - i love the text overlays on the screen
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 August 2010 11:11 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― ledge, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:49 (thirteen years ago) link
lot of grousing on ~forums~ earlier about moriarty and his accent but I thought he was ace
― cozen, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:50 (thirteen years ago) link
moriarty was p. great last night. Also really like the floating-text-message device. and the coat.xp otm
― stet, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:50 (thirteen years ago) link
moriarty was great i thought! sad that it's already over tho? didnt realise there were only going to be 3 eps
― just sayin, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:54 (thirteen years ago) link
has xmas special written all over it
― cozen, Monday, 9 August 2010 15:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Haven't seen the third one yet but the first two were pretty good fun, I hope they spin a few more out of them.
― Matt DC, Monday, 9 August 2010 16:15 (thirteen years ago) link
woah wait, what, that's it? ffs.
― stet, Monday, 9 August 2010 16:17 (thirteen years ago) link
3 eps too many imho
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:21 (thirteen years ago) link
well each one is the length of a movie. it's basically 3 dr whos, or 6 half hours of american television (approx 20 mins each)
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:24 (thirteen years ago) link
er i mean 6 dr whos, and 13 half hours of american television
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:30 (thirteen years ago) link
is this seeable w/o cable
― pies. (gbx), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:33 (thirteen years ago) link
do u know about "the internet"
― max, Monday, 9 August 2010 16:36 (thirteen years ago) link
no :(
― pies. (gbx), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:37 (thirteen years ago) link
I saw the first episode & all those words floating around reminded me of "Ghost Writer."
― spanikopitcon (Abbott), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:42 (thirteen years ago) link
benedict cumberbatch Vs. sheldon turnipseed
― conrad, Monday, 9 August 2010 17:17 (thirteen years ago) link
Totally watchable. Was disappointed with Moriarty, the end of last night's episode was a little soppy. Still good though, Cumberbatch was great in the role.
― mmmm, Monday, 9 August 2010 17:57 (thirteen years ago) link
I watched this last night, I was pleasantly surprised - "reboot" of an old favourite character is usually shorthand for dreadful garbage, but this was good. It was schlocky, but kind of felt like grownup schlock, not adolescent bollocks. Cumberbatch was great.
― Take my hand, we'll make it I swear (Pashmina), Monday, 9 August 2010 18:10 (thirteen years ago) link
low expectations for this, found it to be surprisingly enjoyable, although there's plenty of stuff to nitpick about. ep 2 was the weakest, I think, trying to update the 19th century version of the "exotic orient" just came off a bit too silly. and ending the last ep on a cliffhanger, with no word on when the next one will be-- irritating. but everyone above on the greatness of Cumberbatch is otm.
― her breath came in short pants (sciolism), Monday, 9 August 2010 20:51 (thirteen years ago) link
How come there's only three episodes? That seems crazy.
Benedict Cumberbatch is the name of some Hogwarts reject, I still refuse to believe that that is a real name.
― ô_o (Nicole), Monday, 9 August 2010 20:57 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.rickstv.com/tvo/gwjamal.jpg
― conrad, Monday, 9 August 2010 21:01 (thirteen years ago) link
That might be even worse! Although it is pretty close.
― ô_o (Nicole), Monday, 9 August 2010 21:02 (thirteen years ago) link
Three 1 1/2 hour films is pretty good going - wouldn't have been surprised if they'd just got to make one single episode to start with, tbh (though I think they did an hour-long unscreened pilot which became the first episode). Presume Moffatt and Gatiss a bit busy with Doctor Who stuff as well.
Also, everyone saying Ben Cucumberpatch is awesome is incredibly OTM. I've seen him in other stuff and not been wowed, but he fits this really well.
― ailsa, Monday, 9 August 2010 21:06 (thirteen years ago) link
Speaking of weird and colonial, three guesses why Cumberbatch is a relatively common name amongst African-Americans. Benedict Cumberbatch is really excellent.
Won't someone respond to my point that Mark Gatiss' Mycroft is like watching Peter Mandelson in panto?
― duchy of Pornwall (suzy), Monday, 9 August 2010 21:11 (thirteen years ago) link
three guesses why Cumberbatch is a relatively common name amongst African-Americans
This reminds me of thinking that maybe ska pioneer Theophilus Beckford was related to mento singer Stanley Beckford or U-Roy aka Ewart Beckford, until it was pointed out that there was another reason why a lot of Jamaicans are called Beckford. Which was a slight bummer to my joyful contemplation of reggae history.
Think it's about time I watched this Sherlock, too.
― rah rah rah wd smash the oiks (a passing spacecadet), Monday, 9 August 2010 21:26 (thirteen years ago) link
Didn't Gatiss say he'd based him on Mandelson?
― ailsa, Monday, 9 August 2010 21:37 (thirteen years ago) link
I have no idea, but it is super-funny. I want to see him sitting on a big throne with a bound volume of fairy tales.
Benedict Cumberbatch has brought his family history up in interviews to basically say o_0. A few years ago I was at a book launch and was introduced to a frightfully posh young man whose surname was Womack. I hadn't realized this was an English name AT ALL until that point, and then the guy told me the singers' surname was no accident because theirs had been a slaving family.
― duchy of Pornwall (suzy), Monday, 9 August 2010 21:47 (thirteen years ago) link
Just watched the third one, this kind of nonsense is 100% up my street. Not much that I didn't enjoy, there. A few months ago we re-watched all the Jonathan Creeks and this filled the void that left quite nicely. Although J-Creek wouldn't have had any woooo mysteeeerious stuff (left mysterious).
>>SPOILERS>>>>>>>>I totally called Moriarty as a bad guy the first time he appeared, then forgot. WHY would someone faking a painting make half of it something so weird and "obviously" fake? This really confused me. Was the mistake put in there deliberately by Moriarty? But how?>>>>
― Not the real Village People, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 05:39 (thirteen years ago) link
Btw in the opening shot, my husband was convinced that Sherlock was actually Alan Rickman. He looks and sounds identical there!
― Not the real Village People, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 06:19 (thirteen years ago) link
Only grouse so far (apart from the fact that ep.2 wasn't as good as the other 2) is I hope they don't just go for lots of murders. One of the things I enjoyed about the originals is the stories about non-lethal puzzles and oddities.
According to Zoe Ball (who, I'm sure, must know) Cumberbatch went up for Dr. Who and Matt Smith went up for Dr. Watson. Someone in casting seems to be doing the right thing anyway.
― i find music confusing and annoying (Ned Trifle II), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:09 (thirteen years ago) link
They're already setting up Holmes marathons in the USAhttp://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5iVaDQ26TVnBtf3h0iisgyybUFRTQ
― i find music confusing and annoying (Ned Trifle II), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:10 (thirteen years ago) link
Matt Smith read for Watson and was judged too manic, but when BC was approached to try for Doctor Who, he didn't want to do it because of the merchandising nightmare. This information is available to anyone who reads a newspaper.
― duchy of Pornwall (suzy), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:28 (thirteen years ago) link
cumberbatch would have made an impeccable doctor imo
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:30 (thirteen years ago) link
This was a lot of fun to watch, and I hope they make more... Cumberbatch borrows a couple of mannerisms from Brett (quick lift off the chair while sitting in it indian-style, and the quick flash of rictus type of smile) but takes a totally different, and appealing, tack with the character. I also loved the mindfuck where they show the overhead shot of him at his desk, looking like he's just shot up. As intended, it made me think "here we go again, lazy scriptwriters making Holmes use cocaine DURING a case, which he never ever does" and then it turns out to be nicotine patches! Hilarious. They got me.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:41 (thirteen years ago) link
I had no idea his mum is Wanda Ventham. Blimey.
― Michael Jones, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:46 (thirteen years ago) link
BC even turned up as a guest in a friend's wedding photos last week (she's from a luvvie family too). Truly this man gets everywhere.
― duchy of Pornwall (suzy), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:50 (thirteen years ago) link
Fast forward to 7:14 for nice comic moment and Michael Winner looking like an ass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izAcS9lal9s
― State Attorney Foxhart Cubycheck (Billy Dods), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:51 (thirteen years ago) link
He would have ruined the show for me thanks to his "You have to bite it!" scene in Atonement. In Sherlock it's not as bad because I can't see him raping Martin Freeman.
― ô_o (Nicole), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:08 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm sure ILX's slashfic aficionados know where to find exactly what you describe.
― duchy of Pornwall (suzy), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:15 (thirteen years ago) link
Blimey indeed, I just happnened to see her in The Saint before I left the house, what a babe!
Dr. Who is a bit like Sherlock Holmes in many way.
― tom d: he did what he had to do now he is dead (Tom D.), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:15 (thirteen years ago) link
would objectify
― unchill english bro (history mayne), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:18 (thirteen years ago) link
Really ejoyed this. Even Martin Freeman was suprisingly decent, but Cumberbatch was amazing in the Sherlock role. Was talking to a friend about Cumberbatch in Doctor Who and we both came to the conclusion he would make a great Master to play off Matt Smith if Steven Moffat ever goes down that route.
― Mr.Prologue, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:35 (thirteen years ago) link
second series!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/10/sherlock-second-series-bbc
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:55 (thirteen years ago) link
would objectify― unchill english bro (history mayne), 35 minutes ago
― unchill english bro (history mayne), 35 minutes ago
^^^^^^^^Genuine laugh out loud at this popping up in blog view. Would seriously love if this caught on as a meme.
Kinda follow Penny Red's views on "oh lawd enough with the Holmes already" but, erm, I <3 Cumberbatch for his Momusian turn in To The Ends Of The Earth. I'm avoiding reading any of the slash (it's already turning up in my LJ stream) until I've seen the thing. Which at my rate of tellyviewing is, erm, never.
That is all.
― all your life is channel 13, Sesame Street, what does it mean? (Masonic Boom), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:57 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm avoiding reading any of the slash (it's already turning up in my LJ stream)
always read this as LJ you-know-who
― "It's far from 'loi' you were reared, boy" (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:58 (thirteen years ago) link
Loving it so far - Cumberbatch great, Freeman really good as well (nicely balanced between easy-to-follow everyman & the more actorly damaged army doctor, which is a nice reading of Watson), there's wit & nous in the modernising, cute nods for the fans around the place (Mycroft losing weight, Rache, plenty more I'm missing), really likes London. Perfect Sunday viewing.
And seconded on the drug-haze misdirect - so glad that it didn't just blunder into the world of EDGY Holmes cliché.
― tetrahedron of space (woof), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 12:12 (thirteen years ago) link
Another vote for 'would objectify'. LULZ
― duchy of Pornwall (suzy), Tuesday, 10 August 2010 14:45 (thirteen years ago) link
Thought this was going to be a disaster and was blown away - the bar is set so high in the first ep that the second seems really weak by comparison, tho. LOVED the Mycroft scene in the first ep, fooled me completely.
In the original Study in Scarlet 'Rache' actually IS the German word for revenge! So to have Sherlock lecture Lestrade on how pedestrian that guess is is hilarious.
Nice fan site, tons of interviews etc http://www.sherlocking.org/
― Brakhage, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 15:32 (thirteen years ago) link
This information is available to anyone who reads a newspaper
If only I could find one I liked.
― there are so few places i can wear my jester costume (Ned Trifle II), Wednesday, 11 August 2010 01:22 (thirteen years ago) link
I got confused and thought Moriarty was the Rupert Graves-replacing copper from the second episode. And was like, "Why is he talking about his underwear?". Anyway.
Thought this was very entertaining indeed, although mugging Jim Carrey Moriarty was almost a last-minute shark jumping moment. Did they resolve how the four cases were connected, or was it just Moriarty fucking around?
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 13 August 2010 09:03 (thirteen years ago) link
What a bloody awful thread title.
I didn't mind Moriarty really. The way his character was built up and up and kept mysterious that his eventual reveal was always going to be a bit of a slight let down.
Though you know you're getting old when Holmes and Moriarty start looking young.
― Born too beguiled (DavidM), Friday, 13 August 2010 09:30 (thirteen years ago) link
i never made the sherlock holmes / dr who connection before
You're kidding
― Born too beguiled (DavidM), Friday, 13 August 2010 09:33 (thirteen years ago) link
I liked his mutable, squirming accent, good take on it I thought.
― Hide the prickforks (GamalielRatsey), Friday, 13 August 2010 09:34 (thirteen years ago) link
i'm not!!
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Friday, 13 August 2010 09:41 (thirteen years ago) link
Moriarty reminded me of some weird cross between Paul McCartney and Sam Rockwell.
― ô_o (Nicole), Friday, 13 August 2010 12:51 (thirteen years ago) link
couldn't make heads or tails of his accent for a while, until it seemed like it settled down on 'irish' of some kind?
― pies. (gbx), Friday, 13 August 2010 13:52 (thirteen years ago) link
The actor's from Dublin, so, yeah, 'Irish'.
Moriarty reminded me of some weird cross between Paul McCartney
Ha, he played McCartney in the recent awful Lennon Naked, with former Dr Who Chris Eccleston. It's all connected...
― Born too beguiled (DavidM), Friday, 13 August 2010 14:01 (thirteen years ago) link
Huh. Weird.
― ô_o (Nicole), Friday, 13 August 2010 14:03 (thirteen years ago) link
LOL, he was quite convincing as Macca in that
― tom d: he did what he had to do now he is dead (Tom D.), Friday, 13 August 2010 14:14 (thirteen years ago) link
START YOUR OWN THREAD 'DAVIDM'
― max, Saturday, 14 August 2010 17:28 (thirteen years ago) link
This information is available to anyone who reads a newspaper.
I read one, it didn’t have anything about Sherlock in it.
Wished they hadn’t done a Moriarty reveal so early, but liked him having already popped up and pranked Holmes, and v much liked the shifting accent making him harder for Holmes to deduce anything from.
― bitchmaid (sic), Tuesday, 12 October 2010 23:42 (thirteen years ago) link
NPR coverage:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130572175
PBS is airing this on the 24th on "Mystery!".
― Jaw dropping, thong dropping monster (kingfish), Friday, 15 October 2010 20:10 (thirteen years ago) link
This is the first thing on PBS "Masterpiece" that I've enjoyed in ages.
― macaroni rascal (polyphonic), Wednesday, 3 November 2010 22:08 (thirteen years ago) link
PBS cuts out like 5-10 minutes from each one though, which is pretty lame.
― Loup-Garou G (The Yellow Kid), Thursday, 4 November 2010 03:21 (thirteen years ago) link
i enjoyed this a lot more than i thought i would, considering the granada/jeremy brett series is probably my favorite tv show ever.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 4 November 2010 04:12 (thirteen years ago) link
I feel like these could suffer to lose five minutes! maybe less so the first episode. It'd depend if it was general tightening-up or if it was just whole scenes gone, though.
― thomp, Thursday, 4 November 2010 10:56 (thirteen years ago) link
Now that this has been on PBS, my mom told me that she has a crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. File that under information I really did not need to know.
― romoing my damn eyes (Nicole), Thursday, 4 November 2010 11:05 (thirteen years ago) link
watched the first two episodes of this over the weekend. it's pretty fun (and looks cool, lots of interesting camera angles - is this common for bbc series?) but i was groaning when the first episode went into princess bride "battle of wits" territory.
― bows don't kill people, arrows do (Jordan), Monday, 29 November 2010 16:32 (thirteen years ago) link
I've only watched epsiode 1 (excellent!), consensus on other Holmes thread seems to be 2 is a bit rubbish. Can I skip it and still understand 3?
― A brownish area with points (chap), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 02:58 (thirteen years ago) link
Confirming that the 2nd ep is not as good as the 1st. Have not seen the 3rd but it is avail online for free viewing as I understand.
― calstars, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:01 (thirteen years ago) link
3rd is wonderful, you can skip the 2nd; it's not bad but it does feel very conventional tv mystery show.
― balls, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:16 (thirteen years ago) link
concur
― i'm assuming that it's tity boi, host of the mixtape (sic), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:21 (thirteen years ago) link
sic did u get my webmail
― Princess TamTam, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:25 (thirteen years ago) link
All you really need to know from ep 2:
Watson gets a girlfriend
'M', as mentioned in ep 1, is behind the baddies in ep 2 too
― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:35 (thirteen years ago) link
Oh and:
Chinesers have alternate numbering system for markets (which I have never seen before and I'm learning the freaken language).
― unintentional boob pic (Autumn Almanac), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:57 (thirteen years ago) link
The guy playing Holmes too much of an obnoxious twerp for my liking. Maybe living up to his name (Benedict Cumberbatch).
― sam500, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:59 (thirteen years ago) link
lmfao Cumberbatch
― Princess TamTam, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 04:00 (thirteen years ago) link
It means loads of something e.g. 'oh hai I has baked a cumberbatch of doughnuts, would you like a doughnut'
― best autmn alnamac with ten-letter single-word username (Schlafsack), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 04:04 (thirteen years ago) link
TamTam: y but been busy
― i'm assuming that it's tity boi, host of the mixtape (sic), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 07:43 (thirteen years ago) link
Boo, Cliffhanger! 3 not as good as 1. I quite like the portrayal of Moriarty (reminds me of Simm's Master), though his various schemes make bugger all sense.
Wonder how Freeman getting Hobbited up will affect series 2.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 17:50 (thirteen years ago) link
The two episodes I've watched have the best use of London locations I've seen for ages. It feels like they actually take place in the city I live in, unlike a lot of things set here.
Also: the planetarium fight was amazing.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 17:53 (thirteen years ago) link
is nu-moriarty still a professor?
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 9 December 2010 00:38 (thirteen years ago) link
can forgive the nicotine patches but anorexic mycroft is over the line!
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 9 December 2010 00:40 (thirteen years ago) link
Decision to go with 90-minute films such a good idea.
― Cobra Laser-Face (Leee), Monday, 24 January 2011 05:32 (thirteen years ago) link
In the original Study in Scarlet 'Rache' actually IS the German word for revenge!
I'm pretty sure "rache" is also German for "revenge" in real life too.
― Cobra Laser-Face (Leee), Monday, 24 January 2011 05:33 (thirteen years ago) link
no, what's meant is that it's the other way round in conan doyle: the cop suggests dude was trying to spell rachel and holmes has a good laugh at him before revealing it's german for revenge.
― zvookster, Monday, 24 January 2011 07:47 (thirteen years ago) link
only got to second ep of this because although b.c. was good, the writing was mostly awful
idk if it's a drama exactly
― if opinions about ofwgkta could fly this place would be the wtc (history mayne), Monday, 23 May 2011 08:03 (twelve years ago) link
How was the writing awful?
― StanM, Monday, 23 May 2011 08:53 (twelve years ago) link
the mystery in ep two was just bad, boring, not good, pretty much like any brit detective show but with a better-than-usual protag
― if opinions about ofwgkta could fly this place would be the wtc (history mayne), Monday, 23 May 2011 09:03 (twelve years ago) link
Episode two was the weakest of the three by far.
― England's banh mi army (ledge), Monday, 23 May 2011 09:05 (twelve years ago) link
― A brownish area with points (chap), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 02:58 (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― calstars, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:01 (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― balls, Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:16 (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― i'm assuming that it's tity boi, host of the mixtape (sic), Wednesday, 8 December 2010 03:21 (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Oh, I agree - if they had only released the first and third it would have been perfect.
― StanM, Monday, 23 May 2011 09:10 (twelve years ago) link
See, I really liked two, I must be the only one - London being interpretable through signs and symbols, the Sax Rohmer nods, erm, some other stuff I liked at the time but now can't remember. It did meander I guess, and was the weakest of the three, but I still really enjoyed it.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Monday, 23 May 2011 09:21 (twelve years ago) link
It wasn't bad, but it was like an album track that didn't belong on a 3-track EP.
― StanM, Monday, 23 May 2011 09:28 (twelve years ago) link
aight i'll watch three then
― if opinions about ofwgkta could fly this place would be the wtc (history mayne), Monday, 23 May 2011 09:29 (twelve years ago) link
Yep, that sounds right.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Monday, 23 May 2011 09:56 (twelve years ago) link
i thought the third was pretty weak tbh
― thomp, Monday, 23 May 2011 09:59 (twelve years ago) link
me too, couldn't get through it
― 百万个叉烧包 (Autumn Almanac), Monday, 23 May 2011 10:39 (twelve years ago) link
IMO - 1st showed great potential, 2nd was a let down but watchable and 3rd was a bit rubbish. Ending was poor show. But don't take my opinion - I'm near to completion working my way through 12 series of Poirot box set and loving most of it.
― mmmm, Monday, 23 May 2011 11:21 (twelve years ago) link
All three were terrific. I immediately wished that Moffat would do a full series of this rather than Dr Who.
― Hippocratic Oaf (DavidM), Monday, 23 May 2011 13:47 (twelve years ago) link
last episode of the series 2 is gonna be titled Reichenbach Falls.
― remy bean, Monday, 23 May 2011 14:14 (twelve years ago) link
bah, that's terribly soon. also shush!
― the man who forsook his wife for fap fap fap (sic), Monday, 23 May 2011 14:27 (twelve years ago) link
it's "the reichenbach fall", so it might not be quite what you think.
― joe, Monday, 23 May 2011 14:29 (twelve years ago) link
3 eps too many imho― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, August 9, 2010 5:21 PM (9 months ago)
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, August 9, 2010 5:21 PM (9 months ago)
bollocks to the baftas, this show was appalling
― Romford Spring (DG), Monday, 23 May 2011 16:07 (twelve years ago) link
Worst show EVER. http://i56.tinypic.com/317cohw.jpg
― StanM, Monday, 23 May 2011 16:14 (twelve years ago) link
u hacked my webcam :(
― Romford Spring (DG), Monday, 23 May 2011 16:19 (twelve years ago) link
Cumberbatch
― am0n, Monday, 20 June 2011 17:20 (twelve years ago) link
watchin this now, love it
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 23 July 2011 04:03 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah this is totally great
― I dream of vodka sandwich (jjjusten), Saturday, 23 July 2011 04:43 (twelve years ago) link
everybody otm about the second ep tho
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 23 July 2011 04:56 (twelve years ago) link
even the ciphering is tedious
loved the open on the attacking guy in the turban tho that subsequently gets dropped
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 23 July 2011 04:58 (twelve years ago) link
Slight nagging irritation that they insist getting black cabs everywhere despite living directly above a minicab firm. Despite money worries suspect background trust fund.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Saturday, 23 July 2011 17:40 (twelve years ago) link
for martin freeman fans....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBqBH1RM_8
― Dark Noises from the Eurozone (Tracer Hand), Sunday, 14 August 2011 22:26 (twelve years ago) link
OK so the new one for series 2, SPOILERS OMG SPOILERS ahead:
So is Moff like "I'm being clever, details be damned" or is there more to Mycroft saying that he was extra careful examining her corpse despite it being, yanno, not her corpse?
― alpaca althusser (Leee), Monday, 2 January 2012 20:03 (twelve years ago) link
consider the significance of mycroft's next line, directly after saying he was thorough, this time.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, 2 January 2012 20:27 (twelve years ago) link
lol whoops big oversight on my part.
― Leee, Monday, 2 January 2012 20:40 (twelve years ago) link
the scene between sherlock and mycroft in the morgue after identifying her body (the first time) was one of the all-time great holiday TV moments. for me.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, 2 January 2012 20:51 (twelve years ago) link
Loved this, although thoroughly dismayed at some of my favourite stories (Greek Interpreter, Naval Treaty, Speckled Band) being discarded as in-jokes therefore won't be made.
― 50,000 raspberries with the face of Peter Ndlovu (aldo), Monday, 2 January 2012 20:52 (twelve years ago) link
Not much compensation but they're fleshed out a bit here:
http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/
― Quoth the raven "Nevermind" (ledge), Monday, 2 January 2012 21:57 (twelve years ago) link
that is a bit better than the fake sherlock one, at least
this was really pretty good, i thought. ever-increasing bait-and-switch-and-switch-and-switch-and-switch. it seems strange to me that there are british television shows where things happen every minute or two, rather than one or two things happening in an episode, at depth.
― thomp, Monday, 2 January 2012 22:06 (twelve years ago) link
so so so so so much fun. sacrificing an evening's essential study was totally worth it.
― Upt0eleven, Monday, 2 January 2012 22:18 (twelve years ago) link
does anybody know where i can watch this online?
― gnome rocognise gnome (remy bean), Monday, 2 January 2012 22:24 (twelve years ago) link
I just webmailed you
― kinder, Monday, 2 January 2012 22:48 (twelve years ago) link
Best thing on telly over the whole Christmas period. Absolutely loved it.
― that mustardless plate (Bill A), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 10:25 (twelve years ago) link
otm. wish they hadn't kept referring to her "camera phone" though.
― 1N1ck, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 10:37 (twelve years ago) link
Really enjoyed this, better than last year's and hilarious throughout. The beheading reveal was lame though.
― Matt DC, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 12:07 (twelve years ago) link
Was the beheading reveal bit an actual memory or a Sherlock fantasy moment?
― Daisy Click Clack, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 12:10 (twelve years ago) link
i even liked that. that kind of setup - we're in That Middle East, there are sinister looking arabic types with swords, possibly muezzin wailing - is a horrible televisual cliché and tends to be telegraphing the idea that dark, serious things are happening; for two seconds i thought they actually were going to go there (which would have been aaaaaaaawful) and then it turns out to be for the sake of a gag, so well done them
xpost i had that thought but if it's a fantasy he's not established as having any other reason to know she was/n't beheaded, so
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 12:13 (twelve years ago) link
also it sets up that sherlock definitely knows mycroft is enlisting john to lie to him. (that stuff in this episode that sort of shifts into the idea that sherlock's family/friends are in the position of dealing with a mentally ill person is really smart, i think. -- in terms of convincingly modernizing the given material of the original without rewriting it.)
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 12:17 (twelve years ago) link
also part of why i like this -- the scene where they're waiting in buckingham palace really brought this home -- is that cumberbatch and freeman are sort of playing peter cook and dudley moore, too
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 12:18 (twelve years ago) link
I enjoyed it, but found all the "look at me, I'm writing a blog!/ hey guys just Tweet me @sherlockholmes" stuff to be a bit overdone. I think Cumberbatch is a bit of a ham too. Freeman and Gatiss are both good, though.
― good luck in your pyramid (Neil S), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 12:50 (twelve years ago) link
I enjoyed it - but it's definitely made for the attention deficit disorder generation.
― Daisy Click Clack, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:01 (twelve years ago) link
I loved this unreservedly.
― bouquet beatdown (Nicole), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:22 (twelve years ago) link
i've seen the first 2 minutes of this, which was enough to remind me how little i care for the dude playing moriarty.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:24 (twelve years ago) link
Oh yeah, I forgot about him! Which probably speaks to how slight and badly miscast he is.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:29 (twelve years ago) link
oh noes it's scary Ant from Ant 'n Dec!
― good luck in your pyramid (Neil S), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:29 (twelve years ago) link
he might be a good actor in another situation but he was just so obviously at sea, and overcompensating by doing the whackadoo sub-joker loud-quiet madman schtick we've all seen 10 million times
i totally plant to watch, though
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:39 (twelve years ago) link
uh, plan
If it makes you feel any better he is hardly in the episode after those first two minutes.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:44 (twelve years ago) link
yay!
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:54 (twelve years ago) link
― Daisy Click Clack, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 13:01 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
lol old man, u old
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 14:22 (twelve years ago) link
I almost literally cannot wait until Sunday when the do Hound of the Baskervilles. I am wishing the days away.
― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 14:34 (twelve years ago) link
I like Moriarty! I really like his protean capriciousness. Malice born of boredom, a similar boredom to Holmes. Thought this was unreservedly excellent. Oh, and quite clearly Speedy isn't a cab firm as i stupidly said upthread. I meant to wander up the street where they film it to have a look at whether it is definitely an irl cafe. But didn't. I think it is. How tremendously exciting.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:16 (twelve years ago) link
The cafe in Google streetview looks real enough.
― fun loving and xtremely tolrant (Billy Dods), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:24 (twelve years ago) link
Try again: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=gower+street&hl=en&ll=51.526221,-0.136664&spn=0.009105,0.019119&num=100&hnear=Gower+St&gl=uk&t=h&z=16&vpsrc=0&layer=c&cbll=51.526288,-0.136743&panoid=PxvoCwy-erhpK_1yyUQCpA&cbp=12,254.82,,0,3.79
― fun loving and xtremely tolrant (Billy Dods), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:28 (twelve years ago) link
It does indeed. Although that link seemed to take me to the other side of Gower Street. (xpost) ah yes, there it is.
I didn't really mind the beheading bit, or the sort of equivalent scene in the second episode of season one, where SH is fighting with a rather out-of-time desert clad swordsman, although both jarred. But I find the slight touch of the penny dreadful or comic book quite appealing ultimately i think.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:32 (twelve years ago) link
I missed this because I was away for the New Year. Does anyone know if the Beeb going to do a repeat on BBC 3 (or something) sometime this week or do I have to watch it on iPlayer?
― Stone Monkey, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:32 (twelve years ago) link
BBC3, Saturday, 7pm.
― oppet, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:41 (twelve years ago) link
I thought this was great. Surprised how much I like Martin Freeman in particular.
― oppet, Tuesday, 3 January 2012 18:42 (twelve years ago) link
I think Cumberbatch is a bit of a ham too.
oh noes!
lol at the implication that Gatiss isn't, tho
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Tuesday, 3 January 2012 20:30 (twelve years ago) link
A lot of next week's Hound of the Baskervilles was filmed in and around my friend's pub.
― nate woolls, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 10:31 (twelve years ago) link
xp yeah, fair enough, difficult to play Holmes without being at least a little bit hammy I suppose. For example:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjKXFBkNE10
― good luck in your pyramid (Neil S), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 11:04 (twelve years ago) link
:D aw, that's great
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 12:09 (twelve years ago) link
Brett's the man for doing the dissipated Holmes, but he is also surprisingly convincing (and funny) as the tough guy.
― good luck in your pyramid (Neil S), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 12:47 (twelve years ago) link
I wish Mrs Hudson was my landlady. It would be brilliant.
― Matt DC, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 12:50 (twelve years ago) link
Lot of criticism of Moffat for turning Adler into a sexist cliche, which I have to say I agree with; she should be every bit as unemotional as Holmes and thus unlikely to fall for him and be found out that way. Also, she shouldn't need Moriarty as a 'boss' or Holmes as a saviour; she's meant to be ruthlessly self-sufficient. The dominatrix thing I thought was a little cheap but ultimately didn't mind as such.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/03/sherlock-sexist-steven-moffathttp://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/irene-adler-how-to-butcher-a-brilliant-woman-character/
― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 13:20 (twelve years ago) link
The Guardian piece was cringe inducingly awful, because anyone who thinks that Who is more sexist now than under RTD is more than a little deluded.
― Nicole, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 14:26 (twelve years ago) link
I mean, there are parts of the Irene Adler crit I can agree with but when an article is started on such a boldly false assertion I can't take it seriously.
― Nicole, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 14:29 (twelve years ago) link
I hated the last minute or two and wished they hadn't been included because they were dumb and pointless but reading into it that Moffatt likes his formerly strong women on their knees begging to be rescued by the big man hero is equally dumb.
Think Moffatt's Sherlock is clearly meant to be hot for Adler without ever admitting it - there's no other reason to go to Pakistan to rescue your adversary (especially when it is a really dumb thing to do). It's not just about male reason beating feminine emotion yet again.
― Matt DC, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 14:36 (twelve years ago) link
the original character is a cipher and making pronouncements about how she 'should' be or that conan doyle's gender politics are superior to moffat's is all a bit facepalm, tbh. - & to read the episode as demonstrating sherlock's superiority is to ignore that, you know, he's presented as being basically constitutionally and neurologically incapable of enjoying life, & she isn't
― thomp, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 15:29 (twelve years ago) link
I think Moffatt has a tendency to write himself into corners that he then can't quite convincingly write himself out of and teaming Adler and Moriarty up was his handy way of getting them out of the swimming pool alive *and* introducing Irene.
I need to watch that plane scene again maybe but was it really saying that Adler was acting completely under Moriarty's orders and without any agency or ingenuity of her own? I don't buy that.
― Matt DC, Wednesday, 4 January 2012 15:39 (twelve years ago) link
*SPOILER* The lot of us who watched it tried to parse out Why the information was so valuable to Moriarty, and Why it was only valuable once it had been deciphered, but we couldn't figure it out.
― gord downer (Ówen P.), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 15:41 (twelve years ago) link
WHY it's valuable. Moriarty keeps on being defined in terms of being capriciously disruptive and destructive. his fight against boredom showing itself that way rather than Holmes'. Anti-establishment - see his raspberry at St Stephen's tower. Holmes - Buck House - is ultimately establishment.
Also complete absence of sentiment, in contrast to both Holmes and IA. Mycroft already pointed out despite SH's asseverations to the opposite his very choice of career is sentimental romantic.
WHY it needed to be deciphered. Muddier definitely. Depends on a series of questions - did Moriarty request she get the information? (phone call in pool suggests yes - this means he wasn't just working out how to exploit info already on her phone like she suggests at the end). Was Moriarty aware of a long-term spying operation but not sure of the details? Probably. Hence can only be destroy long-term spying op by knowing what knowledge they have. Like Tinker Tailor in reverse. He only needed to know it was a plane. Hence his text.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 16:29 (twelve years ago) link
Also, can I just sat how much I love the direction/scene transitions in this show, especially in this most recent ep
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Wednesday, 4 January 2012 22:30 (twelve years ago) link
Same director does next week, too; then the last one's by the guy that did Pandorica Opens / Big Bang / Christmas Carol / Astronaut / Moon on Who.
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Thursday, 5 January 2012 00:32 (twelve years ago) link
this was sooo good
still don't think i actually understand the scheme adler had goin
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, 5 January 2012 01:17 (twelve years ago) link
OH. That suddenly makes sense, Gamaliel.I think I assumed that Moriarty was in league with the potential terrorists. If he's not, and just looking for "hot info", it comes together.It doesn't explain why Adler would be beheaded as a result, if anything, she would be respected + honoured by the jihadists, granted wishes, etc. Or not. I don't know.It was well directed, I liked it, but I like it best when detective plots fit together like Tetris games
― gord downer (Ówen P.), Thursday, 5 January 2012 04:29 (twelve years ago) link
- adler has snapshot of an email from MOD guy, but she doesn't know what it means, other than that this guy is boasting that it's important- she calls moriarty to tell him that she has this potentially valuable information ("stayin alive"; did she hack moriarty's ringtone too at some point?)- this is why moriarty spares holmes, because the plan is to use holmes as the code-breaker- but but BUT - how do they know this info is worth anything at all? they don't know what it means! what could have made moriarty react so violently? how could he be so decided that he wants this info?- putting that aside, adler now phones up buckingham palace to tell them she has incriminating photos of the princess. presumably she does this in order to get holmes involved and trick him into breaking the code.- holmes gets involved. so now why does she make it so hard for him to even see the code, much less crack it? she tranqs him just to get her phone back.- why are CIA dudes there? how do they know she's taken a snapshot of this MOD guy's email? adler told the palace about photos, she didn't tell anyone else about anything else.- adler stands to gain $$ from giving moriarty the info, that much we know, cause he says he'll pay her for it- isn't it worth a shot getting, i don't know, ANYBODY but sherlock holmes to have a try cracking the code first? (even setting aside the question of how they know this is valuable info in the first place if they don't know what it is)- what does moriarty stand to gain?
i feel like there's a thread or motivation i missed that will make this make sense
really loved gatiss as mycroft, and really, really loved the oblique, repressed angles of the dialogue in places:
"- Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock.
- Ugh, this is LOW tar!"
- Well, you barely knew her.
* Holmes turns to leave *
- Merry Christmas, Mycroft.
- And a happy New Year."
or
"- So she's alive then. How are we feeling about that?
- Happy New Year, John.
- Will you be seeing her again?
* Holmes plays 'Auld Lang Syne' *"
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, 6 January 2012 01:35 (twelve years ago) link
i really love this show! even though i still don't quite understand what happened the last episode either.
― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Friday, 6 January 2012 04:48 (twelve years ago) link
did her boomerang thoery ever get a response or another mention?
― toandos, Friday, 6 January 2012 05:15 (twelve years ago) link
everyone's trolling everyone
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Friday, 6 January 2012 05:41 (twelve years ago) link
Jumped the shark this week?
― Bob Six, Sunday, 8 January 2012 21:55 (twelve years ago) link
i liked it
― kid steel (cajunsunday), Sunday, 8 January 2012 22:24 (twelve years ago) link
I liked the first half or so.
― Bob Six, Sunday, 8 January 2012 22:25 (twelve years ago) link
Hated the 'thinking palace' bit. And the rest kind of reminded me of the Vic & Bob Randall & Hopkirk with Dervla Kirwan and Derek Jacobi.
― Sugary pee is not normal (aldo), Sunday, 8 January 2012 22:31 (twelve years ago) link
Oh god, the mental palace stuff was terrible.
Husband worked out what was happening about twenty minutes before Sherlock did. This, for me, is a major flaw in both the new Sherlock incarnations: the puzzles just aren't clever enough.
I really want to like this so much, but the stories just don't match up to the superb character stuff and all the little details.
― trishyb, Sunday, 8 January 2012 22:47 (twelve years ago) link
the best character was the moor. the rest of it was pretty meh.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, 9 January 2012 03:38 (twelve years ago) link
The solution was way too obvious in this one, from the start. Also I think the guessing passwords thing has been overdone - you'd never get away with a 6-character password with no numbers/punctuation characters in such a high security place! The biggest letdown in this episode was mainly that Sherlock didn't really have to put anything together to come up with the solution, just remember really hard something he already knew.
Enjoyed it enough, though.
― kinder, Monday, 9 January 2012 07:48 (twelve years ago) link
i liked the mental palace better when it was just holmes blurting out "COVENTRY!!" while sitting around the fire
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 January 2012 08:57 (twelve years ago) link
I did like the money puppy shot, but yeah terrible password guessing routine ("he likes thatcher - bingo!") and remembering something do not make for great detection. (And the mental palace is a nice idea but that tecnique is usually used for a specific one-time list of items, not EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE EVER.)
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 09:38 (twelve years ago) link
I really, really enjoyed it leading up to the resolution but "we were all drugged and hallucinating" is 1x cop-out. You can't beat a good dogging joke.
― Matt DC, Monday, 9 January 2012 09:49 (twelve years ago) link
Yes, this. It's not the technique I have a problem with, it's the way they dramatized it. I also don't really understand why they had to shoot the dog, if they knew it wasn't really going to kill them.
― trishyb, Monday, 9 January 2012 09:50 (twelve years ago) link
Mr evil scientist and maybe policeman and watson were just scared, holmes knew other-guy-whatever-his-name-was would lose his mind otherwise.
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 09:59 (twelve years ago) link
Like he cares what happens to anyone.
― trishyb, Monday, 9 January 2012 10:24 (twelve years ago) link
it was other-guy-whatever-his-name-was's case! holmes would have lost if he lost his mind.
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 10:25 (twelve years ago) link
fwiw i think they overplay the "holmes doesn't care about other people or even know how they think" angle, or at least the second bit, since for successful social engineering, which the orig. holmes was a master at, you have to know what makes people tick.
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 10:28 (twelve years ago) link
He knows how people think, he just doesn't care too much.
― get ready for the banter (NotEnough), Monday, 9 January 2012 10:36 (twelve years ago) link
yeah but that doesn't really work with all the "too soon?" "too soon" holmes/watson interplay.
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 10:39 (twelve years ago) link
the mental palace shit would have been fine if not for the my-brain-is-a-gesture-controlled-computer hand motions.
the passwords thing gave me the rage because it ALWAYS DOES - it especially grates on shows where the password guesser is meant to be a ~genius,~ for some reason, i guess because 'have a password that contains letters and numbers and is not one word' is so utterly basic and flashes up every time you have to pick a password, and yet you are supposed to believe that both An Investigating Genius and his target have never ever heard of it. it is just so lazy! i will believe in a magical usb-attaching black box that cycles through different poss passwords at an impossible rate before i will believe in a universe in which everyone's passwords are the lower-case un-leeted names of their favourite thing.
also, russell tovey seemed impossibly typecast.
― vision creation newgod (c sharp major), Monday, 9 January 2012 10:40 (twelve years ago) link
Still finding it very entertaining, but yes, this week the fun was mostly character stuff and incidentals, not really plot.
Biggest disappointment – Prob not alone here in loving and wanting to see the uncanny England pagan moor countryside aesthetic, which goes very well with creepy science horror. Gatiss clearly going for that, but it didn't work for me - I was just seeing the signifiers, never unsettled.
the memory palace cringe-making. sluggish free association while voguing does not fill me with awe at genius. (It's a palace full of strange things! Show us the palace!)
― you don't exist in the database (woof), Monday, 9 January 2012 11:24 (twelve years ago) link
the middle episode last year also tried to stretch things into a different set of genre conventions w/ iffy results
still haven't seen this but so far i only like moffat's episodes so enh
was there a trailer for next week's? i note it is titled 'the reichenbach fall'
― thomp, Monday, 9 January 2012 11:40 (twelve years ago) link
i was positive that during the password-guessing scene, as holmes is rapid-fire scanning the bookshelves, everything at eye level, etc, that he was going to run across a scrap of paper taped to the monitor labelled "password" - i mean, no way were they actually going to have him GUESS the guy's password, right?? even matthew broderick in wargames has to think to append a "5" to the name he figures out
which makes two otherwise pretty rip-roaringly entertaining episodes in a row where the baddies only get nailed because holmes gets extremely lucky at password guessing
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:08 (twelve years ago) link
even 'maggie79' would have been less ridiculous
but yeah, a few older people i've worked with have kept a notebook of passwords, why couldn't they have had that book hidden in a place that required ~deduction~ to find?
tho rly don't people working in high-security roles tend to have those private-key number-generator fob whatnots nowadays? like people who work for financial companies do?
― vision creation newgod (c sharp major), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:46 (twelve years ago) link
i have three and i'm just yr average mediocre nerd
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:49 (twelve years ago) link
(two for work and one for my online banking)
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:50 (twelve years ago) link
actually when i first started my current job one crucial password wad actually taped to the bottom of one guy's keyboard
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:54 (twelve years ago) link
'multi-factor authentication', is apparently what it's called?
so ANYWAY it would have been totally possible to say "he is an old-school martinet who hates all this newfangled bobbins and therefore leaves his multi-factor authentication widget hidden behind his framed photo of margaret thatcher" - you get the tory stuff, you get the ~characterisation~, you don't sacrifice believability to expediency.
― vision creation newgod (c sharp major), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:57 (twelve years ago) link
i mean, srsly, was it not a cia database they were ~hacking into~ there
― vision creation newgod (c sharp major), Monday, 9 January 2012 13:58 (twelve years ago) link
i know the CIA aren't as technologically adept as KPMG or whoever but surely they'd have got into security tokens by now.
― vision creation newgod (c sharp major), Monday, 9 January 2012 14:01 (twelve years ago) link
or biometric auth, that's getting pretty common (we have it at work)
― stet, Monday, 9 January 2012 14:08 (twelve years ago) link
"based on what you've told me about his personality i surmise his genetic profile would lead to his iris looking like this" [does quick biro sketch, holds it up in front of webcam]
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 14:32 (twelve years ago) link
Sherlock has just cracked your ILM pw
― gord downer (Ówen P.), Monday, 9 January 2012 19:41 (twelve years ago) link
seconding password-guessing as a shorthand for genius is some tired-as-hell TV writing.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, 9 January 2012 22:46 (twelve years ago) link
Enjoyed it, but nowhere near as much as the Moffat eps. Better than the non-Moffatt from last year, though.
Really, the problem is that Gatiss is an enjoyable but not great actor and writer. Most of his Doctor Who episodes are pretty half-baked, with some great lines in them.
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Monday, 9 January 2012 23:23 (twelve years ago) link
I like him as Mycroft but his writing is just blargh.
― Nicole, Monday, 9 January 2012 23:50 (twelve years ago) link
Last week was a bit iffy, but this was terrific. Bit drained after that.
― sktsh, Sunday, 15 January 2012 22:51 (twelve years ago) link
Kinda loved it as it was going along. Bit audacious/cheeky/lazy (delete as applicable to not explain the ending.
― pandemic, Sunday, 15 January 2012 22:53 (twelve years ago) link
I assume it was something to do with Molly.
― pandemic, Sunday, 15 January 2012 22:54 (twelve years ago) link
didn't really understand what was going on on the roof. all that "i am you!" "you are me!" BANG!
― ledge, Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:07 (twelve years ago) link
maybe we're not meant to understand. maybe it was all part of sherlock's genius plan that he had figured out from the beginning to a) get moriarty to kill himself and ii) appear to die, and it won't become clear till the next part. if that ever happens.
― ledge, Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:09 (twelve years ago) link
xps, presumably Molly did the autopsy.
― Mohombi Khush Hua (ShariVari), Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:17 (twelve years ago) link
it was gripping though i am fearful the explanation will be unsatisfactory.
(presumably john being pushed over was important, too)
― djh, Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:23 (twelve years ago) link
https://twitter.com/#!/steven_moffat/statuses/158680970130751488
― cozen, Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:29 (twelve years ago) link
I'm not sure how my enjoyment of this is affected by the realization that Cumberbatch is playing Sherlock as if he was playing Jeremy Clarkson.
― Stockhausen's Ekranoplan Quartet (Elvis Telecom), Monday, 16 January 2012 06:12 (twelve years ago) link
Watson didn't see Sherlock jump, he saw the body fall. Sherlock asked Molly for a favour - he threw Moriarty's body over the edge and she falsified the post-mortem.
― Matt DC, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:00 (twelve years ago) link
Pfeh, the lolling at Sherlock for thinking that technology worked that way didn't erase me shouting "technology doesn't work that way!" at the screen for the previous hour. Or explain the haunting of the jury's video screens, or how he convinced the assassins to kill each other over Sherlock.
I'd have been happier if they'd ended when Sherlock was halfway down, similar to the end of the first series. Every minute past that where people are going "I can't believe he's DEAD" makes it clearer that he isn't.
Also since the explanation will safe to say be based on Molly, there's no punch to the flared-nostril two-sides-of-the-same-coin bollocks on the rooftop, if Sherlock is being pushed towards an outcome that he's already prepared for.
― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:16 (twelve years ago) link
xp There's definitely an identifying shot of Sherlock's bloodied and dented face at the bottom though, right?
― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:17 (twelve years ago) link
swapped him in while john was lying on the tarmac - although the other passers-by would still be a problem. i thought john did see him jump though, he just didn't see him land.
― ledge, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:20 (twelve years ago) link
Also I was so relieved that the key code thing turned out to be bollocks.
― Matt DC, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:28 (twelve years ago) link
The stupidity of the policewoman annoyed me. Super genius criminal mastermind Sherlock kidnapped the kids, didn't cover his face, and then demanded he be the one to interview said kids.
― pandemic, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:36 (twelve years ago) link
Also did Moriaty's trial really take place 6 weeks after the offense? Cameron certainly moving the criminal justice system on apace.
― pandemic, Monday, 16 January 2012 10:38 (twelve years ago) link
tbf the original story hasn't got a much more satisfactory ending. "No, Watson I didn't fall to my death, I remembered I was an expert in Baritsu ("You're making that up now, Holmes..."), and then made it look like I fell and then had various adventures..."
― Ned Trifle X, Monday, 16 January 2012 11:56 (twelve years ago) link
...three years later for reasons that will become clear just as soon as I've settled the advance from the publisher, here I am!
― Ned Trifle X, Monday, 16 January 2012 11:57 (twelve years ago) link
Every minute past that where people are going "I can't believe he's DEAD" makes it clearer that he isn't.
Also the fact that he just isn't. I will be interested to see what explanation, if any, is offered for the old switcheroo, but on the whole the key difference for me between this week's hokum and last week's hokum was that this week's skipped along nice and quickly so I kind of didn't notice the hokum so much. More from this writer, please. Less from Mark Gatiss.
― trishyb, Monday, 16 January 2012 14:32 (twelve years ago) link
Yes, this was a gazillion times better than last week. Though was Watson given the drug from last week, meaning that he was expecting to see Dead Sherlock (Sherlock had instructed him where to stand during his fall)? Why wasn't Moriarty's death also seen to be covered by the press? I assume Molly was involved.
― ailsa, Monday, 16 January 2012 16:06 (twelve years ago) link
Which people have already said.
Why all the mindgames and shit from Moriarty on the roof when he had a gun in his pocket? And Richard Brook = Reichenbach so a hint there too?
― ailsa, Monday, 16 January 2012 16:11 (twelve years ago) link
Though was Watson given the drug from last week, meaning that he was expecting to see Dead Sherlock (Sherlock had instructed him where to stand during his fall)?
That's some good thinking. (They did make the Richard Brook/Reichenbach link.)
― trishyb, Monday, 16 January 2012 16:58 (twelve years ago) link
Hadn't Watson been hit over the head not long before or did I imagine that?
Didn't see any coverage of Moriarty afterwards, it was all Sherlock, hence the assumption it was Moriarty's body that went over the side.
― Matt DC, Monday, 16 January 2012 17:03 (twelve years ago) link
Watson had been hit by a cyclist on his way over to see the post-fall Sherlock and had bumped his head. I don't know they could legislate for that resulting in a head trauma, so assuming cyclist was either buying time for Sherlock to get into position, or hitting John with Baskerville drug, or both. I don't think I'm making too huge a leap in assuming it wasn't coincidental.
― ailsa, Monday, 16 January 2012 17:13 (twelve years ago) link
No, as soon as it happened I assumed it was deliberate. Maybe the cyclist sprayed him/injected him when he bumped him?
― trishyb, Monday, 16 January 2012 17:49 (twelve years ago) link
Stupid policewoman is really being typecast. She's the same character in the *Controversy alert* superior Luther. She also played the same uncertain busybody in Waterloo Road.
― danzig, Monday, 16 January 2012 19:12 (twelve years ago) link
...she's not in Luther.
― Melissa W, Monday, 16 January 2012 20:12 (twelve years ago) link
oops sorry, my mistake
― danzig, Monday, 16 January 2012 20:22 (twelve years ago) link
More from this writer, please. Less from Mark Gatiss.
Uh, the writer for this episode was responsible for the borderline-racist second episode from last "series."
― lEEE (Leee), Monday, 16 January 2012 23:03 (twelve years ago) link
I only caught a small part of that second episode from last season, so maybe I missed what made it "borderline racist". What did I miss? Or is it borderline racist to infer that there is some sort of Chinese underground criminal network? No snark intended, genuinely curious because I didn't see the entire episode.
― jon /via/ chi 2.0, Monday, 16 January 2012 23:40 (twelve years ago) link
Well it's basically all the Orientalist bollocks it featured. Also, it was just a terrible episode generally, before you get to the offensive stuff.
― lEEE (Leee), Monday, 16 January 2012 23:43 (twelve years ago) link
To be less glib, it treats Chinese culture as an exotic curiosity to be deciphered, which is tiresome/cliche and condescending, imho.
― lEEE (Leee), Monday, 16 January 2012 23:55 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah, really enjoyed this, was amazed to see it wasn't Moffatt but the boring writer from last year
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Monday, 16 January 2012 23:55 (twelve years ago) link
Okay I get where you are coming from Leee, I just hadn't noticed anything too blatant in the bit I saw but that was before the circus and the code thing (reading the episode summary now). I genuinely enjoyed the other two from the first series and I'm excited for the new ones to pop up over here.
― jon /via/ chi 2.0, Monday, 16 January 2012 23:57 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah, that's not to say that I didn't like the other two episodes, or two of the episodes from this season, including the one which is written by the Chinese circus guy. Basically, the second episode in each season is terrible, so far.
― lEEE (Leee), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 00:06 (twelve years ago) link
Fuck's sake, can't anyone be consistent? That episode was rubbish, you're right. I didn't realise it was the same person. I rescind my earlier enthusiasm.
― trishyb, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 00:08 (twelve years ago) link
http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxx4euII661qbypg1o1_500.jpg
― lEEE (Leee), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 01:11 (twelve years ago) link
also yeah Watson did see him jump.
also terrible writer of racist episode last year wrote Curse Of The Black Spot in Who this year. either he's gotten better fast or Moffatt heavily edited this one (which it did feel like) (also also good director on this one, as I think I excitedly anticipated counteracting the writing upthread)
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 11:21 (twelve years ago) link
He saw him jump, but iirc he didn't see him land?
― ailsa, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 11:40 (twelve years ago) link
Curse of the Black Spot did start with one great joke and then descend into bollocks, mind.
― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 11:58 (twelve years ago) link
also terrible writer of racist episode last year wrote Curse Of The Black Spot in Who this year. either he's gotten better fast or Moffatt heavily edited this one (which it did feel like)
This felt like a Moffat-written episode, so I have a feeling heavy editing was a major factor.
The Curse of the Black Spot and his last Sherlock episode were both so poor I don't feel like the same person could have written the dialogue in this.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 13:45 (twelve years ago) link
Also, I don't think the policewoman is stupid so much as blinded by her hatred of Sherlock. I think when you already despise someone, you are much more likely to jump to conclusions that cast a poor light on that person.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 13:49 (twelve years ago) link
Particularly when they despise you, and completely busted you sleeping with a co-worker in ten seconds.
I'm not against that kind of character of course, but a) isn't this generally Lestrade's job? and b) giving it to one of the few females and the only recurring non-white character is a particular sort of tone-deafness that I'm starting to think of as 'Moffattish'.
― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 14:50 (twelve years ago) link
Perhaps we should write Moffatt a guide as to how women should be expected to behave in every single thing he ever writes just to be on the safe side.
― Matt DC, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 15:03 (twelve years ago) link
I'm sure Melissa will volunteer.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 15:17 (twelve years ago) link
i don't know if this has been posted before (and i don't agree with everything in it), but i appreciated this rundown of the treatment of s1 female characters in general, and this take on nu-irene adler.
― fighting growlbacks bottomless spirit pit (reddening), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 15:47 (twelve years ago) link
AKA yeah, i'd support someone writing moffat an explanatory pamphlet on portrayals of women in the media or something
― fighting growlbacks bottomless spirit pit (reddening), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 15:51 (twelve years ago) link
I was being sarcastic.
― Matt DC, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:00 (twelve years ago) link
i know! and i wasn't!
― fighting growlbacks bottomless spirit pit (reddening), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:10 (twelve years ago) link
Please don't let this thread turn into tiger beatdown wordvomit.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:13 (twelve years ago) link
sadly i'm not caught up on the new season, so i can't offer to take on all comers in a frothing feminist bout. next month maybe!
― fighting growlbacks bottomless spirit pit (reddening), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:25 (twelve years ago) link
I don't read any of the "Sherlock being rude to Molly about her weight" or "Sherlock walking away from Mrs Hudson mid-sentence" stuff as being sexist or dismissive on behalf of the writers (or played for laughs at the women's expense); I read it as the character of Sherlock being (as in the stories) a massive emotionally immature wanker who is absolutely useless at engaging with anyone except on very precise and unemotional grounds.
― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:48 (twelve years ago) link
Any laughs from those moments (from me) are purely about how useless Sherlock is.
― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:49 (twelve years ago) link
Tea pot sales up.
― Ned Trifle X, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:53 (twelve years ago) link
i've only seen the first 30 minutes or so of this and while i still find moriarty annoying, he is much, much better in this than in S1 - like, he actually calms down a bit and says his lines as if he means them occasionally
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 16:59 (twelve years ago) link
That fucking teapot! Oh god, it annoyed me so much. They were obviously SO PROUD of it.
― trishyb, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 20:33 (twelve years ago) link
Oooh, look at what we sourced, aren't we clever? FUCK OFF.
I am you
― gord downer (Ówen P.), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 20:42 (twelve years ago) link
Ugh, just craven and gross.
― Nicole, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 20:42 (twelve years ago) link
This was pretty much Doctor Who vs The Joker!
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 23:48 (twelve years ago) link
Guys it was obvious that Molly grew a Sherlock clone in her lab. Sherlock engineered the fake phone call to Watson because the clone was about to wake up.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 17 January 2012 23:54 (twelve years ago) link
Bit humiliating for Molly not to get her own assassin, eh
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 16:28 (twelve years ago) link
She was treated so rudely and dismissively by Sherlock that Moriarty figured she was not worth the trouble. I personally would have said "Oh well, sorry, can't help!" if Sherlock had asked me for help after behaving like such a complete twatwaffle.
― Seriously, who votes for Drake? (Nicole), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 16:53 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah, funny chaps, johnny hormones.
― trishyb, Wednesday, 18 January 2012 17:48 (twelve years ago) link
Moffat:
"There is a clue everybody's missed," he says tantalisingly. "So many people theorising about Sherlock's death online – and they missed it! We've worked out how Sherlock survives, and actually shot part of what really happened. It all makes sense."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/20/steven-moffat-sherlock-doctor-who
― kinder, Friday, 20 January 2012 20:50 (twelve years ago) link
I am getting tired of Moffat's "I'm so much more clever than everyone!" interviews. Dude, we all saw the Season Six finale, let's be real here.
― Seriously, who votes for Drake? (Nicole), Friday, 20 January 2012 21:15 (twelve years ago) link
Someone somewhere posted that the head honcho at the Baskerville place had mentioned something about cloning when talking about the weird goings-on there. I will physically break stuff if that's involved in any way.
Though obv I am awe of how Moffat has read the entire internet.
― ailsa, Friday, 20 January 2012 21:21 (twelve years ago) link
Sherlock had a dummy in the flat in this episode - I assumed it was something to do with that but seems unlikely actually.
― kinder, Friday, 20 January 2012 22:37 (twelve years ago) link
thought that was there to paint a fish scarlet
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Saturday, 21 January 2012 00:08 (twelve years ago) link
apparently some of the chinese internet has spent a lot of time talking about how you can use a stressball in your armpit to temporarily cut off the pulse at your wrist, and dude was playing with a stressball for lots of the episode? idk i can't really be arsed to watch the show again to see if this is plausible,
― c sharp major, Saturday, 21 January 2012 09:20 (twelve years ago) link
I've read that a few places too. Was a squash ball iirc.
― ailsa, Saturday, 21 January 2012 17:01 (twelve years ago) link
http://f.cl.ly/items/3k0d1f1X2p1G38152y1L/IMG_0392.jpg
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, 3 February 2012 15:37 (twelve years ago) link
so i finally caught up w/this and liked it a lot! i don't think the plots withstand too much scrutiny, but that's okay. also the baskerville ep was kind of lame.
a question for britishes: what were the less-bbc accents of ms adler and d.i. lestrade supposed to convey?
― mookieproof, Saturday, 11 February 2012 22:19 (twelve years ago) link
Haha what? Lara Pulver is totally BBC, surely. I don't think anything was meant to be conveyed by accents - there are a *lot* of varying ones in the UK!
― kinder, Saturday, 11 February 2012 23:36 (twelve years ago) link
as someone who hasn't read the books i really liked the show! i wish that britishes knew how to make real seasons, though. 3-4 episodes do not a season make.
― tehresa, Sunday, 12 February 2012 03:39 (twelve years ago) link
though they are long episodes at least!
i wish i hadn't burned through all of them in, like, 3 days a few weeks ago... because this is the kind of thing i feel like watching right now, ohwell
― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Sunday, 12 February 2012 03:54 (twelve years ago) link
exactly!
― tehresa, Sunday, 12 February 2012 03:58 (twelve years ago) link
i guess there's a bunch of dr. who, but i'm not sure if i'm ready
― mookieproof, Sunday, 12 February 2012 04:33 (twelve years ago) link
get ready!
― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Sunday, 12 February 2012 04:47 (twelve years ago) link
I tried watching the doctor who pilot in netflix bc of sherlock connection and I was not feeling :(
― tehresa, Sunday, 12 February 2012 04:51 (twelve years ago) link
it gets better. but is perhaps an acquired taste. I mean, one has to keep in mind that it's a family show, after all.
― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Sunday, 12 February 2012 04:55 (twelve years ago) link
And Sherlock is no family show...
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz0mizGkG01r5n6jh.gif
― mookieproof, Sunday, 12 February 2012 05:05 (twelve years ago) link
uh it has changed style more than a few times since 1963! you would be much better starting off with either Blink (a Moffatt one-off from the RTD run) or The Eleventh Hour (the first episode of Moffatt's run as head writer/producer).
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 05:50 (twelve years ago) link
I think she means the pilot of the revived series. Anyway, I think it starts getting good with "Father's Day," which is the third episode of season 1. Stay with it, teh! #itgetsbetter
― omar leeettle (Leee), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:25 (twelve years ago) link
ah, they didn't do a pilot for the revival, though*! for anyone coming to it because of Moffatt, though, I would strongly advise against sitting through four years of RTD, much of which is actively awful. You can absolutely start watching with The Eleventh Hour, and if you get into it, go back and fill in gaps later. But a Sherlock fan should enjoy Blink generally.
*the first episode didn't even get finished in its production run, and had to have scenes picked up by other directors later in other blocks
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:33 (twelve years ago) link
ok so if i dl'd the eccleston season is that a good place to start or not
― mookieproof, Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:35 (twelve years ago) link
wait, five years of RTD! stupid specials.
also, Father's Day is painfully dumb
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:36 (twelve years ago) link
mookie - if you don't enjoy Eccleston, follow my suggestions above (or migrate to a Who thread where I will give detailed ones). there's a v good Moffatt two-parter in the Eccleston year though, so at least skip to that before abandoning.
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:37 (twelve years ago) link
the end of the Ecclestone year is p much not worth watching anyway though. (actually this applies to the end of ALL RTD years, only moreso)
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:40 (twelve years ago) link
i am fine with eccleston, i guess, since i know nothing else? in any case, i don't understand your banter, as it were
RTD?
― mookieproof, Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:41 (twelve years ago) link
RTD = Russell T. Davies, the first show-runner. And hell, I liked his seasons!
― omar leeettle (Leee), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:47 (twelve years ago) link
AND I liked the season finales as well! I'm terrible. And I'm not terribly bothered about RTD's tendency for deus ex machina.
And I assumed that teh meant the first episode when she referred to the "pilot."
― omar leeettle (Leee), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:53 (twelve years ago) link
who did you buy a fez for, though
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:55 (twelve years ago) link
I'm sure you're right in context - pilots /= first episodes tho, and they DID make a pilot in 1963!
{aside - I haven't seen the pilot since '92, but rewatched the re-mounted first ep two months ago, and it's rly great.)
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Sunday, 12 February 2012 07:01 (twelve years ago) link
It was a gift for myself!
― omar leeettle (Leee), Sunday, 12 February 2012 07:04 (twelve years ago) link
Accents. Lestrade: Uncomplicated 'bloke', via non-posh fairly standard estuary english implying highish middle-brow education (good state school education, second-tier university).
Adler: Kensington arriviste (ie BBC-ish, but with a hint of the vulgar - slightly broader vowels/drawl iirc?). Proper Kensington/Chelsea people say things like 'nay jakes' (heard on the tube the other day).
― Fizzles, Sunday, 12 February 2012 08:40 (twelve years ago) link
actually cut the 'BBC-ish' thing, that's become more complicated in the last couple of decades, and can't be equated with any equally dubious concept of 'RP'. Guess I meant high middle class. People go on about the English class system; it certainly persists and is horrid, but I love it. English of all stripes are basically massive snobs.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 12 February 2012 08:43 (twelve years ago) link
sorry. i said pilot because i thought it was a new show based on the old one? anyway it's whatever netflix has as episode one, with secret diary of a call girl girl and mannequins trying to take over the world. does this mean i actually have to research who directed/wrote/produced each episode to determine what's worth watching? and will i miss anything in the overall story doing this?
― tehresa, Sunday, 12 February 2012 16:43 (twelve years ago) link
That's the first episode of the reboot, which is more a continuation of the show rather than a new version.
I wouldn't bother with the research, just watch through consecutively from there. You'll soon figure out who the good/bad writers are.
― ailsa, Sunday, 12 February 2012 16:48 (twelve years ago) link
ailsa otm, just watch the whole durn thing!!! Each season is only 13 episodes, so it won't take that long, so the time invested even in the dud episodes won't be that much (and imo the number of genuinely dire episodes is actually very low, contra sic, the bulk are mediocre but the British conception of sci-fi was pretty fresh to me when I watched). And yes, the seasons do generally develop towards a long arc, so you should watch most of them in order (INCLUDING the Christmas specials, if you're a continuity Nazi communist).
― omar leeettle (Leee), Sunday, 12 February 2012 20:12 (twelve years ago) link
Yeek, post could've used some proofreadin'.
Note I am not getting involved.
― Aunt Acid and the Gaviscons (aldo), Sunday, 12 February 2012 20:22 (twelve years ago) link
Every series is hugely patchy but the good bits make it worth persevering. If you get through the Ecclestone series and don't like any of it (especially Dalek, The Empty Child/Doctor Dances and Father's Day) then it probably isn't going to be for you.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 12 February 2012 20:52 (twelve years ago) link
yeah, i'm not sure i'd recommend jumping in on something like 'Blink', i think it'd be like starting watching Buffy with 'Hush' or 'The Body'? but starting at 'eleventh hour' might work, as that's quite an introductory episode.
― marcus junius ubiquitus (c sharp major), Sunday, 12 February 2012 21:09 (twelve years ago) link
Blink is a) totally standalone, b) by Moffatt and c) a MYSTERY!!! hence recommended for someone coming to Dr Who blind because "the sherlock 'bloke'" does it
otherwise yes Eleventh Hour is totally introductory and...
Each season is only 13 episodes, so it won't take that long,
...with the Christmas specials and the final year of Tennant, this is telling someone who hasn't liked her first RTD episode "oh it's only another FORTY-SEVEN HOURS of that to sit through to get to the Steven Moffatt run!"
TEHRESA!: The Moffatt episodes in the first five years areS01e09 and S01e10 - a two-parter of The Empty Child / The Doctor DancesS02e04 - The Girl In The FireplaceS03e10 - Blinkand S04e09 / S04e10 - a two-parter that's his weakest, but the only one that actually sets up stuff in his run proper. Silence In The Library / Forest Of The Dead.
Then there's a year without a series number, and Moffat has been in charge through S05 and S06. S05e01 is The Eleventh Hour.
You will ABSOLUTELY NOT miss anything by only watching his episodes* - if you find you enjoy a certain Doctor/companion combination, you can go back and fill-in later. I have tested this method on ladyn00bs before (with 3 optional non-Moffatt eps thrown in, including the one you've watched) and it has been totally effective.
*the Doctor is an alien with a blue box that travels in time and space, and his face changes periodically. OK, you're set.
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Monday, 13 February 2012 00:29 (twelve years ago) link
this is telling someone who hasn't liked her first RTD episode "oh it's only another FORTY-SEVEN HOURS of that to sit through to get to the Steven Moffatt run!"
Wait, NOBODY liked "Rose" all that much! This is cutting the nose to spite the face for real, especially when there's great non-Moff episodes like "School Reunion," "Human Nature"/"Family of Blood," "Midnight," and "The Shakespeare Code." (I should note that I've found Moff's run to be incredibly disappointing, what with its phallocentrism and such.)
― omar leeettle (Leee), Monday, 13 February 2012 02:34 (twelve years ago) link
The sixth season was disappointing, but the fifth season to me was perfect and everything I ever wanted from this show. Well, except for the Silurians.
― Nicole, Monday, 13 February 2012 03:26 (twelve years ago) link
teensy lol that "hey, mark gatiss wrote some doctor who episodes too!" has not come up as a selling point thus far.
― ban opinions (reddening), Monday, 13 February 2012 03:28 (twelve years ago) link
IT NEVER WILL.
Just thinking about The Idiot's Lantern annoys me.
― Nicole, Monday, 13 February 2012 03:54 (twelve years ago) link
I read one of Gatiss' Who novels that was quite good. And one of his audios that was trying hard but non-entirely-awful. All his TV eps until Night Terrors have about five minutes of great business and otherwise suck terribly though. Night Terrors is PERFECTLY DECENT Dr Who, there I said it
Wait, NOBODY liked "Rose" all that much!
Almost everything shitty about Rose is Boak stuff they couldn't reshoot, it's Davies' best-written episode IMO - does an amazing job of setting up the premise and characters for new and old viewers alike, establishing the tone of the series, grounding it in present-day reality and very steadily opening up the alien and adventure aspects. It LOOKS absolutely awful (especially in hindsight), but in 45 minutes singlehandedly invented a working paradigm for a massively successful family-friendly C21st version of Dr Who. I p much hold RTD on estimation with JNT as a showrunner, but the dude is a TV genius for the way he envisioned and enacted nu-Who, and most of that is encapsulated in Rose.
This is cutting the nose to spite the face for real, especially when there's great non-Moff episodes like "School Reunion,"
<3 the hell out of School Reunion, but it's of 0 use to Tehresa trying to get into the sherlock "bloke"'s other series.
"Human Nature"/"Family of Blood,"
OK-ish adaptation for most of the time, but soooo much lesser than the novel, which is still free on archive.org. and the ending is so infuriating that I'd write the entire two-parter off even if it was original. iirc me and st3v3m argued abt that on the Who thread of the year tho.
"Midnight,"
RTD purposefully trying to write a Moffatt-style episode, but let down by his own complete disinterest in plotting that makes sense.
and "The Shakespeare Code."
dude c'mon
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Monday, 13 February 2012 07:19 (twelve years ago) link
Rose, Spearhead and Eleventh: the only good "new Doctor" episodes ever.
Night Terrors is no shoddier than Hounds Of Baskerville
</on the real>
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Monday, 13 February 2012 07:23 (twelve years ago) link
No place in that list for Robot? Really?
― Aunt Acid and the Gaviscons (aldo), Monday, 13 February 2012 09:38 (twelve years ago) link
<I>OK-ish adaptation for most of the time, but soooo much lesser than the novel, which is still free on archive.org. and the ending is so infuriating that I'd write the entire two-parter off even if it was original. iirc me and st3v3m argued abt that on the Who thread of the year tho.</I>
This is some pretty severe challops dude, it's one of the three or four best Tennant episodes, admittedly partly because of the lack of Tennant-as-Doctor, also a feature in Blink and Love & Monsters (and I'm well aware that my love for the latter is challops).
― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 13 February 2012 10:11 (twelve years ago) link
(But agree entirely about Rose - the episode's job was to get old fans and new fans simultaneously giddy, and it did a great job)
― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 13 February 2012 10:13 (twelve years ago) link
I was kind of wondering, was the point of the ending "The Reichenbach Fall" to get the viewers to apply the "Sherlock method" on the episode itself? I.e., did the makers deliberately include all the bits of information you need to decipher how Sherlock survived in the episode, and then refuse to explain it, so you'd rewatch it and try to find all the clues yourself? Because there certainly were a lot of potential clues: the ball Sherlock was toying with, Sherlock's final meeting with Molly, the biker who ran down Watson, etc. I can't see any other season why they'd end the final episode of the season with such an infuriatingly open note. (Ok, the first season ended with a cliffhanger too, but at least the mystery was solved before that.) Has the writer/director/producer addressed this after the episode ran in Britain?
― Tuomas, Monday, 13 February 2012 11:04 (twelve years ago) link
He said that "everyone" had missed a crucial piece of evidence that explains how Sherlock did it, so yes, it does seem a little like they were imagining viewers could piece together the puzzle.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 13 February 2012 11:13 (twelve years ago) link
He still says "everyone" has missed something in The Eleventh Hour that explains everything too, so Posts Very Much In Character.
― Aunt Acid and the Gaviscons (aldo), Monday, 13 February 2012 11:24 (twelve years ago) link
Robot is 40% good I guess? Lots of it is rly rly shaky and it doesn't have anything like the confidence of presentation that the other three do. (It's possible that ep 1 of Robot is 90+% great, I can't think what's in episode by episode. The CSO in ep 4 is bad enough to mark the entire story down though!)
I've never rewatched Love & Monsters but I think I really really like it too - it's an entirely elegant way of using the show to tell a story that's simultaneously about fandom and communities in general, and in many subtle ways about Who itself. Also a VERY elegantly-conceived and handled way of handling a 'holiday' episode for the stars!* Would have been way better without the Blue Peter villain, but that said, lol Ian Levine.
we should probably migrate to a Who thread rather than dig into Human Nature (/ any of the last couple dozen posts) here, but I note you're not counter-arguing that it's BETTER than the novel!
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Monday, 13 February 2012 11:32 (twelve years ago) link
*I recently watched both The Aztecs and The Time Meddler for the first time in full, and these do great jobs of being busy and interesting enough that you don't miss the holidaying actors tbf
The only thing I know Moffatt's said about clues in The Eleventh Hour is that Rory's badge was a production error, so anyone looking for more is on a hiding to nothing
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Monday, 13 February 2012 11:34 (twelve years ago) link
Moff has referred to the extra stairs as well, for example, and gone 'aaaaaah'. (No, not aaaaah. This is not an aaaaaah situation.)
I still like Ian L, but I suspect if I rewatched it I would not be as vituperative about how much of an attack it was on him. Still, paving slab blow job jokes DO NOT WANT.
The CSO and Action Man tank let Robot down, but the first ep interaction with Harry and AGLS is joyous. And I love the whole plot about the elderly scientist being taken in by the Not Nazis Honest Guv and their anti-human meeting in a school sports hall. (Agree though, this should probably be in a Who thread).
― Aunt Acid and the Gaviscons (aldo), Monday, 13 February 2012 11:44 (twelve years ago) link
Still, paving slab blow job jokes DO NOT WANT.
I 100% agree with this, mainly because you can't use "it's a kids' show, stop moaning about it being for kids" as a defence if you're then including things that are not suitable for a kids' show. Also, blow job jokes in Doctor Who are just tacky.
― trishyb, Monday, 13 February 2012 13:28 (twelve years ago) link
OK. I think I decided this isn't actually very good. Maybe if I was 10 I would like it.
― De La Soil (admrl), Wednesday, 15 February 2012 22:01 (twelve years ago) link
Seriously, does it get better? I only seen the first two. There's nothing too wrong with them, it's just a bit bland?
― rrrobyn van pursuit (admrl), Wednesday, 15 February 2012 23:10 (twelve years ago) link
i think i like it because it makes me feel a bit like a kid, yet still an adult, obv - suspension of disbelief stuff. though the show doesn't always work to that effect, it's true. (lol @ yr display name)
― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Wednesday, 15 February 2012 23:30 (twelve years ago) link
Adam, the second episode is probably the worst in the series, you should at least watch the third one, it's much better. But if the main concept (aspie guy solves outlandish crimes with the power of deduction) doesn't grab you, that isn't gonna change, though the second series at least has more interpersonal drama.
― Tuomas, Thursday, 16 February 2012 15:21 (twelve years ago) link
Amazon in the UK currently has the first series on region-free blu-ray for £6. I'm guessing there's not much in the way of frills on there.
― trishyb, Thursday, 16 February 2012 15:23 (twelve years ago) link
bbc dvd/blu-rays are normally pretty extra-laden (cf their doctor who discs), i know these discs have commentary tracks, at the v least
― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 16 February 2012 20:48 (twelve years ago) link
old-school Dr Who extras are largely compiled by a dedicated nerd network though, not through endemic BBC policy AFAIU. (no idea about the new series ones though)
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Thursday, 16 February 2012 23:13 (twelve years ago) link
or you know, we could google
The extras on the DVD are a little thin on the ground. There are commentaries for A Study In Pink and The Great Game, along with a short ‘behind the scenes' feature, Unlocking Sherlock, and the original 60 minute pilot. To be honest, there's little point in watching the pilot, as it's a 60 minute version of A Study In Pink, but it's nice to know that it's there.
― Θ ̨Θƪ (sic), Thursday, 16 February 2012 23:21 (twelve years ago) link
I could go and open the one that arrived from Amazon today, but I'm too lazy.
― trishyb, Thursday, 16 February 2012 23:43 (twelve years ago) link
Not to drag out the Who thing, but I just wanted to point out that as awesome a sci-fi story as it is, and arguably as good a Who episode as it is, "Blink" doesn't really introduce viewers to the Doctor?
― omar leeettle (Leee), Friday, 17 February 2012 06:27 (twelve years ago) link
It just takes us back to a time when Carey Mulligan wasn't a bland nonentity like she was in Drive.
― Nicole, Friday, 17 February 2012 11:55 (twelve years ago) link
:(
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, 17 February 2012 12:17 (twelve years ago) link
xp - actually I think it does! It's an intro to the Doctor from the point of view of a bright civilian, we learn what she learns, it's a little brisk but doesn't I think skip past anything you need to know, and by the end you have a decent wordcloud of him - alien, energetic, travels through time, frequently sorry.
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 17 February 2012 12:19 (twelve years ago) link
An alternative entrypoint could be the Girl in the Fireplace, which has equally beguiling time travel tricks up its sleeve but features a lot more of the Doctor.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, 17 February 2012 12:22 (twelve years ago) link
A little of that Doctor goes a long way :)
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 17 February 2012 12:26 (twelve years ago) link
Isn't there a separate thread for Doctor Who?
― Tuomas, Friday, 17 February 2012 12:54 (twelve years ago) link
Sorry if that sounded harsh, but it's sad to notice new posts in this thread, but when I click on it none of them are about Sherlock.
― Tuomas, Friday, 17 February 2012 12:55 (twelve years ago) link
We have nothing to say until Smilin' Steve Moffatt deigns to drop the revelation bomb on us.
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 17 February 2012 12:59 (twelve years ago) link
Tuomas we are talkin about which Dr Who eps a Sherlock fan might like. So it is sort of connected. Sorry you're bummed out tho.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, 17 February 2012 13:03 (twelve years ago) link
http://circletheglo.be/post/19574276992/redscharlach-otters-who-look-like-benedict
― mookieproof, Tuesday, 20 March 2012 00:56 (twelve years ago) link
https://twitter.com/#!/StarShaped_Girl/status/199913017574563840/photo/1/large
― Fas Ro Duh (Gukbe), Tuesday, 8 May 2012 20:15 (eleven years ago) link
I watched Hound of the Baskervilles on the plane recently, and actually enjoyed it despite some of the cheesy bits. Cumberbatch is quite a good Sherlock! Think I will investigate more of them.
― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 8 May 2012 20:29 (eleven years ago) link
That's the weakest of all of the episodes --which is not to say I didn't enjoy it -- so I think you'd better.
― Three Word Username, Tuesday, 8 May 2012 20:32 (eleven years ago) link
Second weakest. Skip S01e02 altogether Veg.
― ┗|∵|┓ (sic), Wednesday, 9 May 2012 01:48 (eleven years ago) link
you're not the boss of me
― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, 9 May 2012 01:53 (eleven years ago) link
http://youtu.be/yrDVSxNycKc
Trailer thingy for CBS' own Sherlock Holmes series, Elementary. Looks like a rather generic police procedural with a 'quirky' lead character - a la Monk - to me.
If I want a Yank Sherlock I'll watch House, I think.
― DavidM, Friday, 18 May 2012 09:55 (eleven years ago) link
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m45a6hTNoB1rr2txjo1_1280.png
― dethklok piccalo (c sharp major), Friday, 18 May 2012 11:07 (eleven years ago) link
What is it with America casting short arse Sherlocks. Johnny Lee Miller isn't Robert Downy short but he's hardly tall and striking. (one of the reasons that Cumberbatch makes a good Sherlock)
― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Friday, 18 May 2012 11:12 (eleven years ago) link
what is it with american television and british film actors of the 90s
― thomp, Friday, 18 May 2012 11:44 (eleven years ago) link
i keep walking past an HMV window with big boardwalk empire and mildred pierce displays with winslet and mcdonald and thinking, just, huh
― thomp, Friday, 18 May 2012 11:45 (eleven years ago) link
Johnny Lee Miller isn't Robert Downy short but he's hardly tall and striking. (one of the reasons that Cumberbatch makes a good Sherlock)
I really don't think Cumberbatch is all that much taller than Miller, it's probably due to the costume choices. Miller is dressed like an overgrown teenager.
― Respectfully, Tyrese Gibson (Nicole), Friday, 18 May 2012 12:18 (eleven years ago) link
idgi
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 16 August 2012 20:51 (eleven years ago) link
I am youyou are me wth
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 16 August 2012 20:52 (eleven years ago) link
yeah?
― gygax! II: pornograffitti (admrl), Thursday, 16 August 2012 20:52 (eleven years ago) link
ya
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 16 August 2012 22:07 (eleven years ago) link
Jan. 29 on these freedom-loving shores, lolling @ u, Blighty!
― Matt Groening's Cousin (Leee), Wednesday, 23 October 2013 20:33 (ten years ago) link
the BBC has the “first window” rights to air the show, so UK fans can at least take heart in knowing they will almost certainly get season 3 sometime before Jan. 19
― just sayin, Wednesday, 23 October 2013 22:10 (ten years ago) link
Surely it'll be a flagship Christmas/New Year showing?
― ailsa, Wednesday, 23 October 2013 22:24 (ten years ago) link
USA! USA!
― Matt Groening's Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 24 October 2013 05:30 (ten years ago) link
I liked it when Derren Brown did it, the actual explanation was more plausible but less television-y I suppose.
The episode itself was pretty good even if it owed a debt to V For Vendetta. Do we really need another series arc super-villain though? And I'm still not keen on the 'thinky time' special effects, even if they were less Minority Report this time round.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Wednesday, 1 January 2014 22:34 (ten years ago) link
didn't think much of it really. lopsided with all the 'coming back' stuff at the beginning. editing/pace was a bit weird more generally - wooshy 'speed up/slow down' stuff over an unnecessarily prolonged motorcycle race. can't remember what colonel moran did in the original story (other than taking a shot at the silhouette of holmes? was it that one?), but big terrorism feels like it's not a great fit for sherlock. felt like an episode where a lot of stuff had to be got out of the way/set up. holmes #bantz bit overplayed. wicker man guy fawkes stuff was fun. compared to the excellent first episode of s2 (admittedly probably the best so far), it all felt badly hobbled.
use of london topography is still a strength i think - the lines of information and communication.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 2 January 2014 02:14 (ten years ago) link
tho the ACD stories after holmes returns are also comparatively lumbering and clumsy, so perhaps it's cunning meta.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 2 January 2014 02:16 (ten years ago) link
Well what did you all expect? This was a Gatiss episode.
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 03:13 (ten years ago) link
Gatiss episodes still >>>>> Thompson episodes on average (esp if you count that Moffat plainly wrote much of Thompson's S2 ep)
― giant faps are what you take, wanking on the moon (sic), Thursday, 2 January 2014 08:17 (ten years ago) link
God this was terrible. Just an appalling mess. I thought it was just the middle episodes that sucked so hard?
― pandemic, Thursday, 2 January 2014 12:46 (ten years ago) link
'elementary' lookin pretty good now huh you pseuds
― j., Thursday, 2 January 2014 14:22 (ten years ago) link
Ha! I actually love 'Elementary'. Sure it's police procedural and an entirely different thing from 'Sherlock', but I'm basically cool with JLM and Lucy Liu just hanging out solving crimes. JLM is incredible in it.
― pandemic, Thursday, 2 January 2014 14:26 (ten years ago) link
was about as good/bad as any of the other mediocre episodes i thought. banter was cute. also im not sure that were meant to take the "actual" explanation as the "actual" explanation? but idk
― max, Thursday, 2 January 2014 14:46 (ten years ago) link
ok - shd watch elementary. this episode of Sherlock just gets worse and worse as I think about it. a non-case only solved by the agency of the extremely unlikely figure of someone whose job it is, from home, to review tube security tapes before wiping them, who then gets in touch with Sherlock rather than his manager. is an expert on tubes, and categorically states there is nothing between two tube stations whereas in a fact there is an entire siding and station (leading nowhere - why was it built?). this is a version of the "secret passage" get-out much abhorred by golden-age crime and detection writers (Sherlock, with its methodical clues and solutions, partakes of this genre as the original Sherlock Holmes stories did much to produce it). the absence of valuable rolling stock is not noticed by anyone.
there was a lot of horrible public-school/establishment bro behaviour - present in the other episodes obviously, but probably more acceptable (if it is at all acceptable) because they are more vulnerable.
plot holes or lack of realism aren't a problem (for me anyway) as long as the emotion or entertainment conveyed is successful, but this was a total hodge-podge, designed to Holmes and Watson to do an unfunny and actually quite repulsive comedy turn.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 2 January 2014 14:54 (ten years ago) link
yeah this "mystery" was one of the absolute worst in terms of plot holes
― max, Thursday, 2 January 2014 15:03 (ten years ago) link
what do you mean by this?
yeah i get the mystery was going to be a minor part of the 'omg you alive' episode but Q: how does this train car disapper in between stations? there are no secret stations or passages between stations so how? A: there is a secret passage between stations! is really just too lazy
― balls, Thursday, 2 January 2014 15:25 (ten years ago) link
It made me want to revisit Jonathan Creek (which doesn't happen very often) to see if my memory of it combining convoluted and improbable mysteries with moderately clever solutions much better is correct.
The whole episode felt like a hook for the bantz, which might be fine if most of the bantz wasn't a tired variation on 'you are gay', 'your moustache looks silly', 'lol @ the woman who is in love with the mighty Sherlock', 'everyone's an idiot apart from me', etc, etc.
― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Thursday, 2 January 2014 15:38 (ten years ago) link
I enjoyed this episode as long as I didn't think too hard about it but honestly I just sigh whenever I see Gatiss's name on anything I like these days. He's not a particularly good writer he's basically just a tiresome fanboy for certain kinds of Victorian murk without much of an idea of how to make things genuinely mysterious or creepy. Which is weird because I liked him as part of the League of Gentlemen but every time he tries to write anything straight (or straight-ish ie Sherlock or Doctor Who) it falls flat.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 2 January 2014 16:52 (ten years ago) link
Do we know for certain that Moff had a hand in the S2 finale, or are we just inferring from its quality (and how groansomely bad Thompson's S1 episode was)?
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 17:15 (ten years ago) link
Did everybody look strangely at Molly's new boyfriend Tom near the end just because he resembles Sherlock, or was there something else notable about him that I missed? It seemed like the camera lingered on his shoes, but I have no idea what the significance of that was.
― Dan I., Thursday, 2 January 2014 18:07 (ten years ago) link
Jonathan Creek is brilliant, and it did that 'boyfriend who looks/dresses exactly like the main character' thing years before this.Xp I think it was just that he looked like Sherlock
― kinder, Thursday, 2 January 2014 18:08 (ten years ago) link
The Avengers showed Mr Peel just slightly before Jonathan Creek
Its basic quality, parts of it's detailed interconnectedness to the series arc, and how groansomely bad both Thompson's S1 ep and his Who ep were that year. It's like how Chibnall obviously disappears from the room ten minutes before the end of the Silurian 2-parter.
― giant faps are what you take, wanking on the moon (sic), Thursday, 2 January 2014 18:20 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, it was just that he looked like Sherlock, I think. I sort of enjoyed this without actually liking it, it was utterly ludicrous (a bomb with an off-switch? Really?! plus yeah secret underground stations that aren't actually on the line, wtf?), the fake-out explanations were annoying, and if that WAS the explanation, then fuck Moff and his "no-one on the internet sussed it" schtick because I'm pretty sure this very thread alone mentions the replacement body, the cyclist knocking Watson down on purpose, and the squash-ball-under-the-armpit trick.
― ailsa, Thursday, 2 January 2014 18:23 (ten years ago) link
Thanks sic.
If Sherlock was going to use the squash ball trick, what was the point of the replacement body then???
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 18:41 (ten years ago) link
Actually, I might need to watch again, I think that was maybe a fake-out explanation as well.
― ailsa, Thursday, 2 January 2014 19:17 (ten years ago) link
I think the third explanation was indeed another fake-out.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 2 January 2014 19:20 (ten years ago) link
everyone is saying that but I didn't get that at all. But then I didn't understand the bit when he disappeared away after telling that guy.
― kinder, Thursday, 2 January 2014 19:23 (ten years ago) link
How was the bomb triggered to go off? I really think I might have fallen asleep at a couple of points :-(
― ailsa, Thursday, 2 January 2014 19:27 (ten years ago) link
The bad guy had a big remote control box with a red button on it in his suitcase.
― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Thursday, 2 January 2014 19:29 (ten years ago) link
I also was suspicious of the third(?) explanation, like, why was Sherlock spilling to that fan guy? Plausibility-wise, the second explanation is still in the lead, AFAI care.
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 19:34 (ten years ago) link
Did Col. Moran trigger the countdown? If so why trigger a countdown instead of triggering the actual bomb to go off? I didn't get why it had to be on a timer.
― pandemic, Thursday, 2 January 2014 20:08 (ten years ago) link
Aye, the need for a timer was the bit I was struggling with.
― ailsa, Thursday, 2 January 2014 20:11 (ten years ago) link
Plausibility-wise, the second explanation is still in the lead, AFAI care
The gay kiss explanation???
it was just that he looked like Sherlock
I'm glad that's been explained to me because I didn't have a clue why everyone did a double-take when they saw him - I thought maybe he was a character from a previous episode that I either hadn't seen or forgot about. He didn't look anything like Sherlock to me.
― Pre-Madonna (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Thursday, 2 January 2014 21:08 (ten years ago) link
He had hair and a coat and was a bit thin.
― ailsa, Thursday, 2 January 2014 21:26 (ten years ago) link
Takes a lot fewer moving parts than the Lazarus plot!
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 21:36 (ten years ago) link
As I understand it, they all went to great lengths to fool Watson - the one person they didn't need to fool. Only the sniper guys and Moriarty needed to believe Sherlock was dead. I get that there might have been some of the gang still hanging around but it doesn't explain why Watson was the one person that needed to be the centre of it all.
― kinder, Thursday, 2 January 2014 22:19 (ten years ago) link
Might be the need to keep Watson in the dark for however long Sherlock needed to root out that last of Moriarty's gang?
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 22:45 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, I figured Watson needed to not be in on it for convincing purposes.
― ailsa, Thursday, 2 January 2014 22:46 (ten years ago) link
right, but everything was set up from his POV - so what about the ppl that actually needed to be tricked?did they take out the one sniper guy beforehand?
― kinder, Thursday, 2 January 2014 22:51 (ten years ago) link
Think so, when S kicked Lazarus off, Mycroft sent his people to deal with snipers (or at least the sniper that was aiming at John). It's anticlimactic, but there you go.
― Matt Groening is MY Cousin (Leee), Thursday, 2 January 2014 23:05 (ten years ago) link
yeah they showed the sniper thru the gunsight
― balls, Thursday, 2 January 2014 23:51 (ten years ago) link
has anyone actually watched the end of the s2 finale to see if it matches at all. seem to recall mycroft reacting in a manner (not mourning exactly) that didn't seem to indicate being in on it, neverminding having helped planned it.
― balls, Thursday, 2 January 2014 23:56 (ten years ago) link
Wouldn't they have filmed all those different explanations at the same time as they filmed the end of the previous series?
― Pre-Madonna (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Thursday, 2 January 2014 23:59 (ten years ago) link
yeah presumably, i'm just trying to remember if they were actively dishonest or if they just pulled a solution out of their ass. the answer clearly is 'both'.
― balls, Friday, 3 January 2014 00:45 (ten years ago) link
i watched the end of the finale just before this, it seemed to have matched up mostly. in one of them watson gets knocked down slightly earlier i think. i dont think we see mycroft after sherlock "dies", just before when watson is yelling at him--he doesnt really react, exactly
― max, Friday, 3 January 2014 02:00 (ten years ago) link
that was very silly.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Friday, 3 January 2014 02:21 (ten years ago) link
As I understand it, they all went to great lengths to fool Watson - the one person they didn't need to fool.
My theory was always that Sherlock didn't tell Watson he's alive because he wanted to protect Watson. He didn't want Moriarty's crooks to try to get to him through Watson, as they had done in the past. (Though I don't know why doesn't say it in this episode - maybe he just doesn't want to admit it to Watson?) You may notice that the three major characters Sherlock didn't inform about his faked death are the same ones Moriarty's snipers targeted in the previous episode, i.e. the people Moriarty considered to be Sherlock's true friends. Maybe Moriarty's network was still keeping an eye on them even after Sherlock had "died"? Moriarty might've even been smart enough to figure out Sherlock might try to fake his death, so maybe he ordered his goons to spy on these three people in the case Sherlock would re-emerge and try to contact them. So by not contacting them Sherlock made sure they stayed out of harm's way until he had fully destroyed Moriarty's network.
Also, maybe I totally misinterpreted it, but I thought the "final" explanation for how Sherlock survived was just something Watson imagined? We see Watson waiting to die in the metro carriage, the scene fades to white, then we see Sherlock's scene with Anderson, then there's another fade to white to white and were back to Watson in the metro. IIRC, in that scene Anderson says he actually faked the whole terrorist scare just to lure Sherlock out of hiding, that the bomb wasn't real, which of course isn't what actually happened; it's just Watson imagining how they might survive the bomb. Which would mean the explanation for Sherlock's survival was imaginary too, and we never found out how exactly he faked his death.
The terrorist plot in this was a bit silly, but I liked how the writers handled the fake death cliffhanger... They must've realized that any proper explanation they could come up for it would fail to live to up to the fan expectations built up during the two-year break, so basically they just acknowledged this failure with a meta wink, and never gave a definite answer to the mystery.
― Tuomas, Friday, 3 January 2014 09:04 (ten years ago) link
IIRC, in that scene Anderson says he actually faked the whole terrorist scare just to lure Sherlock out of hiding
Did he? I don't remember that. I thought he admitted faking the Jack The Ripper thing.
― Pre-Madonna (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Friday, 3 January 2014 09:21 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, he admitted the Jack the Ripper thing, but after that I think he was talking about the bomb too... I guess I have to rewatch the episode to see if I remember the lines correctly, but I thought this scene's placing between the fadeouts in the metro carriage was curious, it certainly felt like it was something Watson (or Sherlock) imagined, not something that really happened. But anyway, even if the scene was actually real, it ends with Anderson saying that he would be the last person Sherlock would tell the truth; i.e. we still don't whether the third account was the correct explanation for how Sherlock did it.
― Tuomas, Friday, 3 January 2014 09:38 (ten years ago) link
there was a lot of horrible public-school/establishment bro behaviour - present in the other episodes obviously, but probably more acceptable (if it is at all acceptable) because they are more vulnerable.what do you mean by this?
― max, Thursday, January 2, 2014 3:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
yep, was a bit glib, I'll see if I can break it down a bit:
a lot of horrible public-school/establishment bro behaviour
by which i mean that sadism towards the emotions (not just a feature of public school male behaviour). why am i hand-wringing about this? well, the episode stank of the stuff - it was tiresome. unlike earlier episodes where sherlock is seen to be unaware of what other people might feel, by the end he is aware of what he can do with Watson's emotions. He's not a detective here. It's also condoned, in previous episodes Watson was seen as a reformative character - someone who might make Sherlock be better. Here S's behaviour is seen as charming or amusing - in fact the whole episode, if it was about anything, was about getting Watson to 'come round'.
probably more acceptable (if it is at all acceptable)
i can probably find it acceptable because <3 the earnest and innocent young males of Victorian/late Victorian genre lit (RL Stevenson!), but i can see why people might not see 'charm of male arrogance'=entertainment. perhaps this is because i'm in a self-inflicted nihilistic mood of 'destroy the white male hegemony, it's had its turn and it f'ing stinks to the core'.
because they are more vulnerable
early episodes represented a 'getting to know' period of uncertainty (for the viewer as much as the characters), series 2, Holmes was seen to be matched (E1), chemically frightened (E2), and E3 was about his rise and hubristic fall. the eccentric arrogance (which as I say was not condoned) had a touch of frailty about it. This episode was about the returning conquering hero, adored by all (even Watson's fiancee!), undefeatable even by a big bomb under Parliament. Not so earnest, not so innocent. As is always the case, bombast and bravura are different coming from those who are vulnerable than those who are in power. (it's the thing that people who make false claims about notional equality never get ('why can't we have a white history week!').
He's not a particularly good writer he's basically just a tiresome fanboy for certain kinds of Victorian murk without much of an idea of how to make things genuinely mysterious or creepy.
oh you saw The Tractate Middoth too did you? Odd choice of story anyway, one of the very few (only?) happy ending MR James stories. And Gatissss's's equivocation at the end (omg is he still haunting them?!!) was a bit shit, quite reminiscent of MR James's despised 'modern' use of elipsis...
― Fizzles, Friday, 3 January 2014 12:32 (ten years ago) link
Yeah I didn't think the Tractate Middoth was much cop at all really. This episode was a million times better by comparison.
I think Watson's more affectionate tolerance of Sherlock bullshit can be explained by Sherlock having a) come back from the dead and b) saved him from being burned alive. Those scenes were genuinely tense, btw.
― Matt DC, Friday, 3 January 2014 13:23 (ten years ago) link
It seemed a lot of Sherlock's sadism towards the end (lying about not calling the police, the bomb timer scene) was because he wanted to get Watson back to business by making him admit he's almost as big a thrill-seeker as Sherlock himself, and he couldn't have done that without getting him into a thrilling life-or-death situation (but one where Sherlock felt he was in control and Watson wasn't in real danger, unlike with the Guy Fawkes bonfire scene, where he obviously couldn't have afforded to play any games). Though the timer did start at 2:30 and we see Sherlock stopped it at 1:30, so it remains unclear whether Sherlock knew how to stop it the whole time and was just playing mind games from the beginning, or whether he was being serious to Watson at first, and only figured out the off-switch at 1:30, after which he decided to fuck with Watson a bit. It's true that Watson should've called Sherlock out on his behaviour, but on the other hand he already did that in a major way (more major than in any previous episode) in the first act, when Sherlock revealed he wasn't dead, so maybe doing the same in finale would've been repetitive? Also, maybe Watson actually got Sherlock's point, despite his fucked-up method of getting it across? After all, it was his own choice to team with Sherlock again and go looking for the bomb, even after he was almost burned to death.
― Tuomas, Friday, 3 January 2014 13:44 (ten years ago) link
And he could've called the police himself, it's not like Sherlock was forcing him not to call them. He had the choice to stay behind and phone the cops, or follow Sherlock and try to solve the whole thing with just the two of them, and he chose the latter, as Sherlock had hoped he would.
― Tuomas, Friday, 3 January 2014 13:53 (ten years ago) link
they were - the burning alive scene was excellent and v alarming.
and yep, fair points, Tuomas - I got in a state of unhelpful critical agitation about the whole thing. hope the rest are better because thoroughly enjoyed the first two series.
― Fizzles, Friday, 3 January 2014 14:05 (ten years ago) link
that scene was less tense for me because it's certain that he will be there on time as watson will not die. but that really is just me watching TV incorrectly!
― ^ sarcasm (ken c), Friday, 3 January 2014 14:29 (ten years ago) link
I didn't think this was a superb episode either; as people have pointed out above, the actual plot is full of holes. But I think it managed to do the things it absolutely needed to do (showing how people react to Sherlock's return, giving some explanation to how he survived, re-establishing his relationship with Watson) in a satisfactory way, while also providing a couple of neat character moments for Mycroft, Mary, and Molly. Let's just hope the next two episodes can build on that, with better mysteries.
TBH I was maybe expecting more of this episode because the recent Dr. Who movie Gatiss wrote was so great, much better than his Dr. Who and Sherlock episodes of the past... But that movie was all about the characters and their interaction, whereas Sherlock requires some intricate plotting too, and it just doesn't seem like Gatiss is very good at that.
(xpost)
― Tuomas, Friday, 3 January 2014 14:35 (ten years ago) link
― ^ sarcasm (ken c), Friday, 3 January 2014 14:29 (9 minutes ago) Permalink
no i think this is watching tv correctly, or being good at watching tv
like if there are plainly no stakes then the only interesting thing is the novelty of the solution to the nominal problem, and the solution to the nominal problem was dull
as was everything with thinking bullet time, or with the mobile/internet superimposed text device -- devices i liked fine when well-executed -- which were just clunky here
elementary's first season actually did better at setting up situations where something is at stake i think. and this is an american tv model which one expects to be way more about slate-wiping. like the question of whether sherlock will kill moran in that, e.g., even when he doesn't the way in which he doesn't has outcomes, ramifications.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 3 January 2014 14:57 (ten years ago) link
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/jan/03/sherlock-doctor-who-fans-influencing-tv
This seems true for Sherlock, but less so for Dr Who. I haven't actually watched Dr Who for years and haven't seen the episode in question, so I could be wrong, but the whole 12-regenerations thing is quite a fundamental thing that would have been picked up on by the majority of viewers, I would have thought, rather than just a small number of obsessive fans, so it needed to be sorted out. Probably wrong thread.
― Pre-Madonna (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Friday, 3 January 2014 15:49 (ten years ago) link
I agree with Tuomas that the episode demanded too much plot from Gatiss when he's much better at character and emotion. I was thinking the other day about Brian Michael Bendis and how I adore his intimate work on Daredevil and Alias but can't connect with him at all when he has to do the kind of intricate plotting demanded by multi-title arcs because he doesn't have enough grasp of pace and exposition to keep all those plates spinning. To be honest, few writers do. Even Moffat, who did some great plate-spinning with the Riversong storyline, got in an almighty tangle with the latest Doctor Who, and I remembered that the epsiodes of his that initially engaged me, like Blink, The Empty Child and The Girl in the Fireplace, were small, character-driven stories. And that's where the first few episodes of Sherlock also excelled - you could enjoy them in isolation. Which is my long-winded way of saying I can live without complicated continuity and geek pandering.
― Deafening silence (DL), Friday, 3 January 2014 16:24 (ten years ago) link
My theory was always that Sherlock didn't tell Watson he's alive because he wanted to protect Watson. He didn't want Moriarty's crooks to try to get to him through Watson, as they had done in the past.
If M's henchpeople suspect S is alive and wanted to get to S via W, that's not at all contingent on whether or not W is aware of S's vitality.
we still don't whether the third account was the correct explanation for how Sherlock did it.
Agree with this.
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Friday, 3 January 2014 17:54 (ten years ago) link
I wasn't really pulled into this, but I thought the Sherlock death conspiracy group was a nice touch.
― Elvis Telecom, Saturday, 4 January 2014 00:05 (ten years ago) link
the way to make this episode great is to get so stoned you can't keep a train of thought for longer than about 45 seconds, which is the longest stretch in this episode where anything makes sense plotwise. it feels like they randomly cut out about a third of the story and just kept the bits with the best dialog.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Saturday, 4 January 2014 01:37 (ten years ago) link
ok I accept my reaction to Ep1 was a bit off beam but I think this is quite a good episode of bob hope and bing crosby.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:21 (ten years ago) link
loool why does he need five laptops to have five chat windows open?
― Fizzles, Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:37 (ten years ago) link
Would watch Drunk Sherlock & John Investigate in a heartbeat.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:40 (ten years ago) link
you are.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:42 (ten years ago) link
I've already assumed this is the guy from the kitchen with the waterproof phone.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:45 (ten years ago) link
This was really fun!
― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:53 (ten years ago) link
And I was wrong, obviously. This has been really fun though.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Sunday, 5 January 2014 21:56 (ten years ago) link
someone on Facebook has just pointed out that he was in Nathan barley...
― koogs, Sunday, 5 January 2014 22:04 (ten years ago) link
it's a cute visual parallel that sells what the link is with the preceding thing immediately? i don't think it's meant to be not ludicrous
this was fun and reassuringly not awful
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Sunday, 5 January 2014 22:44 (ten years ago) link
yeah ok. I still think both stories have struggled with pace, alternating fun bit/solvy bit, so that you get a thin case and the personality stuff seems fevered rather than carried by the energy of the narrative.
mark s has pointed out there's a few father brown refs going in as well - the waiter/guest ref (the queer feet), the Invisible Man in this one, and I thought the commander who survives the death of all his troops was a ref to The Broken Sword.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 5 January 2014 22:56 (ten years ago) link
That was mostly boring for the first two thirds then pretty good
― Pre-Madonna (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Sunday, 5 January 2014 23:24 (ten years ago) link
poor molly
― mookieproof, Monday, 6 January 2014 02:41 (ten years ago) link
The first two thirds had me convinced that this was going to be a shaggy dog story with lots of Sherlock/John/Mary feels, and then it suddenly had to go and resolve itself. Impressive.
Still waiting on the headless nun though.
ikr?
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Monday, 6 January 2014 04:33 (ten years ago) link
First hour was a shark-jump. Last 30 minutes just about saved it.
― I can still taste the Taboo in my mouth when I hear those songs (Scik Mouthy), Monday, 6 January 2014 07:57 (ten years ago) link
I thought this was an excellent episode, and I liked the first hour too, before the tying-everything-together finale... I felt that at this point the series had earned a plot-light breather episode with a character focus, and this was written and performed exceptionally well. (In fact it was the finale that was perhaps the weakest part, as it felt a bit too neat; what coincidence that the two cases Sherlock brought up during his best man speech were related to each other and to John's wedding, even though Sherlock didn't know it when he mentioned the cases.)
There were some hysterically funny bits (the whole "drunken detectives" episode, especially seeing how Sherlock's "Sherlock scan" works while he's drunk), as well as poignant ones (Mary manipulating both John and Sherlock into thinking it's the other one who needs take a new case to take his mind of the wedding, when in fact it's both of them who need it; again pointing out that Watson is in for the thrills almost as much as Sherlock is). And the main emotional theme of the episode, Sherlock's fear that his best friend is gonna abandon him once he's married was handled exceptionally well, and in a way that us non-sociopaths could also relate to him.
So yeah, once I got over the "there's not gonna be a big and thrilling mystery in this one, is there?" disappointment, I simply enjoyed the episode for what it is... And even though the detective stuff at the end was awfully clever, I don't think it was the meat of this episode, the character development was.
― Tuomas, Monday, 6 January 2014 18:29 (ten years ago) link
Oh, and when the series eventually ends, they're gonna pair Sherlock and Molly together, aren't they? They can't do it yet, because at this point any lovey-dovey stuff would ruin the character dynamics between Sherlock and Molly, as well as Sherlock and Watson, but again in this episode it was hinted that Molly still has feelings for Sherlock, and that Tom is mostly just a poor woman's substitute. (This was especially poignant in the scene where Molly felt the need to tell Sherlock that she has lots of sex with Tom; since sex is the one thing Sherlock seems to be mostly disinterested in, it felt like Molly was saying, "Well, at least he's better than you in that regard!")
― Tuomas, Monday, 6 January 2014 18:39 (ten years ago) link
The missing train bit is taken from the Doyle story "The Lost Special". The secret passage was a disconnected side line into a mine. They should have included a bit about it having to be reconnected in the show. (Interestingly, this is one story where Holmes gets the solution wrong.)
I dislike the "master criminal sends clues to Sherlock" device. It's lazy writing, and it reminds me of the Riddler on the Batman TV show.
― zanarkand bozo (abanana), Monday, 6 January 2014 18:43 (ten years ago) link
xp agree w/your first post, but Irene Adler is the only 'the woman' for Sherlock. I don't want him to pair off!
― kinder, Monday, 6 January 2014 18:44 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, I don't want him either, he doesn't really work as a romantic character, but I'm sure the writers have figured this out too, that's why I think they're not gonna pair the two until at the end of the series. (It would also provide a neat conclusion to larger character arc they seem to have planned for Sherlock, one where he gradually tries to figure how to connect with other people and have feelings for them.)
― Tuomas, Monday, 6 January 2014 18:56 (ten years ago) link
it was hinted that Molly still has feelings for Sherlock
"hinted."
Anyway, I don't think he ~needs~ to be rehabilitated, even if it's at the end of the series.
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Monday, 6 January 2014 19:01 (ten years ago) link
fun, enjoying the new daffiness cumberbatch is bringing this year. mystery was a ridiculous cheat again and also completely beside the point again. sherlock failing to pull and skulking out to go home and listen to 'how soon is now' on blast was great. my fave middle episode so far but the competition is weak.
― balls, Monday, 6 January 2014 19:30 (ten years ago) link
it took me three tries to finish the first episode but this one kept me hooked way past my bedtime. just great. the elaborate staging of the chat window conversations melding into mycroft-as-obi-wan was just brilliant, as good as it gets on stage or screen imo.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 08:59 (ten years ago) link
though i have to confess i still don't really understand the murder weapon :(
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 09:00 (ten years ago) link
super-thin stabby thing, so tight you don't feel. belt stops you bleeding out till released - like a pre-set tourniquet.
― giant faps are what you take, wanking on the moon (sic), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 09:04 (ten years ago) link
but you'd feel it or see it when putting the belt on. and if it's super-thin why doesn't it get bent down?
― koogs, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 09:42 (ten years ago) link
i dont think it was part of the belt, it was just stabbed through the belt
― just sayin, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 09:57 (ten years ago) link
yes - stabbing takes place through the belt, while wearing the belt - in the whizzy how-it-happened summary we see culprit coming up close to both guardsman & sholto to do the stabbing.
― woof, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 09:59 (ten years ago) link
found it a lot of fun on every level - incident, character business, structure. don't know which of the writers built it, but it had a lot of what I've always liked in Moffatt since Press Gang, pleasure in form + bright chatter.
― woof, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 10:07 (ten years ago) link
Even if the murder weapon thing was explained, there were still loads of holes in the resolution. Like, even if you're using a super-thin blade, is it really possible to lethally stab someone without him noticing it at the moment of stabbing? Why didn't the Royal Guard dude start bleeding immediately after he took off the belt, why did the bleeding start only after he'd undressed completely and walked to the shower booth? If the photographer guy's motive was to avenge the death of his innocent brother, how could he justify killing another innocent soldier as a way of rehearsing the murder? If the murder had to happen in the wedding because army guy was living in secret place, and all of his staff had sign a confidentiality contract that they wouldn't disclose any information on him, how did the photographer find all those women working for him? Did he just randomly date thousands of women until he happened to come across the right ones? But if the location of the army guy's residence was a secret, he wouldn't even know in which city to begin the whole dating thing. And what if the army dude's female employees had all been married or in an exclusive relationship? Also, how could the photographer be sure the army guy would wear his uniform in the wedding? It wasn't a military occasion, so he could've showed up in his civvies.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 10:47 (ten years ago) link
even if you're using a super-thin blade, is it really possible to lethally stab someone without him noticing it at the moment of stabbing?
i also don't really believe that you wouldn't feel a blade being slipped into you, no matter how nano it was, but it's not as if i have a lot of experience with that, and the show seemed pretty sure of it, so hey, you go with it; sherlock's smarter than i am!
Why didn't the Royal Guard dude start bleeding immediately after he took off the belt, why did the bleeding start only after he'd undressed completely and walked to the shower booth?
cause the wound is tiny and it takes a while for the blood to start gushin.... but once it does, watch out
If the photographer guy's motive was to avenge the death of his innocent brother, how could he justify killing another innocent soldier as a way of rehearsing the murder?
uh cause he's a...... MURDERER? and therefore pretty psycho already?
how did the photographer find all those women working for him?
research, i guess. who knows how long he'd been working on this?
what if the army dude's female employees had all been married or in an exclusive relationship?
then.. i guess it wouldn't have worked and he'd have had to try something else
how could the photographer be sure the army guy would wear his uniform in the wedding?
he couldn't, it might have just been a strong hunch, but too good of an opportunity to pass up
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:13 (ten years ago) link
He was sure he would wear the uniform because the army guy had asked for special dispensation to be allowed to keep it. The kind of person would do that is the kind of person who would wear his uniform to a wedding.
― treefell, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:15 (ten years ago) link
Especially the wedding of someone he'd served with.
― treefell, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:16 (ten years ago) link
The case of the flummoxed Finn
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:18 (ten years ago) link
People do occasionally get stabbed without realising it irl and the fact that he was on duty would have meant he'd probably not have been able to visibly react to any mild discomfort.
― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:22 (ten years ago) link
stabbing someone through a leather belt like that is going to take some force though.
― koogs, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:36 (ten years ago) link
i was pretty consciously rolling with the tv/film physics, ie a) any sufficiently fine or sharp edged weapon can go through anything p easily & b) you can even be beheaded by a sufficiently sharp/fine blade and not notice until you cough or scratch your ear or similar.
― woof, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:45 (ten years ago) link
a wire, yes, with both ends attached. but a fine blade would buckle when used in a stabbing motion.
sorry, i have turned into the sort of person i debookmarked the dr who thread because of 8(
― koogs, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:48 (ten years ago) link
If the wound is so tiny it takes minutes for the blood start coming out, how can it be lethal?
But he wasn't presented as a psycho who randomly kills people, he had a clear, moral motive for the one murder he set out to commit: to punish a person he thought was guilty, to avenge someone he thought had died unjustly. So it felt a bit odd he would unjustly and immorally murder another innocent person to achieve this. If the photographer was so amoral that an innocent person dying didn't matter to him, it would seem he wouldn't want to risk a life in prison to avenge his brother in the first place.
"Research" isn't a magic wand, though. If the Major was living in a secret location, and if all his employees signed an agreement of confidentiality, how was he able to locate not one but five them among millions of Britons, and on top of that find their dating profiles? (The Major didn't seem like he was exorbitantly rich, so those five women must've represented quite a large proportion of the number of single women working for him.)
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 11:58 (ten years ago) link
And of course the biggest inexplicable bit was that the two cases Sherlock brings up during his best man speech just happen to be linked to each other and to the wedding at hand, even though Sherlock didn't know about that when he started the speech. But I'm willing to let that one slide, because according to the rules of fiction it would've been pointless for him to blabber about some other cases that had nothing to do with the main plot.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:05 (ten years ago) link
you can get some of the way with that one by saying that his unconscious had some outstanding/unsolved bits and pieces that it was trying to fit together… military murder… sholto at wedding… maybe the middle name thing… & that's why they're in the speech - but then he normally has extremely good conscious access to that preprocessing part of the mind, & it seemed deeply surprising to him, so I don't think that quite does it.
― woof, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:19 (ten years ago) link
And Tuomas claimed NOT to be a sociopath.
― I can still taste the Taboo in my mouth when I hear those songs (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:25 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, I guess you could explain the speech thing with unconscious thought processes, but that still doesn't explain why, if Sherlock gets hundreds of potential cases in his inbox, right before Watson's wedding he just happened pick two cases that relate to each other and also to the wedding. There's no way he could've known about those connections when he chose to investigate the cases.
(x-post)
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:28 (ten years ago) link
I can get with this; the wedding speech nerves would hamper his usual conscious access to these links.
― I can still taste the Taboo in my mouth when I hear those songs (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:28 (ten years ago) link
So the murder mystery plot was really just an excuse (because a Sherlock episode has to have a mystery of some sort) to sell all the character development in the episode, which was by far the more important part, and the less you think about the intricacies of the mystery, the better.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:36 (ten years ago) link
This was fairly disappointing. I wouldn't have minded it, but to make one of three episodes after a two year wait an extended slapstick-y sitcom seems a waste.
All the people I've met who whip their coats on like Sherlock tend to be complete prats.
― painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture (DavidM), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:41 (ten years ago) link
xps
true, it does just push the problem back to case selection… I think it's more of a problem for the guardsman one (because that's almost an arbitrary pick from the inbox iirc), less so for the dating-a-ghost one because… it crosses her mind to visit Sherlock *because* she's seen the invitation, maybe? Which means the investigation is secretly triggered by the wedding, as is the ghost date. And he accepts because he's drunk, because it's the stag, so… that's ok enough for me.
― woof, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:51 (ten years ago) link
sherlock is a complete prat, QED
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 12:56 (ten years ago) link
So it felt a bit odd he would unjustly and immorally murder another innocent person to achieve this.
Loads of people don't think he's innocent (hence the death threats he receives), so I'm just going out on a limb here to say that photog probably doesn't think soldier is innocent.
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 17:16 (ten years ago) link
Er, I was talking about the Royal Guard dude that the photographer almost murders, as a "rehearsal"... Of course he thinks Major Sholto is guilty, that's why he tries to kill him. But the Royal Guard guy has nothing to do with his revenge on Sholto, he just picks him because he happens to be wearing a similar belt.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 17:37 (ten years ago) link
tuomas is it really too much of a stretch to think that a person capable of plotting and carrying out the murder of a retired army major based on nothing more than grief and speculation is also capable of justifying the murder of someone else?
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 17:41 (ten years ago) link
Perhaps Finnish psychopaths have intact moral centers and empathy?
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 17:44 (ten years ago) link
"Probably a monomaniac" was the phrase used IIRC.
― Tim, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 17:44 (ten years ago) link
Also, soz for misreading! xp
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 17:45 (ten years ago) link
I'm with Tuomas on this. While I think that a murderer wouldn't have much difficulty in justifying extra murders, he was planning the murder of a specific person for a specific reason - I see no reason why he would choose a method which required practise on someone who would therefore become to all intents and purposes just an innocent victim like his brother whose death he was avenging.
― ailsa, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 18:15 (ten years ago) link
I'm with Ailsa in being with Tuomas, but it doesn't pay to analyse it too deeply
― Pre-Madonna (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 19:48 (ten years ago) link
can't believe this sitcom about two mismatched bros sharing a flat and office had an episode that was like a sitcom
― giant faps are what you take, wanking on the moon (sic), Tuesday, 7 January 2014 19:55 (ten years ago) link
the mustache!
― mh, Tuesday, 7 January 2014 20:07 (ten years ago) link
it sort of is a magic wand, though. he had the persistent assiduousness of a murderer hell-bent on revenge. it doesn't matter exactly how he found them. the women each have a different story about how they met him, suggesting a diversity of methods. you can fill in the blanks yourself if you'd like but it's not a "plot hole".
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 8 January 2014 01:39 (ten years ago) link
egg chair?sitty thingy?
― mh, Wednesday, 8 January 2014 03:33 (ten years ago) link
he's clueing for looks
― Roz, Wednesday, 8 January 2014 04:52 (ten years ago) link
drunk clueing was the best part of the episode
― zanarkand bozo (abanana), Wednesday, 8 January 2014 05:01 (ten years ago) link
No this was the best part of the episode:http://s.mlkshk.com/r/WL81
― Dan I., Friday, 10 January 2014 19:42 (ten years ago) link
Or at least 2nd best...
― Dan I., Friday, 10 January 2014 19:43 (ten years ago) link
http://s.mlkshk.com/r/WL9A
― Dan I., Friday, 10 January 2014 20:28 (ten years ago) link
sitty thing????
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 10 January 2014 20:29 (ten years ago) link
?deaded?
― kate78, Friday, 10 January 2014 20:55 (ten years ago) link
Enjoyed this a lot, until what happened at the end. I really don't get the obsession with someone who is, to those that have read the books, such a minor character.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:06 (ten years ago) link
the fancy house is on the outskirts of my countryside idyll.
its a very (in)famous house round here.
i know the man who made the spiral staircase that was featured a few times.
― mark e, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:18 (ten years ago) link
'sherlock is actually a girl's name'
― bizarro gazzara, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:29 (ten years ago) link
moriarty.gif was also a nice touch.
― bizarro gazzara, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:31 (ten years ago) link
Looks like bobbins to me...
― Mark G, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:32 (ten years ago) link
Watched this with my dad, who is head of hearing, so we had the subtitles on - it was like the show was GIFing itself as it went along
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:33 (ten years ago) link
Could have done without the voiceover saying "remember to keep watching after the adverts.
Thought the MAJOR spoiler from halfway through was very, very well done and I'd like to see exactly where it's been flagged before other than what they mention.
AMERICANS - AVOID THIS SPOILER AT ALL COSTS
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:34 (ten years ago) link
'Adverts', I meant 'end credits'.
I'm not sure whether the mention of the Sussex Downs and beekeeping means he ends up with Janine after all.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:36 (ten years ago) link
Yes. But I like 'head of hearing' anyway...
― Mark G, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:37 (ten years ago) link
The only way to get out of that typo was to write "no I meant my dad is hard", but then I thought, no.
Anyway, that was fun, but the end to the Magnus stuff was a bit disappointing.
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, 12 January 2014 22:53 (ten years ago) link
Bottom bit of that spiral staircase looked like Dougal from Magic Roundabout
― kinder, Monday, 13 January 2014 12:23 (ten years ago) link
man ilx does not care about this episode
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 13 January 2014 15:35 (ten years ago) link
A little difficult to discuss without spoilers, I think.
― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Monday, 13 January 2014 15:40 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, I think that's the problem - spoiler #1 pretty much ruins the series for anyone and spoiler #2 would upset some people.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Monday, 13 January 2014 15:47 (ten years ago) link
ruins the series for anyone
idk what this spoiler is yet but lol
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 13 January 2014 15:49 (ten years ago) link
Spoiler 1 was a bit obvious and Spoiler 2 was kind of "ah well, okay I guess"
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 13 January 2014 16:01 (ten years ago) link
What I mean is the spoiler is REALLY a BFD and affects both episodes from this series in a huge way.
Like if you knew Darth Vader was Luke's father before you saw Star Wars (or A New Hope if you're that way inclined) for the first time. <homerleavesthecinema.gif>
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Monday, 13 January 2014 16:03 (ten years ago) link
This episode almost made up for the previous two, for me.
― painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture (DavidM), Monday, 13 January 2014 16:14 (ten years ago) link
still sad that the reveal wasn't that Magnuson was a terminator. the mind palace visualization stuff was a little too obvious after they spent time with Sherlock going through his own.
― mh, Monday, 13 January 2014 16:27 (ten years ago) link
Was it suggesting that if an individual employed by the police and/or the state was to shoot another individual (albeit one who was a bit creepy and who was blackmailing others), this might be sanctioned by the UK government?
― djh, Monday, 13 January 2014 17:03 (ten years ago) link
Daily Mail was upset about the programme's left-wing bias, in today's paper.
― djh, Monday, 13 January 2014 17:04 (ten years ago) link
Is that thing about magnetic swipe cards and smartphones true IRL? Cos I keep them together like that basically.
So the end credits thing: not some swashbuckling Renaissance-period action thing??
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Monday, 13 January 2014 17:29 (ten years ago) link
http://members.questline.com/Article.aspx?articleID=17783&accountID=1285&nl=10213
this says no to the mag strip thing
― koogs, Monday, 13 January 2014 17:43 (ten years ago) link
Regarding the end spoiler: it was just animated gif, right? (Unless you count the post-credit scene, but I take that was more of a meta gag, not something diegetic.) So it could be anyone behind it, not necessarily the person in the gif? Of course the Rules of Drama would require for it to be him, but OTOH Sherlock has occasionally managed to bend those rules in an interesting way, so I hope they're doing it with this reveal too. (Or at least I'm hoping that, if it really is him, the explanation won't revert to some "identical brother" or "he just faked it" silliness.)
― Tuomas, Monday, 13 January 2014 19:15 (ten years ago) link
Also, while I mostly enjoyed this episode, I thought the way they defeated Magnussen felt a bit too easy, since the writers' and the actor had done a nice job in making him a memorably icky villain. For a supposed mastermind, he was pretty stupid in revealing the secret of his secret vaults to Sherlock and Watson, right? I mean, after that he was fair game for anyone who wanted him dead; even if he was sure Sherlock and Watson wouldn't kill him, they could've simply tipåed off someone who would be willing to do it, and based on what Magnussen's actions, there probably wouldn't have been a shortage of candidates.
In fact, I was pretty sure the twist at the end was gonna be that Mycroft's men were actually gonna shoot Magnussen, since it seemed Sherlock wanted to make it clear Mycroft would learn his secret by shouting it out loud. But now I don't quite get it: what was the point of Sherlock shouting it, if it wasn't for Mycroft's benefit?
― Tuomas, Monday, 13 January 2014 19:26 (ten years ago) link
"tipåed" = "tipped"
― Tuomas, Monday, 13 January 2014 19:45 (ten years ago) link
just watched. enjoyed.
― Drop soap, not bombs (Ste), Monday, 13 January 2014 23:35 (ten years ago) link
Elliot Gould's Marlowe.
Just sayin...
― Mark G, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 00:11 (ten years ago) link
i agree all of tuomas's objections , which makes me feel weird
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, 14 January 2014 00:50 (ten years ago) link
well, Magnussen's (*cough* Milverton's) murder in the original story wasn't super-exciting either.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 14 January 2014 02:43 (ten years ago) link
When does this show in the US? I want to talk about it but don't want to spoil
― cardamon, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 04:30 (ten years ago) link
i think it premieres in the us on sunday. i will say i thought this episode was pretty great and the thing at the end i don't think you can (or they would) do w/o it actually being real though i do think their explanation is going to be a cheat for sure judging by how they handled it last time.
― balls, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 04:36 (ten years ago) link
I did like how the end was a homage to a scene in Tinker Tailor
― cardamon, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 04:56 (ten years ago) link
Same plane
need mycroft and sherlock to meet in a wimpy
― balls, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 05:01 (ten years ago) link
Do we really need to totally avoid spoilers in this thread? People were talking pretty freely about the previous two episodes as soon as they'd aired. Personally I avoid this thread until I've seen the latest episode, I was kinda assuming everyone does the same. Are there people reading this who haven't yet seen "His Final Vow"?
What did the episode title a refer to, btw? What was the "final vow"? In the previous two the title was dropped in the dialogue, but it was less clear in this one... Or did I miss it?
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 07:45 (ten years ago) link
It was from last week - at the wedding he says that thing about how he's never made a vow, and never will again, but he's making this one to protect John and Mary. Or something like like that. Can't remember if he actually says "final vow"
― woof, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 07:58 (ten years ago) link
Also one of the final Holmes stories is "His Last Bow" which this ep pulls a few references from (Watson's final lines about an east wind coming, Holmes retiring to be a beekeeper in Sussex Downs)
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 14 January 2014 08:21 (ten years ago) link
Don't think it's true but I did wipe a hotel keycard by putting it in my phone case which has a snap-shut magnetic catch, so, any "don't keep your hotel keycard in with your phone" instructions are probably for idiots like me
I'd hope credit cards are more robust than hotel cards which are designed to be wiped and restriped every day or two though but I don't know if that's technically possible
(this is probably not relevant to the show at all, haven't seen this episode yet. so I've also stopped reading several posts ago for spoiler fear)
― not a player-hater i just hate a lot (a passing spacecadet), Tuesday, 14 January 2014 10:32 (ten years ago) link
nah, your phone would throw off a completely different type of radiation, not magnetic. might be a bit of an effect, although I would think sunspots would be about as likely to scramble your card. nice plot device, though.
I'm hoping we see more of Sherlock's homeless understudy
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 14:48 (ten years ago) link
Has anyone noticed that the writers seem to be fond of the same material that's pretty popular on blogs documenting novel or secret architecture? I'd read about both unused train stations and that apartment facade hiding a train ventilation system before.
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 14:50 (ten years ago) link
I dunno, I think of those things as London general knowledge really; I have never knowingly read a blog about novel or secret architecture (though I read the odd architecture blog here and there) and I knew something about both of those.
― Tim, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 14:54 (ten years ago) link
Actually, I'm not sure if the London one is real, but here's a similar setup in Brooklyn:http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/brooklyn-vent.html
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 14:54 (ten years ago) link
And here's a guide to possible future episode locales! http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/london-topological.html
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 14:55 (ten years ago) link
Ah, here we go, was this the one from the episode? http://www.urban75.org/london/leinster.html
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 14:57 (ten years ago) link
yup.
― mark e, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 15:00 (ten years ago) link
It's really bugging me where I first heard about those facades, like a few months ago. Wee they in another film or documentary prog on UK telly?
― kinder, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 15:31 (ten years ago) link
Yes, I mean, people know about this stuff apart from on blogs but they are a mainstay of a certain set of British blogging
There's also a lot of texting, tweeting and blogging within the show itself. Not sure how I feel about this, seems to work within the show/be used interestingly?
― cardamon, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 18:17 (ten years ago) link
kind of an accepted part of real life these days
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 18:21 (ten years ago) link
i think it's good: partly because it forces you to address certain mechanics about how these things work in your plots (text updates to get Watson out of bonfire, can't keep anything secret cos of Twitter), which in turn forces the writer to consider glib use of plot mechanics, also refreshes the language and visual presentation - total effect is to produce something that is aware and receptive to technology in the world, even if it also means getting it wrong sometimes (in a Scandal in Belgravia persistently referring to a phone that could take photos as a 'camera phone' for instance).
The Leinster Gardens facade i've known since god knows when, tho can't remember where I first heard it. Fairly commonly ref'd as prank played on newly-recruited... fucking finding a gender neutral term for postman is a bastard - I'm going to go for the appropriately 19th C PO term 'letter carriers'. It's mentioned in a few tube histories as well.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 20:07 (ten years ago) link
I didn't really like the whole swipe card thing because it was Rube Goldberg sort of solution, when the best Sherlock stuff to me hinges on his inhuman ability to observe and recall things. Of course in the original story he doesn't really perform any feats of that kind... they just kind of watch Milverton get his comeuppance and stay out of the way.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 14 January 2014 21:22 (ten years ago) link
I read it as less of him relying on a technical glitch and more his observation of how human nature would make people react to variations on that situation
― mh, Tuesday, 14 January 2014 21:26 (ten years ago) link
I think the fact that he's proposing to Janine merely to get into Magnussen's apartment was sufficient Sherlockian antics for the scene, and the swipe card stuff was too gimmicky. The idea that a bunch of security guards will come running because someone unauthorized tries their swipe card on his private elevator is pure silliness. It just wouldn't open the elevator. If Magnussen was that paranoid, he'd station a guard next to the elevator.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 14 January 2014 21:45 (ten years ago) link
One thing bugging me about the episode: How did SPOILER#1 get in the office?
I thought Sher's mom's book on the mathematics of combustion might tie into Watson's burning, but no.
― zanarkand bozo (abanana), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 04:43 (ten years ago) link
Also, a bit ironic that they seem to be getting their science facts from British rags like Murdoch's tabloids.
― zanarkand bozo (abanana), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 04:48 (ten years ago) link
One thing bugging me about the episode: How did SPOILER#1 get in the office?I thought Sher's mom's book on the mathematics of combustion might tie into Watson's burning, but no.
these things bother me less when they're not central generally - but let's say as an assassin her approach wdve been less to deceive Janine than, idk, steal her card and get it copied, maybe (she's dressed in black the in the brightest building in the world) she got in from outside w'out using the lift "somehow".
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 06:59 (ten years ago) link
The mom's book seemed to be a Moriarty reference; in "The Final Problem" Moriarty is a former math professor, and in some other story it's said he's written a book with a similar title. Because of this, some internet folks have speculated that Sherlock's mom was actually behind the final plot twist, and will be the main antagonist for season 4... I guess there are a couple things that support such a theory: during the Christmas dinner scene, we find out Mrs. Holmes is quite protective of Sherlock ("Somebody's put a bullet in my boy, and if I ever find out who, I shall turn absolutely monstrous!"), and the plot twist certainly gets him out of a bad situation.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 07:37 (ten years ago) link
Spoiler #1 got in through Janine somehow, it's in the dialogue. Sherlock compares notes with her about building a fake relationship just to get in - in the fake house iirc.
― Ian Glasper's trapped in a scone (aldo), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 08:26 (ten years ago) link
One thing that bugs me is the USB stick containing the files on her former life... IIRC they go straight from the fake house to Baker Street, so she must have had the stick with her when she went to the fake house, but why would she? At that point she didn't know she would be exposed. I guess that could be a simple continuity error, but why did she have those files in the first place? If she wanted no one to know about her past, shouldn't she have destroyed them long ago?
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 09:37 (ten years ago) link
Yeah. During the episode I assumed she got it from Magnussen, but the ending means that's unlikely.
― zanarkand bozo (abanana), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 10:57 (ten years ago) link
Maybe she keeps it with her at all times so she knows where it is?
― Chewshabadoo, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 13:34 (ten years ago) link
Maybe Magnussen typed it all out for her in plaintext ASCII for convenience?
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 16:20 (ten years ago) link
Maybe, but why would she have that stuff on file in the first place, if she wants no one to find out about the past? What if John had accidentally found the files and taken a peek?
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 18:20 (ten years ago) link
Ahh, that explains everything, Tuomas! She carries it on her everywhere, and to ensure that John will never peek at it, she sets up the entire Magnussen plot so that after an initial interim of tension, John will take a principled stand and refuse to read her files AND destroy the USB drive FOR her. Ingenious! CIA training!
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 18:44 (ten years ago) link
― Tuomas, Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:45 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
otm
― max, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 20:22 (ten years ago) link
oh whoops
― max, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 20:23 (ten years ago) link
i mean tot otm the other tuomas post, oh well
― Tuomas, Monday, January 13, 2014 2:26 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
this one
― max, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 20:24 (ten years ago) link
maybe sherlock shouts to let mycroft know hoping that then mycroft's men would take out magnussen and then when that didn't happen deciding he'd have to do it himself. that's a stretch. seems to me sherlock could've simply let mycroft and his men take them away (surely he would've gotten off, esp since he was working for lady shagwell or whatever) and then, having decided he was going to kill magnussen simply wait to a more opportune time. it's not like sherlock holmes couldn't figure out a way to get away w/ murder. a tidier way to clean it up might have been to have watson stand up to magnussen (toss him over a balcony maybe, something that could easily be swept under a rug ) or if you wanted something w/ punch have mary pop up and finish the job, maybe after they leave and sherlock knows but doesn't care and nobody solves it cuz (as in the original story) so many ppl had a motive. hell you could just have sherlock mention magnussen's vault is his mind palace (ugh) to mary in passing then cut to sherlock reading a paper w/ magnussen's death as the headline and sherlock does a half smile and then o what's this on the telly moriarty is alive somehow.
― balls, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:01 (ten years ago) link
the empty vault was symbolic
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:02 (ten years ago) link
why are we in thrall to the redtops. why do we trust them as a source of meaning. they are but an empty room. wake up sheeple
i find it weird that they're doing this mind palace thing since it's a thomas harris thing. you'd think they'd want to dissociate him from popular culture's second most famous sociopath
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:04 (ten years ago) link
kinda hated the mind palace stuff cuz it makes it seem that sherlock isn't esp bright or observant, he's just really good at those memory tournaments. reminds me of movies like phenomenon or something where the guy is suddenly incredibly intelligent and they demonstrate it by showing he knows the capitals of all the countries in africa.
― balls, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:05 (ten years ago) link
pop culture's second most famous sociopath surely tom sawyer
― balls, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:06 (ten years ago) link
its probably sheldon cooper but i was mainly just writing words in an order i thought sounded good
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:08 (ten years ago) link
didn't realise it was a thos harris thing, just associated it with this:
http://studyplace.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/w/images/9/9c/Yates-1966-Art-of-Memory-excerpt.pdf
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:23 (ten years ago) link
that's frances yates's the art of memory for those who don't like clicking unspecified links. follows the persistence of classical methods of mnemonics, particularly that of associating memory with place or abstract architectural structures, through into renaissance magic and thought.
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:28 (ten years ago) link
but yes. memory less appealing than observation. capacious high-recall memory feels like it's special - we can't do it, our memories don't work like that. reasoning from observation feels like we should be able to do it and indeed can do it to a lesser extent.
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:34 (ten years ago) link
this has always bugged me but sherlock isnt really a sociopath is he? i thought sociopaths were supposed to be quite charismatic, very good at mimicking normal human interaction, and so on. i mean you could argue that he IS all those things but i think the point is that with sociopaths they appear in general to be "normal" at all times. sherlock presents as difficult from the start; he seems more autistic than sociopathic.
― max, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:37 (ten years ago) link
curious how long 'actually sherlock is a monster!' has been around. the first time i can remember coming across it was mark s here and then it kinda became the norm to have sherlock as clearly understood to be some asshole weirdo instead of just incredibly smart and observant (even the recent sherlock but not really precursors to the current wave had this eg house). seems like previously any revisionism of sherlock usually just focused on drug use or they'd have it turn out that watson was actually the smart one like some remington steele situation.
― balls, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:42 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, Sherlock's condition is clearly Asperger's, I'm not sure why the writers keep on repeating the sociopath thing; "high functioning sociopath" is not even a real diagnosis, but "high functioning autist" fits Sherlock perfectly.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:47 (ten years ago) link
doyle vacillates in the stories, like yeah in 'study in scarlet' we encounter him beating up corpses and he doesn't know the order of the planets in the solar system but in a lot of the later ones he's just smart + forbidding
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:49 (ten years ago) link
also worth noting if mb obvious that the axes along which sherlock might present as 'weird' in a late-victorian context are different to those along which he might present as 'weird' in 2010-date
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 15 January 2014 21:50 (ten years ago) link
Well, in the Conan Doyle stories Sherlock can be rude and antisocial and "weird", but he almost always shows high moral standards. It's often hinted that he gets more pleasure in solving the crimes than bringing the guilty to justice, but IIRC it's never ever suggested justice and morality wouldn't matter to him a lot. I mean, in "The Final Problem" he's willing to sacrifice his life if that also means the worst criminal he's ever met dies with him. (Unlike in Sherlock, in the short story Moriarty never threatens the lives of his loved ones, so protecting them is not a motivation for his sacrifice, it's purely justice.) So I don't really feel the canon supports this "Sherlock is a monster" revisionism.
Maybe the revisionists feel Sherlock's moralism is just something Conan Doyle was forced to include in the stories because of the era in which he wrote, and that if he had had a free reign he would've made Sherlock more ambiguous and less heroic, so they feel they're revealing the "real" core of the character... But I dunno, morality still feels like a large part of the character to me, it rarely feels superficial or tacked-on. (One of my favourite Sherlock story is "The Yellow Face", which is all about morality, and it's also one of the few cases where Sherlock's deductions actually prove wrong.) So the "heroic" Sherlock is just as real as the "monster" one, even if the latter is more popular now. I guess people just prefer different types of protagonists these days?
(xxpost)
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 15 January 2014 22:09 (ten years ago) link
I think morality matters a great deal to this iteration of Sherlock though - it's more like this version tries to paint him as someone who chooses to see himself as a monster, rather than him actually being one.
There's a bit in the Irene Adler episode, where Mycroft tells Watson that Sherlock had the brain of a scientist or a philosopher but chose to be a detective instead, and then asks Watson what that says about Sherlock. we're clearly meant to see him as someone who does have a strong sense of morality and justice, even if he doesn't care about conforming to polite social norms.
― Roz, Thursday, 16 January 2014 04:37 (ten years ago) link
― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I don't think it is 'a Harris thing' , it is something that Harris has had Lecter utilise but I think it is a much older means of structuring your memory so that you remember things.
― Stevolende, Thursday, 16 January 2014 11:55 (ten years ago) link
Doesn't Thomas Cromwell use such techniques in Wolf Hall?
― Neil Nosepicker (Leee), Thursday, 16 January 2014 17:28 (ten years ago) link
― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 4:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
John Crowley works with these notions in his Aegypt-Love & Sleep-Demonomania trilogy, also
Have that yates book on my nook, one of many things I'm dying to read if I ever stop frittering
― yes, i have seen the documentary (Jon Lewis), Thursday, 16 January 2014 17:38 (ten years ago) link
it's excellent, jon - stop frittering. also groundbreaking if i remember rightly - finding a continuity that wasn't a post-enlightenment retrospect 'progress of thought' narrative, but an examination of the sources and the use made of them, ie magic, and power, and renaissance humanism, was revolutionary.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 16 January 2014 20:57 (ten years ago) link
i saw it on Britain's Secret Homes a few months ago. maybe there?
― friend to all animals (anky), Sunday, 2 February 2014 19:59 (ten years ago) link
I am very late to the party and no doubt ilx is all talked out on the subject of this version of Sherlock Holmes, but...
Having watched all up to the next to last episode of season three, my basic take on it is that it varies from delightful at its best to merely competent at its worst, so that in spite of a great deal of unevenness, it delivers much more entertainment than the norm. The humorous moments are almost always genuinely funny. The fiddly clever plots are full of gaping holes if you take them at all seriously, but as with the original stories, to take them seriously is to miss their value entirely.
Watching them in relatively quick succession (compared to the pace of their initial release) reveals the extent to which the writers soon exhausted their first wave of inspiration based on a novel approach to the characters, then fell back on more elaborate gimmickry, and now are subverting the characters they originally created in order to give themselves new spaces to explore. iow, the usual evolution of successful tv shows. still worth a go, though.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, 20 December 2015 20:31 (eight years ago) link
The Christmas special is an odd idea in that it seems to be a period piece...
― koogs, Sunday, 20 December 2015 20:59 (eight years ago) link
Yeah, I don't understand how the producers thought it would be a good idea. Are they gonna do the texting stuff - I guess not? Odd indeed. It's a bit of a gamble. Is this gonna turn the show into the other endless tv/film version of Holmes? I remember from my kiddy Guinness Book of Records days that Holmes is the character played by the most actors ever. I don't see how this could do anything interesting.
― kraudive, Sunday, 20 December 2015 23:18 (eight years ago) link
You don't see how a Sherlock Holmes story could be interesting?
Is this gonna turn the show into the other endless tv/film version of Holmes?
Since it's a one-off for fun and S4 will be returning to modern-day continuity, the answer to this is obviously "no"
― glandular lansbury (sic), Monday, 21 December 2015 00:17 (eight years ago) link
― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3:34 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― max, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3:37 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― balls, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 3:42 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
fyi in the superior product ELEMENTARY they make a lot of the above issues converge (no idea how well/where this tracks the canon) by making sherlock kind of a totally committed utility-maximizer, like if john stuart mill discovered that his greatest duty to the world could be found in performing investigations of murderers and then did everything he could to shape his life toward that end. so he's very smart and observant etc, but also constantly training himself with memory games and skill maintenance and relevant scientific inquiries. more than once he has floated the idea to others that essentially the normal rules, laws, etc. ought reasonably not to be applied to him in virtue of the greater good that is done by him being allowed to operate as he sees fit. thus his trying to murder M when he believes M to have killed irene adler, his defiant response to a police dept hearing aimed at canning him for recklessly causing his police colleague to be shot, lastrade's ominous warning to watson that seems to be connected to signs of sherlock's willingness to be utterly deceptive and manipulative to those around him (his doing 'voices'), etc.
i assume a lot of that is pretty normal. as they do it it comes across like sherlock is just an incredibly tense but subtly unstable balance of all the strengths and flaws necessitated by having shaped himself from the person he was born as, with the person with his biography, into the person he is. at times it makes it seem like he's an embodied interpretation of a nietzschean utilitarian.
― j., Monday, 21 December 2015 04:12 (eight years ago) link
How can anything with Lucy Liu be superior to a British production?
― :wq (Leee), Monday, 21 December 2015 18:11 (eight years ago) link
she's great!
― j., Monday, 21 December 2015 18:22 (eight years ago) link
can you have nietzchean utilitarians
― carly rae jetson (thomp), Monday, 21 December 2015 21:27 (eight years ago) link
are they a thing
― carly rae jetson (thomp), Monday, 21 December 2015 21:28 (eight years ago) link
right that's what i'm saying, it's weird. to feel a moral (in the customary sense) demand on oneself despite conducting oneself sort of as if no such demands had any claim on you.
perhaps the out would have something to do with the fact that sherlock really only seems to care about personal injustices. when he serves the state w/ his talents it's still in the service of catching muuuuurderers etc
― j., Monday, 21 December 2015 22:15 (eight years ago) link
fyi in the superior product ELEMENTARY they make a lot of the above issues converge (no idea how well/where this tracks the canon) by making sherlock kind of a totally committed utility-maximizer, like if john stuart mill discovered that his greatest duty to the world could be found in performing investigations of murderers and then did everything he could to shape his life toward that end.
FYI, this concept is introduced in the very beginning of the very first Conan Doyle story, where Watson tells us that Holmes doesn't know Earth revolves around the Sun, because information like that isn't useful to solving crimes, and he's committed to learning only things that help him in his detective work.
I agree that Elementary is underrated, and the way it explores Holmes' utilitarianism is intereresting (in ways Sherlock isn't), but I still wouldn't call it superior... Mostly because the actual mysteries in Elementary are almost never as clever as in Sherlock, and they rely even more on ridiculous coincidences, sometimes to the point breaking the suspension of disbelief. Also, while Jonny Lee Miller himself is good, the other actors simply cannot manage to make their characters as fascinating as those same characters are in Sherlock. Still, gotta give props for the makers of Elementary for avoiding the wiener-fest of the original stories, Watson isn't the only character who's a woman in this version.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 22 December 2015 10:06 (eight years ago) link
there's a series called something like Doyle and Houdini on soon, which is Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini solving the crimes. him from Dirk Gently's in it, Mangan.
http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/itv-commissions-supernatural-crime-drama-houdini-doyle-itv-encore
ITV though.
― koogs, Tuesday, 22 December 2015 15:18 (eight years ago) link
xp i don't have room in my brain for mysteries, it's a waste of space i could be using for theorizing about police procedurals
― j., Tuesday, 22 December 2015 17:42 (eight years ago) link
this was godawful
― pandemic, Sunday, 3 January 2016 13:01 (eight years ago) link
To such an extent that i wonder how anyone let it get through unaltered. A horrible mess from start to finish.
― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Sunday, 3 January 2016 13:07 (eight years ago) link
It played like terrible fan-fic.
I was enjoying it in an unchallenged way* up until the point when Sherlock woke up on the plane and it became clear that Moffat was about to start Moffatting in a way that showcased all his worst traits as a writer and true to form it just deteriorated from there. The final stretch was an incoherent mess and the less said about the Suffragette stuff the better. A straightforward Victoria episode would have been so much stronger.
*Except Gatiss in the fat suit. Nothing in the history of TV has been made better by putting someone in a fat suit.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 3 January 2016 13:32 (eight years ago) link
I liked the suggestion that Moriarty = nemesis = drug addiction, but otherwise bleh meh blurgh.
― barbarian radge (NotEnough), Sunday, 3 January 2016 15:11 (eight years ago) link
Gatiss in the fat suit was easily the highlight. The rest was pretty wretched. Preposterous premises. Half-baked profundities. Self-referential smirkiness. No one watching that as their first exposure to the series would ever watch another.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, 3 January 2016 19:09 (eight years ago) link
Despite prior misgivings about the pointlessness of a Victorian episode, I quite liked the purely Victorian half - a bit heavy on the injokes but I have a guilty childish habit of enjoying the little neural spark from spotting a reference, so I mostly enjoyed it right up until I didn't enjoy it any more with Moriarty's arrival, and then obv as Matt says it all went very wrong on the plane.
(I am trying to train myself out of that habit and luckily Moffatt zapping the viewer's reference-spotting aren't-you-clever neuron so relentlessly provides v. good training material)
Had a little tingling sense of impending wankery when Sherlock had a torch in the mansion but I somehow convinced myself that some kind of oil lamp happened to resemble a flashlight. Should've just turned it off then instead.
― a passing spacecadet, Sunday, 3 January 2016 19:58 (eight years ago) link
some kind of oil lamp happened to resemble a flashlight
a bullseye lantern?
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, 3 January 2016 20:05 (eight years ago) link
it looked quite small and cylindrical (I see the first electric tubular flashlight was invented in 1898 but was presumably rather more bulky) but yeah, I was trying to tell myself it was just a small bullseye lantern, except I didn't know what they were called, so thanks!
― a passing spacecadet, Sunday, 3 January 2016 20:35 (eight years ago) link
Agree that this one would've been much better as a pure alternate universe Victorian mystery. Now all the meta-wankery at the end meant we didn't even get a proper solution to the mystery; at the end, Sherlock ask Lady Carmichael why she hired him if she was the killer all along, and the question is never answered. I did actually like the idea that a Victorian conspiracy of Suffragettes was behind the murders, so if they'd developed that into a proper story, this could've been a classic episode.
Seems to me that they added the modern-day bits because they thought people are tired of waiting until 2017 to finally get the resolution to the cliffhanger of "His Last Vow", so they had to add some bits that at least address that plot. But it was mostly pointless, and I think the stupidest part was that the one bit of new evidence about Moriarty we got didn't even make sense in light of what happened earlier in the episode... At the end, Sherlock says that no one could survive blowing their brains out, and that his mind palace hallucination proved that to him. But in the actual hallucination we saw how someone could fake their suicide like that, so why did Sherlock claim the opposite?
― Tuomas, Sunday, 3 January 2016 21:41 (eight years ago) link
i enjoyed this, probably at least as much because of the silliness as despite the silliness, but moffat's tedious convolutions (here and on doctor who) wouldn't be nearly as tiresome if he were ever able to actually resolve them in a clever, honest way. the 'why did lady carmichael hire sherlock?' thing is this lazy trick he does where he thinks if he openly acknowledges the obv inconsistencies or problems maybe he can fool some ppl into thinking he's solved them. 'moriarty is really dead' is moffat conceding he can't think of a way to twist himself out of that plot development but when sherlock says 'i know what moriarty is going to do' does anyone actually believe moffat knows also?
― balls, Sunday, 3 January 2016 22:05 (eight years ago) link
Thought this was probably the worst of these nu-Sherlock episodes. And then there's that wedding one.
― Acid Hose (Capitaine Jay Vee), Sunday, 3 January 2016 22:24 (eight years ago) link
'why did lady carmichael hire sherlock?'
― kinder, Sunday, 3 January 2016 22:30 (eight years ago) link
incipient alzheimers?
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, 3 January 2016 22:39 (eight years ago) link
to make Sherlock feel smart.
― glandular lansbury (sic), Monday, 4 January 2016 00:42 (eight years ago) link
Well she didn't *actually* hire him, she only hired him in his mind, in order to solve the case. Once the actual case was solved that little invented detail was irrelevant. n.b. I'm not trying to defend the ridiculousness, merely explain...
Had a little tingling sense of impending wankery when Sherlock had a torch in the mansion
Don't know if this was before or after the big giveaway, fat moriarty talking about 'the virus in the data'.
― ledge, Monday, 4 January 2016 09:16 (eight years ago) link
To me the first giveaway was the Bride using the term "shotgun wedding", which obviously sounded way too modern to be used in Victorian England. And later on Sherlock is using similarly modern terms while talking with Mycroft, and Mycroft comments on that, which I think was the point where you were supposed to figure out something's not right with the setting. "The virus in the data" was then the final nail in the coffin.
― Tuomas, Monday, 4 January 2016 10:47 (eight years ago) link
for the excitement of trying to fool sherlock/having their case heard/perpetuate the 'Bride' story to allow more killings? I dunno.
But if Lady Carmichael simply wanted to witnesses so the Bride legend could go on and she herself wouldn't suspected of the murder, she could've hired any random person. What was the point of hiring a legendary crime-solver who might, you know, actually solve this crime too?
But this is the problem with inserting an "it was all a dream" twist into a series like Sherlock. The satisfaction the viewers get from Sherlock solving the crimes comes from the dissection of tiny, seemingly insignificant detail and how they fit into the solution, as well as from understanding how a seemingly illogical/inexplicable/impossible crime makes perfect sense. That's why you have all those big "Sherlock summing up how the crime happened" monologues in every episode. So taking away that and instead saying "all the details don't actually fit and it only makes sense because Sherlock wanted it to" removes the primary source of enjoyment people get from most Sherlock Holmes stories, including this series.
Even though it's horribly cliched, "it was all a dream" can be a satisfying trope in some types of stories, but not in whodunnit/howdunnit crime fiction like this.
― Tuomas, Monday, 4 January 2016 10:59 (eight years ago) link
you just displayed all the enjoyment you got out of putting together that it was SHERLOCK'S BRANE wot dun it, in your previous post! the inexplicable hiring was another one of those discrepancies (just not a very useful or satisfying one as a clue).
― glandular lansbury (sic), Monday, 4 January 2016 12:24 (eight years ago) link
I said I spotted those clues, but who said anything about enjoying it? "It was all a dream" is one of the oldest, most predictable twists in the book, so realizing the story was heading for that direction was more groanworthy than satisfying. It certainly wasn't the sort of clever, unexpected solution better Sherlock stories end with.
― Tuomas, Monday, 4 January 2016 12:34 (eight years ago) link
Also, the fact hiring Sherlock was inexplicable wasn't even revealed until well after we found out it was all dream, so it wasn't even a clue, just an example of the writers trying to cover up their own ineptitude with a meta wink.
― Tuomas, Monday, 4 January 2016 12:38 (eight years ago) link
"the fact that hiring Sherlock"
straight dope gives the first recorded usage of 'shotgun wedding' as 1903 fyi (shotguns are pretty old!)
― carly rae jetson (thomp), Monday, 4 January 2016 12:46 (eight years ago) link
this was really enjoyable, if you would have preferred a straight up victorian murder mystery alternative entertainments are available, for boring people
― carly rae jetson (thomp), Monday, 4 January 2016 12:49 (eight years ago) link
https://antiscribe.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles-2002.jpg
i see a lot of complaining about the "mansplaining" on the most recent episode. which is fair enough, but i'm racking my brain and i can't actually recall sherlock holmes ever _not_ "mansplaining" anything.
― new zingland (rushomancy), Monday, 4 January 2016 13:02 (eight years ago) link
^seems like a misuse of 'mansplaining'.
one could easily imagine transposing Holmes' character as a woman, doing precisely the same shtick, and it being both equally entertaining and equally (im)plausible.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 4 January 2016 18:21 (eight years ago) link
The first 20 mins were terrific, and then all the "this isn't what it seems" hints, which could have been fun and mysterious, were so jackhammeringly obvious they spoiled the fun for the rest of the episode.
I think the mystery of why Lady Carmichael hires Sherlock is pretty clearly resolved without being too lampshade-y: she doesn't hire him *at all* because it's a dream, as Lestrade (I think) points out. Tuomas right to be confused by this, though:
I think the stupidest part was that the one bit of new evidence about Moriarty we got didn't even make sense in light of what happened earlier in the episode... At the end, Sherlock says that no one could survive blowing their brains out, and that his mind palace hallucination proved that to him. But in the actual hallucination we saw how someone could fake their suicide like that, so why did Sherlock claim the opposite?
Apart from that, does anyone find "fan favourite Moriarty" unutterably awful? God what an annoying performance.
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 4 January 2016 19:43 (eight years ago) link
They deliberately pushed the portrayal of Moriarty to an extreme and then pushed him over a cliff, where he should have stayed.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 4 January 2016 19:50 (eight years ago) link
Not really, mansplaining is 'explaining' something that the listener already understands. The whole point of Sherlock Holmes is that he is supposed to explain shit that no one else gets.
There's a vague get-out-of-jail card about that scene all being in Sherlock's head - and in any case I think Dream-Sherlock was explaining feminism to Dream-Watson rather than the Suffragettes themselves - but the whole thing was so flimsy, clunky and stupid that I'm not inclined to play it. And that's before you get onto the issue of the world's greatest detective being unable to spot a woman in a false moustache.
― Matt DC, Monday, 4 January 2016 19:56 (eight years ago) link
Mansplaining is when men explain things for women, instead of letting them have their own agency and explaining things themselves. In that sense Sherlock's final summation was a perfect example of it, because it was inexplicable why the women couldn't explain their scheme and motivation themselves, and this being inside Sherlock's dream is no excuse, because Watson still had plenty of agency there... Unless the point of that scene was to expose Sherlock's inner sexism, but it didn't really read that way.
Also, Aimless' "what if the genders were flipped" excuse doesn't really work, because mansplaining is about the difference in power positions of genders, so a woman can't mansplain, just like a white Westerner can't be a victim of racism.
― Tuomas, Monday, 4 January 2016 20:14 (eight years ago) link
In my first iteration I also mentioned the point Matt made, that Holmes' ability to explain was unique to him, and therefore 'uniquesplaining', which part I removed, but I shouldn't have. It was the combination of the two (flipping gender and uniqueness of ability) that removed the 'man' from the 'splaining'. My error.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 4 January 2016 20:18 (eight years ago) link
To think I assumed this worst of all things couldn't get worse
― The difficult earlier reichs (darraghmac), Monday, 4 January 2016 20:49 (eight years ago) link
enjoying the men splaining mansplaining itt a lot more than I did that episode
― sktsh, Monday, 4 January 2016 20:54 (eight years ago) link
all-purpose use of mansplaining as a rhetorical device is reminiscent of the many uses of rubber-glue in elementary school
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 4 January 2016 20:59 (eight years ago) link
As a rough guide:
The random guy at the bike store who wanted to tell my partner how to use a bicycle pump properly = Mansplaining
Sherlock summing up whodunnit at the end of a TV show/short story = Not Mansplaining
Sherlock summing up whodunnit at the end of a TV show specifically about how men deny agency to women = Probably Mansplaining
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 4 January 2016 22:33 (eight years ago) link
wasn't even revealed until well after we found out it was all dream, so it wasn't even a clue
this is what I said
just an example of the writers trying to cover up their own ineptitude with a meta wink.
since they have the ability to go back pages in Final Draft, I would assume that they didn't accidentally realise that it made no sense for Lady Carmichael to hire Sherlock on page 80 and have to go with it. therefore it seems more reasonable to read it as, especially as it becomes apparent after the meta nature of the 1880s story is entirely revealed, a further commentary on Sherlock's narcissism and selective observation, which at this point has become a major theme of the episode.
again, I'm not arguing that it is a great or clever or satisfying element. but in context it does appear to be deliberate.
(same goes for Sherlock's line about shooting the back of one's head off: it could be that he is speaking specifically and only about Moriarty's suicide, by intentional contrast to the Abominable Bride scenario - as the Moriarty one took place directly in front of his eyes, not on a mid-distant balcony, with a lace curtain behind him that an accomplice could spray fake blood through. It could be a set-up for a revelation in S4 that Moriarty did somehow fake his own death after all, by showing that it can be done. Or it could just be one of many, many examples across the five years of this series of Sherlock saying things that are wrong - again, possibly as a herald of a twist in 2017, or as in other instances in this episode of imaginary-Sherlock making incorrect observations, or of drugged-up real-world Sherlock being incoherent in his chemical cocktail haze. The audience has a year or two to enjoy the tension caused by this ambiguity, if they want to.)
― glandular lansbury (sic), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 02:20 (eight years ago) link
it's interesting that in august of 2010, martin freeman was "tim from the office". from that to arthur dent to watson to the greatest little hobbit of them all.
― remove butt (abanana), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 03:00 (eight years ago) link
bravest, rather
― remove butt (abanana), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 03:01 (eight years ago) link
This is pretty much accurate. I didn't mean to say that every Sherlock summation is mansplaining, since besides Irene Adler there haven't even been female master criminals in the series, but with this particular case and these particular culprits it veers towards it. Note that mansplaining isn't some special way of talking, nor are the men doing it usually even aware that they're doing it... So Sherlock could be doing the same style of summation he did when talking about Moriarty's crimes, but because the power dynamic is different, because he denies agency from someone not socially equal to him while talking for her, it's mansplaining.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 10:44 (eight years ago) link
mansplaining is totally a special way of talking
that is why you can make the #actually joke
― j., Tuesday, 5 January 2016 10:46 (eight years ago) link
What I meant by that was that you can't say a "Sherlock summation" can't be mansplaining, because he's done similar speeches in non-mansplaining situations. It's not about the particular way he talks, it's about who's present, who's he talking for, and who remains silent.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 10:49 (eight years ago) link
My mum hated this... according to my sister... I didn't see it.
― Anyway, it's not a three, it's a yogh. (Tom D.), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 10:55 (eight years ago) link
this was awful. last year's was awful too... there's a real problem with them doing one big meta story each year when most people watching are mega hungover each time, can't remember what happened the year before, and (at least in my house) aren't willing to put up with the nonsense they're shovelling as narrative. when was the last episode they did that was just an investigation without all the awful stuff about what it MEANS and who Sherlock REALLY IS
because nobody cares about that stuff.
― jamiesummerz, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 11:05 (eight years ago) link
best thing about it was the hidden skull print that he had on the wall, similar to this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_pun#/media/File:Allisvanity.jpg
― koogs, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 11:06 (eight years ago) link
This was wanky and annoying. It feels to me as if they (they being Moffat and production team) have bitten too hard into the belief that Sherlock is big and clever and important TV, hence doing one big meta story, which never works. Because you end up enjoying Silent Witness way more.
― Hey Bob (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 11:50 (eight years ago) link
Went to find a copy from the usual sources, read thread, skipped.
― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:00 (eight years ago) link
Reminds me of when I watched Moonlighting as a kid - in later seasons you would also cross your fingers that it'd be a "case" epsisode, and not a "relationship" episode... but it was always a bloody relationship episode with a dream sequence,
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:08 (eight years ago) link
I think a series can afford to do a big meta story when it's been running for years and the iconography and character are so familiar it's fun to see them being deconstructed. IMO the first part of this episode was kinda enjoyable like that, because the meta wasn't about this particular series but about Sherlock Holmes fiction in general, so they had plenty of history and familiar material to play with. But as soon as it jumped to the present day and it became apparent this was just another character study of this particular Sherlock Holmes (not Sherlock Holmes in general), it became boring, because Sherlock hasn't been on long enough and hasn't established its own iconography deep enough to earn the right to get meta about itself.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:13 (eight years ago) link
Last few posts otm. I read the summary for last year's (which I did see at the time) and it just sounds like complete garbage.
― ledge, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:17 (eight years ago) link
xps As anyone who's read my posts in the past year or several will know, I am all in favour of seeing mansplaining and microaggressions everywhere, and I do like Chuck's breakdown in this particular case
however the entire genre of detective stories does rather revolve around that final detectivesplain, where the hero lists all the events in painstaking detail while the suspect/master criminal listens meekly to their own motives and actions. not quite sure abt saying that if the suspect is a woman this improbable-in-reality narrative device itself becomes problematic
though I am thinking, do female-protagonist whodunnits have less grand-splainy-narration in their denouements? I do not remember e.g. Miss Marple giving a Sherlockesque monologue, more flashbacks and nudging the suspect into a detailed confession instead. could definitely buy a "genius man holds forth" / "socially adept woman says little - nobody likes a woman who monologues* - but prompts the (often male) murderer to tell all" dichotomy, but maybe that's all in my had.
* oh um hi
the Moriarty schtick is p. unbearable at this point, yes. I mean I suppose that's the point, but less of it anyway please
― a passing spacecadet, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:18 (eight years ago) link
Though of course deconstructions of classic Sherlock are hardly new ("The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" and "Without a Clue" are funnier examples of that), and the first Guy Ritchie movie did the "Victorian Sherlock but with a modern sensibility" better than this episode, so it's not like the 19th century parts of the story were super classic either.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:23 (eight years ago) link
The problem is that in most cases the master criminal is morally reprehensible, and the detectivesplaining is the first part of his punishment; he thought he was being so clever, and now he has to sit and quietly listen how the detective outsmarted him. But in this case the Suffragettes were supposed to be right in their cause (as acknowledged by both Mycroft and Sherlock), and they were presented as sympathetic characters, so there was no reason whey they couldn't explain it all themselves.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:27 (eight years ago) link
I think you might have a point with your Holmes/Marple dichotomy too. Though sadly I haven't seen/read enough classic whodunnits with a female lead to know whether this is a more general phenonemon in them?
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:31 (eight years ago) link
not quite sure abt saying that if the suspect is a woman this improbable-in-reality narrative device itself becomes problematic
Yeah I'm not sure about this notional female master criminal voluntarily standing there admitting their own crime and exactly how they did it just to show "agency", (as if becoming a master criminal doesn't require agency in the first place, up until the point at which they are arrested/defeated at least).
None of this is particularly relevant in this case because this episode was apparently written for the benefit of a child with no idea who the Suffragettes were, rather than an audience of 21st century viewers who aren't idiots. In fact I'm not really sure why there were Suffragettes in this in the first place, except to go "look, Suffragettes! Weren't they great?"
It's almost as if Moffatt was stung by criticism of his treatment of female characters and decided to ostentatiously swing the other way, and getting it equally wrong in the process. In fact it's amazing how one episode could manage to be simultaneously so condescending and so incomprehensible. Moffatt didn't bother to shake himself out of Dr Who mode, essentially.
― Matt DC, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:33 (eight years ago) link
if a man explains something in the forest and no one hears does he make a splain/what is the sound of one man splaining
― soref, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 12:44 (eight years ago) link
I remember the old Joan Hickson Marples always had a detectivesplain sequence at the end; and certainly there was always an extensive Jessicasplain at the end of every Murder She Wrote.
I really like the idea above that the reveal scene is the "first part of the villain's punishment". The other function (on TV anyway) is to give your lead actor a bit of monologue scenery to chew, so they don't feel like they're being upstaged by their own story. (Hickson was particularly good at using those scenes to reveal the real self behind her doddery oldperson act).
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 13:00 (eight years ago) link
One of the best things about Elementary is that the explanatory monologues at the end of the cases are usually tag-team routines between Holmes and Watson, each of them filling in parts of the puzzle.
― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 14:17 (eight years ago) link
My favorite part of this episode was the retro Sherlock Vision with newspaper clipping on strings.
For an episode entirely in Sherlock's head, it didn't seem to reveal many of his internal workings. Why was Watson the main character in the first half? What conclusion does he draw from the grave scene -- his theory involved Ricoletti being dead, the grave dream proved it wrong, so why does he wake up and say Moriarty is dead?
― remove butt (abanana), Tuesday, 5 January 2016 20:30 (eight years ago) link
yes and in january of 2016 he is still "tim from the office" and so it shall be forevermore
― kinder, Tuesday, 5 January 2016 21:34 (eight years ago) link
this was awful. last year's was awful too... there's a real problem with them doing one big meta story each year when most people watching are mega hungover each time, can't remember what happened the year before
You're so not paying attention that you don't remember that this has previously been three separate episodes each series, that the first was broadcast in July 2010, and the last was two years ago.
What conclusion does he draw from the grave scene -- his theory involved Ricoletti being dead, the grave dream proved it wrong
???
― glandular lansbury (sic), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 02:03 (eight years ago) link
His theory was that Ricoletti used a double and the double was buried in the same grave.There was only one body in the grave, and the whole scene turned out to be part of his dream. Therefore he should think that his theory is unproven.
i'll also point out that the method of her fake death was the same as how sherlock survived jumping off the building that was revealed in the last season.
― remove butt (abanana), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 05:03 (eight years ago) link
there was no actual reason to think the double was in the grave - that's the point, that he got wildly obsessed with this latest incorrect side-detail he'd pulled out of his arse, dragging Lestrade and Mycroft down into his pit of narcissistic bullshit and pushing Watson & Mary, who care about him in a closer fashion, away.
His subconscious is telling him this behaviour is damaging and inappropriate, the way the Sherlocksplaining scene is his subconscious telling him that he is horrible to women.
Ricoletti was dead, and had to be for the entire premise of the mystery to exist, based on the autopsy.
― glandular lansbury (sic), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 14:39 (eight years ago) link
I've been reading some Holmes stories to my daughter and his explanations are part of the formula. They're not about punishing the villain (who often isn't present for the explanation) and there's no reason for them to become problematic when women are involved. It's just what he does. It's a bit odd to discuss modern ideas of agency when a character is doing exactly what he was created to do in the 1800s, especially in a case which is taking place in his head.
I thought the silly suffragette vigilante reveal was clearly signposted as a symptom of Holmes's guilt about how he treats women (doesn't Mrs Hudson protest that she's more than a plot device?). But clumsily done yes.
― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 15:09 (eight years ago) link
More nitpicking, wasn't the '"it's never a twin" ho-ho how we laughed' moment at the start entirely out of character? Holmes would never indulge in such evidence-free generalisation.
― ledge, Wednesday, 6 January 2016 16:08 (eight years ago) link
Well, I'd rebut that a little, if only because there's tons of meta/deconstruction stuff in the short stories as well (not so much the novels). Take "The Blue Carbuncle", where the crime is pretty piffling, and Holmes lets the culprit go, or "The Yellow Face", where Holmes gets everything wrong. Even "A Scandal in Bohemia", the very first short story, deliberately goes against the formula with the Irene Adler plot.
What you end up with is this ironic situation where the best episodes of A Very Modern Update of Sherlock are the ones that play it straight, while (some of) Doyle's best stories are the weird self-referential ones.
What's lame about the most recent episode isn't Sherlock's mansplaining (who cares, really) but that the (really interesting!) suffragette stuff gets shoved under a bus for all that tedious Holmes/Moriarty legend building.
― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, 6 January 2016 16:18 (eight years ago) link
I've only read The Red-Headed League, Silver Blaze and The Speckled Band to my daughter so far so my memory of those self-referential stories is foggy. My point wasn't that Conan Doyle was relentlessly formulaic, only that the word mansplaining is meaningless in the context of Holmes. The whole idea is that nobody sees what he sees and he loves showing off about it so he's never going to let the culprits explain their own plan, whoever they may be.
― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 18:32 (eight years ago) link
Er, I don't think anyone was saying anything about the original Conan Doyle stories, rather than this particular modern TV episode, which wasn't based on (except for some small details) any of the original stories. Also, it's not like the writers of any modern Sherlock adaptation are completely ignorant of the social context where it's made. You can't just deflect criticism by saying, "but it was in the Conan Doyle stories too". The original stories also have (obviously, given when the period they were written) loads of casual sexism, such as in "A Case of Identity", where Holmes lets the bad guy get away with his fraud, because he thinks it's better than letting the woman he screwed over know the truth and get upset.
Also, like I said, "mansplaining" isn't some particular type of speaking that you can identify regardless of context. Even if "Sherlock summation" is a formula inspired by the Conan Doyle stories, it can also be mansplaining when it denies women the authority to speak for themselves. And "loves showing off" is also often a part of mansplaining, when men feel like they have to show they're smarter than women, even when the women (as was the case in this episode) are clearly more knowledgable on the subject at hand.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 6 January 2016 19:05 (eight years ago) link
I'm not saying they should recreate Victorian values. I'd be worried if the TV version kept casting aspersions on gypsies. I just think that calling the most fundamental part of Holmes's character mansplaining in this one situation is stupid. He talks that way to everybody. He's not meant to be an empathetic modern dude.
― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 19:26 (eight years ago) link
but, since it was all a dream, those women were not real women, but only dream images, so that no women were 'splained to in the making of that scene. it was just Our Hero having the Holmesian equivalent of a wet dream.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 19:28 (eight years ago) link
While having flashes of guilt about how he treats women. It's sort of doing the opposite of what Tuomas says.
― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Wednesday, 6 January 2016 19:38 (eight years ago) link
Hmm.
― Ned Raggett, Monday, 2 January 2017 06:44 (seven years ago) link
Its a sort of wacky version of "Mr Selfridge"
I did recognise that "If you ever feel I'm getting too sure of myself" bit from the original book(s)..
― Mark G, Monday, 2 January 2017 10:30 (seven years ago) link
ah is it time for my annual wish of orrible deaths to all involved again already? my my the time does fly
― loudmouth darraghmac ween (darraghmac), Monday, 2 January 2017 10:32 (seven years ago) link
ahem ahem
i wish an orrible death on all involved
― loudmouth darraghmac ween (darraghmac), Monday, 2 January 2017 10:33 (seven years ago) link
I was thinking of posting that this was rather slight, then I remembered we only watched half of it. Lots to look forward to clearly.
― brekekekexit collapse collapse (ledge), Monday, 2 January 2017 10:39 (seven years ago) link
Has a new episode come out or are you still talking about last year's mess?
― Tuomas, Monday, 2 January 2017 11:33 (seven years ago) link
Pretty sure it was new, but I've not seen the other(s)
― Mark G, Monday, 2 January 2017 12:54 (seven years ago) link
Every season gets even more overconvinced of its charm. And every episode still has enough interesting moments to make the dross seem all the more perplexing. Yesterday's bonus: one of the sloppiest-directed fight scenes I've ever seen (by the pool)
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 2 January 2017 12:59 (seven years ago) link
First of a series of 3 was on last night. It was partially based on the story with the Napoleon plaster busts but it substituted Margaret Thatcher and gave an explaining story about how Thatcher was seen as comparable to Napoleon.I enjoyed it, it was more coherent than the one off story last year.
― Stevolende, Monday, 2 January 2017 13:19 (seven years ago) link
I do enjoy this programme and think it has lots of good quality despite its various flaws and its unusual self-regard, but I agree with those who think it has made a mistake in leaving Detection behind and going in for International Espionage Fist-Fights, Gun-Battles etc.
― the pinefox, Monday, 2 January 2017 15:18 (seven years ago) link
Good of Mark Gatiss to give himself so much screen time.
― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Monday, 2 January 2017 15:44 (seven years ago) link
I agree with those who think it has made a mistake in leaving Detection behind and going in for International Espionage Fist-Fights, Gun-Battles etc.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Mycroft Problem. (Conan Doyle used him, what, in three of the stories total? He's an interesting add-on used very sparingly in a couple of highly notable cases -- only one of which was a full-on espionage case IIRC -- and by making him, institutional spying and The Government more and more of a central thing throughout, it all gets more boring, somehow.)
― Ned Raggett, Monday, 2 January 2017 16:46 (seven years ago) link
Will not be much of a surprise when they let the cat out of the bag that Sherlock faked the death of "Mary" aka "Rosalind" in order to fulfill his preposterously sentimental vow, thus putting Watson through the grief of once more losing a loved one 'for the team'. Also, "Mary" as a Jason Bourne-alike is not especially convincing. I like this version of Holmes better when he was more of an insufferable asshole.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 2 January 2017 19:04 (seven years ago) link
yeah i dunno that i care all that much about all this espionage nonsense? sentimental sherlock and sad dad watson flirting with a girl on a bus and of course its never just a girl in a bus so who knows what all thats about
i was behind on last season & caught up yesterday- i hate storylines like "all the worlds secrets are kept in x" and that vault being in the bad-guy's mind made it 10 times more stupid, so gatissy/moffaty to resolve in such a facepalm way- abominable bride was ok, setting it in 19th c actually make all the affectedness of the show a bit more pleasant & less annoying for me...but the flashing forward & back was p silly imo- AGRA flash drive, rmde nonsense that anyone would house all that info in one place x 4! (like the stupid magic James Bond hard drive with all the agents names in Skyfall)
But it's not a terrible way to kill an hour and a half on a Sunday night/Monday morning. I enjoy it despite all my petty annoyances & eyerolling
― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 2 January 2017 22:05 (seven years ago) link
(like the stupid magic James Bond hard drive with all the agents names in Skyfall)
I laughed out loud on a plane when hacker genius Julia Stiles started downloading a folder labeled BLACK OPS in the latest Bourne movie.
― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Monday, 2 January 2017 22:43 (seven years ago) link
Feeling the American 'Elementary' way more than this
― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Monday, 2 January 2017 22:45 (seven years ago) link
What a mess. Gatiss has a big problem with structuring a 90 minute story. the last 3 episodes have all been bad. OTOH this means i am fine with them dropping the rupert murdoch murder cliffhanger.
the cases that flashed by weren't clever, didn't make sense, didn't involve any clues, and felt like a first draft to be filled in later. was there ever a reason given for why watson's house had been repainted?
gun & pool fights looked awful and added nothing. agra bond plot was a bore. part of the fault is "the sign of four", the weakest doyle sherlock novel. at least a study in scarlet was enjoyably bad!
i can't work out how ammo/amo was supposed to be a hint. there's a person who used the codename "love", and... it wasn't her?
i liked the 5-minute mystery with the cars.
― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 07:07 (seven years ago) link
Where have I seen the dressing like a chair trick before? It seemed familiar.
― koogs, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 09:35 (seven years ago) link
this thing?http://www.businessinsider.com/man-attempts-to-illegally-enter-us-by-disguising-himself-as-a-car-seat-2016-7
― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 09:59 (seven years ago) link
it was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nHxBux1JAg
which i think is an advert based on something that the same guy did a few years earlier - taking an 'empty' car through a drive-thru, for the lolz.
― koogs, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 11:19 (seven years ago) link
I saw one in a museum in Berlin, about the ways people got through the iron curtain - they had the car with the fake seat, and a mannequin inside.
tbqh, that seemed like one of those "it's in the Conan Doyle original", like the question is not so much "how did he die" rather than "why would he do that?" (I know, I know, there weren't cars back in the 1890s and so on)
A bit like that old one about the hanging guy with only a pool of water underneath him..
― Mark G, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 11:20 (seven years ago) link
Also..
I know we are in the future now and all that, but a tracking device inserted into a USB stick?
― Mark G, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 11:22 (seven years ago) link
Shrines to M.Thatcher. Who does that? nobody, that's who.
― Mark G, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 11:53 (seven years ago) link
right?
― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 15:58 (seven years ago) link
Oh, it wouldn't surprise me if some rabid Tory arseholes did.
― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 16:07 (seven years ago) link
Though they'd be voting UKIP these days.
― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 16:08 (seven years ago) link
I'd normally roll my eyes at nitpicking about credibility but everything about this was just egregiously terrible and insulting. The Thatcher shrine was the single most believable element.
― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 16:14 (seven years ago) link
I don't imagine that Mary will return - it would be pleasant from the point of view that I quite like the actress and he writes well for her on a scene-to-scene basis. It would also be quite surprising because the actress has recently separated from Martin Freeman.
But mostly there is noting in Moffatt's history of Heroic Men and the Women who Facilitate Them that suggests this would be a feint.
― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 16:22 (seven years ago) link
I didn't realise they'd split up. Would've been better to kill him and keep her then, really. Could still be Sherlock & Watson, just a more interesting Watson. Plus it'd be easier from a scheduling perspective.
― trishyb, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 16:29 (seven years ago) link
He doesn't seem to have much coming up, but otherwise I approve of your plan.
― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 16:46 (seven years ago) link
was there ever a reason given for why watson's house had been repainted?
I'm not really a devotee of this show and was only half-watching as I walked in and out of the room doing other things but even if I was a rabid fanboy I don't think this question would ever occur to me.
― ¶ (DJP), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 17:11 (seven years ago) link
presumably we find out in the extras on the dulux edition
― loudmouth darraghmac ween (darraghmac), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 17:13 (seven years ago) link
I like how they compressed the actual mystery-solving into a dismissive handful of incoherent text message montages. It was a hearty fuck you to everyone who enjoys the idea of Sherlock Holmes actually solving mysteries instead of spending the entire episode on the tragic family life of John the Bus Stop Pickup Artist and his wife Mary, Ex-Superspy with her Signature... Dice and USB Thumb Drive. Just the dumbest possible bullshit they could come up with to hang a bunch of unearned pathos on. The same thing that makes recent Doctor Who unwatchable.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 18:05 (seven years ago) link
Just the dumbest possible bullshit they could come up with to hang a bunch of unearned pathos on.
The average viewer takes little or no pleasure in intellectual pursuits, but far prefers the luxurious sensation of wallowing in unearned pathos. Pleasing that average viewer is what makes for the biggest audience and greatest commercial success. /captainobvious
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 18:43 (seven years ago) link
people love to repaint their homes, especially when they're having a kid
― mh 😏, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 19:15 (seven years ago) link
The Scottish accent of the woman on the bus was pretty unbelievable.
― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Tuesday, 3 January 2017 19:35 (seven years ago) link
Was that a Scottish accent? I thought she had some kind of a speech impediment.
I thought the repainting was because Rosamund had thrown up all over the walls? They did compare her to the girl in Excorcist in that bedroom scene.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 3 January 2017 21:37 (seven years ago) link
was there ever a reason given for why watson's house had been repainted?I'm not really a devotee of this show and was only half-watching as I walked in and out of the room doing other things but even if I was a rabid fanboy I don't think this question would ever occur to me.
it's something sherlock notices in floating text that goes nowhere.
― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 02:36 (seven years ago) link
Wow, this was senseless. At least it was a Gatiss episode.
Was Molly sitting for John at the end when Sherlock visited (i.e. was that John's place and not Molly's place)?
― Bianca Smell BO (Leee), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 04:39 (seven years ago) link
I think so, she is the kid's godmother after all.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 07:08 (seven years ago) link
wow, how bad this latest episode was !absolutely rubbish.As noted upthread, the fighting was stupid. The tracking over north Africa was useless (reminded me of indiana jones with the travels over maps). the mary story/traitor meh. The final shooting/sacrifice thing...I had noticed how badly written the show was but that's a low... or maybe the long time between each episode makes me forget how bad most of them are !At this point, the only things I still enjoy in the show are the tiny comedy bits.
― AlXTC from Paris, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 12:32 (seven years ago) link
or maybe I'm just too old for this and they target kids/teenagers. which is quite likely !
― AlXTC from Paris, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 12:37 (seven years ago) link
Yeah, I turned to my missus and said "They could just burn large piles of cash in front of the screen instead".
― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 12:44 (seven years ago) link
https://twitter.com/caslxcked/status/815701993545080832
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 12:52 (seven years ago) link
I think Gatiss/Moffat seem to have have forgot that the main draw for the show (and most Sherlock Holmes stories in general) is clever mysteries and watching how Sherlock solves them, not the meta wankery of the previous episode or the pointless soap opera tear-jerking of this one. They're just not very good writing at writing genuine human drama, and they definitely shouldn't do it in a show that doesn't need it.
Mary's dying scene, where she had the time to say all those corny things and then died right after finishing her last sentence was already cringeworthy enough, but then they had to more to it in the form of the video will, and create more pointless melodrama by having John blame Sherlock for her death. I actually liked the drama in Sherlock's fake death and return, but that was more low-key, and before that they'd managed to make the Sherlock/John relationship tangible in a way the Mary/John relationship never was.
Also, this must be third time since season 2 that Sherlock learns the lesson that he shouldn't be so arrogant and cocksure? It's getting a bit tired, please come up with some new morals.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 13:04 (seven years ago) link
Also..I know we are in the future now and all that, but a tracking device inserted into a USB stick?
I don't mind moments of unreality in Sherlock Holmes plots, whether they be snakes that climb ropes or tight belts that prevent internal hemorrhage. My test for acceptability is whether I can tell it's invented while I'm reading or watching it. I didn't know trackers weren't quite that small yet, so it was acceptable to me. Maybe it fails for others.
Perhaps the creators were thinking of RFID tags, but those require local trackers.
― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 17:07 (seven years ago) link
Thanks Tuomas.
I've been trying to rank the Gatiss episodes. This one is as bad as "The Hound of the Baskervilles" as far as narrative coherence, but not offensive in the way that "The Blind Banker" is. I can't remember what kind of naff "The Empty Hearse" is.
― Bianca Smell BO (Leee), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 17:49 (seven years ago) link
I think Gatiss/Moffat seem to have have forgot that the main draw for the show (and most Sherlock Holmes stories in general) is clever mysteries and watching how Sherlock solves them, not the meta wankery of the previous episode or the pointless soap opera tear-jerking of this one.
alternatively, fans of meta-wankery and pointless soap opera tear-jerking are their target audience. plus, you know, dweebs who moan about shit on the internet even tho they keep watching it.
― Rock Wokeman (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 17:57 (seven years ago) link
it's 2017, it's not hard to understand that overblown emo/nerd shit draws in the viewers
― Rock Wokeman (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 17:58 (seven years ago) link
I don't think "The Blind Banker" was by Gatiss, it was by the third dude who writes Sherlock, can't recall his name... Toby something?
"The Empty Hearse" was where Sherlock came back after his faked death. It wasn't half bad, the mystery was a bit daft, but IMO the Sherlock/John interactions were nicely done. I guess Sherlock/John just work better as a couple than John and Mary, even his grief for Sherlock seemed more genuine and heartfelt than for Mary here.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 17:59 (seven years ago) link
xxpost
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 18:00 (seven years ago) link
Doh, you're right, Gatiss did "The Great Game", which wasn't terrible.
― Bianca Smell BO (Leee), Wednesday, 4 January 2017 18:08 (seven years ago) link
I actually liked the drama in Sherlock's fake death and return
this is the emotional climax of the doyle corpus is why
― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 18:11 (seven years ago) link
I think "The Blind Banker" still remains the worst episode in the series (though this new one comes close), because besides the daft mystery you get stupid Orientalism too.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 18:11 (seven years ago) link
Yeah, but Doyle did it way differently, you don't really get to see Watson griefing, or getting angry at Sherlock for not telling him. And I think those worked really well in the TV version, I guess largely because Bilbo and Cucumber have such good chemistry.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 4 January 2017 18:14 (seven years ago) link
i checked back and yr right, i had remembered there being more. specifically what i remembered was the line "a thousand apologies, my dear watson-- i had no idea you would be so affected" which i guess i'd extrapolated into a more complex scene in my head because it is such a good line (holmes' weird only half-ingenuous emotionlessness, since even if he didn't know watson would faint he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of disguise if he didn't want to have an effect; the tenderness between them in spite of holmes' essential narcissism; the meta ghost of doyle himself, speaking to his readers) and may be all the depth you need from a sherlock holmes story. i haven't seen this show lately but i hope they used that line. yet i am also pretty grumpy about this show so i also hope they didn't.
― difficult listening hour, Thursday, 5 January 2017 04:52 (seven years ago) link
(when i imagine doyle himself saying the line, of course he is also being disingenuous)
― difficult listening hour, Thursday, 5 January 2017 04:53 (seven years ago) link
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/04/to-an-undiscerning-critic-from-mark-gatiss
― the pinefox, Thursday, 5 January 2017 08:45 (seven years ago) link
well thats the worst thing ive ever fucking read
― loudmouth darraghmac ween (darraghmac), Thursday, 5 January 2017 09:38 (seven years ago) link
Lol @ watching any sherlock holmes based tv show that doesn't star Jeremy Brett tbh
― Houston John (Bananaman Begins), Thursday, 5 January 2017 09:42 (seven years ago) link
Brett is the greatest Holmes, obviously, but that series does such straightforward adaptations that it gets a bit boring if you've read the stories and know the solutions to the mysteries already.
― Tuomas, Thursday, 5 January 2017 10:08 (seven years ago) link
Brett was fantastic (which made the last episodes of his series quite sad, once he was very sick).That said, I don't have any (major) issues with this holmes (and watson).it's just that the stories and mysteries are very badly written/adapted, most of the times.
― AlXTC from Paris, Thursday, 5 January 2017 11:52 (seven years ago) link
thats not.... major?
― loudmouth darraghmac ween (darraghmac), Thursday, 5 January 2017 12:02 (seven years ago) link
oh I meant no major issues with the current actors.
― AlXTC from Paris, Thursday, 5 January 2017 12:03 (seven years ago) link
Not even with Martin Freeman's hair?
― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Thursday, 5 January 2017 12:27 (seven years ago) link
eheh. yup ! that said, it feels like he doesn't really care anymore. just phoning it in (especially the Mary's death scene).
― AlXTC from Paris, Thursday, 5 January 2017 12:35 (seven years ago) link
This is like a David Bowie video.
― Mark G, Sunday, 8 January 2017 21:32 (seven years ago) link
https://twitter.com/search?f=users&vertical=default&q=cumberbatch&src=tyah
― groovypanda, Sunday, 8 January 2017 22:18 (seven years ago) link
Did anyone think this episode (with Toby Jones) an improvement?
I didn't - thought TJ's villain and surrounding plot ridiculous - but many apparently did.
― the pinefox, Monday, 9 January 2017 13:15 (seven years ago) link
It was a lot better than last week's, but the whole thing is just too far off the rails now to be called good. It's not Sherlock Holmes anymore, it's a comic book superhero knockoff. Like a shitty Avengers.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Monday, 9 January 2017 14:32 (seven years ago) link
way too much time tied up in character baggage
I got the impression Toby Jones was supposed to be a sort of "what if Jimmy Saville killed adults for fun instead of sexually assaulting children" with the whole keys to the hospital thing
― mh 😏, Monday, 9 January 2017 15:16 (seven years ago) link
Yes -- but he seemed also a deliberate, sometimes heavy-handed comment on Trump, presumably filmed a long time before Trump's election.
The scene early on where he got all his associates to take a memory-loss drug -- I mean, this was ludicrous, and went on and on and on while they sat around waiting for him to do his evil things to them.
Then he spent much of the rest of the episode issuing manic evil laughter.
I thought: someone this obviously horrible couldn't be so successful, but that view doesn't really work as lots of horrible people (Trump, Johnson et al) are indeed successful.
― the pinefox, Monday, 9 January 2017 15:22 (seven years ago) link
This episode was ridiculous and trashy, but it did manage to hit several of the notes that made the first season fun, and therefore was better than the previous episode. Every series runs out of worthwhile at some point. Even Conan Doyle knew he'd run out of ideas and tried like hell to extricate himself from the purgatory of fan service.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 9 January 2017 19:05 (seven years ago) link
agreed with the previous comments.It's MUCH better than the first episode (but it couldn't really be worse !).still, the bad guy and the story were not very well written/obvious (indeed the opening scene where he repeated 10 times they wouldn't remember anything was ludicrous) and the personal/over the top emo stuffs are annoying but the whole thing had more punch and rhythm.and the final twist was unexpected !so overall, not bad. and even funny at moments.
― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, 10 January 2017 10:12 (seven years ago) link
Bad Moffat >>>>>>>> Good Gatiss.
Although I usually find the online enmity towards Moffat and his portrayal of women overwrought, Mary's focus on saving the two men in her life was incredibly glaring and uncomfortable.
But otherwise, agreed that this was trashy fun.
― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmy8x2Lm7rE (Leee), Tuesday, 10 January 2017 16:38 (seven years ago) link
Worst episode ever?
― the pinefox, Sunday, 15 January 2017 22:50 (seven years ago) link
Career suicide bad
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 16 January 2017 00:15 (seven years ago) link
Is this like when Alan Alda directed that one episode of M*A*S*H?
― Moog and Stan (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 16 January 2017 00:50 (seven years ago) link
Ooft, that was horrible. Surely that's them done with it now?
― ailsa, Monday, 16 January 2017 00:52 (seven years ago) link
just started
uh is the sister a memetic virus who wrote herself on to Sherlock years ago
― mh 😏, Monday, 16 January 2017 00:55 (seven years ago) link
I think maybe she is an avatar of Star Trek NG's holodeck nemesis The Q.
― Moog and Stan (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 16 January 2017 00:57 (seven years ago) link
well I called that one a few minutes before they did
― mh 😏, Monday, 16 January 2017 00:57 (seven years ago) link
i called it from episode 0
― trilby mouth (darraghmac), Monday, 16 January 2017 01:02 (seven years ago) link
Or maybe this is all really taking place inside the 'mind' of the lunar prison computer MYCROFT from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
― Moog and Stan (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 16 January 2017 01:04 (seven years ago) link
darragh would have fared well in my family's "i wrote this" joke where we'd guess where the plot was going on a tv show or movie and then after viewing say "see, i wrote it"
― mh 😏, Monday, 16 January 2017 01:18 (seven years ago) link
high praise
― trilby mouth (darraghmac), Monday, 16 January 2017 01:24 (seven years ago) link
Is somebody going to sing "Dry Bones" at the end of this?
― Moog and Stan (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 16 January 2017 01:38 (seven years ago) link
did they consider writing some episodes in this series where they just solve some cases
― mh 😏, Monday, 16 January 2017 02:14 (seven years ago) link
coming up with extremely clever deductive solutions to rather spectacular, but marginally believable, criminal cases is above the talents of the two writers. now that they've sprinted past the end of the Doyle corpus and must generate their own material, they've decided to take a different direction that better suits their abilities.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 16 January 2017 04:54 (seven years ago) link
that's cool but could they hire someone who can write some mysteries
― mh 😏, Monday, 16 January 2017 05:06 (seven years ago) link
I think I'm going to see that new Underworld movie. I hear the actress who played Irene Adler is in it and this season could have used her presence
― mh 😏, Monday, 16 January 2017 05:08 (seven years ago) link
It was entertaining enough for what it was (AU fan fic) with brain disengaged until the last ten minutes but no show meant to be detail-oriented can afford to be this sloppy with plot holes.
Like 'aha! the recoil would have meant the killer couldn't have been wearing glasses!' but nobody checks the first place you would look for Redbeard for thirty five years.
― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Monday, 16 January 2017 06:31 (seven years ago) link
(AU fan fic)
kill with fire
― trilby mouth (darraghmac), Monday, 16 January 2017 07:39 (seven years ago) link
I think this was really bad, the worst episode I have seen.
I have some kind of attraction to this programme despite all - the high production values, the sense of intelligence even if manifested in meta- / ironic stuff; what may have seemed the subtlety of the relation between C19 original and C21 version; and detection which, like others, I like.
But this one pretty much trampled over all that - I can't think of one thing that was good about it. It became some kind of different programme. Bad way to go out. Christ, even the closing last monologue on Mary's dvd -- how she slowed down so she was reading a trailer voiceover than actually talking to people she knew -- preposterous.
― the pinefox, Monday, 16 January 2017 10:10 (seven years ago) link
wat if maigret but in space
― Houston John (Bananaman Begins), Monday, 16 January 2017 10:46 (seven years ago) link
Good thing there was plenty more screentime for Mycroft, though. He's the best one!
― trishyb, Monday, 16 January 2017 11:04 (seven years ago) link
I get the feeling when the Russians allegedly leaked ep 3 onto the torrents a couple of days ago that there wasn't even a significant demand for it. Also the headline about the BBC enquiry into the leak, lol! Russia be bricking it.
― calzino, Monday, 16 January 2017 11:26 (seven years ago) link
Euros was a cross between Hannibal Lecter, Jigsaw, and a j-horror ghost girl. Ridiculous.
It had actual detection scenes in it so it was better than the Six Thatchers, but not by much.
― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Monday, 16 January 2017 18:55 (seven years ago) link
otm http://thequietus.com/articles/21578-bbc-the-final-problem-sherlock-review
― millmeister, Monday, 16 January 2017 19:05 (seven years ago) link
but someone gets a throwaway line about how Thatcher is like Napoleon, which she isn't
Yes, that irritated me from the start.
― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Monday, 16 January 2017 19:10 (seven years ago) link
tbf, Maggie was the PM during the Falkland Islands War, which was the 45th most important war of the 20th century.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 16 January 2017 19:21 (seven years ago) link
Quietus nailed it, I could barely make it through the last ep. The reference in the article to the taxi driver scene from S1 was a cruel reminder of how good the show used to be. Everyone's contracted for S5, so unfortunately we have further to fall
― Brakhage, Monday, 16 January 2017 20:28 (seven years ago) link
Yeah, the taxi driver scene is a good comparison, because it was a very intense but quite bit of drama, where two people matched their wits, and Sherlock tried to deduce whether the taxi driver could really predict which pill he would choose... But it was still a human scene, you could still put yourself in that situation and see how you could've made the same conclusion as Sherlock. But in this season Sherlock can predict two weeks into the future, the bad guy can predict years into the future, she can be sure that none of the three protagonists die in that grenade explosion (which wasn't even really necessary, cos all she wanted was them to come to Sherrinford), because her mind games wouldn't work if all three weren't there, plus she appears to have telepathic powers comparable to Charles Xavier. It's ridiculous.
So the characters in this series have become wizards, there's nothing human left in them anymore. Moffat and Gatiss seemed to think that the threats the protagonists face have to escalate every seriers, so Holmes and Watson have to fight mass killers in every episode now, not solve any "ordinary" mysteries... Even though the original stories always balanced between more mundane and gruesome crimes, giving them a nice balance. That balance seems to be lost here, it's all on hyperdrive and it's all so dull now.
― Tuomas, Monday, 16 January 2017 20:51 (seven years ago) link
"a very intense but quiet bit of drama"
― Tuomas, Monday, 16 January 2017 20:52 (seven years ago) link
Today, sherlock fans, we have to be soldiers, and that means to hell with what happens to us.
The quietus: To be completely fair, about half of this episode is like a quite good episode of a different show.
Guess I missed that half.
― brekekekexit collapse collapse (ledge), Monday, 16 January 2017 21:16 (seven years ago) link
Well actually I did miss the second half, since the first one was so bad I decided washing up would be a more enjoyable way of spending my time.
― brekekekexit collapse collapse (ledge), Monday, 16 January 2017 21:39 (seven years ago) link
the second half devolved pretty completely into incoherence
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, 16 January 2017 21:42 (seven years ago) link
the fact that this stuff is on at a prime slot on a sunday and promoted as well as it was reminds me of how Sapphire and Steel used to be on twice a week on primetime itv.
― koogs, Monday, 16 January 2017 22:53 (seven years ago) link
Remove Bookmark from this Thread
― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 03:59 (seven years ago) link
trying to imagine a whole country watching Sapphire and Steel at the same time, it's like an episode of Sapphire and Steel
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 17 January 2017 06:59 (seven years ago) link
(11.8M viewers for S&S apparently. But there were only 3 channels at the time and no remote controls)
― koogs, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 07:13 (seven years ago) link
Everyone's contracted for S5, so unfortunately we have further to fall
Now that Sherlock is "cured" of his misanthropy/sociopathy, there will be all the fun of him falling in love on a regular basis, I expect.
― trishyb, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 13:02 (seven years ago) link
I think it's kinda sad that this episode was such a misstep, because the was a germ of a good idea there: that Sherlock would finally come across a case he can't solve with his wits, only by using his empathy. I even kinda liked the oh-so-blunt metaphor they used to signal this, when kid Aurus was always asking kid Sherlock, "won't you play with me?", and in the end he was literally playing (the violin) with her, DO YOU SEE? But that human-sized story was buried under all the "clever" audience misdirection, fanwankery, ridiculous plot holes, and the whole stupid attempt to out-Hannibal Hannibal Lecter. It really felt like Moffat & Gatiss forgot like they were writing Sherlock and not Dr. Who (where such stuff is more tolerable since it's science fantasy, not detective fiction).
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 13:15 (seven years ago) link
I think it's also telling that only one of the main plots this season was actually a mystery brought to Sherlock by a client, and even in that case the client turned out to be fake and tied to a larger non-detective plot. And the characters who were essential when this was still a detective/police procedural (Molly, Gregson, the other cops) have been completely sidelined, while main characters have been reduced to family members and lovers.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 13:20 (seven years ago) link
oh my, what was that shit !??joining the choir : that was simply horrible. For all the reasons already mentioned. I could barely watch it. actually, at some point, like Ledge, I had to go and do something else as I couldn't stand it anymore.Especially the sister and her silly mind games which were somewhere between kids/teenagers games and TV games.So many things that didn't make sense in that story...I also realized I can't stand Moriarty who's like a synthesis of the show : affected over the top emo.I thought they hit rock bottom with ep1 of this season but this was even worse.Is it the final ep of the season ? It seemed like it by the end but I thought there were 4ep ?
― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 16:18 (seven years ago) link
It really felt like Moffat & Gatiss forgot like they were writing Sherlock and not Dr. Who
It's utter wank when they do it there too.
― Mud... Jam... Failure... (aldo), Tuesday, 17 January 2017 18:48 (seven years ago) link
Agreed. I don't even watch Doctor Who anymore.
― trishyb, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 19:45 (seven years ago) link
Is it the final ep of the season ? It seemed like it by the end but I thought there were 4ep ?
And at the moment, quite possible that there'll be no more.
― groovypanda, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 21:17 (seven years ago) link
We have yet to see Sherlock water ski.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 17 January 2017 21:19 (seven years ago) link
What I meant was, if this was Dr. Who, the idea that some person can control an entire prison staff and make them do things they wouldn't want to is ok, because it's sci-fi, you can just write her to have telepathic powers. But in here, as cool as it may have seemed to Moffat & Gatiss, it's nonsensical, it break the suspension of disbelief.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 21:20 (seven years ago) link
no its shit when writing is lazy emo wank in any genre
― trilby mouth (darraghmac), Wednesday, 18 January 2017 00:08 (seven years ago) link
Pattern detection: basically anything with Martin Freeman seems destined to overextend itself until it's so far past being meaningful, tense or funny that you wonder WHY?!? WHY AM I WATCHING THIS?!? THIS IS AWFUL!!! I think he's part of a plot.
― The beaver is not the bad guy (El Tomboto), Wednesday, 18 January 2017 02:50 (seven years ago) link
(note: TV Fargo (may have) avoided this fate by only using him for one season. Maybe they know what's up)
― The beaver is not the bad guy (El Tomboto), Wednesday, 18 January 2017 02:54 (seven years ago) link
So basically, the final season is : 2 horrible episodes and 1 okay-ish... good work !That said, if I took the time to consider all the episodes of the series, I'm pretty sure I'd be left with something like 2-3 that I really enjoyed.As said by others here, they were just so bad at writing good mysteries based on the original material. All the meta and Moriarty stuff have mostly been garbage.
― AlXTC from Paris, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 11:23 (seven years ago) link
The first episode and the Irene Adler episodes are the properly good ones, although I think the Adler one spins too wildly by the end. I like the wedding episode too, which seems a lot less indulgent by comparison after the 4th season.
― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 11:29 (seven years ago) link
For a show that did just 13 episodes, out which only 2-3 were undivisive, people stayed remarkably engaged to the end...
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 11:40 (seven years ago) link
The Hound of the Baskervilles is on-the-line 'good' - if every episode was that level of completely generic quality then I don't think anyone would be complainings.
Along with the three Chuck mentions, I quite like His Last Vow (Mads Mikkelsen's brother) and The Abominable Bride, though the weakest bits of them are the connections to the ongoing plot.
Even The Great Game, the end of season 1, is really good, it's just what it all leads to that's the problem.
― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 12:26 (seven years ago) link
I think during the first two seasons, the consensus was that the middle episodes ("The Blind Banker" and "The Hounds of Baskerville") were meh, but the the other ones were great. (And I agreed with that opininion.) "The Blind Banker" has that awful orientalist/racist vibe, and "The Hounds of Baskerville" is the first one where solution to the mystery is utterly ridiculous and unrealistic. So 66% of those seasons were still great and provided some clever (but not outrageous) mysteries, that's a pretty good average.
Then season 3 started with an episode that did what it absolutely needed to do (bring Watson and Holmes together, provide an answer to the previous episode's cliffhanger that wouldn't piss off viewers) satisfactorily, but the mystery part was perfunctory and mostly just a subplot. I guess as a correction to that, the second ep for season 2 raised the detective work to a much higher level, which was fun to watch while it was on, but in retrospect this was the first episode where solutions to the mysteries had some really obvious holes in them. Episode was 3 okayish, but again slight on the mystery department. In retrospect, it kinda presaged what went wrong with season 4, i.e. the writer were more interested in creating a Hannibal-like vile villain and emphasizing his cleverness than having Sherlock do his sherlocking.
"The Abominable Bride" was the first time the show really went full-on into meta wankery and writers just attempting do clever "DO YOU SEE!?" moments instead of a coherent plot. But after that point I think a lot of viewers, me included, thought that the lates two episodes were just anomalies, and that season 4 could return the show back to being a clever detective procedural. So I was still psyched about the new season. Unfortunately it turned out "His Last Vow" and "The Abominable Bride" weren't anomalies, they actually set up the new standard.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 12:53 (seven years ago) link
Also, like I said above, the show really went wrong by trying to up the threat level with each season. At some point the attempt to create yet another villain who can outsmart Sherlock and who is even more clever than previous villains will just lead into something that's too ridiculous and unrealistic even for this show, and hence we got Eurus. I get the impulse of trying to wow the fans more and more, but it never ends well. I would've been much better to balance the more outrageous cases with more mundane ones, like in the Doyle stories.
It's not a coincidence that Doyle created the "evil mastermind who's just as smart as Holmes" only for what was supposed to be the last ever story, and most people agree the quality started dropping when that didn't turn out to be the finale after all.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 13:01 (seven years ago) link
There are loads of good stories after "Final problem" - maybe not as consistent, but certainly the best ones are as good as anything in the first two books.
The novels are more like the TV show than the short stories - lots of implausible rubbish with some good bits
― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 13:23 (seven years ago) link
The first episode where the solution had major holes in it was the first episode. The taxi drivers method made no sense... And wasn't Scandal in Belgravia almost completely a spy- and politics story? Just saying, the show changed much less than people think, imo. It was always flawed, the flaws just became much more obvious as time went by. I still liked most of it, because Moffatt is one of the best writers in the medium, who even when the big stuff falls apart puts so much great little stuff in there that it stays watchable.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 14:26 (seven years ago) link
The taxi drivers method made no sense...
In what way?
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 14:44 (seven years ago) link
I mean, he knew he was gonna die anyway, and clearly he was very proud of the way he was able to read people, probably cultivated throughout the years he'd been a cabbie. So it makes sense he decided to murder them with a method that involved a risk of death for himself too, because he wasn't afraid of dying, and everytime he "won" he proved how superior he was.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 14:47 (seven years ago) link
The method he used to win made no sense. Or rather, it was never explained. Probably because nothing would have made sense.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 14:50 (seven years ago) link
I did, in fact, go see Underworld: Blood Wars and not only was Lara Pulver (Sherlock's Irene Adler) one of the main characters, the movie was better than at least one of this season's episodes of Sherlock.
― mh 😏, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 14:59 (seven years ago) link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentalism
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:00 (seven years ago) link
That's kinda rubbish.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:14 (seven years ago) link
Suggesting post-Final Problem is inferior is madness imo, so much good stuff there without even mentioning Baskervilles (which I'd speculate is the one thing the Man On The Clapham Omnibus could name - or could have, before the TV show); Dancing Men, for example, is probably top 5, but see also Norwood Builder, Empty House,Bruce-Partington, Second Stain, Wisteria Lodge...
― Mud... Jam... Failure... (aldo), Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:15 (seven years ago) link
that reminds me that, as already noticed upthread, they didn't even bother with the mystery stories by the end since a couple of times they have simply "mentioned" the cases (dancing men, for instance) in the "fastforward" moments (don't know how to qualify those !). Like "who cares about the cases that made the hero famous in the first place when we can go on and on about the wives and families" !
― AlXTC from Paris, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:38 (seven years ago) link
Nevertheless, real-life perfomers use these techniques to predict choices people make with fairly good accuracy, so it's not like the cabbie's method doesn't make sense, at least compared to a bad guy controlling the entire staff of a high-security psychiatric ward because she's so good at convincing people.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:45 (seven years ago) link
And the weird thing is all those entertainers also learned their craft through cabbing!
Nah, it's bullshit. And not just that he gets them to choose the poison, but that he gets them to choose at all. No sign of struggle, nothing. That solution is full of holes.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:51 (seven years ago) link
And I'm not comparing it to the last few, but to the second one of season three, which I suspect you were referring to when you said that was the first holed solution? That the corsets are unusually strong is a less stupid thing than that the cab-driver had learned how to be a mentalist...
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 15:52 (seven years ago) link
And not just that he gets them to choose the poison, but that he gets them to choose at all. No sign of struggle, nothing.
He was pointing a pistol at them, so if they refused to choose he'd shoot them. It makes sense that most people would choose (what looks to them like) a 50/50 chance of dying rather than almost certain death.
As the plot holes in "Sign of Three", the corset was hardly the biggest one. My complain about the episode is way upthread, but here's a direct link to it:
the bbc sherlock series by the dr who 'bloke' and starring tim from the office
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 16:02 (seven years ago) link
ahah, I've just read the Quietus article.It's perfect.lock thread !
― AlXTC from Paris, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 16:34 (seven years ago) link
Re the cab driver, my Sherl-obsessed daughter tells me it was figured out on the innernettes that it was the water which was poisoned - both pills being innocuous, a dry swallow is safe but drinking it down was fatal. I have neither the interest nor the time to verify tho. Hated the fourth season front to back, embarrassing overheated fanfic.
― attention vampire (MatthewK), Wednesday, 18 January 2017 21:37 (seven years ago) link
I don't think we ever see cabbie give anyone a glass of water? He certainly doesn't give Sherlock any.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 18 January 2017 22:29 (seven years ago) link
Ah my bad, sorry.
― attention vampire (MatthewK), Thursday, 19 January 2017 03:21 (seven years ago) link
No trick, he was just riding his luck.
Nevertheless, real-life perfomers use these techniques to predict choices people make with fairly good accuracy
Hmmmm.
― brekekekexit collapse collapse (ledge), Thursday, 19 January 2017 09:02 (seven years ago) link
Real-life mentalists can use all sort of more or less subtle tricks to make a seemingly random choice less so. Here's one crude example of such a trick, but the cabbie probably has refined better techniques to make the victim more likely to choose the poisoned pill. He supposedly only makes "one move" (pushing one of the bottles towards the victim), which is very flashy, but no doubt that flashiness works to hide the other, more subtle gestures/suggestions that he uses to make the seemingly random choice work in his favour. Of course he (like any real-life mentalist) still has a percentage of failure, but since he's about to die anyway, he's willing to take that risk.
Also, since we learn he doesn't even own a real gun but a fake one, the "one move" is very useful in pushing the victim towards accepting his game. If he were to present the two bottles equally, so that the victims would think they have an even 50/50 chance of picking the wrong one, some of them might rather take their chances in trying to fight the guy than to choose a pill, in which case they'd find out the gun isn't real, and the cabbie would be exposed. But since he makes his "one move", this makes the choice not-random, and the victims would think they can second-guess the (seemingly simple-minded) cabbie's intentions, and choose the pill he didn't want them to choose. So they're more likely to play the game, thinking they have a better than a 50% chance to win.
― Tuomas, Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:01 (seven years ago) link
That's still pretty nonsensical...
― Frederik B, Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:38 (seven years ago) link
xp they also use cheap (physical) magic tricks in the guise of mentalism but i suppose there's no reason the cabbie couldn't have done that too. still prefer my theory though.
― brekekekexit collapse collapse (ledge), Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:39 (seven years ago) link
Guys, it is sherlock holmes, in one of the original stories a man was killed by a trained snake, relax, it is not hard realism
― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:43 (seven years ago) link
Yeah, James, that's kinda my point :) I enjoy the show, I just don't think the descent into nonsensicalness has been so steep as others do.
― Frederik B, Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:48 (seven years ago) link
Indeed. Also, pretty obviously the writers didn't explicitly explain how the cabbie did so viewers could construct their own theories, just like they did later on when they didn't reveal the exact details of how Sherlock faked his suicide.
― Tuomas, Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:50 (seven years ago) link
I don't agree: there still think there's a marked difference between the cabbie's methods and Eurus' mass hypnosis. The former can explained in a way that works within it the shows level of relative realism. The latter can't be, it breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way the cabbie doesn't.
― Tuomas, Thursday, 19 January 2017 10:53 (seven years ago) link
From the Washington demo yesterday:
http://i.imgur.com/tNfX2LP.jpg
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, 22 January 2017 21:06 (seven years ago) link
god I just remembered the bit about the dog and the friend that got thrown down the well by the sister and hated this show so hard
― El Tomboto, Tuesday, 28 February 2017 02:14 (seven years ago) link
congress: grab him by the emoluments & tax returns
― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Tuesday, 28 February 2017 02:34 (seven years ago) link
it was actually a plot device down the well and not a dog iirc
― mh 😏, Tuesday, 28 February 2017 02:35 (seven years ago) link