the bbc sherlock series by the dr who 'bloke' and starring tim from the office

I liked the suggestion that Moriarty = nemesis = drug addiction, but otherwise bleh meh blurgh.

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.

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.

some kind of oil lamp happened to resemble a flashlight

a bullseye lantern?

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!

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?

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?

Thought this was probably the worst of these nu-Sherlock episodes. And then there's that wedding one.

'why did lady carmichael hire sherlock?'

incipient alzheimers?

to make Sherlock feel smart.

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'.

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.

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?

to make Sherlock feel smart.

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.

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).

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.

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.

"the fact that hiring Sherlock"

straight dope gives the first recorded usage of 'shotgun wedding' as 1903 fyi (shotguns are pretty old!)

this was really enjoyable, if you would have preferred a straight up victorian murder mystery alternative entertainments are available, for boring people

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.

^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.

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.

They deliberately pushed the portrayal of Moriarty to an extreme and then pushed him over a cliff, where he should have stayed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To think I assumed this worst of all things couldn't get worse

enjoying the men splaining mansplaining itt a lot more than I did that episode

all-purpose use of mansplaining as a rhetorical device is reminiscent of the many uses of rubber-glue in elementary school

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

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.)

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.

bravest, rather

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

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.

mansplaining is totally a special way of talking

that is why you can make the #actually joke

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.

My mum hated this... according to my sister... I didn't see it.

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.

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

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.

Went to find a copy from the usual sources, read thread, skipped.

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,

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.

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.

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

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.

(xxpost)

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

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.

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?