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

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.

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.

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

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.

*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.

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.

Also, can I just sat how much I love the direction/scene transitions in this show, especially in this most recent ep

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.

this was sooo good

still don't think i actually understand the scheme adler had goin

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

- 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' *
"

i really love this show! even though i still don't quite understand what happened the last episode either.

did her boomerang thoery ever get a response or another mention?

i feel like there's a thread or motivation i missed that will make this make sense

everyone's trolling everyone

Jumped the shark this week?

i liked it

I liked the first half or so.

Hated the 'thinking palace' bit. And the rest kind of reminded me of the Vic & Bob Randall & Hopkirk with Dervla Kirwan and Derek Jacobi.

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.

the best character was the moor. the rest of it was pretty meh.

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.

i liked the mental palace better when it was just holmes blurting out "COVENTRY!!" while sitting around the fire

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.)

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.

i liked the mental palace better when it was just holmes blurting out "COVENTRY!!" while sitting around the fire

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.

Mr evil scientist and maybe policeman and watson were just scared, holmes knew other-guy-whatever-his-name-was would lose his mind otherwise.

Like he cares what happens to anyone.

it was other-guy-whatever-his-name-was's case! holmes would have lost if he lost his mind.

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.

He knows how people think, he just doesn't care too much.

yeah but that doesn't really work with all the "too soon?" "too soon" holmes/watson interplay.

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.

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!)

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'

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

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?

i have three and i'm just yr average mediocre nerd

(two for work and one for my online banking)

actually when i first started my current job one crucial password wad actually taped to the bottom of one guy's keyboard

'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.

i mean, srsly, was it not a cia database they were ~hacking into~ there

i know the CIA aren't as technologically adept as KPMG or whoever but surely they'd have got into security tokens by now.

or biometric auth, that's getting pretty common (we have it at work)

"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]

even 'maggie79' would have been less ridiculous

Sherlock has just cracked your ILM pw

seconding password-guessing as a shorthand for genius is some tired-as-hell TV writing.

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.

I like him as Mycroft but his writing is just blargh.

Last week was a bit iffy, but this was terrific. Bit drained after that.

Kinda loved it as it was going along. Bit audacious/cheeky/lazy (delete as applicable to not explain the ending.