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

Jan. 29 on these freedom-loving shores, lolling @ u, Blighty!

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

Surely it'll be a flagship Christmas/New Year showing?

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

USA! USA!

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.

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.

tho the ACD stories after holmes returns are also comparatively lumbering and clumsy, so perhaps it's cunning meta.

Well what did you all expect? This was a Gatiss episode.

Gatiss episodes still >>>>> Thompson episodes on average (esp if you count that Moffat plainly wrote much of Thompson's S2 ep)

God this was terrible. Just an appalling mess. I thought it was just the middle episodes that sucked so hard?

'elementary' lookin pretty good now huh you pseuds

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.

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

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.

yeah this "mystery" was one of the absolute worst in terms of plot holes

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?

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

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.

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.

Gatiss episodes still >>>>> Thompson episodes on average (esp if you count that Moffat plainly wrote much of Thompson's S2 ep)

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)?

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.

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

The Avengers showed Mr Peel just slightly before Jonathan Creek

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)?

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.

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.

Thanks sic.

If Sherlock was going to use the squash ball trick, what was the point of the replacement body then???

Actually, I might need to watch again, I think that was maybe a fake-out explanation as well.

I think the third explanation was indeed another fake-out.

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.

How was the bomb triggered to go off? I really think I might have fallen asleep at a couple of points :-(

The bad guy had a big remote control box with a red button on it in his suitcase.

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.

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.

Aye, the need for a timer was the bit I was struggling with.

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.

He had hair and a coat and was a bit thin.

The gay kiss explanation???

Takes a lot fewer moving parts than the Lazarus plot!

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.

Might be the need to keep Watson in the dark for however long Sherlock needed to root out that last of Moriarty's gang?

Yeah, I figured Watson needed to not be in on it for convincing purposes.

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?

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.

yeah they showed the sniper thru the gunsight

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.

Wouldn't they have filmed all those different explanations at the same time as they filmed the end of the previous series?

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'.

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

that was very silly.

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.

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.

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.