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

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.

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(

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 wound is so tiny it takes minutes for the blood start coming out, how can it be lethal?

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?

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.

how did the photographer find all those women working for him?

research, i guess. who knows how long he'd been working on this?

"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.)

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.

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.

And Tuomas claimed NOT to be a sociopath.

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)

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.

I can get with this; the wedding speech nerves would hamper his usual conscious access to these links.

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.

(xpost)

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.

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.

All the people I've met who whip their coats on like Sherlock tend to be complete prats.

sherlock is a complete prat, QED

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.

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 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?

Perhaps Finnish psychopaths have intact moral centers and empathy?

"Probably a monomaniac" was the phrase used IIRC.

Also, soz for misreading! xp

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.

I'm with Ailsa in being with Tuomas, but it doesn't pay to analyse it too deeply

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.

can't believe this sitcom about two mismatched bros sharing a flat and office had an episode that was like a sitcom

the mustache!

"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.)

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".

egg
chair?
sitty thingy?

he's clueing for looks

drunk clueing was the best part of the episode

No this was the best part of the episode:
http://s.mlkshk.com/r/WL81

Or at least 2nd best...

http://s.mlkshk.com/r/WL9A

sitty thing????

?deaded?

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.

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.

'sherlock is actually a girl's name'

moriarty.gif was also a nice touch.

Looks like bobbins to me...

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

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

'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.

Yes. But I like 'head of hearing' anyway...

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.

Bottom bit of that spiral staircase looked like Dougal from Magic Roundabout

man ilx does not care about this episode

A little difficult to discuss without spoilers, I think.

Yeah, I think that's the problem - spoiler #1 pretty much ruins the series for anyone and spoiler #2 would upset some people.

ruins the series for anyone

idk what this spoiler is yet but lol

Spoiler 1 was a bit obvious and Spoiler 2 was kind of "ah well, okay I guess"

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>

This episode almost made up for the previous two, for me.