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

Not even with Martin Freeman's hair?

eheh. yup !
that said, it feels like he doesn't really care anymore. just phoning it in (especially the Mary's death scene).

This is like a David Bowie video.

it's 2017, it's not hard to understand that overblown emo/nerd shit draws in the viewers

https://twitter.com/search?f=users&vertical=default&q=cumberbatch&src=tyah

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Worst episode ever?

Career suicide bad

Is this like when Alan Alda directed that one episode of M*A*S*H?

Ooft, that was horrible. Surely that's them done with it now?

just started

uh is the sister a memetic virus who wrote herself on to Sherlock years ago

I think maybe she is an avatar of Star Trek NG's holodeck nemesis The Q.

well I called that one a few minutes before they did

i called it from episode 0

Or maybe this is all really taking place inside the 'mind' of the lunar prison computer MYCROFT from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

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"

high praise

Is somebody going to sing "Dry Bones" at the end of this?

did they consider writing some episodes in this series where they just solve some cases

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.

that's cool but could they hire someone who can write some mysteries

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

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.

(AU fan fic)

kill with fire

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.

wat if maigret but in space

Good thing there was plenty more screentime for Mycroft, though. He's the best one!

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.

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.

otm http://thequietus.com/articles/21578-bbc-the-final-problem-sherlock-review

but someone gets a throwaway line about how Thatcher is like Napoleon, which she isn't

Yes, that irritated me from the start.

tbf, Maggie was the PM during the Falkland Islands War, which was the 45th most important war of the 20th century.

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

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.

"a very intense but quiet bit of drama"

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.

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.

the second half devolved pretty completely into incoherence

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.

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trying to imagine a whole country watching Sapphire and Steel at the same time, it's like an episode of Sapphire and Steel

(11.8M viewers for S&S apparently. But there were only 3 channels at the time and no remote controls)

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.

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).

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.