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

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.

oh my, what was that shit !??
joining the choir : that was simply horrible. For all the reasons already mentioned.
I could barely watch it. actually, at some point, like Ledge, I had to go and do something else as I couldn't stand it anymore.
Especially the sister and her silly mind games which were somewhere between kids/teenagers games and TV games.
So many things that didn't make sense in that story...
I also realized I can't stand Moriarty who's like a synthesis of the show : affected over the top emo.
I thought they hit rock bottom with ep1 of this season but this was even worse.
Is it the final ep of the season ? It seemed like it by the end but I thought there were 4ep ?

It really felt like Moffat & Gatiss forgot like they were writing Sherlock and not Dr. Who

It's utter wank when they do it there too.

Agreed. I don't even watch Doctor Who anymore.

Is it the final ep of the season ? It seemed like it by the end but I thought there were 4ep ?

And at the moment, quite possible that there'll be no more.

We have yet to see Sherlock water ski.

What I meant was, if this was Dr. Who, the idea that some person can control an entire prison staff and make them do things they wouldn't want to is ok, because it's sci-fi, you can just write her to have telepathic powers. But in here, as cool as it may have seemed to Moffat & Gatiss, it's nonsensical, it break the suspension of disbelief.

no its shit when writing is lazy emo wank in any genre

Pattern detection: basically anything with Martin Freeman seems destined to overextend itself until it's so far past being meaningful, tense or funny that you wonder WHY?!? WHY AM I WATCHING THIS?!? THIS IS AWFUL!!! I think he's part of a plot.

(note: TV Fargo (may have) avoided this fate by only using him for one season. Maybe they know what's up)

So basically, the final season is : 2 horrible episodes and 1 okay-ish...
good work !
That said, if I took the time to consider all the episodes of the series, I'm pretty sure I'd be left with something like 2-3 that I really enjoyed.
As said by others here, they were just so bad at writing good mysteries based on the original material.
All the meta and Moriarty stuff have mostly been garbage.

The first episode and the Irene Adler episodes are the properly good ones, although I think the Adler one spins too wildly by the end. I like the wedding episode too, which seems a lot less indulgent by comparison after the 4th season.

For a show that did just 13 episodes, out which only 2-3 were undivisive, people stayed remarkably engaged to the end...

The Hound of the Baskervilles is on-the-line 'good' - if every episode was that level of completely generic quality then I don't think anyone would be complainings.

Along with the three Chuck mentions, I quite like His Last Vow (Mads Mikkelsen's brother) and The Abominable Bride, though the weakest bits of them are the connections to the ongoing plot.

Even The Great Game, the end of season 1, is really good, it's just what it all leads to that's the problem.

I think during the first two seasons, the consensus was that the middle episodes ("The Blind Banker" and "The Hounds of Baskerville") were meh, but the the other ones were great. (And I agreed with that opininion.) "The Blind Banker" has that awful orientalist/racist vibe, and "The Hounds of Baskerville" is the first one where solution to the mystery is utterly ridiculous and unrealistic. So 66% of those seasons were still great and provided some clever (but not outrageous) mysteries, that's a pretty good average.

Then season 3 started with an episode that did what it absolutely needed to do (bring Watson and Holmes together, provide an answer to the previous episode's cliffhanger that wouldn't piss off viewers) satisfactorily, but the mystery part was perfunctory and mostly just a subplot. I guess as a correction to that, the second ep for season 2 raised the detective work to a much higher level, which was fun to watch while it was on, but in retrospect this was the first episode where solutions to the mysteries had some really obvious holes in them. Episode was 3 okayish, but again slight on the mystery department. In retrospect, it kinda presaged what went wrong with season 4, i.e. the writer were more interested in creating a Hannibal-like vile villain and emphasizing his cleverness than having Sherlock do his sherlocking.

"The Abominable Bride" was the first time the show really went full-on into meta wankery and writers just attempting do clever "DO YOU SEE!?" moments instead of a coherent plot. But after that point I think a lot of viewers, me included, thought that the lates two episodes were just anomalies, and that season 4 could return the show back to being a clever detective procedural. So I was still psyched about the new season. Unfortunately it turned out "His Last Vow" and "The Abominable Bride" weren't anomalies, they actually set up the new standard.

(xpost)