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

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.

I assume it was something to do with Molly.

didn't really understand what was going on on the roof. all that "i am you!" "you are me!" BANG!

maybe we're not meant to understand. maybe it was all part of sherlock's genius plan that he had figured out from the beginning to a) get moriarty to kill himself and ii) appear to die, and it won't become clear till the next part. if that ever happens.

xps, presumably Molly did the autopsy.

it was gripping though i am fearful the explanation will be unsatisfactory.

(presumably john being pushed over was important, too)

https://twitter.com/#!/steven_moffat/statuses/158680970130751488

I'm not sure how my enjoyment of this is affected by the realization that Cumberbatch is playing Sherlock as if he was playing Jeremy Clarkson.

Watson didn't see Sherlock jump, he saw the body fall. Sherlock asked Molly for a favour - he threw Moriarty's body over the edge and she falsified the post-mortem.

Pfeh, the lolling at Sherlock for thinking that technology worked that way didn't erase me shouting "technology doesn't work that way!" at the screen for the previous hour. Or explain the haunting of the jury's video screens, or how he convinced the assassins to kill each other over Sherlock.

I'd have been happier if they'd ended when Sherlock was halfway down, similar to the end of the first series. Every minute past that where people are going "I can't believe he's DEAD" makes it clearer that he isn't.

Also since the explanation will safe to say be based on Molly, there's no punch to the flared-nostril two-sides-of-the-same-coin bollocks on the rooftop, if Sherlock is being pushed towards an outcome that he's already prepared for.

xp There's definitely an identifying shot of Sherlock's bloodied and dented face at the bottom though, right?

swapped him in while john was lying on the tarmac - although the other passers-by would still be a problem. i thought john did see him jump though, he just didn't see him land.

Also I was so relieved that the key code thing turned out to be bollocks.

The stupidity of the policewoman annoyed me. Super genius criminal mastermind Sherlock kidnapped the kids, didn't cover his face, and then demanded he be the one to interview said kids.

Also did Moriaty's trial really take place 6 weeks after the offense? Cameron certainly moving the criminal justice system on apace.

tbf the original story hasn't got a much more satisfactory ending. "No, Watson I didn't fall to my death, I remembered I was an expert in Baritsu ("You're making that up now, Holmes..."), and then made it look like I fell and then had various adventures..."

...three years later for reasons that will become clear just as soon as I've settled the advance from the publisher, here I am!