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

no :(

I saw the first episode & all those words floating around reminded me of "Ghost Writer."

benedict cumberbatch Vs. sheldon turnipseed

Totally watchable. Was disappointed with Moriarty, the end of last night's episode was a little soppy. Still good though, Cumberbatch was great in the role.

I watched this last night, I was pleasantly surprised - "reboot" of an old favourite character is usually shorthand for dreadful garbage, but this was good. It was schlocky, but kind of felt like grownup schlock, not adolescent bollocks. Cumberbatch was great.

low expectations for this, found it to be surprisingly enjoyable, although there's plenty of stuff to nitpick about. ep 2 was the weakest, I think, trying to update the 19th century version of the "exotic orient" just came off a bit too silly. and ending the last ep on a cliffhanger, with no word on when the next one will be-- irritating. but everyone above on the greatness of Cumberbatch is otm.

How come there's only three episodes? That seems crazy.

Benedict Cumberbatch is the name of some Hogwarts reject, I still refuse to believe that that is a real name.

http://www.rickstv.com/tvo/gwjamal.jpg

That might be even worse! Although it is pretty close.

Three 1 1/2 hour films is pretty good going - wouldn't have been surprised if they'd just got to make one single episode to start with, tbh (though I think they did an hour-long unscreened pilot which became the first episode). Presume Moffatt and Gatiss a bit busy with Doctor Who stuff as well.

Also, everyone saying Ben Cucumberpatch is awesome is incredibly OTM. I've seen him in other stuff and not been wowed, but he fits this really well.

Speaking of weird and colonial, three guesses why Cumberbatch is a relatively common name amongst African-Americans. Benedict Cumberbatch is really excellent.

Won't someone respond to my point that Mark Gatiss' Mycroft is like watching Peter Mandelson in panto?

three guesses why Cumberbatch is a relatively common name amongst African-Americans

This reminds me of thinking that maybe ska pioneer Theophilus Beckford was related to mento singer Stanley Beckford or U-Roy aka Ewart Beckford, until it was pointed out that there was another reason why a lot of Jamaicans are called Beckford. Which was a slight bummer to my joyful contemplation of reggae history.

Think it's about time I watched this Sherlock, too.

Didn't Gatiss say he'd based him on Mandelson?

I have no idea, but it is super-funny. I want to see him sitting on a big throne with a bound volume of fairy tales.

Benedict Cumberbatch has brought his family history up in interviews to basically say o_0. A few years ago I was at a book launch and was introduced to a frightfully posh young man whose surname was Womack. I hadn't realized this was an English name AT ALL until that point, and then the guy told me the singers' surname was no accident because theirs had been a slaving family.

Just watched the third one, this kind of nonsense is 100% up my street. Not much that I didn't enjoy, there. A few months ago we re-watched all the Jonathan Creeks and this filled the void that left quite nicely. Although J-Creek wouldn't have had any woooo mysteeeerious stuff (left mysterious).

>>SPOILERS>>
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I totally called Moriarty as a bad guy the first time he appeared, then forgot.
WHY would someone faking a painting make half of it something so weird and "obviously" fake? This really confused me. Was the mistake put in there deliberately by Moriarty? But how?
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Btw in the opening shot, my husband was convinced that Sherlock was actually Alan Rickman. He looks and sounds identical there!

Only grouse so far (apart from the fact that ep.2 wasn't as good as the other 2) is I hope they don't just go for lots of murders. One of the things I enjoyed about the originals is the stories about non-lethal puzzles and oddities.

According to Zoe Ball (who, I'm sure, must know) Cumberbatch went up for Dr. Who and Matt Smith went up for Dr. Watson. Someone in casting seems to be doing the right thing anyway.

They're already setting up Holmes marathons in the USA
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5iVaDQ26TVnBtf3h0iisgyybUFRTQ

Matt Smith read for Watson and was judged too manic, but when BC was approached to try for Doctor Who, he didn't want to do it because of the merchandising nightmare. This information is available to anyone who reads a newspaper.

cumberbatch would have made an impeccable doctor imo

This was a lot of fun to watch, and I hope they make more... Cumberbatch borrows a couple of mannerisms from Brett (quick lift off the chair while sitting in it indian-style, and the quick flash of rictus type of smile) but takes a totally different, and appealing, tack with the character. I also loved the mindfuck where they show the overhead shot of him at his desk, looking like he's just shot up. As intended, it made me think "here we go again, lazy scriptwriters making Holmes use cocaine DURING a case, which he never ever does" and then it turns out to be nicotine patches! Hilarious. They got me.

I had no idea his mum is Wanda Ventham. Blimey.

BC even turned up as a guest in a friend's wedding photos last week (she's from a luvvie family too). Truly this man gets everywhere.

Fast forward to 7:14 for nice comic moment and Michael Winner looking like an ass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izAcS9lal9s

cumberbatch would have made an impeccable doctor imo

He would have ruined the show for me thanks to his "You have to bite it!" scene in Atonement. In Sherlock it's not as bad because I can't see him raping Martin Freeman.

I'm sure ILX's slashfic aficionados know where to find exactly what you describe.

I had no idea his mum is Wanda Ventham. Blimey.

Blimey indeed, I just happnened to see her in The Saint before I left the house, what a babe!

Dr. Who is a bit like Sherlock Holmes in many way.

Blimey indeed, I just happnened to see her in The Saint before I left the house, what a babe!

would objectify

Really ejoyed this. Even Martin Freeman was suprisingly decent, but Cumberbatch was amazing in the Sherlock role. Was talking to a friend about Cumberbatch in Doctor Who and we both came to the conclusion he would make a great Master to play off Matt Smith if Steven Moffat ever goes down that route.

second series!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/10/sherlock-second-series-bbc

would objectify

― unchill english bro (history mayne), 35 minutes ago

^^^^^^^^Genuine laugh out loud at this popping up in blog view. Would seriously love if this caught on as a meme.

Kinda follow Penny Red's views on "oh lawd enough with the Holmes already" but, erm, I <3 Cumberbatch for his Momusian turn in To The Ends Of The Earth. I'm avoiding reading any of the slash (it's already turning up in my LJ stream) until I've seen the thing. Which at my rate of tellyviewing is, erm, never.

That is all.

I'm avoiding reading any of the slash (it's already turning up in my LJ stream)

always read this as LJ you-know-who

Loving it so far - Cumberbatch great, Freeman really good as well (nicely balanced between easy-to-follow everyman & the more actorly damaged army doctor, which is a nice reading of Watson), there's wit & nous in the modernising, cute nods for the fans around the place (Mycroft losing weight, Rache, plenty more I'm missing), really likes London. Perfect Sunday viewing.

And seconded on the drug-haze misdirect - so glad that it didn't just blunder into the world of EDGY Holmes cliché.

Another vote for 'would objectify'. LULZ

Thought this was going to be a disaster and was blown away - the bar is set so high in the first ep that the second seems really weak by comparison, tho. LOVED the Mycroft scene in the first ep, fooled me completely.

In the original Study in Scarlet 'Rache' actually IS the German word for revenge! So to have Sherlock lecture Lestrade on how pedestrian that guess is is hilarious.

Nice fan site, tons of interviews etc http://www.sherlocking.org/

This information is available to anyone who reads a newspaper

If only I could find one I liked.

I got confused and thought Moriarty was the Rupert Graves-replacing copper from the second episode. And was like, "Why is he talking about his underwear?". Anyway.

Thought this was very entertaining indeed, although mugging Jim Carrey Moriarty was almost a last-minute shark jumping moment. Did they resolve how the four cases were connected, or was it just Moriarty fucking around?

What a bloody awful thread title.

I didn't mind Moriarty really. The way his character was built up and up and kept mysterious that his eventual reveal was always going to be a bit of a slight let down.

Though you know you're getting old when Holmes and Moriarty start looking young.

i never made the sherlock holmes / dr who connection before

You're kidding

I liked his mutable, squirming accent, good take on it I thought.

You're kidding

i'm not!!

Moriarty reminded me of some weird cross between Paul McCartney and Sam Rockwell.

couldn't make heads or tails of his accent for a while, until it seemed like it settled down on 'irish' of some kind?

The actor's from Dublin, so, yeah, 'Irish'.

Moriarty reminded me of some weird cross between Paul McCartney

Ha, he played McCartney in the recent awful Lennon Naked, with former Dr Who Chris Eccleston. It's all connected...

Huh. Weird.

LOL, he was quite convincing as Macca in that

What a bloody awful thread title.

START YOUR OWN THREAD 'DAVIDM'

This information is available to anyone who reads a newspaper.

I read one, it didn’t have anything about Sherlock in it.

Wished they hadn’t done a Moriarty reveal so early, but liked him having already popped up and pranked Holmes, and v much liked the shifting accent making him harder for Holmes to deduce anything from.

NPR coverage:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130572175

PBS is airing this on the 24th on "Mystery!".

This is the first thing on PBS "Masterpiece" that I've enjoyed in ages.

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)

Also, like I said above, the show really went wrong by trying to up the threat level with each season. At some point the attempt to create yet another villain who can outsmart Sherlock and who is even more clever than previous villains will just lead into something that's too ridiculous and unrealistic even for this show, and hence we got Eurus. I get the impulse of trying to wow the fans more and more, but it never ends well. I would've been much better to balance the more outrageous cases with more mundane ones, like in the Doyle stories.

It's not a coincidence that Doyle created the "evil mastermind who's just as smart as Holmes" only for what was supposed to be the last ever story, and most people agree the quality started dropping when that didn't turn out to be the finale after all.

There are loads of good stories after "Final problem" - maybe not as consistent, but certainly the best ones are as good as anything in the first two books.

The novels are more like the TV show than the short stories - lots of implausible rubbish with some good bits

The first episode where the solution had major holes in it was the first episode. The taxi drivers method made no sense... And wasn't Scandal in Belgravia almost completely a spy- and politics story? Just saying, the show changed much less than people think, imo. It was always flawed, the flaws just became much more obvious as time went by. I still liked most of it, because Moffatt is one of the best writers in the medium, who even when the big stuff falls apart puts so much great little stuff in there that it stays watchable.

The taxi drivers method made no sense...

In what way?

I mean, he knew he was gonna die anyway, and clearly he was very proud of the way he was able to read people, probably cultivated throughout the years he'd been a cabbie. So it makes sense he decided to murder them with a method that involved a risk of death for himself too, because he wasn't afraid of dying, and everytime he "won" he proved how superior he was.

The method he used to win made no sense. Or rather, it was never explained. Probably because nothing would have made sense.

I did, in fact, go see Underworld: Blood Wars and not only was Lara Pulver (Sherlock's Irene Adler) one of the main characters, the movie was better than at least one of this season's episodes of Sherlock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentalism

(xpost)

That's kinda rubbish.

Suggesting post-Final Problem is inferior is madness imo, so much good stuff there without even mentioning Baskervilles (which I'd speculate is the one thing the Man On The Clapham Omnibus could name - or could have, before the TV show); Dancing Men, for example, is probably top 5, but see also Norwood Builder, Empty House,Bruce-Partington, Second Stain, Wisteria Lodge...

that reminds me that, as already noticed upthread, they didn't even bother with the mystery stories by the end since a couple of times they have simply "mentioned" the cases (dancing men, for instance) in the "fastforward" moments (don't know how to qualify those !). Like "who cares about the cases that made the hero famous in the first place when we can go on and on about the wives and families" !

That's kinda rubbish.

Nevertheless, real-life perfomers use these techniques to predict choices people make with fairly good accuracy, so it's not like the cabbie's method doesn't make sense, at least compared to a bad guy controlling the entire staff of a high-security psychiatric ward because she's so good at convincing people.

And the weird thing is all those entertainers also learned their craft through cabbing!

Nah, it's bullshit. And not just that he gets them to choose the poison, but that he gets them to choose at all. No sign of struggle, nothing. That solution is full of holes.

And I'm not comparing it to the last few, but to the second one of season three, which I suspect you were referring to when you said that was the first holed solution? That the corsets are unusually strong is a less stupid thing than that the cab-driver had learned how to be a mentalist...

And not just that he gets them to choose the poison, but that he gets them to choose at all. No sign of struggle, nothing.

He was pointing a pistol at them, so if they refused to choose he'd shoot them. It makes sense that most people would choose (what looks to them like) a 50/50 chance of dying rather than almost certain death.

As the plot holes in "Sign of Three", the corset was hardly the biggest one. My complain about the episode is way upthread, but here's a direct link to it:

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

ahah, I've just read the Quietus article.
It's perfect.
lock thread !

Re the cab driver, my Sherl-obsessed daughter tells me it was figured out on the innernettes that it was the water which was poisoned - both pills being innocuous, a dry swallow is safe but drinking it down was fatal. I have neither the interest nor the time to verify tho. Hated the fourth season front to back, embarrassing overheated fanfic.

I don't think we ever see cabbie give anyone a glass of water? He certainly doesn't give Sherlock any.

Ah my bad, sorry.

No trick, he was just riding his luck.

Nevertheless, real-life perfomers use these techniques to predict choices people make with fairly good accuracy

Hmmmm.

Real-life mentalists can use all sort of more or less subtle tricks to make a seemingly random choice less so. Here's one crude example of such a trick, but the cabbie probably has refined better techniques to make the victim more likely to choose the poisoned pill. He supposedly only makes "one move" (pushing one of the bottles towards the victim), which is very flashy, but no doubt that flashiness works to hide the other, more subtle gestures/suggestions that he uses to make the seemingly random choice work in his favour. Of course he (like any real-life mentalist) still has a percentage of failure, but since he's about to die anyway, he's willing to take that risk.

Also, since we learn he doesn't even own a real gun but a fake one, the "one move" is very useful in pushing the victim towards accepting his game. If he were to present the two bottles equally, so that the victims would think they have an even 50/50 chance of picking the wrong one, some of them might rather take their chances in trying to fight the guy than to choose a pill, in which case they'd find out the gun isn't real, and the cabbie would be exposed. But since he makes his "one move", this makes the choice not-random, and the victims would think they can second-guess the (seemingly simple-minded) cabbie's intentions, and choose the pill he didn't want them to choose. So they're more likely to play the game, thinking they have a better than a 50% chance to win.

That's still pretty nonsensical...

xp they also use cheap (physical) magic tricks in the guise of mentalism but i suppose there's no reason the cabbie couldn't have done that too. still prefer my theory though.

Guys, it is sherlock holmes, in one of the original stories a man was killed by a trained snake, relax, it is not hard realism

Yeah, James, that's kinda my point :) I enjoy the show, I just don't think the descent into nonsensicalness has been so steep as others do.

Indeed. Also, pretty obviously the writers didn't explicitly explain how the cabbie did so viewers could construct their own theories, just like they did later on when they didn't reveal the exact details of how Sherlock faked his suicide.

(xpost)

I don't agree: there still think there's a marked difference between the cabbie's methods and Eurus' mass hypnosis. The former can explained in a way that works within it the shows level of relative realism. The latter can't be, it breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way the cabbie doesn't.

From the Washington demo yesterday:

http://i.imgur.com/tNfX2LP.jpg

god I just remembered the bit about the dog and the friend that got thrown down the well by the sister and hated this show so hard

congress: grab him by the emoluments & tax returns

it was actually a plot device down the well and not a dog iirc