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

yeah presumably, i'm just trying to remember if they were actively dishonest or if they just pulled a solution out of their ass. the answer clearly is 'both'.

i watched the end of the finale just before this, it seemed to have matched up mostly. in one of them watson gets knocked down slightly earlier i think. i dont think we see mycroft after sherlock "dies", just before when watson is yelling at him--he doesnt really react, exactly

that was very silly.

As I understand it, they all went to great lengths to fool Watson - the one person they didn't need to fool.

My theory was always that Sherlock didn't tell Watson he's alive because he wanted to protect Watson. He didn't want Moriarty's crooks to try to get to him through Watson, as they had done in the past. (Though I don't know why doesn't say it in this episode - maybe he just doesn't want to admit it to Watson?) You may notice that the three major characters Sherlock didn't inform about his faked death are the same ones Moriarty's snipers targeted in the previous episode, i.e. the people Moriarty considered to be Sherlock's true friends. Maybe Moriarty's network was still keeping an eye on them even after Sherlock had "died"? Moriarty might've even been smart enough to figure out Sherlock might try to fake his death, so maybe he ordered his goons to spy on these three people in the case Sherlock would re-emerge and try to contact them. So by not contacting them Sherlock made sure they stayed out of harm's way until he had fully destroyed Moriarty's network.

Also, maybe I totally misinterpreted it, but I thought the "final" explanation for how Sherlock survived was just something Watson imagined? We see Watson waiting to die in the metro carriage, the scene fades to white, then we see Sherlock's scene with Anderson, then there's another fade to white to white and were back to Watson in the metro. IIRC, in that scene Anderson says he actually faked the whole terrorist scare just to lure Sherlock out of hiding, that the bomb wasn't real, which of course isn't what actually happened; it's just Watson imagining how they might survive the bomb. Which would mean the explanation for Sherlock's survival was imaginary too, and we never found out how exactly he faked his death.

The terrorist plot in this was a bit silly, but I liked how the writers handled the fake death cliffhanger... They must've realized that any proper explanation they could come up for it would fail to live to up to the fan expectations built up during the two-year break, so basically they just acknowledged this failure with a meta wink, and never gave a definite answer to the mystery.

IIRC, in that scene Anderson says he actually faked the whole terrorist scare just to lure Sherlock out of hiding

Did he? I don't remember that. I thought he admitted faking the Jack The Ripper thing.

Yeah, he admitted the Jack the Ripper thing, but after that I think he was talking about the bomb too... I guess I have to rewatch the episode to see if I remember the lines correctly, but I thought this scene's placing between the fadeouts in the metro carriage was curious, it certainly felt like it was something Watson (or Sherlock) imagined, not something that really happened. But anyway, even if the scene was actually real, it ends with Anderson saying that he would be the last person Sherlock would tell the truth; i.e. we still don't whether the third account was the correct explanation for how Sherlock did it.

there was a lot of horrible public-school/establishment bro behaviour - present in the other episodes obviously, but probably more acceptable (if it is at all acceptable) because they are more vulnerable.
what do you mean by this?

― max, Thursday, January 2, 2014 3:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep, was a bit glib, I'll see if I can break it down a bit:

a lot of horrible public-school/establishment bro behaviour

by which i mean that sadism towards the emotions (not just a feature of public school male behaviour). why am i hand-wringing about this? well, the episode stank of the stuff - it was tiresome. unlike earlier episodes where sherlock is seen to be unaware of what other people might feel, by the end he is aware of what he can do with Watson's emotions. He's not a detective here. It's also condoned, in previous episodes Watson was seen as a reformative character - someone who might make Sherlock be better. Here S's behaviour is seen as charming or amusing - in fact the whole episode, if it was about anything, was about getting Watson to 'come round'.

probably more acceptable (if it is at all acceptable)

i can probably find it acceptable because <3 the earnest and innocent young males of Victorian/late Victorian genre lit (RL Stevenson!), but i can see why people might not see 'charm of male arrogance'=entertainment. perhaps this is because i'm in a self-inflicted nihilistic mood of 'destroy the white male hegemony, it's had its turn and it f'ing stinks to the core'.

because they are more vulnerable

early episodes represented a 'getting to know' period of uncertainty (for the viewer as much as the characters), series 2, Holmes was seen to be matched (E1), chemically frightened (E2), and E3 was about his rise and hubristic fall. the eccentric arrogance (which as I say was not condoned) had a touch of frailty about it. This episode was about the returning conquering hero, adored by all (even Watson's fiancee!), undefeatable even by a big bomb under Parliament. Not so earnest, not so innocent. As is always the case, bombast and bravura are different coming from those who are vulnerable than those who are in power. (it's the thing that people who make false claims about notional equality never get ('why can't we have a white history week!').

He's not a particularly good writer he's basically just a tiresome fanboy for certain kinds of Victorian murk without much of an idea of how to make things genuinely mysterious or creepy.

oh you saw The Tractate Middoth too did you? Odd choice of story anyway, one of the very few (only?) happy ending MR James stories. And Gatissss's's equivocation at the end (omg is he still haunting them?!!) was a bit shit, quite reminiscent of MR James's despised 'modern' use of elipsis...

Yeah I didn't think the Tractate Middoth was much cop at all really. This episode was a million times better by comparison.

I think Watson's more affectionate tolerance of Sherlock bullshit can be explained by Sherlock having a) come back from the dead and b) saved him from being burned alive. Those scenes were genuinely tense, btw.

It seemed a lot of Sherlock's sadism towards the end (lying about not calling the police, the bomb timer scene) was because he wanted to get Watson back to business by making him admit he's almost as big a thrill-seeker as Sherlock himself, and he couldn't have done that without getting him into a thrilling life-or-death situation (but one where Sherlock felt he was in control and Watson wasn't in real danger, unlike with the Guy Fawkes bonfire scene, where he obviously couldn't have afforded to play any games). Though the timer did start at 2:30 and we see Sherlock stopped it at 1:30, so it remains unclear whether Sherlock knew how to stop it the whole time and was just playing mind games from the beginning, or whether he was being serious to Watson at first, and only figured out the off-switch at 1:30, after which he decided to fuck with Watson a bit. It's true that Watson should've called Sherlock out on his behaviour, but on the other hand he already did that in a major way (more major than in any previous episode) in the first act, when Sherlock revealed he wasn't dead, so maybe doing the same in finale would've been repetitive? Also, maybe Watson actually got Sherlock's point, despite his fucked-up method of getting it across? After all, it was his own choice to team with Sherlock again and go looking for the bomb, even after he was almost burned to death.

And he could've called the police himself, it's not like Sherlock was forcing him not to call them. He had the choice to stay behind and phone the cops, or follow Sherlock and try to solve the whole thing with just the two of them, and he chose the latter, as Sherlock had hoped he would.

I think Watson's more affectionate tolerance of Sherlock bullshit can be explained by Sherlock having a) come back from the dead and b) saved him from being burned alive. Those scenes were genuinely tense, btw.

they were - the burning alive scene was excellent and v alarming.

and yep, fair points, Tuomas - I got in a state of unhelpful critical agitation about the whole thing. hope the rest are better because thoroughly enjoyed the first two series.

that scene was less tense for me because it's certain that he will be there on time as watson will not die. but that really is just me watching TV incorrectly!

I didn't think this was a superb episode either; as people have pointed out above, the actual plot is full of holes. But I think it managed to do the things it absolutely needed to do (showing how people react to Sherlock's return, giving some explanation to how he survived, re-establishing his relationship with Watson) in a satisfactory way, while also providing a couple of neat character moments for Mycroft, Mary, and Molly. Let's just hope the next two episodes can build on that, with better mysteries.

TBH I was maybe expecting more of this episode because the recent Dr. Who movie Gatiss wrote was so great, much better than his Dr. Who and Sherlock episodes of the past... But that movie was all about the characters and their interaction, whereas Sherlock requires some intricate plotting too, and it just doesn't seem like Gatiss is very good at that.

(xpost)

that scene was less tense for me because it's certain that he will be there on time as watson will not die. but that really is just me watching TV incorrectly!

― ^ sarcasm (ken c), Friday, 3 January 2014 14:29 (9 minutes ago) Permalink

no i think this is watching tv correctly, or being good at watching tv

like if there are plainly no stakes then the only interesting thing is the novelty of the solution to the nominal problem, and the solution to the nominal problem was dull

as was everything with thinking bullet time, or with the mobile/internet superimposed text device -- devices i liked fine when well-executed -- which were just clunky here

elementary's first season actually did better at setting up situations where something is at stake i think. and this is an american tv model which one expects to be way more about slate-wiping. like the question of whether sherlock will kill moran in that, e.g., even when he doesn't the way in which he doesn't has outcomes, ramifications.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/jan/03/sherlock-doctor-who-fans-influencing-tv

This seems true for Sherlock, but less so for Dr Who. I haven't actually watched Dr Who for years and haven't seen the episode in question, so I could be wrong, but the whole 12-regenerations thing is quite a fundamental thing that would have been picked up on by the majority of viewers, I would have thought, rather than just a small number of obsessive fans, so it needed to be sorted out. Probably wrong thread.

I agree with Tuomas that the episode demanded too much plot from Gatiss when he's much better at character and emotion. I was thinking the other day about Brian Michael Bendis and how I adore his intimate work on Daredevil and Alias but can't connect with him at all when he has to do the kind of intricate plotting demanded by multi-title arcs because he doesn't have enough grasp of pace and exposition to keep all those plates spinning. To be honest, few writers do. Even Moffat, who did some great plate-spinning with the Riversong storyline, got in an almighty tangle with the latest Doctor Who, and I remembered that the epsiodes of his that initially engaged me, like Blink, The Empty Child and The Girl in the Fireplace, were small, character-driven stories. And that's where the first few episodes of Sherlock also excelled - you could enjoy them in isolation. Which is my long-winded way of saying I can live without complicated continuity and geek pandering.

My theory was always that Sherlock didn't tell Watson he's alive because he wanted to protect Watson. He didn't want Moriarty's crooks to try to get to him through Watson, as they had done in the past.

If M's henchpeople suspect S is alive and wanted to get to S via W, that's not at all contingent on whether or not W is aware of S's vitality.

we still don't whether the third account was the correct explanation for how Sherlock did it.

Agree with this.

I wasn't really pulled into this, but I thought the Sherlock death conspiracy group was a nice touch.

the way to make this episode great is to get so stoned you can't keep a train of thought for longer than about 45 seconds, which is the longest stretch in this episode where anything makes sense plotwise. it feels like they randomly cut out about a third of the story and just kept the bits with the best dialog.

ok I accept my reaction to Ep1 was a bit off beam but I think this is quite a good episode of bob hope and bing crosby.

loool why does he need five laptops to have five chat windows open?

Would watch Drunk Sherlock & John Investigate in a heartbeat.

you are.

I've already assumed this is the guy from the kitchen with the waterproof phone.

This was really fun!

And I was wrong, obviously. This has been really fun though.

someone on Facebook has just pointed out that he was in Nathan barley...

loool why does he need five laptops to have five chat windows open?

it's a cute visual parallel that sells what the link is with the preceding thing immediately? i don't think it's meant to be not ludicrous

this was fun and reassuringly not awful

yeah ok. I still think both stories have struggled with pace, alternating fun bit/solvy bit, so that you get a thin case and the personality stuff seems fevered rather than carried by the energy of the narrative.

mark s has pointed out there's a few father brown refs going in as well - the waiter/guest ref (the queer feet), the Invisible Man in this one, and I thought the commander who survives the death of all his troops was a ref to The Broken Sword.

That was mostly boring for the first two thirds then pretty good

poor molly

That was mostly boring for the first two thirds then pretty good

The first two thirds had me convinced that this was going to be a shaggy dog story with lots of Sherlock/John/Mary feels, and then it suddenly had to go and resolve itself. Impressive.

Still waiting on the headless nun though.

poor molly

ikr?

First hour was a shark-jump. Last 30 minutes just about saved it.

I thought this was an excellent episode, and I liked the first hour too, before the tying-everything-together finale... I felt that at this point the series had earned a plot-light breather episode with a character focus, and this was written and performed exceptionally well. (In fact it was the finale that was perhaps the weakest part, as it felt a bit too neat; what coincidence that the two cases Sherlock brought up during his best man speech were related to each other and to John's wedding, even though Sherlock didn't know it when he mentioned the cases.)

There were some hysterically funny bits (the whole "drunken detectives" episode, especially seeing how Sherlock's "Sherlock scan" works while he's drunk), as well as poignant ones (Mary manipulating both John and Sherlock into thinking it's the other one who needs take a new case to take his mind of the wedding, when in fact it's both of them who need it; again pointing out that Watson is in for the thrills almost as much as Sherlock is). And the main emotional theme of the episode, Sherlock's fear that his best friend is gonna abandon him once he's married was handled exceptionally well, and in a way that us non-sociopaths could also relate to him.

So yeah, once I got over the "there's not gonna be a big and thrilling mystery in this one, is there?" disappointment, I simply enjoyed the episode for what it is... And even though the detective stuff at the end was awfully clever, I don't think it was the meat of this episode, the character development was.

Oh, and when the series eventually ends, they're gonna pair Sherlock and Molly together, aren't they? They can't do it yet, because at this point any lovey-dovey stuff would ruin the character dynamics between Sherlock and Molly, as well as Sherlock and Watson, but again in this episode it was hinted that Molly still has feelings for Sherlock, and that Tom is mostly just a poor woman's substitute. (This was especially poignant in the scene where Molly felt the need to tell Sherlock that she has lots of sex with Tom; since sex is the one thing Sherlock seems to be mostly disinterested in, it felt like Molly was saying, "Well, at least he's better than you in that regard!")

The missing train bit is taken from the Doyle story "The Lost Special". The secret passage was a disconnected side line into a mine. They should have included a bit about it having to be reconnected in the show. (Interestingly, this is one story where Holmes gets the solution wrong.)

I dislike the "master criminal sends clues to Sherlock" device. It's lazy writing, and it reminds me of the Riddler on the Batman TV show.

xp agree w/your first post, but Irene Adler is the only 'the woman' for Sherlock. I don't want him to pair off!

Yeah, I don't want him either, he doesn't really work as a romantic character, but I'm sure the writers have figured this out too, that's why I think they're not gonna pair the two until at the end of the series. (It would also provide a neat conclusion to larger character arc they seem to have planned for Sherlock, one where he gradually tries to figure how to connect with other people and have feelings for them.)

it was hinted that Molly still has feelings for Sherlock

"hinted."

Anyway, I don't think he ~needs~ to be rehabilitated, even if it's at the end of the series.

fun, enjoying the new daffiness cumberbatch is bringing this year. mystery was a ridiculous cheat again and also completely beside the point again. sherlock failing to pull and skulking out to go home and listen to 'how soon is now' on blast was great. my fave middle episode so far but the competition is weak.

it took me three tries to finish the first episode but this one kept me hooked way past my bedtime. just great. the elaborate staging of the chat window conversations melding into mycroft-as-obi-wan was just brilliant, as good as it gets on stage or screen imo.

though i have to confess i still don't really understand the murder weapon :(

super-thin stabby thing, so tight you don't feel. belt stops you bleeding out till released - like a pre-set tourniquet.

but you'd feel it or see it when putting the belt on. and if it's super-thin why doesn't it get bent down?

i dont think it was part of the belt, it was just stabbed through the belt

yes - stabbing takes place through the belt, while wearing the belt - in the whizzy how-it-happened summary we see culprit coming up close to both guardsman & sholto to do the stabbing.

found it a lot of fun on every level - incident, character business, structure. don't know which of the writers built it, but it had a lot of what I've always liked in Moffatt since Press Gang, pleasure in form + bright chatter.

Even if the murder weapon thing was explained, there were still loads of holes in the resolution. Like, even if you're using a super-thin blade, is it really possible to lethally stab someone without him noticing it at the moment of stabbing? 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? 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? If the murder had to happen in the wedding because army guy was living in secret place, and all of his staff had sign a confidentiality contract that they wouldn't disclose any information on him, how did the photographer find all those women working for him? Did he just randomly date thousands of women until he happened to come across the right ones? But if the location of the army guy's residence was a secret, he wouldn't even know in which city to begin the whole dating thing. And what if the army dude's female employees had all been married or in an exclusive relationship? Also, how could the photographer be sure the army guy would wear his uniform in the wedding? It wasn't a military occasion, so he could've showed up in his civvies.

even if you're using a super-thin blade, is it really possible to lethally stab someone without him noticing it at the moment of stabbing?

i also don't really believe that you wouldn't feel a blade being slipped into you, no matter how nano it was, but it's not as if i have a lot of experience with that, and the show seemed pretty sure of it, so hey, you go with it; sherlock's smarter than i am!

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 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?

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

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

what if the army dude's female employees had all been married or in an exclusive relationship?

then.. i guess it wouldn't have worked and he'd have had to try something else

how could the photographer be sure the army guy would wear his uniform in the wedding?

he couldn't, it might have just been a strong hunch, but too good of an opportunity to pass up

He was sure he would wear the uniform because the army guy had asked for special dispensation to be allowed to keep it. The kind of person would do that is the kind of person who would wear his uniform to a wedding.