Sherlock - Modern BBC interpretation

Sad but true. It’s even more hilariously bad when you realize that the actor who portrays the victim (you know, the guy who thinks he’s a werewolf) is the guy who played the werewolf in the other BBC series Being Human. It was like they were trying to do a crossover episode but didn’t really think through the ramifications. It was a bad episode.

I’m not so sure. Moriarty was completely insane – that was part of the point of that take on the character – so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d make that decision. And, if they are trying to be true to the core material (even if they put their own spin on it), Moriarty dies in story The Final Problem, on which that episode was based.

All that being said, if Holmes can survive a fall from a sixth story building or whatever it was, Moriarty could probably survive a self-inflicted gunshot wound. They don’t even mention whether Moriarty’s body is discovered after they deal with Holmes. How deep do you think the rabbit hole goes?

Thanks for the teaser clip, by the way; I hadn’t seen that yet. EXCITING.

There’s a difference between being completely insane and Moriarty though. He was still smart, he wasn’t looking to just kill himself. He was a calculated crazy, not a meth head insane.

I haven’t read the source material, so I don’t know. I really liked him as a charactar though, and the actor.

All of our questions about to be answered?

Series 3 begins…

Very underwhelmingly, unfortunately. It felt like an episode of a show that had just been revived after a cancellation - all in-jokes, reintroducing characters and no real plot. And the visual flair was just annoying - half the time it wasn’t even used to illuminate his thought processes, just to show off.

I will agree that the SFX were just flat-out silly like 95% of the time here. Where you used to draw clever clues or useful knowledge, you now either got obvious statements of fact or a bewildering barrage of letters, symbols, and graphics that you couldn’t hope to understand, neither of which lets the audience feel clever alongside Sherlock.


Aside from that, I did like it a fair bit. Maybe I’m just a sucker for callbacks and “getting the band back together again” type shit (the potential for doing so will be my only reason for ever finishing ME3, I suspect), but I did enjoy vast portions of the ep. The central mystery was a little blah (maybe too many shades of V for Vendetta or I’m just getting really tired of hidden subway station plots in my crime dramas), but it wasn’t really the point. It felt a little like the pointedly ridiculous cases in House in eps where character development was far more important than the Heart-Vomiter-of-the-Week; we were here to watch Sherlock get back in the saddle.

The lampshade hanging of the obsessive speculation about how “Sherlock pulled it off” and the fact that the show implied several times that we never got the real story (or perhaps mocked the assumed fan-response toward the same) did strike me as the same sort of condescending faff that infiltrates Doctor Who mysteries nowadays. I know the ep wasn’t penned by Moffat, and that whole subplot was large enough for me to assume he didn’t just insert it, but it felt like it had his fingers all over it nonetheless. More than anything, I can’t help but think that Moffat decided he just wouldn’t definitively go with any solution that a fan guessed online, because he didn’t want anyone to have the satisfaction of saying they got it right–regardless of how he may have originally envisioned it happening. A very snobby sort of “Hah! None of you got it right, suckers! Look, you’re just a bunch of weird obssessive fanfic writers or something!” feel, honestly.

But again, that aside, it was good. If it was nothing but 1.5 hours of Cumberbatch and Freeman bantering with each other, I might still say the same, so I dunno how valid my opinion really is, but every member of the main cast really sells this thing in a fabulous way that I just love watching. Cumberbatch may get all the ladies with his snarkiness and Dat Voice and Dem Cheekbones, but damn if Freeman isn’t working his ass off in every scene. The way they let his “reunion” play out was just fucking phenomenal. And Mycroft ALWAYS delights.

. It felt a little like the pointedly ridiculous cases in House in eps where character development was far more important than the Heart-Vomiter-of-the-Week; we were here to watch Sherlock get back in the saddle.

Sure, so why bother with a mystery at all, or rather why bother with squeezing a country-threatening mystery (and a secondary minor mystery!) into a small amount of narrative space and with zero meaningful antagonists only to end it with a whimper?

To be fair, I enjoyed parts of the episode. It was quite funny. It just felt so disjointed. I’m fairly confident Sunday’s episode will be much stronger.

Am I weird for seeing a bit of meta-humor to it?

Sherlock offhandedly solves country-threatening mystery (again) mostly because it provides a convenient route to reconciliation with his best friend? Like, he’s really just that bored of it all, but at least it comes in handy, so why not?

I like the invasion of slash fiction. Otherwise I’m with Ginger Yellow.

In the end Arthur Conan Doyle could not sustain the quality of Sherlock Holmes stories. Anything after The Return of Sherlock Holmes is shite IMO. He just could not keep up with popular demand (and/or related to his dabbling with spiritualism…) It seems history is repeating itself a century later.

Even Season 2 IMO wasn’t very interesting because it was a lot more slavish. Not necessarily to the source material but to the idea that it must be “modern”. So they slavishly fit Irene Adler to be a dominatrix (otherwise how would she cause a scandal??? OH I KNOW, how about just a normal woman shagging the Prince and taking pics?). So now in Season 3 they add post-modernism and self-reference. How marvelously “modern”.

Guy Ritchie’s reinterpretation is a lot more fun (the sequel still kind of sucked but the first is a very good effort. RDJ’s accent sucked all the way.)

Well, it’s worth remembering Doyle killed off Sherlock in “The Final Problem” in 1893 because he wanted to move on with his writing career. 8 years later, he finally succumbed to pressure and wrote “Hound of the Baskervilles” (set pre-death); then brought him back for real 2 years later (“The Empty House”) and kept writing about Holmes for almost a quarter-century. It’s probably fair to say that somewhere along the way, his heart was no longer in it.

Anyway, I enjoyed the latest episode: the plot / central mystery was shite, but it’s just oh so much fun to see Cumberbatch and Freeman bouncing off of each other. Oddly, the only thing which really bothered me was Mycroft’s appearance in the opening. The whole point to his character is he’s even more brilliant than Sherlock, but so lethargic he can barely be bothered to leave his beloved Diogenes. He certainly wouldn’t become a globe-trotting secret agent; especially not when he must’ve known Sherlock would’ve found his own way out. Arranging for some sort of cryptic clue which lures Sherlock back to London would’ve been much more Mycroft’s style.

When I watch this, I find it feels like I am watching an episode of Doctor Who. The story doesn’t really make sense, and lots of over the top shit happens for the sake of it. As much as I like Cumberbatch and Freeman, I think I’ll stick to Elementary.

Best Sherlock Holmes movie was the one with Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley.

I agree with “disjointed”, “too many flashy fx” and “too pleased with itself”, but the two main actors just work so well together, indeed the whole cast is great. Not enough to hang another series on though - the next episode better get some meat on the bones pronto (I mean some detective-ey stuff that makes some kind of vague sense that you can have fun trying to figure out for yourself).

Incidentally, the whole carriage thing was a complete mess to anyone who knows the London Underground. You can actually walk between carriages, by opening some chunky doors and exposing yourself to the howling wind in the tunnel for a moment, but you can easily do it.

I think the implication was that you could see the whole train coming in–empty, obviously–and were expecting to see Dude inside the last compartment, except he wasn’t. AKA, if he’d moved to another car, you’d see him as the front of the train pulled in.

Finally saw Episode 3 of Season 2. I feel uncomfortable calling these episodes, since they’re 2 hours long, and feel more like movies. So, I’ll rephase: I saw the 6th Sherlock Holmes movie in this series today. What a great movie!

I still remember watching Jeremy Brett’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series as it ended with that confrontation with Moriarty as Sherlock met his death. I had never read the books, so I was so shocked to see Sherlock meet his demise in that way. It never occurred to me at the time that no one actually saw the actual death in question. Doctor Watson only pieced it together with the clues he saw left behind. But the series ended.

And then years later, a new series with Jeremy Brett came around. With a new actor playing Dr. Watson. I remember thinking Canon Doyle must have killed Sherlock Holmes that way for the very reason that he COULD bring him back if he wanted to.

But in this modern interpretation, I liked the twist that Watson was there, watching Sherlock’s death.

Re: S03E02: Much better than the first episode IMO. At least there is enough mystery in there. The wedding I feel I’ve seen a slightly different version with Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes sequel. Same themes (Sherlock metaphorically begging Watson to PLEASE DON’T GO), just slightly different framing.

Yes, latest episode was much better than the first one in my opinion.

Although…

I sat waiting for a reveal that never happened. I was sure it was going to turn it he didn’t write the speech (I assumed Molly had done it).

By the way the three new movies will come to the U.S. pretty fast this time. Jan 19th on PBS and then on from there.

At this point, the mysteries almost feel like an after-thought - a pretext for Cumberbatch and Freeman to indulge their schticks. But since that’s my favorite part of this series, I have no objections to that. :)

That was what the original Holmes stories were, too. As mysteries they were completely unfair because Holmes always had evidence that wasn’t told to the reader anyway, so the stories were half there for the Holmes-Watson thing, and half there for the horripilating backstory revealed at the end.

The wife and I thought Episode 2 was crap, roll on episode 3.

Lol, see we watch these on the BBC in England and they have no adverts, certainly don’t feel like film length and many of the Uk’s programs like this are 90 minutes long making it normal. Glad to see the back of epi 2, did anything happen, talk about a lack of urgency or crime apart from you know what with a switch on it.

To add I do not want to see Sherlock becoming more human or empathising in any way with normal people, epi 2 felt too much like that was happening and doesn’t work at all for me, keep him weird.

While not a direct comparison I really liked The Mentalist season 1 where he felt like a modern take on Sherlock, by season 2 he just became another detective and I never watched after that.