You have to smile at the Thatcher/Napoleon inference.
It’s pretty strange that they made the woman on the bus a Modgirl. They wanted her to be someone older than 20s to be in John’s peer group roughly. They wanted her to be someone who was immediately identifiable as being open to being in a mistress/married guy relationship - but without making her a prostitute. Fine. But, was long hair and the Modgirl dress and the flower really the best way to walk that fine line? She looked, to me, like someone who had walked directly out of Central Casting - someone in a costume. It added to the overall falseness of the whole idea of John having an affair. Piffle.
I’m not deep into Sherlock Holmes fandom, but I have heard before that many fans of the original stories consider Watson to have been a ladies man.* I believe the main evidence for this is that Watson claims considerable experience with women in IIRC A Study in Scarlet. I believe there’s also some debate as to how many times Watson was married in the stories (is every reference to his wife the same woman, or does he remarry after his first wife’s death?), but that’s getting beyond me.
*I’m guessing this is what AngelSoft’s friend was alluding to. It’s not shocking that Mrs. Watson would die, because Watson is a widower in some of the later Holmes stories.
That was a very difficult episode to watch. Way too rapid fire for most of it. Hard to keep up with the dialogue/action. It’s like watching a badly made music video. Esp. when they have music playing over it.
Note to producers: never play music during dialogue.
At least slowed down a bit near the end, but by then the damage to caring about what was going on was done.
Also relegating a core character to a token appearance is pointless. Either include him as a real character or leave him out.
And Mycroft is of little relevance as well.
If it wasn’t for the Freeman/Moffat aspect, I’d have given up on this long ago. (And the Moffat-istic component barely remains.)
I don’t suppose there’s any point in quibbling about the tired “person throwing themselves in front of a bullet after the gun’s already been fired” trope. Mary’s a super-agent, not a superhero, and outrunning a bullet is not an option regardless of whether you’re in slo-mo or not.
I love Sherlock but boy, did I hate the hell out of that episode.
- I don’t care if Mary is dead or alive; what I do care about is that I really didn’t want to see more Mary. She’s a good enough character but the show’s about Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, not Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and Mary Watson. We had the big Mary reveal, she was accepted by Watson, just leave it there for Christ’s sake. I want to see Sherlock Holmes solve mysteries and John Watson try to keep him in line.
[QUOTE=Peter Griffin]
That’s right, folks. It’s gonna be a Meg episode. Stick around for the fun… here’s the clicker… no one would blame ya.
[/QUOTE]
-
I really didn’t get what the hell was going on. I mean, I understood the dude was looking for the memory stick to find Mary, but was she that hard to find, really? Aren’t the memory sticks just stupid anyway? How do these Sooper Dooper agents get so confuzzled that three of them live and she thinks she’s the only one who lived?
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The Watson affair with the bus lady seemed like it should have had some sort of emotional weight, and to be honest I can see the point of it; it does humanize Watson’s perfection a little. Or what point they were trying to make, anyway. But it was as if they jammed it in without connecting it to anything else - and, of course, barring future revelations, it is rather hard to believe Dr. John Watson hid this affair from his secret agent wife and SHERLOCK FRICKIN’ HOLMES.
Was is an actual affair, or just temptation?
Because we see nothing to indicate any sort of affair led to sex. Sure, he saw an attractive lady on the bus, the temptation was certainly there (because lord knows the Watsons have had issues in their relationship), they were texting each other, but while an affair was implied I don’t see it as proven.
This I can believe. They were separated in the chaos, all the hostages were killed as well as one of the four, a second one was subsequently tortured to death shortly thereafter and the third kept in a secret prison for six years. She had every reason to assume all three had died along with the hostages.
I watched the episode a second time and liked it a bit better, mainly for the reasons RickJay says.
I think the writers realized they had gotten bogged down in the Mary plot line and had to get rid of her so they could go back to focusing on the Holmes/Watson partnership. I sure hope so. I enjoy Cumberbatch’s performances as Sherlock (which I didn’t expect, since I’m a diehard Jeremy Brett fan) and his interactions with the Watson, Mrs. Hudson and LeStrade characters. The others, meh. The Mary character always assumed too much importance in the series for my taste. With luck, she’ll stay dead.
I do have some elevated expectations for Toby Jones. He looks like he’s going to make a right good villain.
Heh. Watching this episode, it occurs to me that-- well, remember that guy who has a faded mark on his arm that he doesn’t really think about, which prompts Sherlock to deduce the nationality of the woman he’s not really carrying a torch for but is still a bit fond of? And remember the bit with the hairs of two different cats, and the ring that’s been routinely getting worn on the wrong finger for years? And the residue at her ankles, from a particular road under construction? And so on?
Okay so imagine that you’re John Watson, always watching the great man make those deductions right in front of you; could you resist the urge to do stuff that makes no damn sense, for no particular reason?
“He keeps checking his wristwatch, and he has an ink smudge on his fingertip – the sort of ink used at a local bank, but not the one where he banks; the other one. And there’s a small mustard stain on the cuff of his sleeve, and I know John doesn’t like mustard; put together, that means – hang on, it’ll come to me. Could it be – no, that’s not it. Wait, checking the wristwatch again? What the hell, John? Why aren’t you using your bloody pocketwatch? There must be a reason!”
Heh. This was once done in House. Wilson decided to mess with House and started altering his behavior patterns so that House would go crazy trying to figure out what was up.
I, too, was disappointed by the continuation of the Mary storyline. I didn’t need to know any more of her story. The flash drives they carried made no sense to me, either, how exactly did that help the team again?
Another thing that bothered me; John Watson is no Sherlock Holmes, but he isn’t a drooling moron either. If your wife is one of the world’s foremost assassins and super-spies, sending text messages to your new girlfriend is ill-advised.
IIRC, this was a plot point in an episode of House. House was in a funk (prior episode’s POTW died, or something), so Wilson made a bunch of arbitrary changes to his routine just to give House something to puzzle over.
I didn’t think this was a great episode of Sherlock but they did the necessary and got rid of Mary, so that was a plus point. The idea that they can introduce her, in the manner that they did, and then have her in the background, not doing much, doesn’t make much logical sense. You’ve got a trained killer on hand, who will do pretty much anything for her husband and his weird mate - run into any serious bother and she’s your get out of jail free card. For stakes to be real, she had to go.
Of course, the sensible thing to do would have been either to not introduce her at all or introduce her and not make her a super spy/assassin/death squad leader/ninja/superhero/alien, thus avoiding painting yourself into this corner. But then, I generally get the feeling that that Moffat and Gatiss are not the geniuses they’d like us to think they are.
My memory of this–and please correct me if wrong-- is that Arthur Conan Doyle used two different names for Watson’s wife in stories written years apart–not to indicate a remarriage, but simply because he forgot which name he’d used earlier. (And isn’t Watson himself sometimes called ‘James’ and sometimes called ‘John’…?)
This was annoying to me, too.
And let’s face it, the main suspense in that scene came from wondering whether they had the budget to show the breaking of the aquarium glass via bullet. That *would *have been expensive, even if faked in the computer.
The whole thing was a bit slapdash. Let’s hope the other episodes were given greater care in the writing process.
Ironically, it’s his wife who calls him “James.”
I must have missed that one – but I’m not out to take credit; before that, they had it as a plot point in a Batman comic.
Sure, the Penguin is obviously up to something, and our hero has a pretty good idea of what’s going on – but the one thing that keeps making him wonder, is: why the heck is that monocle being worn over the wrong eye? And the answer is – well, no reason other than to provide a head-scratching irrelevance; he’s not Two-Face, he’s not the Riddler; he’s not compelled to act in some weird pattern that’s a big clue if you can just get the joke; he’s just a guy who plans crimes.
But I digress.
Ha!
(The second one or the first one? Because if it’s the second one, who is actually the first one but being called by the wrong name—she might be calling him “James” out of revenge.)
I thought it was pretty obvious Mary’s role was updated to super spy because of political correctness. Can’t have the boys having all the fun.
She could’ve just pushed him out of the way. Or they should’ve tazed the old lady.