Even leaving aside the callback to “The Yellow Face,” Sherlock’s becoming more human is an ongoing part of the show. His admission of his own faults and Watson being the mechanism by which he is improving himself is the theme of his best man speech, after all.
Anyway, the idea that this episode is good because it eliminates the silly “Mary is a superspy” thing just doesn’t work for me, for three reasons:
There’s only three episodes a shot, and this may be the last season. So it took them 33% of the season to get rid of her as a storyline.
And of course she’s not yet gone. Even assuming she is actually dead, the spectre of her death and it dividing Holmes and Watson is now the dominant theme; at the conclusion of the episode Watson wants nothing to do with his erstwhile best friend. He hates him. You can’t just crank it up on Sunday with Sherlock and John having adventures with the throwaway line “oh yeah I was wicked piassed dude but it’s ok now.” Repairing their relationship will occupy a substantial portion of the rest of the series. Mary’s ghost is going to carry on where Mary the living person can’t.
Really, they COULD have buried it. The issue was done. She had a past and it went into the fire. There wasn’t anyone pursuing her until this episode. The guy with all the secrets had them blown out the right side of his head. It could have been used from time to time as an amusing thing without overwhelming the story.
As a super spy, she is obviously trained in the detection of micro-expressions and body language danger signals, so she must have noticed that Vivian was about to shoot and jumped at that moment, microseconds before Vivian actually pulled the trigger. The scene we see with her jumping after the shot has been fired is just down to bad editing…
Anybody notice that the two passing references to this nebulous “Sherrinford” do not mention a gender? Nor have any fans been able to ferret out what actor portrays the rumored third Holmes “brother”. I can’t find any clues by looking ahead at the casts for the next two episodes on IMDB, either.
The joke with the balloon sums this episode up for me:
The writers have realised that the second of their two main characters has become an irrelevance, a background blur who only exists to nod and smile at Sherlock rather than to make any contribution. Their response is not to give him something to do but to make a cute joke about it. Ha ha ha, boys. (£10 says this scene was based on something Martin Freeman said when he saw the first draft of the script.) They do something very similar when Sherlock and Mary conspire to ditch John: “She’s better than you” says Sherlock. And he’s right, of course. When they asked themselves if it wouldn’t be really cool to make Mary Watson a badass international assassin rather than a John Watson style everywoman, Moffat and Gattis should have answered, “No. No it wouldn’t. Not for more than 5 minutes.” But having done that, they should have committed. Leave John at home and take the ninja with you. Always. Shift the central duo to Sherlock/Mary and stick with your choices.
But that wouldn’t fly, so we get crappy jokes about how they’ve written a main character into irrelevance and a ludicrous bullet-catch death just so that they can try to skew things back to normal. Which, as **RickJay **points out, will not happen easily.
She’s a badass international assassin with a skillset that apparently involved being very good with guns. I mean, without a gun, all she can do upon confronting someone is stand very still for an very long time and wait patiently while they draw a gun of their own and chat for a while before firing – but, man, of course you take her along, because she’s ever-so-very useful to have around if she has a gun.
Why even bother writing her off the show? As they just proved, they can simply write her gun out of an episode: she had one in the flashback, and then, oopsie.
Well yeah, exactly. The only way to get to where they wanted (e.g. the inconveniently talented Mary dead and John having something to do) was to have their characters ignore not just their own skills but also elementary common sense. I mean, if I had to confront a frail old woman who was also a ruthless spy you can bet I’d have her capacious handbag away from her in the first 10 seconds of our encounter, and I’m a moron. It’s just about excusable for Sherlock to ignore that obvious precaution because he’s been established as overconfident and arrogant. But Mary is meant to be expert in precisely this kind of tense stand off, so what the hell was she thinking? And why did she rate Sherlock’s life more highly than her own?
You and I were thinking on the same lines. I thought the reason Sherlock went into his diatribe was to draw the attention of the stenographer while super-spy Mary swiftly attacked and disarmed her. Instead she stands there like a post and only uses her ninja-like reflexes to jump in front of the bullet!
I also think it’s possible that Sherlock was wearing a bullet-proof vest and that was the reason he was trying to draw her focus, and Mary ruined his plan by taking the bullet.
Sherlock Shellingford is a character in the far superior Japanese manga iteration, Tantei Opera Milky Holmes.
Oddly enough, this being anime they are all tiny, tiny girls.
Not to be confused with the great Hayao Miyazaki’s 1980s’ reimagining, Sherlock Hound, where they are all dogs.
Also much better, although I have never seen it.
Most certainly. However, both she and her husband ( to an even greater extent ) looked far too old to be having their first baby, let alone doing all that SAS / Navy Seal crap. Joints start to creak with age.
I’m sure I’m not the first to realize this, and I’m really not trying to introduce politics into this thread.
In the very first scene, a super-top-secret intel briefing in MI6, Sherlock is being a dork and tweeting out bullshit to show MI6 how little he respects them.
Har har - remind you of anyone? And this episode was filmed many months ago.
I don’t disagree. But I don’t like it. It’s the sort of conventional, mawkish ‘character development’ that is all too common in episodic storytelling.
I can’t help contrasting Breaking Bad, the excellence of which lay partly in the refusal of the showrunners to sentimentalize their anti-hero. Apart from one moment of honesty (to his wife–instead of continuing to pretend he ‘did it all for her’ in noble self-sacrifice, he at last admitted he did it for himself), he died as he had lived: as a son of a bitch.
That Gatiss and Moffat want to make their Sherlock cuddly and lovable is understandable—it’s the sort of thing creators do all the time.* But it’s disappointing all the same.
*Arguably it happens in re-workings of the Sherlock Holmes character even more predictably than it happens with other characters; some viewers of House certainly felt that the character lost his edge by the last couple of seasons.
My suspension-of-disbelief was blown even earlier, when Holmes and Ajay had their big, long, loud, splashy fight in a house where no one came to investigate the commotion. A house belonging to a man who installed a fancy-dan indoor pool, but no burglar alarms.
It was set up to sound like a curse, but given that she had just asked Sherlock to save John, I interpreted it to mean that John was about to go through hell, and she wanted Holmes to go after him and help him through it.
Am I the only one who, after Holmes was shocked that the busted busts were “about Mary”, thought that the twist would be that Ajay’s “escape” had been arranged by Moriarity before his death, as a move in the bigger posthumous game he has running?
I interpreted the taunting as a deliberate attempt by Sherlock to get the villain to shoot at him, not at Mary (not anticipating that Mary would throw herself in front of him). But of course, there was no reason to invite Mary along to confront the villain anyway.
Another quote from “The Yellow Face” that showed up in this episode is “I think I’m a better man than you’ve given me credit for.”
This - she has a fucking baby (although, as shown, she’d happily abandon said baby for a worthless round-the-world jaunt so, maybe, not the world’s best mum), a husband and Sherlock was fucking asking for it, too. The suicide (that’s what it was) made no sense. Which is the only reason I’m favouring a “not really dead” explanation.
But they certainly did develop Walter White as a character. He is not the same person in Season 5 as he is in Season 1. The tragic flaw was always there, but it carries him through an arc.
The difference between Sherlock and Walter isn’t that they don’t both change, it’s that Sherlock’s arc is largely positive, and Walter’s is negative. Sherlock has a seed of humanity in him - that’s why they have flashbacks to him as a normal child who loves a dog. That bit of humanity begins to grow when he meets someone he genuinely cares about who can connect with him.
Walter, conversely, was always a prideful ass. But until the events of the show, all it got him was a nondescript teaching job and lost opportunities. A confluence of events - his cancer, and finding out you can make big bucks with meth - makes that dark nastiness inside him start to grow.
The idea in both shows is pretty much a common idea in stories going back a bazillion years; you cannot escape your nature. Sherlock WANTS to be a Vulcan, but he isn’t and there’s no getting away from that. Walter White would like you (and himself) to believe he’s the good guy, but he is in fact an evil bastard. Both truths inevitably bubble to the surface.
I suppose you could have Sherlock… uh, break bad, but really it’s hard to see how it would make sense. He’s just become Moriarty, I guess.
Finally getting around to this season a bit late… I thought this episode had some fun moments, but I agree with most of the criticisms in this thread, particularly about how stupid Sherlock frequently is when it comes to confronting baddies.
In addition, the dead boy in the car makes as little sense as the guy who killed himself with a boomerang, when it comes to wacky-seeming Sherlock mysteries that he solves with far too much certainty. (Even if all the rest of the logistics made sense, couldn’t he have just been crouching in the back seat? And since when do cars explode? I thought everyone knew that was just a stupid cliche by this point.)