Aired in the UK, we await the American airing. Any thoughts?
Only that it must not be perceived by PBS as being much of an asset (which for PBS means, a show that drives membership sales). They’ve given it the inferior 7pm ‘lead-in’ position for the new Queen Victoria project. (Well, in my market, anyway. Different elsewhere?)
That was stupid, filled with massive plot holes, and…really enjoyable. Great episode despite being a lot…and I mean* a lot* to ask us to take in.
A bit goofy.
Blah…blah…plot holes…blah
Super fun, very intense and stressful, but ultimately so fun.
Same as my review.
Didn’t like it at all. A terrible wrap to a great series.
Did I miss something? How’d Eurus get out to terrorize John and Sherlock? Didn’t she shoot John?
The prison governor told us that she was the one in charge of the place, so presumably she could get out whenever she wanted.
But I’m tired of the detective/mystery show trope of the super-genius sociopathic criminal mastermind. It’s been done far too often.
I mostly enjoyed it, but it definitely had some flaws. I figured out early on that the girl on the plane was a feint. I also felt the resolution was a bit ridiculous. So Eurus just wanted a hug? And then she was fine with being caught and locked up again?
I don’t get the whole Redbeard/Victor thing either. If a young boy went missing and little Eurus kept teasing little Sherlock about his whereabouts with the song, then… why the fuck weren’t their parents doing something about it?
What a steaming pile of suppurating horse droppings! I actually considered turning off the TV and walking away in disgust, but my SO wanted to watch until the end, but then we both ended up rolling our eyes so heavily.
Flaws? Where do I begin? The whole Bond-style leaping out of flaming windows, the endless reintroduction of dead characters, the highly implausible heart-string-tugging violin oh-all-she-really-needed-was-a-hug bullshit. I have a feeling the writers are trying on the one hand to show how desperately clever they are (Ooo, Sherlock’s sister was actually Watson’s therapist! Plot twist!) but also pander to a wider demographic, so you end up with this half-baked nonsense with the melodramatic emotion but without the deduction that makes Sherlock Sherlock.
Whew. Glad I got that off my chest. I liked the references to the canon story titles, but really disliked the way they were twisted to suit yet another implausible scenario. And yes, the sociopathic villain is definitely being worn a bit thin. I’m sorry to say that if this is the level to which this series has sunk, it’s probably a good thing it’s being put out of its misery now.
Is it the last episode?
I have had nightmares which were more enjoyable.
The rumour is that this is the last ever episode, which would explain the attempt to sum everything up and wrap it in a homily from ACD’s “The Final Problem”, to wit: “him whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”
I don’t know if there has been any confirmation one way or the other, though. I suppose in some sense this episode did an adequate job in that it mostly wrapped up a storyline while leaving potential options to explore in the future (e.g. Eurus has hypnotised another criminal mastermind, or Mycroft turns evil, or hyper-intelligent space aliens give Sherlock a series of “tests”).
AFAICT, the point was that – back when – she just wanted someone to play with, the way Sherlock and his little pal did; and that, since she had an off-the-charts intellect beyond Newton’s, the only playmate on the planet worth reaching out to could solve a riddling rhyme wrapped around a high-stakes game: big brother Mycroft is close, if you go slow enough; but Sherlock, he can actually get her.
So the hug is the point, but getting there is the point too: it has to be someone who can piece together a puzzle the way she could’ve, if someone had built a song like that for her; and it has to be someone who, though smart enough to relate to her, is still human enough to show warmth and make friends and care about people.
(Kind of ties back to what she’d said when Sherlock explained his ongoing deductions to her during their walk around London – you know, when she expressed surprise at how emotion sincerely factored in, and even seemed to power, the sorts of calculations that only a Holmes could possibly manage; that, sure, when it comes to reasoning about people and their relationships, he does it superbly – but also sweetly.)
Awful awful awful. I figured Eurus out last week. Committed a murder as a kid, got locked up, Sherlock repressed it. Lazy writing from Moffat and Gattis. Lazy resolution. My psychopath sister just needs a hug. I only enjoyed the last few minutes, of Mary’s DVD.
I think it’s the worst episode of the franchise. In a way, that’s good; had it been brilliant, it would have been too sad that this was the last one.
The lightning in the bottle finally burned out.
Among other things, it’s as if – whenever you need to move the plot along – you just plug in “Mycroft Holmes Is Stupid”. Sherlock needs to know what Mycroft knows? He tricks him. (Oh, but surely Mycroft would have a weapon? Ah, but surely his brother anticipated that and nullified it.) So, what Mycroft knows is what happened to their sister – which is to say, he thought she was safely locked up, while she was in fact running the asylum. Oh, so that’s how she pulled Moriarty’s strings? No, that was a separate mistake by Mycroft. Okay, never mind that; why is she doing all of this? Well, because (a) Mycroft was too dumb to play the game with, but (b) Sherlock is smart enough. Let’s now watch Watson get closer to solving a problem than Mycroft does. Let’s now watch Mycroft fail to trick Sherlock into shooting him instead of Watson. Let’s now watch Mycroft find out that his Lady Bracknell wasn’t all that. Let’s now watch Mycroft get chewed out by his parents.
I’m pretty sure that’s not supposed to be the point of Mycroft Holmes.
In the first season, psycho genius Moriarty used death threats against innocents to force Sherlock into solving a series of crimes and puzzles against the clock, culminating with John Watson as the innocent in peril. It’s not a bad plot- it’s got tension, pace and variety - but it’s a shame they had to retread so much for their final episode. Of course, the remake has to be bigger than the original, so we had not one but two creepily gothic locations for the challenges, and a villain for whom previous archnemesis Moriarty was merely junior partner or possibly pawn. And of course the ultimate puzzle had to have massive psychological/emotional implications for Sherlock so that we could really care.
The actual set up was beyond belief - our villain can obtain total mind control over anyone she wants just by talking to them and uses this power to carry out an elaborate remodelling of her entire prison, arrange multiple kidnaps, and nip out to share a bag of chips with her brother. Oh, and also send them a grenade that could quite easily have killed them all thus making the whole of the foregoing futile. If you could overlook that, the escalating tension of the puzzle-maze section was quite entertaining, but the whole set up was so out of left-field that it didn’t feel earned.
The same goes, incidentally, for the Molly Hooper scene. Back in series one she was a regular character whose crush on Sherlock was her major characteristic (in fact, it was her only characteristic, and she only existed as an object that enabled Sherlock to display first his sociopathy and later faltering steps towards empathy). But she’s barely been seen since Sherlock’s wedding, and then only to hold a baby, so the actress had to do a lot of work to make us care about Molly again. And best if we didn’t, because as was made clear by the self-eulogising bollocks at the end, her feelings about that moment aren’t worth pursuing.
The finale, in which Sherlock a) found out that Euros murdered his best friend from childhood and b) gave her a hug, didn’t make any goddam sense. A child goes missing. Another child is known to be taunting her brother about this with a riddle. Apparently, that isn’t looked into very much. There are presumably search parties. No-one thinks to check the nearby well. But aside from the incredible nature of this murder, this feels like another example of Moffat and Gattis falling over themselves trying to do feminism: The other Holmes sibling was a girl - didn’t see that coming did you, you chauvinists! And she manipulates men’s minds until they become her slaves! And she’s nursing a grudge but refuses to just say what it is straight out because she’d rather make our hero jump through hoops! And it turns out to be that she’s really pissed of about her hero spending time with his mate instead of with her! But if you give her a hug and occasionally make time to do something she likes together then you can leave her indoors while you go off and be awesome with your mate! Hah! Whose got the sexist world view now, haters?
Anyhow, with the crazy obsessive woman mollified by a bare minimum of attention, we get treated to another dead character who apparently also spent her whole life recording video so she could tell our heroes how important they are… telling our heroes how important they are. This was self-aggrandising bollocks of the highest order and was, like so much else, completely unearned. “Holmes and Watson solve puzzles by being quirky and dynamic” is an awesome basis for a series - it’s just a damn shame - and ironically an apt ending - that this was seen as fit for a montage but not for the actual episode, or indeed most of the last two series.
I agreed, but reluctantly gave it a pass by figuring she did what Sherlock always does: looking not at the marks on a woman’s wrist, but at what must be hidden marks on her wrist – after seeing her belongings, and realizing a secret got kept from someone until the relationship ended, though there wasn’t anything physical going on for quite some time, which is when the folded paper was removed from the book it had been kept in and got thumbtacked to a wall in a tiny kitchen where she gets no visitors but still cooks to impress, living in isolation with no human contact while contemplating suicide as per the hem of her skirt and the rain on her shoulders.
Since I can’t really buy in to the show unless I buy in to Sherlock’s ability to do that in seconds during a quick chat, I can’t not buy in to his sister having that same ability; and once you grant that, it’d actually be weirder if she couldn’t correctly anticipate the responses of people she’s read like a book.
Anyone else reminded of the final episode of The Prisoner? Not specifics, but the whole “We’ve got to do something crazy and spectacular to wrap up the show” vibe.
Having said that, it was entertaining to watch, and I had nightmares about poor Redbeard last night.