Rick and Mycroft
Personally, I like the idea of “House of Holmes”.
I’ve actually been thinking that I’d watch a spinoff about Mrs. Hudson.
Yikes, that was rough. Having just finished a few minutes ago, I’m sure I’ll think of more, but right now all I keep thinking is:[ul]
[li]How was Eurus planning on getting her hug if her drone grenade had blown them all up?[/li][li]Was that mind-fuck the only way to get Mycroft to open up? How long did that take - hire a midget and a clown and direct them, get a child to make some recordings, rig some hidden speakers to play them, splice in home movies into that specific film that he knew Mycroft would watch, (and then just all sit around waiting for their cues), rig those paintings to cry blood…I mean, wow.[/li][li]I’m not sure how this slave things works, but it sure works damn well. Did they arrest all of the crime committing goons that had to have helped her? She’s got quite a staff: Heilcopter pilots, folks kidnapping people and hanging them from ropes, carpenters getting flown to a castle to build a fake cell, to say nothing of her substantial IT department, prepared to rig a central workstation to a Moriarty sound board, several networked flat screen TVs, (both at the prison and the castle), remote access cameras at Molly’s place…[/li][/ul]
How about both of them? The free-wheeling, tea-brewing grandmotherly figure partnered with the stuffy genius for crime-solving adventures together. Kind of like “Murder She Wrote”, except with an intelligence agent instead of the local sheriff.
Mycroft and Mrs Hudson?
Mrs Hudson and Mycroft?
Who gets top billing? Tricky, that.
No, I’ve got it. Mycroft moves to Bel Air and becomes a taxi driver as a sideline to his crime solving. Immediately following one case that led him into the sewers, he has to drive Will Smith to his aunt and uncle’s house.
This sort of thing always bothers me about these shows. I was always a bit puzzled in this show as to how James Moriarty did as much as he did despite being a 31-year-old lunatic. He demonstrated control of an enterprise that could not possible have cost less than a hundred million dollars a year to run, but he didn’t look or act smart enough to work the cash at a Best Buy. How did THAT guy become CEO? How did some other criminal not say “Maybe I , not this Joker ripoff, should be in charge”?
Euros took it to a whole new level. It was preposterous. The setup for her little game cost millions and millions of pounds/dollars/euro and would have required the cooperation of a hundred or more employees. And she still couldn’t afford some better clothes after she was done pretending to be imprisoned. The hell?
What I find irritating about it is that there’s no need for it. You can write an intriguing mystery without making every villain a James Bond type bazillionaire. If anything, the villain having seemingly limitless resources always ruins the story, because it forces you into two invariable problems:
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You have to write the story in such a way that the villain, despite having limitless resources and being obsessed with killing the hero, does not in fact just have the hero assassinated. This is such a silly cliche that making fun of it has become a silly cliche. “Engage the unnecessarily slow lowering device!” “You sly dog! You got me monologuing!”
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You have to explain where the villain got the resources. Sherlock utterly fails at this; other stories don’t (see: Goldfinger, Thje Incredibles) but it’s usually a stretch and often a complete fail. Villain after villain has a vast array of henchmen you cannot really explain. How d’you pay all these guys? Even Mafia kingpins don’t have a hundred men standing around with guns all the time.
Maybe in the next series, if there is one, Sherlock can finally rid the world of that damn Hank Scorpio.
A lot of us would be content with ridding the Sherlock world of Martin Freeman’s bloody wife.
Villains like Eurus or Goldfinger or Hank Scorpio get their drama by revealing the vast conspiracy that has laid hidden in plain sight for years. It’s a bit like a magic trick. We, the audience, get to see the finished illusion. We are spared the dozens of hours that go into creating it. It’s assumed that we would find it tedious.
To be perfectly honest, however, I’m the sort who really would find it fascinating to go through the steps of how an empire like theirs is built.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Breaking Bad so much. It wasn’t about a big pay off. It was concerned mostly with the interaction of the players within the conspiracy. Rogue One, to some extent, tried to do the same thing for Star Wars.
The location used was St Catherine’s Fort, off the Welsh coast near Tenby.
T thought the whole thing was self-indulgent twaddle, which could have been trimmed to sixty minutes. The plot bore resemblance to a 1970s Doctor Who one, where The Master has been imprisoned on an offshore fort, guarded by people who are supposedly immune to his influence, and he influences the Governor instead.
So ? Does that matter when you know he is and nobody’s going to complain on his behalf ?
Of course, someone like Moriarty wouldn’t have come to Sherrinford without setting up some high-explosive collateral a phone call away just in case they wouldn’t let him go, so the point is moot.
Agreed. And it’s always done badly, because TV writers are not, in fact, super geniuses. They just don’t have the brainpower to think up an *actually *genius plot or plan.
Well, now, you don’t need to back away from your point quite that fast; this is, after all, the Sherlock-verse – where the world’s cleverest blackmailer willl helpfully toss aside the very idea of contingencies in favor of ‘gloating’ and ‘smugness’.
Yeah, Sherlock is a superhero and he whips out his superpowers and solves impossible things. He might as well be tossing cars around. I never get the impression that I, a member of the audience, should bother thinking about how he’s going to solve something anymore than I wonder how Hulk is going to solve something.
Calling it Sherrinford was a nod to a name Conan Doyle was considering for his detective before he settled on Sherlock.
I learned this from “The Making of The Final Problem” (I think that was the name) that aired after “The Final Problem” on my PBS station.
Also, that name is referenced in Wikipedia: Minor Sherlock Holmes characters - Wikipedia
Ah! Good to know. For more: St Catherine's Fort - Wikipedia
Not if you assume that “Sherrinford” was merely the codename of the facility. You would’t say “Eurus is being held on St Catherine’s Fort” when any idiot could find that on Google Earth.
Eh, you could argue that it was in character (and also the case for the source character in Doyle’s books, who did wind up getting shot by one of his blackmail victims he thought he could crush and control). Moriarty on the other hand has shown multiple times that he does believe in contingencies, up to and including shooting himself in the face to keep his plan going.