Otherwise, though, you liked it?
Ah, he did Coupling? I recall it’s success in Britain as a UK Friends and then the failure of the attempt to re-patriate it to the US. But one of the US actresses is a “who is that actress?!” crush of mine (Rena Sofer).
And thanks for the miniseries Jekyll recommendation - and Mtgman, too. I will check that out.
But either way, it sounds like Moffat is - what? The UK Whedon? Is that how he is looked at in the UK? If I have that wrong, please enlighten me - I sure mean it as a compliment, since I like Joss Whedon’s writing, and appreciate his attempts, even if they don’t quite work out…
I missed something…who killed the hiker with the boomerang?
Some great dialogue though…
Sherlock: Punch me in the face.
Watson: Punch you?
Sherlock: Yes, punch me, in the face. Didn’t you hear me?
Watson: I always hear “punch me in the face” when you’re speaking, but it’s usually subtext.
and…
Watson: You want to remember, Sherlock, I was a soldier. I killed people!
Sherlock: You were a doctor!
Watson: I had bad days!
He killed himself, of course. The noise he heard caused him to look away and fail to catch the now-lethal returning boomerang.
I love the show, I love the modern interp of Holmes, but I think the plotting fails on several counts. In this episode, the 007 plan makes no sense (as already mentioned.)
In the last episode of series 1, Moriarty is a “consulting criminal” who helps his clients commit crimes; he goes to all the trouble of setting up bombs on people, in order to send Sherlock very obscure clues that help Sherlock solve those past crimes. Problem 1: why would he give away his own clients? Surely, as word spreads, that’s the end of his criminal consultations! Problem 2: He blows up the old blind woman because she gives Sherlock a clue about his voice, and then almost immediately after, he reveals himself to Sherlock. Why go to all the trouble to hide your identity if you’re going to unveil a few hours later?
I have no problem with a certain amount of illogic in the activities of master-criminals, but too many piled on make me uneasy. And pull me out of the fun.
On Sherl’s sexual (or lack thereof) orientation: the original stories were written in late Victorian Era and shortly thereafter. Attitudes towards sex were very different, one didn’t write about it except in very guarded terms. Today, when we’re much more open , the notion of someone being asexual seems… odd.
While this is true, in the stories Doyle did not merely tastefully refrain from mentioning Holmes’s love life. He has Watson describe Holmes as a man who never felt (romantic) love at all, something Watson seems to have considered unusual. I think there’s plenty of room to question whether Watson is right about Holmes’s lack of tender emotions – Holmes clearly has special regard for Irene Adler, and perhaps he felt more for her than Watson realized – but Doyle *could *have made Holmes a man who unquestionably had romantic feelings towards women without shocking Victorian morals. He could have had Holmes fall in love and get married, or reveal that he was a confirmed bachelor because his childhood sweetheart had died tragically or something. If these sound like terrible ideas for a Sherlock Holmes story then that, not Victorian attitudes about sex, is probably why Doyle chose not to give Holmes a love life.
There’s also the strong glorification of science and rationality that Holmes rather embodies. As much as love between a man and a woman would have been considered “natural”, it was certainly not considered logical – it was a thing of irrational wonder. Holmes also went against what many Victorians would have considered the “natural order of things” in ways that we, from our vantage point, consider more positive. There’s one story where he meets a white woman who had met and married a free black man in the American South; she acknowledges that it was a scandal when she tells them the back story, but Holmes not only doesn’t care, he doesn’t even blink. And he is forever running around among the filthy working-class of London, even though the description of the rooms he and Watson share make it pretty clear that they are of the professional class, and there are hints that Holmes’ family may have been horribly boring country squires somewhere.
It’s more unusual for the modern Sherlock to be wholly inexperienced with sex, or at least to present as such. By the time this Sherlock was, say, in college, it would have been accepted among his peers to experiment with sex in the same way he evidently experimented with drugs. If he’d ever been curious, he certainly could have managed it – he has demonstrated that he’s entirely capable of turning on (what other people view as) charisma, if he thinks it would be useful. Irene’s taunts might be accurate, and he simply never cared about other humans enough to wonder, and never found himself in circumstances where he had to use it to get something else he wanted. Or she could have just been trying to get to him, and chose a way that reflected more about what she felt than what he did.
As for the “tender emotions” in the original model, while Irene/romantic love can be argued, Watson was most certainly wrong about the general case. As Watson was literally his only real friend, Holmes was extremely emotionally attached to him. It does show on occasion, although pretty much never when anyone else who rates as simian to Holmes is around; the most notable such incident was in “The Three Garridebs”, when the criminal of the case shot at Watson and winged him slightly. Holmes drops everything to make sure Watson isn’t badly wounded, and then turns around and more or less informs the gunman that he’s lucky he missed or he wouldn’t be leaving that room alive.
Yes, I have read these things a lot, why do you ask? 
Having seen the later episodes I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Moriarty isn’t so much a master criminal as a Holmes-obsessed psychopath.
The BAFTA’s for Craft TV were announced today. Sherlock was nominated for three–all from this episode. It won three…
The “Big” winners will be announced later this month. Benedict Cumberbatch has been nominated for Best Actor. Martin Freeman & Andrew Scott (Moriarty) are both in the running for Best Supporting Actor.
Well, that was disappointing. They tried to cram way too much into 80 minutes, and it all ended up pretty incoherent.
What was the deal with the rabbit? I couldn’t make head nor tails of the conversation in the lab with that scientist – not sure if I was just too tired, or their accents, or what.
The little girl wanting Sherlock to find her missing rabbit was the daughter of the scientist who made the glow-in-the-dark rabbits, and Sherlock enlisted her help in solving his case by threatening to tell the daughter that it was mommy who made Bluebell the rabbit disappear from a locked hutch.
Right, I got that much – but … never mind, not that important. Was the rabbit really glowing in the dark? Why? How did the daughter get the rabbit in the first place? Why would the mother give her daughter a lab critter? Esp. a glow-in-the-dark lab critter?
I think this is an example of how they tried to cram too much into this show. This all needed at least three minutes, and it got about one.
Yes. It had been crossed with jellyfish DNA. It was an accident so the mom tried to undo it.
[Quote= twickster]
Right, I got that much – but … never mind, not that important. Was the rabbit really glowing in the dark? Why? How did the daughter get the rabbit in the first place? Why would the mother give her daughter a lab critter? Esp. a glow-in-the-dark lab critter?
[/quote]
Without getting into the how or why, they mentioned that the rabbit had been treated with GFP. That part, at least, is an entirely real thing, and seeing the rabbit glowing under (presumably) UV light isn’t actually all that out there.
What were folks’ general impressions on the second episode? The latest episode of The Incomparable podcast reviewed the new season of Sherlock, and they savaged S02E02. Me, I enjoyed it enough, but I’m easy to please. And I couldn’t very well disagree with many of their criticisms (predictable; unbelievable elements such as having t-shirts made up for your secret government project; Liberty, Indiana; the attempt at having a “supernatural” explanation as a red herring in a show that is all about rationality and logic; etc.).
I liked the episode fine. But my opinion comes from watching the DVD (from the UK) numerous times, not from relying on the opinions of others.
Still, I watched last night on PBS. Despite the cuts, it was great to see it in HD–the show* looks *so beautiful. Rather than the Gothic horror of the story, it presented modern horror in the X-Files mold. With a side order of the ongoing friendship with John–continuing in the last episode of this year’s trilogy. And the complex relationship with his brother. Hey, wait–there was Moriarty, too!
I could easily see a group of academic nerds creating a t-shirt, thinking of it as a joke that only they would get. Getting back to X-Files–how many episodes were about some possible eldritch horror that might really be the result of government skulduggery or might be something else again?
Plus, bloody Sherlock with a harpoon! John pulling rank–to Sherlock’s approval. And Lestrade in shades!
Why was Sherlock driving–shouldn’t John be at the wheel? Martin Freeman can’t drive…
There actually is a Liberty, Indiana
I’m not surprised that there is; the use of it in the show was just a bit precious.
S02E02 is probably the least impressive one in the set. I haven’t seen the version with cuts; I cannot imagine they helped any. You certainly had to pay attention to catch all of the plot points the first time. And some of them were sort of “unfair”. The first series were all plotted very tightly, and the clues were generally on-screen or in dialogue, to the point where it was possible to solve them most of the way before the denouement. In this one, a lot of the final burst of deduction about the project depended on non-real-world information that hadn’t previously been given to the viewer. I went through the working out of the delivery system with Sherlock, but it wasn’t possible to come up with the motive from outside the narrative. Boo.
I thought the character bits were all nicely done. This and S02E01 make it quite clear that Sherlock is actually *trying *to learn some social graces, and that he’s doing it for John’s benefit. Also that it pretty much only applies to John – otherwise he might have bothered to find out what Lestrade’s first name was before now. 
My main issue with the second episode was Sherlock guessing the password of the military guy, using the same method everybody on TV does. I was expecting something different, like Sherlock deducing that the password would be insanely complicated and set by IT, and the officer was the type of person not to trust his memory, leading to Sherlock just finding the Post-It with the password written on it or something.