Agreed. This bugged me. It didn’t seem to fit Moriarty. He would just prance around, or leave himself, and gloat from the ground. Blowing his brains out robs him of enjoyment of the victory. But yes, having Sherlock throw Moriarty off the building would push sympathies for him a bit.
This is also tough. Sherlock anticipated he needed to die, and he contrived the plot to get Watson out of the way and enlist Molly’s help. He therefore had a plan, which he executed. But in that moment, he is standing on the edge prepping to jump, and asks Moriarty for space, a moment alone. I think his intent was for Moriarty to be far enough away that he could jump and Moriarty wouldn’t be able to see the impact.
But then he had the realization that Moriarty must have a way to call it off. But that seems off. Why would he suddenly realize that? What about Moriarty stepping away from the edge reveals that? Lamia says it was something in the dialogue, but I didn’t catch it. That appeared to be a true deduction at the time, which was then trumped by Moriarty’s exit, when then forced Sherlock back to the first plan.
It is obvious that Sherlock was manipulating Watson to be in the precise point to see the jump but not the impact. Someone has to back up the truck so Sherlock can land, then take off, and explain all the bystanders.
teela’s plan works okay. Sherlock has arranged a bunch of plants to run up. But that makes it hard to make his “I was a fake, I really died” explanation last very long. It’s one thing to bribe the homeless network to feed you information, it’s quite another to keep someone else from paying them for info that Holmes faked his death. But I can’t imagine that many real medical folks (half a dozen in blue scrubs) being tricked by his pulse in 1 arm. For starters, there are two arms. Plus, there’s the pulse at the neck. And of course, checking for breathing is likely.
I struggle accepting that part. And the part about the trash truck being where he could land in it. He didn’t get that far away from the building in his fall.
Was it definitely Sherlock who arranged for the call? It seemed clear to me that he understood that Mrs. Hudson was not really in danger, but due to the similarity to the original story I assumed that Moriarty was responsible for the call and that Sherlock realized it was a ploy to get Watson out of the way and decided this was for the best.
Good point, although this wouldn’t be the only plot hole in the series. It could also be that Sherlock had a plan to fake his own death if necessary but would have preferred not to go through with it, since even if he was confident the plan would go off perfectly it would still be kind of a pain to have to go into hiding for an indefinite period.
I was just re-watching this episode. The dead hiker is shown face-up on the moor with his head on one of the few rocks protruding from the grass. The boomerang hit him and knocked him down, but it seems the implication was that the fatal blow to the head could have come from hitting the rock. Or maybe that just amplified the blow received from the boomerang. It’s unclear from the dialogue. It’s a nice fan wank around the smaller, lighter boomerang issue, anyway.
[Watson does say a “single blow to the back of the head.”]
The episode is showing in rerun on PBS right now, and I just saw the scene in question a second time.
When Moriarty explains that he has sent assassins after Sherlock’s only three friends, he says twice that only Sherlock’s death can save them. First he says something about how even if Sherlock tortures him, etc., it won’t do any good. But the second time he says “Your death is the only thing that’s going to call off the killers. I’m certainly not going to do it.” This is the last thing he says before Sherlock asks for a moment alone.
Moriarty stepping away didn’t reveal anything, it was his words. His earlier comment about torture being useless implied that he couldn’t call off the killers, but “I’m certainly not going to do it” indicates that he could but is determined not to do so.
Ultimately, Moriarty wasn’t trying to gain anything for himself, (neither in a material or social sense) but rather, was trying to cause an excellent story to take place. His ability to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to whomever he wanted made it pointless, from his point of view, to care about anything that was in any way centered on gaining anything for himself. Instead he wanted something awesome to happen. Something that would surprise and delight even him, who is so easily and incurably bored. This is why he was disappointed that he’d beaten Holmes so easily–because that story isn’t awesome. And this is why he killed himself–because the idea of a man finding he must kill himself in order to destroy his enemy makes for an awesome story, especially if the man is as awesome as Moriarty himself and the enemy is equally awesome.
I thought Moriarty’s suicide was one of the coolest things that has happened on a TV show in a long time.
Didn’t think this warranted a new thread:
Just saw the first of the second season. I thought the first season was great - this episode was even better! I wish there were more of them!
My kid went halvsie with me to get the DVD of season 2 for my birthday. We have watched the series, the documentary and both episodes that have commentary. Then we watched the first season again. It was a hellova saturday.
As mentioned above, I think, new episodes will start filming this January, and Cumberbatch says he’ll “always do Sherlock” because he loves the role so much. I, a distinctly non-tech type, am already starting to try to teach myself how to get at the new episodes immediately without having to wait five months or watch cropped-for-U.S. versions.
And Martin Freeman better “always do John”, because I can’t imagine anyone else in the part. I watched the commentary, too, and I liked Moffatt’s and Gatiss’s story of their auditions for the role of John Watson. They said many excellent actors auditioned, but Freeman clicked just right as far as the chemistry between the two.
There’s a list of props with detailed info on them, from the riding crop to the teakettle at 221B, at Sherlockology. The mobile phones of several characters are included.
I love the series, and find the lack of Hollywood polish just adds to the charm.
However, the Moriarty character fell very very flat for me. He didn’t seem threatening or believable as a villain at all. He just looked like a smarmy schoolboy who needs a good bitch-slap.
Is there a lack of polish? It seems very polished to me.
I’m torn on Moriarty. I have friends who love that character. And certainly, the Moriarty of the original books is dull as dishwater. In the series, he certainly is a vivid character.
But I find a tension between the idea that on the one hand he’s a spider, a mastermind criminal with a finger in every jar, a consulting criminal, to boot, and on the other hand he’s a Joker-level obsessive psychopath. The two don’t seem to match.
And I get kind of bothered by the idea of someone who has the unbelievable foresight and ability to account for so many possibilities in advance. It’s one thing to posit that Holmes has a remarkable ability to observe what’s in front of him and a fantastic memory that together allow him to draw deductions. It’s another thing for Moriarty to have the mind, time, and resources to do the work of what seems like it would take hundreds or thousands of dedicated, highly skilled workers who never make mistakes.
Just wanting to note: Ascenray’s post (#118) is three months after the prior post. This isn’t quite “resurrection of zombie thread” (which would be OK as well) but there is a significant hiatus… just callin’ it to yer attenshun.
Sherlock is a fantasy world where hero-genius always prevails, throwing CIA agents out of windows, and walking around Buckingham Palace in a bedsheet. They’ve spent a lot of money making some incredible scenes, which are great to watch, but unfortunately that also highlights where they’ve failed to spend money and the scenes are missing. For example, it would have served them well to use some money to establish Moriarty as the evil genius puppetmaster that he is supposed to be, but they didn’t really do that. I may be very wrong, but I put that down to budget constraints.
Along with the very cool text-messaging effects where the cell-phone texts scroll across planes in the structures of each scene (aside: where did they get that idea? Has it been done before?), there are also some really bargain basement effects.
Look at the beginning of the first episode where we see Watson’s wartime flashbacks. It looks like someone’s family video of a paintball game on a paddock in Coventry, paired with stock sound effects and sepia tone. It seems very old-school in terms of production values.
Even later in the Baskerville episode, the special ‘hallucination’ effects were just on the lower side of ordinary, didn’t you think?
All in all, it’s a great show, but I find it really uneven in production quality.
WearSherlock explains those unrealistic “special effects” in the Afghanistan scenes…
I find Sherlock extremely sleek & polished. The unscreened pilot, included with the first set of DVD’s/BluRays, shows just how much more money & care went into the show actually broadcast. But time is money. We only get 3 episodes with each series, even if each one is 90 minutes long. I don’t need to see every plodding detail.
The phone messages (& other details) projected on the screen are original to the show. I think Paul McGuigan, who directed most of the episodes, came up with the idea…
