I know, I know - the audience doesn’t have a right to an opinion. Or at least, not one that isn’t fulsome praise.
Do you think, if I were to gush about the episode, you’d still be telling me that my opinion was meaningless? It’s just as true - I doubt Moffat et al. care about my particular opinion one way or another.
so you gonna agree with me that that part was ridic and pretty stupid?
i gotta admit, i would have gone down to meet sherlock instead of letting him up. however what i would do and what others will do sometimes vary wildly.
there are many, many, oh so many times that i would do things differently than someone in a movie or tv show. there are more than enough real life examples of people doing odd, silly, illogical things, having janine let him up the lift, instead of her going down doesn’t bug me.
according to magnussen’s schedule he and his bodyguard were to be at a dinner elsewhere. i believe sherlock’s original plan was that janine would let him into the office where she was alone . then he and john would look for the papers after distracting or something to janine.
that was derailed by mary’s entry elsewhere in the office/penthouse. she did not use the same entry as sherlock. from the scene where mary was the client sherlock mentioned she came in and out from a separate point, perhaps a penthouse entry.
the plan would have been derailed with or without Mary by virtue of the fact that Magnussen was in his desk, with a bodyguard nearby, when Janine decide to let them up
Yeah it was at least heavily implied - I might be misremembering but I thought it may even have been explicitly said somewhere in the show.
I saw a snippet from a recent interview somewhere that said that His Last Vow is supposed to show Sherlock unbalanced and screwing up. He’s let his emotions off the leash since he got back and it almost gets him killed. Moffat and Gatiss have said that they consider this Sherlock to be immature. He hasn’t developed the right mix of compassion and cold reason yet.
[quote=“GovernmentMan, post:329, topic:653312”]
[ul]
[li]the ridiculous coincidence that Sherlock would happen to meet the personal assistant of Magnussen during Watson’s wedding.[/li][li]the fact that a big bad evil mastermind would have flighty person like Janine as his PA, who would let her BF sneak into her boss’ super secure, heavily-restricted “14 levels of security” office. ooh it’s because he’s proposing![/li][li]and apparently Magnussen was still in the office all the while? how else did he and his bodyguard get there? how did Mary get in?[/li][li]Mary not “shooting to kill”. he was literally on death’s door. his heart had flatlined. if he hadn’t known to fall backwards, didn’t get the “will to live” through imaginary Moriarty, or had the ambulance just been a tiny bit late, or any number of other things, he would have died for sure. [/li][li]Magnussen frisks Sherlock and John in Baker St, but not in his own? How did his security guys forget this?[/li][li]Mycroft having a laptop containing top-secret information on him during a visit to his parents?[/li][li]Magnussen revealing that there are no physical proof of any of his info, that it was all in his head. How stupid was this? What would stop the government from secretly having him killed now?[/li][li]also, this doesn’t have anything to do with this episode, but it’s been bugging me: the apparent existence of perfect body doubles that are able to fool Sherlock and Mycroft into thinking certain people are dead.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I agree with pretty much all of this, except the first part. She was the maid of honor and Sherlock was the man of honor. That was the whole banter at the start of the wedding about the tradition of them getting it on. I can’t remember if it’s implied or stated that Mary was friends with her to get close to Mag to start with.
However, pretty much the rest of this episode was crap.
Consider, had Sherlock not shown up at precisely the correct instant (say 1 minute later), Mag would have been dead, Mary’s secret would have been kept, the end.
Furthermore, Sherlock solved no mystery, caught no criminals, and finally ended the situation with blunt force–which any thug can do (and would have done with this turd of a man long before, considering how stupid and vile he was). On top of that, the exposition Sherlock gave us at the beginning of the vault was some of the clunkiest exposition ever, and turned out to be completely wrong.
Lastly, we again have a case of the writers lying to the viewers again. The multiple scenes we had of the vault were complete fabrications intended to deceive us until the big reveal. Trying to be clever rather than being good. Sherlock died at the end of S2, and this is now SherLost.
And if Moriarty is somehow alive (rather than someone else who is just using his photo) that’s just more proof that the audience has been St. Elsewhere’d. Dreck.
I understand you. It was done badly, and the excuse “it’s based on the original story” doesn’t hold up as the way it was done in the original story makes far more sense.
The previous season ended with Sherlock apparently dead but in a surprise ending, actually still alive. So for this season to end with Moriarty apparently dead but in a surprise ending apparently still alive isn’t what I’d expect from this otherwise well-written show. So I’m hoping it’s actually someone else.
There’s an hour-long podcast or multi-page transcript with Moffat and Gatiss at Empire magazine where they resolve some of the points in question in this thread. I enjoyed listening to it.
I loved series 3, and am glad we have so much meat to chew on during the new hiatus.
"And if you actually think this through, suppose Sherlock hadn’t blundered his way in that night? She’d just have shot Magnussen, gone back to being Mrs. Watson – and not only that, they’d have carried on solving crimes together, with this lethal killer nurse wandering along behind them, picking off anyone who might put them in danger. That would’ve been the show. "
Shucks, now I’m all nostalgic for something that didn’t even happen.
Sherlock did die, then they changed it so he didn’t die. I won’t reiterate my whole screed about that, but it’s the same trick as the old serials showing the car going off the cliff with everyone dying, then in the next installment inserting a scene where the hero bails out of the car (and yet in the original sequence there wasn’t time for the scene to occur).
My tally for this series is 1.5-1.8 good episodes. The first one suffered because Sherlock didn’t survive, he was just magically made alive again. The second was nearly flawless, but the third was just terrible, with the plot holes enumerated above, and the fact that Sherlock is now a net detriment.
I agree with your last point. I hope Sherlock gets his act back together a bit in Series 4.
But I can’t agree with the first point. The original Sherlock Holmes was magically made alive again. This one survived through careful planning.
…why would I agree with you when I’ve already told you that I don’t?
There’s not a chance in hell that the screenwriters’ original plan was for Sherlock to die in the Moriarty face-off and then they changed it. That’s one of the major features of the original Conan Doyle set of stories: everyone including Watson thinks Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty, and then years later he reappears in Watson’s life. I’m gonna assume the screenwriters had read to the end of that story before they started writing the script for that episode.
Oh, and too late for edit:
One plot point in this series that I thought was glitchy: Sherlock says that the Mayfly Man’s ‘victims’ had nothing in common, including not having the same employer. But later he says that the Mayfly Man chose them because they all worked for Whatshisname, the soldier, and he wanted to get his hands on the wedding invitation. Did I miss something? Or mishear something?
They work for different companies, but are all contracted to work for him. So one works for the security company that provides security for him, one works for a cleaning company that does his cleaning, etc.
What exactly do you not agree with?
:smack: That makes sense - thanks! (Although I still think it was uncharacteristically sloppy of Sherlock not to find out if all their agencies had assigned them to the same client.)
To clarify my comment–we saw Sherlock alive and well at the end of Reichebach, so we knew he survived. However, the writers also showed us that it wasn’t possible for him to survive. He survived not by being Sherlock, but because It Was In The Script that he survived.