It was a practice run. Proof of concept. ‘Can I, in fact, stab a guy through one of these belts and have it go unnoticed?’
She obviously didn’t know he was in the next room, as he was supposed to be out to dinner. Mary coming in with a gun apparently put a crimp in his evening’s plans.
Actually, now that I think about it more, Mary would have had to hit Janine and the bodyguard in the reception area before going into Magnussen’s room, as it wouldn’t have made sense for her to be in there first, then come out to hit them and go back in. And this would have had to take place in the time the elevator took to deliver John and Sherlock to that floor. So the question remains, why wasn’t Magnussen at dinner like he was supposed to be?
It’s still pretty obvious that Janine didn’t know he was still there, or she’d have said something like “I can’t let you up, my boss is here!” and would definitely not have let them up. She didn’t strike me as being at all stupid, much less that stupid.
i agree janine was in an outer office, magnusen was running late for some reason. he should have been out of the office totally.
if after seeing sherlock with the ring, she even gave cam a thought, it would be that he was in his flat, on the way out, or out of the building.
remember that we only see bits and bobs of sherlock’s life. in this series the 4.5 hours we see are over a year and a bit of time. many of the details are filled in by the viewer, that is why there are so many different views of what did or did not happen.
A lot of the ‘Why would Janine…?’ questions hinge on the way the actress played the part. She had a really difficult line to walk. She had to make the character silly/ditzy enough to let Sherlock into the lift when she saw the ring, but she also had to make the character smart enough that we’d be willing to believe (until Sherlock reveals why he’s with her) that someone like Sherlock was actually into her, and smart enough to be PA to Magnussen. That’s a nearly impossible balance. I think she did a lovely job of it, but if anything she leaned slightly towards making Janine no idiot, which makes the ring thing a little less believable.
Think of it this way: if she’d played Janine as a total dizzy idiot (which the script definitely would’ve allowed her to do), then no one would be asking ‘Why would she let Sherlock up with the ring?!’ But if she had, most people would have been suspicious, from the moment she showed up as Sherlock’s girlfriend, that he was going out with her for some more complex reason.
There is no possible way she didn’t know.
Magnussen’s office and seat are in plain view of that reception area or whatever. There wasn’t even a door separating the two rooms.
Not to mention she would have known if he was out since he would have to go past her to get to the elevator.
It’s totally unbelievable that Magnussen would even have someone even a little bit ditzy like Janine as his PA. Ruthless genius big bads like him would probably have some hypercompetent assistant (and probably even someone he would trust to know about his extracurricular activies) and not someone who’s all " my BF is proposing. aw shucks i can’t help but let him in my boss’s, who’s really anal about this security stuff and is a really creepy and scary man in general, office!"
I think it’s possible that Janine had her own reasons for letting Sherlock into the office, beyond the engagement scenario. It’s suggested later in the episode that she’s not just working for Magnussen because it’s a great job. She has to let him flick her in the eye.
She did seem really happy about selling he story to the tabloids and getting out from under cam’s flicking finger.
A Sherlock big-screen movie someday? It could happen: http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/01/20/sherlock-movie-benedict-cumberatch-martin-freeman/?hpt=hp_t3
I don’t see the point of a movie. The episodes are that long anyway, and they make 3 of them per series/season, even if they’re a couple of years apart. Making them movies may allow them to be slightly longer, and involve slightly larger budgets, at the expense of a lot more time and risk.
Watched the final Season 3 episode last night.
Magnussen is one creepy bastard. I liked the comment from the podcast saying that he was being honest about being a businessman - he didn’t have a master evil plan, he didn’t have any specific goals other than accumulating knowledge, and he was so used to being in control that he never even thought about the possibility of someone shooting him. Someone who practices flicking his secretary in the eyeball and wiping their fingers in people’s water glasses doesn’t live their life thinking that other people have enough gumption and agency to act on their resentment and shoot him over his presumption. This works much better set in England than in the USA for obvious reasons.
I wish we could have seen a bit more of ‘drunken’ Mycroft. That was a sweet little scene, with them hiding their cigarettes.
I also hope Janine comes back. She’s feisty. I liked that dig about a cottage in Sussex with beehives - it’s a callback to the originals where Holmes retires to become a beekeeper in Sussex and lives in a cottage in the country. Nice ironic touch there.
It’s a rumor that Season 4 is coming on Christmas, any further (officialish) word on that?
i was amused by watson being outraged over the fireplace, sherlock zeros in on the letters. total picture of who they are.
Which is why he goes to people’s houses with an army of guards and has them checked for weapons. Give me a break.
…one thing I realized over night: how many people actually died in series three? Was Sherlock the only person this season who actually committed a murder?
The guy in the second episode killed that guard. Uh…he did die, didn’t he?
…no he lived, because Watson saved his life, it was a key point of Sherlock’s speech.
Thanks, I forgot.
Um - ok, wow. Episode 2 was easily one of the most enjoyable bits of TV I’ve seen in years. Ditto Episode 3. I mean, if you found Episode 2 ‘boring’ and Episode 3 ‘garbage’, you should have found all previous episodes even more so. So why the fuck are you even watching something you obviously think is rubbish?
Go threadshit somewhere else please.
… until someone actually comes this close to shooting him. You might think that would cause him to re-assess the odds that someone would try to shoot him.
There was an offscreen death in Ep 1 - Mycroft’s agent who died to pass on the “underground network” clue. Other than that, I think you’re right.
See, I don’t understand what’s so complicated about this. He knows nobody will (or should) try to kill him without retrieving / destroying the copies of the documents being used to blackmail them (I can’t remember; do we know Mary was going to out-right kill Magnussen, or was she just going to threaten him to get him to turn over the documents on her?).
In the final scenes, he reveals that all the ‘evidence’ is only in his head - but does so with the full knowledge that Mycroft and police etc. are already on the way. In other words - he knows that Sherlock can’t kill him without being basically caught red-handed and thrown in jail for a Very Long Time. It never crosses his mind that Sherlock would be willing to do just that.
I also thought there’s a small chance the episode was sort of a homage to Curtain, Agatha Christie’s last novel with Hercule Poirot. The villain in the novel uses just enough psychological pressure to provoke someone to commit murder; Poirot himself kills the villain…by shooting him in the head.