just for bringing things full circle, i believe that the flight shelock was on at the end was mjn air. (final episode for that taping on 23 feb.)
If you want to get really precise about it, I suppose it depends whether you think that the actions of the Mayfly are ones that would ever be taken by an intelligent and sensible criminal in the real world. We’ll assume that there’s an intelligent guy A who wants to kill someone B. The vast majority of the time (in the real world) A will do something very straightforward like wait outside B’s house, wearing gloves, with a pistol with the serial number filed off. Then he will shoot B, throw the pistol into a river, throw the gloves into a dumpster, and drive away. Not very interesting. In certain very rare situations A might, due to circumstances, rationally come up with a much more intricate plan. He might go so far as to do something like infiltrating a wedding party as a wedding photographer or something. What I’m saying is that the odds of a sensible and rational criminal deciding that his best plan to commit murder is the Mayfly’s plan, in the real world, and then getting so close to success that only the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes would stop him, is effectively zero. It would never happen. Never. And not only do I think that’s true, I think that’s pretty clearly true.
Which doesn’t mean that that makes Sherlock a bad show, or makes it dumb for someone to watch the show, or even makes it dumb for someone to enjoy trying to come up with appropriate fanwankery to justify every individual step of the Mayfly’s plan… so I guess my question is are you saying “aww, c’mon, here are some possible justifications for why individual parts of that plot might happen” in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink-devil’s-advocate way? Or are you saying “why, I actually do think that it’s plausible that an intelligent killer might adopt that intricate plan as the one most likely to succeed, should the situation be right”?
To me there’s a difference between “there’s an extremely clever and intricate, but self-consistent and ultimately plausible, plan. We only get to see some pieces of it, but the writers have thought through every last bit of it, and to the best of their knowledge, the whole thing actually does hold together, with minimal dramatic license” and “the writers have conceived a criminal plan which is created from the ground up purely to provide for interesting plot twists, neat Sherlock-y mind palace scenes, and fun character moments, and they have made minimal efforts if any to make the entire thing plausible or self-consistent. Then they have deliberately NOT filled in many of the blanks, not because they respect our intelligence as viewers, but because they fundamentally don’t have answers for what actually happened in those blanks”. It’s possible that the latter approach, on the whole, actually leads to more entertaining television. Tastes vary. But it certainly does not lead to television with fewer plot holes.
For you to say “I don’t need my hand held, my imagination works fine” is just as condescending as it would be for me to say “well, I guess some people just don’t want to actually THINK about the plot holes”.
Fair enough. Although if you think my version of Sherlock is one in which the audience is hand-held through every last step of every last plot twist, you are quite mistaken. I just would prefer there to be at least the POSSIBILITY of a cohesive and sensible explanation for what happened, that doesn’t mean I want it spoon-fed to me.
Another way of thinking about it is that you think your only two choices are between Sherlock and something lowest-common-denominator like NCIS; whereas I think they are between Sherlock and something like Breaking Bad.
…you are being purposely evasive. Am I a fool for disagreeing with you was the question I asked. Are you going to get around to answering that or not?
But in your opinion, they are foolish, and I’m a fool, correct?
The “are you saying” meme is so lame.
I’m saying what I said. There is nothing I hate worse than when people try and restate my words into a couple of strawman versions of what I said and then try to force me to choose between the two versions. Read what I wrote. I don’t think I’m being unclear.
You’ve just, IMHO, described Sherlock series 3.
This is obviously not a description of Sherlock series 3. IMHO of course.
I disagree. And if you’ve seen any of the interviews with the writers it is abundantly clear that they did not play these sort of games with the audience. Some of the blanks were not filled: but it wasn’t because they didn’t have the answers.
What you describe in your earlier posts are not “plot holes” and most (if not all) have “in universe” explanations that don’t resort to fan wankery.
From the guy who thinks I’m foolish for daring to disagree with your opinion: this is a bit rich.
I think your version would be like the TV series Elementary. I enjoy Elementary. But it is an unsurprising and a “by the numbers” procedural. Its predictable. Its been done.
I can’t stand Breaking Bad. I don’t enjoy watching horrible things happening to people: I get more than enough of that in real life. So personally the comparison you’ve just made makes absolutely no sense to me.
I hope that one photo isn’t of the one and only kitchen in that house - it looks like crap! He might be a great architect, but he is one horrible interior designer.
I’m with you on this one (except to point out that Mayfly didn’t sleep with his dates) and indeed asked this question earlier - how did he know who to date in order to find out the details of the wedding? The killer was methodical (and “monomanical”) but the plan makes no damn sense unless we at least get an inklng as to how this all was supposed to work.
Also, Sherlock gave up awfully easily on the locked-shower mystery. Even I could have come up with a reasonably plausible theory on that one.
The point about Janine being Magnusson’s PA gets weaker the more I think of it:
Magnusson knew Mary was a spy/assassin;
Magnusson knew Mary was getting married, including the date and location;
Magnusson had Janine under his thumb and flicking finger;
Either - Magnusson knew that Janine was bridesmaid at Mary the stealth killer’s wedding and didn’t find this connection between his inner circle and a pissed-off ninja to be a concern
Or - Magnusson somehow didn’t know, despite the close tabs he was keeping on both women, that they were best friends.
Both of those options seem (to me!) to be pretty implausible, given the characterisation of Magnusson. He’s a hyper-controlling, nigh-omnsicient manipulator who excavates people’s lives for fun and profit until the plot says he isn’t.
And, as has been pointed out, his whole power base is built on a house of cards. And it’s implausible again that at no point in his career was he ever challenged to provide proof. We know from recent revelations about the culture and practices of the British press that most celebs/politicians were indeed cowed - but not all. If real-world Steve Coogan and Charlotte Church could take these papers to trial despite the pressure to keep things hidden, it’s assuming a lot to say that no-one in Sherlock-world had similar nerve. And the risk was enormous. If he’d ever had his bluff called and it was shown he’d printed highly damaging statements with no proof, he’d have blown everything.
It doesn’t even need to be trial. “OK, Magnusson - you show me you’ve got the letters and I’ll do what you say”. “Well I can quote them.” “Sure, but just humour and unfold one in front of me please.” “Oops, I left them in my other pocket.”
That most people are too scared of a public fight I can buy. But that none of the explicitly powerful and capable people he has under his thumb ever thought to do due diligence or put up a fight is, again, sacrificing plausibility for a good story.
Your last few posts, including the one this came from, have been full of “Are you saying I’m a fool?”
Just saying.
I was okay with Magnusson’s “It’s all in my head”. You can know where the bodies are buried without having the bodies in your back yard. He wasn’t making shit up.
Agreed - he always had the goods (even if he later destroyed them). How would his victims know he never kept the evidence?
His position relied on him basically never lying. If you knew a guy who (a) never lied and (b) always made sure he had the goods before blackmail, you the victim would be intimidated - and if you weren’t, why other people would be ready to believe it.
The unbelievable part of that episode, to me, was Mary shooting Sherlock ‘just enough’ not to instantly kill him. Why not just kill both Sherlock and Magnusson? Watson would be OK, as she would then escape with the gun - there is no way the cops could pin it on him.
There’s a Sherlock mini-episode, “Many Happy Returns,” from before the current season began - I just learned about it. Pardon me if it’s already been posted in this thread.
Watch it here:
Learn more here:
Yes and no. It works on Mary because there are people he could call up and say “hey, remember that lady named (whatever) who screwed you over? here’s here current address”. It wouldn’t (or at least wouldn’t necessarily) work on the politician lady because it makes no sense for his paper to just publish a story saying “hey, the lady’s husband once sent love letters to an underage girl” without actually being able to produce the letters if sued.
He doesn’t have to publish. He just has to credibly have had the letters, and threaten to publish. The victim knows the accusation is true, and has no way of knowing he has destroyed the evidence.
Sure, if the victim (in the words of the Duke of Wellington) says ‘publish and be damned!’ to his threats, he may be in a difficult spot.
Dude, get over it. I used the phrase “is fooling himself”. That is clearly and distinctly different from “is a fool”.
As for my actual opinion of you, I don’t know you. Why would I have an opinion of you as a person? My opinion of the reasonableness of your claims in this thread depends on something I have not yet actually been able to figure out, namely, whether you do think that the overall crime scheme of the mayfly is one that plausibly could/would be planned and implemented to near-success in the real world. As far as I can tell your answer to that question is that yes, you do so believe. I believe that to a very clearly incorrect. But then, people think things I think are incorrect all the time, and I’m sure vice versa. Welcome to the internet.
If you do in fact think that that overall crime scheme is a plausible one, can you do us the great favor of laying out what you think happened, and why, step by step? There’s no point in debating the plausibility of something unless we agree on its details.
Regardless of what you might think of the tone of Breaking Bad (and it’s definitely a grim show), I’d argue that Breaking Bad has intricate plots filled with twists and turns that are not always spoon-fed to the audience, some of which are (now that the show is over) left eternally as mysteries, but it does NOT often have plot elements such as “he has these one-night stands in houses of recently deceased strangers” which are unjustifiable-by-real-world-logic.
Or even “show me this blackmail material”. Having all the material in his mind (even assuming that a “mind palace” could possibly exist, but that’s something I’m willing to have suspension-of-disbelief for since the entire show depends on Sherlock being able to do that kind of thing) is better for security, but much worse for actually-being-able-to-blackmail-people. Having it all in his mind and then TELLING SHERLOCK AND WATSON ABOUT IT is suicidal, because even if they are disgraced and arrested, Watson can presumably post on his widely-read blog “hey, outside world, just learned something interesting about Magnusson, in case you happen to be being blackmailed by him…”, at which point anyone being blackmailed by him knows (a) he can’t actually produce proof, and (b) if you just kill him dead then there is no beyond-the-grave threat.
…and I told you "I haven’t been “fooled”. Yet for some reason you insisted on arguing with me. Why are you arguing with me? I’ve got an opinion on something, you hold a different one. Such is life. But I’m not foolish for disagreeing with you.
And as I’ve said over and over Sherlock doesn’t exist in the real world. He is impossible. If you can accept the over the top nature of the crimes and solutions of the pilot episode: there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t accept the over the top nature of the crimes and solutions of the mayfly. If you can’t accept the mayfly: how on earth are you accepting the basic premise of Sherlock?
Did you watch the show? You want me to give you a plot summary? What I think happened was described by Sherlock and pretty much confirmed when the photographer was arrested. Was it plausible? Well it happened in show, didn’t it?
Breaking Bad doesn’t have the same plot as Sherlock? I’m shocked, really?
I’m glad you enjoy Breaking Bad and I’m sure its a great programme. But Sherlock is an entirely different kind of show. Its the kind of show where really over the top things happen. Its based on a series of books written over a hundred years ago and elements of those books are placed liberally, but differently, throughout the series in many different ways. The writers of the series have chosen to take the programme in a certain direction: which is certain to delight some people and upset others. There are details that you are hung up on that I really don’t care about. And if you entitled to get hung up on it and you are entitled to rant as much as you like about it. If you hadn’t of implied that the people who disagreed with you were foolish then I would have ignored your post. But I’m not a fool and I’m not deluding myself because I enjoy a piece of entertainment the way it was presented to me.
The “mind palace” thing is a real memorization technique - it’s been used for centuries, by people with a need to memorize vast amounts of stuff.
In fact, the Jesuit Priest Matto Ricci, wanting to impress the Chinese in the 16th Century with the fact that Western Culture had some things it did better than China (a hard sell), used the existance of the “memory palace” technique as his example!
The blackmail technique relies on the victim knowing that real evidence exists and that M. has it - given that he could, if he wanted, quote verbatum from provate letters etc.
M. may occasionally run into trouble with stubborn hold-outs, but that would be true even if he kept the goods.
M. told S. & W. about his memory palace because that was S.'s price. Presumably, he knew it was unlikely that S. would be believed if he said ‘none really exists’ - everyone would just assume M. lied to S. because his house was about to be raided. Only S. would find such a claim at all believable, exactly beause S. uses the same technique.
I believe Mycroft told Sherlock that Magnusson was basically harmless to keep Sherlock off Magnusson. Mycroft’s one pressure point was Sherlock. Magnusson was clearly not harmless, as he has a hold on every top person in the government, including the top man, Mycroft. By having a hold on Mary, therefore John, therefore Sherlock, therefore Mycroft.
At least with Mary, the threat wasn’t entirely about knowing her past, but knowing who to call who would put a serious hurt on her. If keeping her secrets secret didn’t make her play ball, maybe not siccing the Scalphunters on her would.
Possibly the other blackmail victims were similarly motivated.
I think this is the crux of the disagreement. I view (or at least viewED) the show as “well, it’s mostly the real world, with real world physics, laws of possibility, general human nature, general types of crime, geography, governments, and basic logic… EXCEPT that we stick in Sherlock who has what are basically mental superpowers. Later we find out that Moriarty and Mycroft have similar mental superpowers”. But that’s a model in which basic logic holds, and our basic knowledge about how the world works is relevant. Which is important for a show like this, because if part of the fun is trying (as you mention) to fill in the missing pieces, then it’s important that we have some knowledge of the basic constraints by which the world runs, and that they be similar to our world, so that we can even begin to speculate about what happened when and why and how.
It’s fun to say “hey, how did that happen? hmmm, well, I know X and Y and Z, so I think the only way it could possibly have happened is W”, and hope that one was smart enough to think of all the possibilities.
On the other hand, if the world of Sherlock is, while superficially similar to ours, so utterly divorced from reality that the most efficient way for a criminal to commit a crime is to invent super-stabbing and have one-night-stands in vacant houses of the newly deceased, well, there’s a kind of a gleeful fun in finding out these outrageous details, but it renders pointless any kind of “hmm, I think I will try to figure out what happened” because if the Sherlock world is that far divorced from our reality, then basically anything that is not actual Harry-Potter-style magic can happen, so instead of basically playing along and trying to deduce anything for ourselves, we might as well just turn off our real-world-critical-thinking-skills and enjoy the ride.
And, hey, it’s a fun show, but I feel like that level of divorce from reality makes it at some level less satisfying than what I initially envisioned, the real-world-logic-but-with-Sherlock show.
Just watched S3E3 last night.
I really didn’t think much of Magnusson. Sure, he was creepy, but as pointed out, the whole “I can blackmail anyone!” schtick will fall apart once you try to blackmail someone that just doesn’t give a damn. Or has half a brain - I specifically thought that Lady Smallwood was going to call Magnusson’s bluff in the beginning; “Oh, you have my husband’s letters! Oh, whatever will I do… about some 30 year old crap that happened before I even met the man. Seriously, I deal with bigger scandals on a weekly basis. Oh, and my desk is bugged, so security is on the way to arrest you for attempted blackmail. Be fun to seize your estate and rifle through everything while you’re sitting in jail”. Instead we get - “Oh no, my hubby my have something dredged up from decades ago! I guess you can lick my face now.” :rolleyes:
EDIT: while I have enjoyed the show, like most people here, I agree that the plot holes detract from the show quite a bit, because mysteries should have an element of “can the viewer figure it out”, again, like most people here.