BC on Sesame Street: Benedict Cumberbatch must solve a mystery of his own on Sesame Street
On the last season of 24, Katee Sackhoff’s character was blackmailed by an old boyfriend. She practically destroyed her life jumping thru hoops obeying his every whim, then spent two episodes agonizing over killing him and his buddy. Later that same “day” as her character is outed as the season mole, she coldly kills people to protect her cover and shoots people randomly during various escape attempts, and is seen standing up to being waterboarded. It was some of the worst plotting I’d seen, until this.
Numerous powerful people who regularly order the death’s of others are blackmailed for what appear to be decades before it occurs to someone to just blow him away? C’mon!
I enjoyed the ep, with its twist and characters, but the bad guy was just silly.
The reason no-one killed him before is that no-one knew what he had in place to reveal secrets should he be killed. Everyone assumed that he had vaults filled with his blackmail material under his house.
Sherlock is the only person likely to believe his “memory palace” device, exactly because Sherlock uses the same device. Hence, Sherlock is the only person able to kill him without fear of blackmail material being disclosed.
Okay. So Mary was there to kill him because…? She was pretty desperately trying to make sure John didn’t find out, and she seemed to think a .22 to his brain would solve her problem.
Mary’s also established as a LIAR, and John has believed her so far. If Magnussen is dead, she could easily be willing to lie her ass off to him. Sherlock hasn’t said anything, so either he doesn’t know about her, or he knows and figures it’s her business. (According to Nary’s thinking, anyway)
Mary, like everyone else, didn’t know there was no vault. So you’re saying her plan was to kill him, wait for the info to surface, and deny everything. Even though it’s pretty certain that 1) groups of people would show up trying to kill them and 2) groups of people would show up trying to arrest her? She seems a bit smarter than that.
The only way her actions make sense is if she knew there was no vault, putting her ahead of Sherlock at reaching the obvious solution to dealing with the problem. But then, you’re faced with the conundrum of why let Sherlock do it in front of everyone when a professional who was far less likely to get caught was available and motivated?
Mary’s case was different. She wasn’t being blackmailed over threats to her reputation that would be published in a newspaper, but a private and personal threat that her secret background would be whispered in just the right ears. Frankly, M. was a fool to attempt to blackmail an assassin.
The biggest plot-hole I can’t find a reason for is why Mary doesn’t just shoot them both dead. How does it help her to wound Sherlock? The notion that murdering them both would put John behind bars doesn’t fly, as presumably she would walk out with the gun.
Her situation was different in that the knowledge she was formerly an assassin doesn’t need files to prove. Merely knowing it - and whispering it in the right ears - is enough. The people who want her are presumably the types who can find their own proof.
Saving Sherlock’s life helps her a great deal; also, killing him would mean hurting John a great deal. She saw what John went through the first time Sherlock died.
That’s very true about Magnusson should have known and cared about Mary becoming friends with Janine. I would have thought that Magnusson would find out about them becoming friends, then would have a meeting with Mary in a restaurant or something and tell her that he knows what she’s trying to do and it won’t work.
Also, his regard for security makes no sense. It would have made much more sense if he was super arrogant about how no one could hurt him because of all the information he had, and so he had no bodyguards with him when he went to Baker Street. Then he got spooked after almost being murdered by Mary, then had bodyguards and more security at the end of the episode. Sherlock could still get a gun or something somehow and shoot Magnusson.
That’s very true about asking for proof regarding blackmailing. I’ve never been blackmailed, but if I ever was, the first thing I’d do would be ask for the proof. Politicians and celebrities often have rumors about various bad deeds they’ve done. If he threatened a politician with blackmail about an affair the politician had, but didn’t show any proof, the politician could just call his bluff and not pay Magnusson. Then if Magnusson published in his paper without any proof that the politician had an affair, the politician could deny it, and say something about the horrible rumors spread by his opposition.
This works in some cases, like in Mary’s case where there are buried bodies. But wouldn’t work as well for events like adultery or drug use at a party or something. Someone threatening to expose your adultery last year with your secretary, with clear pictures of the event, and receipts, and several sworn eyewitness accounts is a scary thing that would probably get you to pay the blackmailer. Someone threatening to expose your adultery last year but with no proof is still a concern, but one you could manage without paying the blackmailer.
Maybe Magnusson could just blackmail people like Mary where proof stored in physical files isn’t necessary. But the other blackmail threat we’re shown is when he is threatening blackmail over some letters a man wrote to an underage woman. Without those letters, then that blackmail attempt is pointless.
How long did Magnusson blackmail people for? I would think some people would just get tired of paying, or think that their secret coming out would hurt less than continuing to pay. Then if some people stopped paying and no proof came out, I would think that word would get around.
I’m guessing Mary didn’t intentionally kill Sherlock because she does like him and she loves John, and she knows that if Sherlock died (again!) it would hurt John. Mary did look conflicted when she heard that Sherlock was alive. I’m sure she’d have been relieved if he was dead since that would be less trouble for her, but also glad John didn’t lose his friend.
That’s a very good point about his blog. Magnusson telling them that his vault is actually in his mind palace was not smart at all. But I can kinda go with that, since it’s a common trope of the villain being too arrogant, and telling his plans to the hero even though it ends up ruining things for him.
How accurate are “mind palaces” in real life? The wikipedia article mentions people using it to memorize decks of cards and digits of pi and things like that, but I would think that would be different that remembering much different facts about many different people, including dates, times, addresses, amounts of money, relations between people, and all sorts of other things. And all of the facts would have to be remembered extremely precisely and accurately to be of any use as blackmail.
I’m not saying this to nitpick the show, I can go with the mind palaces being amazing and accurate in the show, I’m just curious about how much that corresponds to real life.
Reminds me of the Nero Wolfe story built around (spoilers? seriously?) a blackmailer who only ever threatens to expose people for stuff they haven’t done, but where it’s always something downright plausible, and the victim only ever gets asked for an endurably small amount of money to prevent the evidence-free rumormongering.
Of course, that blackmailer eventually – inevitably, if you will – targets someone who actually did it, and of course has no Release-After-My-Death evidence stashed away to stop someone from resorting to murder, because he thinks he’s once again playing the old game, and, hoo, boy, he ain’t.
I don’t really know. I’ve never attempted the technique myself. By all accounts I have read, some people can perform amazing feats of memorization using this technique (remember that in real life the Jesuits used it to impress Chinese scholar-officials - no slouches themselves in memorizing tons of stuff, given how their written language works!), but as to how amazing - that I could not say. I suspect it would be only the very, very unusual person who could use it to obtain near-eidetic memory.
But from my perspective, that’s the type of suspension-of-disbelief I’m perfectly happy to make for purposes of an entertaining TV show… it’s the logic of motivations surrounding things like why-didn’t-Mary-go-through-with-killing-Magnusson that bother me. (Because John would be a suspect? Ridiculous… shoot Magnusson dead. Shoot Sherlock to wound. Shoot John in the shoulder without letting him see your face. How is John a suspect?)
Obviously it was enough for Lord Smallwood to kill himself. At least, the headline of the newspaper that Lady Smallwood was reading when conferencing with Mycroft and the others just before Sherlock’s plane took off said so.
Mind palaces apparently work best for people with very visual, spatially oriented minds.
I read a study where they talked about chess players and how they visualize the board and the placement of the pieces in several iterations, and how that was very similar, mentally, to creating a mind palace, but I can’t remember where I found it online. Most likely Popular Science.
I do know that I have a decent memory, and I have a weird tic for remembering random things that I’ve read (the internet screws that over something horrible, but if it’s physically printed, I can recall page formats and where the info is on the page/which side of the page/how far through the book) and I can’t do mind palaces for SHIT.
I spent a good couple of years trying to build one because I read about it and it seemed really useful, but I get hung up on the visualization aspects. Just cannot do it. As a related note, I suck equally hard at that “rotate complicated objects in your mind” task, and my navigation drives my husband utterly mad, so I think I’m just a bad candidate for the conceptual format.
except he knows where the material is and he says he can get it if needed. As to “Mary” he threatened her life outright by saying he knows people who would like a piece of her and has their phone number. SHE should have been the one to kill him. I don’t understand how forgiving Sherlock was of getting shot by her.
chess has always been about how many iterations you can process ahead of your opponent. I can’t get very far on that but I use to be very good at assembling and and rotating stuff I was trying to build in my head. I think this is a different talent than number of permutations. You’re focused on a single purpose versus a task that has many multiple paths. The few times I’ve gone through and discarded large numbers of options in my head it seemed to be done on a subconscious flash of activity. I would greatly enjoy being able to do that at will.
It certainly wasn’t entirely clear to me what the deal was. If his basic plan was:
(1) get ahold of some blackmail material
(2) memorize it in his mind palace
(3) hide it somewhere very far away, but fetchable if necessary
(4) start a rumor that there’s a huge vault under his house where he keeps all his blackmail material, just so that anyone who wants to try to retrieve the material will be looking in the wrong place
Then that’s actually a reasonable and non-nonsensical plan. Is that his plan? It kind of might be, but it’s left vague. (Certainly doesn’t explain why he didn’t bother having his goons frisk our heroes before letting them into his house.)
yes he was vague but he did say he could get his hands on it if he wanted to. But that was his mistake. by saying he didn’t have a central vault containing it all the solution became obvious. Kill him and his empire of threats melt into their individual unrelated hidy-holes.
He did apparently have the letters, and he did say to Sherlock and John that even though most of his ‘files’ were in his mind palace, he could get his hands on hard copies when he needed to.