It’s pretty obvious (to me, anyway) that she actually likes Sherlock (and thinks he’s good for John, whom she clearly does love)
Moffatt and Gatiss have both been deeply into the stories since they were boys, and said they have always believed that Watson’s somewhat vague report of how Milverton was murdered by the strange woman was actually because either Watson or Holmes truly shot him. And Watson could not, of course, admit that in his story. That has always been their considered personal reading of the canon, and they decided to go there with their show.
Elementary and the Holmes-inspired Mentalist have already gone there.
Then why does she shoot him at all? Remember that he almost did die, right on the operating table. I can’t buy that she was such an amazing shot that she knew for sure he’d pull through.
Moreover, even assuming he did pull through, isn’t he likely to tell John about it? She would have a better chance simply asking him not to - or killing him stone dead.
Shooting and almost killing him seems the worst of all worlds for her.
I sometimes dip into the analyses by more-obsesssed fans, some of who are vigorously applying their education in literary criticism, or their teaching of film studies. They scrutinize every frame, and find stuff I never thought of.
Here’s an interesting one about Mary being a fabulous villain because she’s a stone-cold psychopath.
Sure it can be fan-wanked (although not very satisfyingly), but it shouldn’t HAVE to be.
Sherlock has no particular regard for life, IMHO. Nobody complained when John shot the taxi driver. Sherlock wasn’t in danger from the driver, he was in danger from his own psyche. Sherlock tortured the dying guy to get the info he wanted (Moriarty’s name) and congratulated John on his deadly shot. He ensured that Mr. Hudson would be executed. He left the butcher to die in Russia (or Kiev or someplace). And I think he more or less assassinated one of the CIA guys in “A Scandal in Belgravia”. (At least that’s how I remember it - he shouted “Vatican Cameos” to John, threw himself to the side, picked up the gun and shot the guy who was to his left, holding a gun on him).
When Mycroft (and his assistant) declared “Someone died to get us the information that there was an underground terror network about to blow up London”, Sherlock pretty much thought he’d wasted his life.
I don’t think to Sherlock there’d be much difference between watching someone else pull the trigger and pulling it himself.
StG
I’m going to re-watch a scene tonight to try to clarify something in my mind.
Was Sherlock using or not? When John asked Molly after the pee-test, Molly didn’t just say yes or no. She said “Clean . . .?” and then slapped Sherlock silly.
After this scene, John seems to completely forget about the whole issue, which he wouldn’t have if he thought Sherlock was back into drugs. I must have missed something in the fast dialogue, which wouldn’t be the first time.
Gatiss has actually been a Who villain more than once, but buried under latex and make up on some occasions. He was the alien playing Live Chess with the Doctor who later took him into the tower with the hungry skulls.
Of course. Why wouldn’t he?
You’re right: Moffat had her making the worst possible choice. I can’t see that there was any payoff for his decision in the episode. Next season there may be a payoff, I suppose. But it does seem sloppy.
Agreed.
I don’t think you missed anything; it was simply dropped.
Of course I made no such assertion. Naturally, that strawman is far easier to knock down than would be my actual assertion:
I’d be interested to see you wrestle with my actual claim, instead of making up something that I didn’t say and criticizing the fabrication.
What fan-wanking? I’m going by Magnussen’s own words in 221B…
You don’t buy it, even after she plugs a coin in a dimly-lit corridor?
That she’s a super-accurate shooter, that I can buy.
That she knows that a bullet shot into Sherlock in a particular spot will almost, but not quite, kill him, no.
There are simply too many variables - how long it will take the medics to reach him, Sherlock’s medical history, where major organs and blood vessels are in his body (slightly different for each person), etc. In the episode itself, Sherlock states that falling backwards will increase his chances over falling forwards. She can’t know which way he will fall.
The ability to shoot the centre out of a coin simply isn’t enough.
I agree.
Also: how likely is it that falling forward would be a better choice for someone shot in the abdomen, assuming they have enough presence of mind and coordination to be able to make a choice? Even if said shootee doesn’t have a mirror conveniently placed so as to confirm whether the bullet has gone straight through or is still in the body…would falling on one’s face ever be a more optimal choice?
The whole thing seemed like a poor excuse to use the “mind palace” (as a setup for its appearance later). Who would need a mind palace to decide such a thing? It came off as contrived.
I’m talking in this case specifically about:
We’re specifically shown earlier how very paranoid Magnusson is about personal safety. And he has to be, because he’s a blackmailer, and more specifically a blackmailer who (as far as we can tell) has NOT done any of the “and if I die, a trusted associate will make all this info public” stuff that blackmailers so often do. Which they NEED to do, because that provides them with protection from just being shot-in-the-head.
Furthermore, to approach this with the remotest amount of common sense, having people searched for weapons wouldn’t be something he had to invoke, it would be the absolute expected default behavior that his security staff (and he must have money to hire very very good and thorough security) would always apply to anyone.
So why on earth would Sherlock (who Magnusson must be aware is one of the handful of most dangerous men in England) and Watson (who has every reason to be a very enraged husband) NOT be searched?
And further-FURTHERmore, they could easily have been searched, and then instead of shooting him dead with Watson’s gun, Sherlock could kill him at the same moment, fulfilling all the same dramatic beats, in some OTHER fashion, one that does not make the writers look moronic. In fact, it would be a great moment for some super-clever bit of Sherlock-y-ness, in which he used his super brain to have come up with a super awesome plan to sneak a weapon in, which “put a gun in the coat” definitely was not.
Obviously it was moronic for Magnusson not to search them, because it led 100% directly to him getting killed. And we were told (and in other contexts shown) how brilliant he was. So what’s more likely: that Magnusson made a massively idiotically beginner-level stupid error? Or that the Sherlock writers did?
…the purpose of the first search was not to “search.”
It was, as Mr Dribble put it, to “mark his territory.” Sherlock dominates any room he is in. Magnusson entered Sherlocks domain, had Sherlock frisked and searched, whipped out his dick and pissed in the fireplace. The message that Magnusson was sending wasn’t “I think you’ve got a gun or a microphone and I’m gonna search you” it was “I’m the top dog. And you are nothing. I have nothing to fear from you.” Magnusson wanted to show that he was in control, that he was the boss.
There is no “fan wanking” going on with my explanation. This is what happened on screen.
So you’re saying that Magnusson, who is a brilliant and careful strategist who maintains his power purely through extortion and blackmail, whose entire life is based on making people hate him, does NOT take precautions to keep people from just randomly killing him? He sometimes PRETENDS to, but it’s purely as part of his dominance posturing?
Character traits don’t materialize out of thin air. A competent writer shows traits that flow naturally from a full character. I don’t know about Holmes and Wagner, but if you have developed a Holocaust survivor character hating Wagner would be a very reasonable thing for this character to do, even if you as the author love Wagner.
Holmes - and not just in this episode - is shown as intensely loyal to Watson and thus to Mary, patriotic, and a high functioning sociopath. Magnusson is not only a threat to Mary but also a threat to England - remember he bragged about using the methods he has developed in England to more or less take over the world. A non-sociopath might find another way to deal with the problem, but Holmes doing what he did comes directly from his character. You can’t say anything about what the writers would do, since they are not sociopaths.
The mark of a good villain is that the villain operates rationally given his personality and morality. That doesn’t mean the author agrees with it.
A writer whose characters only do things the writer things is proper to do is worse than a hack.
I agree with this line of thinking, and, having just seen S3E3, want to add…Magnusson, who was not himself British, *despised *the English. He called them a “nation of shopkeepers”, which is not something a writer puts in by accident. You know who else called them a nation of shopkeepers?
Magnusson thought he had *beaten *Sherlock and Watson and could safely flick Watson in the face while they waited to be arrested for high treason.
Which leaves two questions, one in-universe and one out-universe. In-universe, what possible reason was there for him NOT to have security goons involved? There’s a reason that “if I die, this information will all go public” is such a common trope in blackmailing stories, which is that the blackmailer is by very definition REALLY REALLY REALLY pissing people off. And historically, people who are super pissed off have a tendency to employ violence. (The only remotely fanwanky answer I can come up with that makes sense is that Magnusson thinks that he has an amazing ability to figure out how to push people right up to the edge of violence but not over it, and in fact kind of gets off on it, kind of like people who do rock climbing without ropes.)
Out-universe, as I’ve said several times, it would have been trivially easy for the writers to have all of the security there, have them search Holmes and Watson, and then have everything else play out exactly as it did, except that instead of Holmes killing Magnusson with a hidden gun, he does it with some super-awesome-Sherlock-genius-trick. All the same emotional beats are there, Holmes has been defeated in the intellectual game and has to resort to violence because of how much he cares about Watson, etc., etc., but then we wouldn’t be having this huge argument.
(It’s also worth pointing out that Magnusson came within seconds of getting shot in the head mere weeks earlier, and was saved not at all because of his own trickiness, which you’d think would make him a bit cautious about such things…)