Actually, I think there is something to support this - the question of why Sherlock had a gun in the first place.
We know Sherlock doesn’t carry a gun just in case, so he brought it for a reason. As has been mentioned, releasing blackmail documents on the death of the blackmailer is standard procedure, so if Holmes thought that there were actual pictures and documents in the vault killing Magnusson would be stupid. Therefore, Holmes had to know that the information was locked in Magnusson’s head, which was the only case in which killing Magnusson would make sense.
How could Sherlock know? I think it was Magnusson’s act of inviting him. Magnusson has insulted Watson but has not yet demeaned Holmes. Pissing in his fireplace didn’t seem to do it. The only way would be to dominate Holmes intellectually, by showing that Holmes was totally wrong and could never make Mary safe.
This also explains why Magnusson didn’t have his security check for guns. (Which is a good point.) He was sure that Holmes thought the had the stuff in the vault, which meant that killing Magnusson would lead to disaster for Mary and England, and that therefore Holmes would never bring a gun, and therefore patting him down was so very ordinary and would seem to indicate that he was not sure about what Holmes would do.
We saw Holmes being superficially charming and manipulative in this same episode – that’s how he got Janine to go out with him. He’s pulled the same kind of thing on Molly once or twice before.
That said, I agree with others that Sherlock probably isn’t really a sociopath but just likes claiming to be one. I suspect most of his issues in dealing with people can be explained by the fact that he’s much more intelligent than most of the people he meets BUT grew up in the shadow of an even more brilliant older brother.
i’m reckoning some school councillor or psych. may have put sociopath in his “permanent record” at some point. sherlock found it helpful and goes with it. rather like sheldon stating he is not crazy, his mother had him tested.
well done teela brown! now see if you can get her email and send her gif links.
It’s a well-thought-out theory, but if Moffat had it in mind, wouldn’t he have Watson only asking to see the vault, and Sherlock simply looking superior while Watson makes the demand? Wouldn’t there have been stage directions in the teleplay along the lines of “when the “vault” doors are opened, Watson looks flabbergasted but Sherlock carries on looking smugly superior” or the like?
Instead we had Sherlock asking to see the vault, and looking just as flummoxed as Watson, for several beats, after the doors are opened.
Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. Moffat and Gatiss are free to do with the character whatever they please.
But the fact is that Arthur Conan Doyle never showed, nor reported via another character, Holmes murdering anyone in cold blood.
Attempts to get around this with assertions that ‘Conan Doyle meant to show it’ or that ‘Conan Doyle wanted us to infer it’ or that ‘Conan Doyle really thought of Holmes as someone who would do cold-blooded murder in certain circumstances’ or…whatever…are not sufficient to counteract the fact that Conan Doyle never showed, nor reported via another character, Holmes murdering anyone in cold blood.
Now, readers and viewers are perfectly within their rights to declare approval for characters who, in certain circumstances, kill fellow-humans despite not being in any immediate danger from those humans. Such readers and viewers are also within their rights to call for depictions of Sherlock Holmes in which he kills fellow-humans despite (etc.).
But the fact is that up until this latest episode, the show Sherlock has not been one of those many fictional productions in which the hero does cold-blooded murder.
Is this change for the better? Opinions clearly differ; Sherlock’s ultimate ratings fate may be affected or may not. Given the number of factors at work, it might not be possible to tease out the influence of this one.
But it’s futile to pretend that this episode didn’t cross a line.
Which proves what, exactly, about the Gatiss/Moffat show?
As mentioned above, writers are free to do anything they please with public domain characters. New directions may prove to be popular or artistically successful or both–or neither.
For example: For many decades, particularly following the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampire stories were dark, violent, gothic, and macabre. Variations over the years offered some innovations in tone, adding a more explicit and center-stage treatment of glamour and sex. But Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series turned our first associations with the term “vampire” into “teen melodrama”.
Did that new direction in the depiction of vampires violate the spirit of the original stories? Arguably, it did.
Another example: Beginning in the 1940s, several popular and well-received novels and movies portrayed life in POW camps in Nazi Germany. There was often some comic relief in these stories, but on the whole they were serious stories of heroism in adversity.
In the 1960s, the American TV show Hogan’s Heroes told such a story in an innovative way: as a situation comedy, complete with wacky, goofy Nazis. It was very popular. But did it violate the spirit of the original stories? Yes, of course.
I’m not saying that the makers of innovative variations on originals are bad or wrong. I’m just saying that once you make a change that violates the original enough, then you have A New Thing.
If Gatiss and Moffat want to strap a bandolier and shotgun back-scabbard on Holmes, and have him go around gunning down people who annoy him, then they can do exactly that. It might be a very entertaining show.
But it won’t be Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
…I was going to address the silly *‘you said that writers are incapable of writing characters who differ from themselves!!’ *claims from a few pages back…but… ridiculousness is ridiculousness. If I need to say more, I’ll say it later.
Mycroft warns Sherlock away from the Magnusson case, and Sherlock tells him to stay away from his bedroom. This implies he doesn’t want Mycroft to know he’s seeing Janine, because since Mycroft knows everything, he’d know that Janine was Magnusson’s P.A. and Sherlock’s point of entry to the office building.
So Mycroft doesn’t know Sherlock is seeing Janine. Why then does Janine call him Myke and say that the brothers fight all the time? She must have stayed hidden in the bedroom a lot.
It is true that in the original short stories by Conan Doyle, Sherlock never himself killed anyone.
On the other hand, he essentially approved of or protected murderers several times, and outright declared that he would have killed in like circumstances at least once.
The story I’m thinking about is The Devil’s Foot. Sherlock knows that the murderer who killed the last of the Trigellis family is the African Explorer. He killed in revenge - the wretch the Explorer murdered had previously murdered the Explorer’s long-time girlfriend (the wretch’s own sister) with fear-inducing poision (the Explorer kills the wretch the same way).
Holmes lets him go, without telling the police. Watson questions this decision. Holmes says something like “I have never loved, but if I had, and the woman I loved met such a fate, I’d have done the same as [the Explorer]”.
So clearly Sherlock was not adverse to killing, under some circumstances. Even revenge killing. In summary, Sherlock himself, in the original stories, was a character who did “… declare approval for characters who, in certain circumstances, kill fellow-humans despite not being in any immediate danger from those humans.”.
Because if he didn’t ask, and didn’t look surprised (which he did during the standoff) Magnusson would have caught on that he knew. Sherlock is an excellent actor. Remember how upset he was about not knowing how to disarm the bomb in the Underground - even though he had already turned it off? That was to game Watson, but if he could game his best friend he could game Magnusson - who of course wanted Holmes to be flummoxed.
So are you saying “this is my personal theory to explain what happened” or are you saying “this is what the text of the show implies that the writers intended”?
My personal theory, of course. In something as complicated as this there can be lots of plausible explanations. They could have noticed that the gun was a plot hole and said screw it, no one will notice.
In some shows it would be way too convoluted - but Sherlock seems to be written around convoluted plots.
Good god, this might be the stupidest, most asinine thing I’ve ever read on these boards…and believe me, that’s saying a lot - I’ve been in threads with couger58…
How would Magnussen have known how Sherlock looked (surprised or not), when the “vault” doors were opened?–and why would Sherlock have thought that Magnussen would be evaluating how surprised he looked? They weren’t facing each other (and the vault had a plain white wall, not a mirror).
