Sherlock

[Cain]

OK, started it.

Benedict Cumberbatch would not have been my first choice to play Sherlock.  Then again, neither would Robert Downey Jr, or Hugh Laurie.  Out of all three of them, I think Laurie pulls it off the best and most convincingly.  Cumberbatch is... adequate, but I think there were better and more suited actors out there.

Watson is much more well cast.  Maybe not perfectly, but he is believable enough in his role.

One thing I can quickly see being annoying is that Sherlock makes his deductive inferences on slim and shallow data sets which, while impressive enough to the average viewer, strikes me as not so much "science" and "intelligence" as quick-witted judgementalism.  Also Holmes has to be mentally ill, of course, a "high-functioning sociopath" was the phrase used in the first episode, I believe.  He couldn't simply be a very intelligent person who easily gets bored and does not suffer fools gladly, oh no.

I am, admittedly, only two episodes in (lol, shallow data set), and those above are my major quibbles with the show as a whole, which is less than with many programs.

I am forced to agree that the second episode of season one is rather silly though.  "The Chinese government wont let just anybody out... so they have to pose as a circus act!"  WTF?  This isn't the Cultural Revolution any more, if you've got a lucrative smuggling gig going on, you can bribe a Chinese official for pretty much any identity you want, and leave the country quite freely.  Hell, the Snakeheads are considered heroes in parts of China for human smuggling schemes.  The whole premise seems quite contrived.

[Faust]

It was poor, see what you think of the next one, and the first episode of series two (my favourite).


I watched the last episode on sunday, not an awful lot of deductive reasoning, but a whole lot of personal drama, would have preferred more of the former for the confrontation with the antagonist.

Once everyone has watched it I'd like to discuss the very end of the last episode.

[Cain]

Will do.  I did enjoy A Study in Pink, but of course, you always put out a strong pilot episode.  Still, more like that and less like the follow-up would definitely be nice.

I'll probably start the next episode in a few minutes, as I'm not doing anything today.

[Cain]

OK, that was a bit more like it.  Now started A Scandal In Belgravia.

[Cain]

Noticing something odd in the Hound of the Baskervilles.  The symbol, on the Baskerville base.  That's the double cross symbol.  Don't know if its relevant, but thought I should mention it.

[Cain]

OK, watched them all.

The only explanation I have for the end of the final episode is that Watson was dosed with some of the drugs from the previous episode.  Nothing else fits.

[Faust]

OK, watched them all.

The only explanation I have for the end of the final episode is that Watson was dosed with some of the drugs from the previous episode.  Nothing else fits.

Spoilers ho:


Clues
Sherlock Chose the location.
M talked about making him fall (sherlock arranged a situation he knew he would go off of the roof).
He knew that M wouldn't bother with a threat of random explosions or whatever, he wouldn't have cared, so he knew it would be personal targets. By choosing the location he could predict that someone would be watching for him taking the fall.
Sherlock talked to the woman in the morgue about needing help, was it his body that went off the roof?

The only thing that I can't figure out is how he made the body look like him. All I can think of is that they did plastic surgery on one of the corpses.

Else if:
Sherlock chose the hospital as the location knowing he was going to go off a roof, suffered a head trauma but had doctors on scene.

Else if:
That was M's body falling off the roof, was that a mask?

Possible clue: In the original books Sherlock and M went off a waterfall and their corpses were described, outraged fans insisted on Sherlock be written out of death.

[Cain]

Yes, disguising M as himself is the only other possibility.  Around the same age, height and build...it's possible, though still a stretch.  I think any explanation for that ending is going to be a stretch, really.

I also suspect that particular M was not the real M, though he was a fanatical follower, or impersonator of him. There is no coming back from that death, and Holmes without M is...well, it's not going to work.  That death is going to have to be undone somehow.  Given he is a consultant criminal who supposedly likes to work behind the scenes....well, M was a bit too flamboyant, a bit too desiring of the limelight.  It didn't fit the previously established facts about him.

[Triple Zero]

(SPOILERS)

Hm I like Faust's first explanation. I should watch part of it again, because even though M said "you chose this location" while on the roof, I didn't really catch that happening, I thought M texted Sherlock to come there. But then the time moved from night to day, and made me wonder if M would have just waited there all those hours, so I guess I really missed something there

About it being M's body thrown down disguised as Sherlock's, I considered that, especially with M's remark "you ARE me!!" but the odds of the disguise somehow coming off as the body hit the ground are against that.

To go back to Faust's first idea, it also fits with Molly (the woman at the morgue), because that's another thing I really wondered about, if it wasn't Sherlock's body, certainly she'd make sure to inspect it very carefully and would have undoubtedly found out. But if she was in on the plot, that would explain, as well as Lestrade not getting wind of it.

[Rumckle]

When I saw it I figured that some producer saw that the series was popular and decided to leave it open for another series, which Moffat didn't like, and as such, didn't bother providing any explanation as for Sherlock surviving the fall.

(SPOILERS)

Hm I like Faust's first explanation. I should watch part of it again, because even though M said "you chose this location" while on the roof, I didn't really catch that happening, I thought M texted Sherlock to come there. But then the time moved from night to day, and made me wonder if M would have just waited there all those hours, so I guess I really missed something there

Yeah, I also didn't quite get that, I assumed it was M being cryptic/metaphorical, and meaning that all the choices that Sherlock made lead to this current situation.

[CorbeauEtRenard]

The impression I got was that he picked the location with some plan about surviving the fall, which would obviously require some cooperation from the medical examiner to not get caught at.

He also seemed to make sure people saw it and would crowd around so that Watson couldn't reach the body until after someone else had checked for vitals first.
Plus they only checked his wrist for a pulse. That's one of the easiest places to give someone a deliberate false negative.

But I'm a big fan of the Pretender and crazy Xanatos gambits, so I pretty much immediately assumed some extremely complicated pre-planning was going on once I knew he was up to something involving the morgue lady.

(Note: I only watched the episode once a week and a half ago and at this point I remember my reactions to what happened better than the exact details of what the episode actually contained, so I might be off on some of the particulars)

[Triple Zero]

(MOAR SPOILERS)

When I saw it I figured that some producer saw that the series was popular and decided to leave it open for another series, which Moffat didn't like, and as such, didn't bother providing any explanation as for Sherlock surviving the fall.

No that part is a pretty straight wink to the books. As Faust mentioned, the writer Doyle killed off Sherlock in the original books (because he had enough of the character), fan outrage forced him to revive him.



Check the Wikipedia pages on Sherlock Holmes and the original stories, you'll find a great many correspondences from the original stories that they lifted to modern times:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_holmes

Conan Doyle wrote the first set of stories over the course of a decade. Wanting to devote more time to his historical novels, he killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem," which appeared in print in 1893. After resisting public pressure for eight years, the author wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, which appeared in 1901, implicitly setting it before Holmes's "death" (some theorise that it actually took place after "The Return" but with Watson planting clues to an earlier date).[50][51] The public, while pleased with the story, was not satisfied with a posthumous Holmes, and so Conan Doyle revived Holmes two years later. Many have speculated on his motives for bringing Holmes back to life, notably writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who wrote an essay on the subject in the 1970s entitled "The Great Man Takes a Walk". The actual reasons are not known, other than the obvious: publishers offered to pay generously. For whatever reason, Conan Doyle continued to write Holmes stories for another 24 years.



Some writers have come up with other explanations for the hiatus. In Meyer's novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, the hiatus is depicted as a secret sabbatical following Holmes's treatment for cocaine addiction at the hands of Sigmund Freud, and presents Holmes making the light-hearted suggestion that Watson write a fictitious account claiming he had been killed by Moriarty, saying of the public: "They'll never believe you in any case".[citation needed]

And from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Final_Problem (remember how Moriarty in the TV series went on about the "Final Problem"? Now you know why)

"The Final Problem" was intended to be exactly what its name says. Conan Doyle meant to stop writing about his famous detective after this short story; he felt the Sherlock Holmes stories were distracting him from more serious literary efforts and that "killing" Holmes off was the only way of getting his career back on track. "I must save my mind for better things," he wrote to his mother at the time, "even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him."



Conan Doyle sought to sweeten the pill by letting Holmes go in a blaze of glory, having rid the world of a criminal so powerful and dangerous that any further task would be trivial in comparison. (Holmes says as much in the story.) But this device failed in its purpose and pressure from fans eventually persuaded Doyle to bring Holmes back, writing The Hound of the Baskervilles (set before "The Final Problem") and returning him in "The Adventure of the Empty House". There were enough holes in eyewitness accounts to allow Conan Doyle to plausibly resurrect Holmes; only the few free surviving members of Moriarty's organisation and Holmes' brother Mycroft (who appears briefly in this story) know that Sherlock Holmes is still alive, having won the struggle at Reichenbach Falls and sent Moriarty to his death – though nearly meeting his own at the hands of Moriarty's henchmen.[1]

So that's another possibility for what might have happened in the TV series: Assuming that a lot of the plot details from the TV series closely follow the books, except in a modern setting, maybe his brother Mycroft helped him stage his own death?



I can't recall anything suggesting as much from the episodes, but Mycroft definitely loves his brother enough to want to keep him alive, despite their brotherly hate, and he certainly has the means to set up whatever complicated scheme this might require. On the other hand, it is unlikely, because Sherlock would not likely admit to need his brother's help, not if there is any other way.



With no evidence shown so far, it would require a lot of exposition in the next season, and in a not very Sherlock-y way, "all this stuff actually happened behind the scenes" is not really the style of a detective show, where the audience is supposed to come up with possible explanations.



I still think the "Molly helped him" theory is most plausible. Also because of the "Chekhov's Gun" factor (I'll spare you the link to TVTropes): That scene where he asked her for help because "he wasn't allright" and she said "What do you need?" and he said "You." (or something like that, I didn't check). There's been no follow-up to that, but they wouldn't have put it in if it weren't part of the story, especially not with her offering herself in a scene before that. And maybe because Jim Moriarty was Molly's boyfriend for a short while (he looks very different, younger, in that scene btw) she'd be the only one that might have seen evidence that M is not a hired actor.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Im going to guess that Moriarty is alive.



A quick google of "Sherlock Mountford" takes me to the wikipedia of John Gardner who in addition to writing the Suzie Mountford series of detective novels also wrote Return of Moriarty and Revenge of Moriarty.

Which are collectively about Moriarty surviving the final problem and seeking revenge on Sherlock.