Series/Sherlock

I tried watching Sherlock. My mom loves the show and let me borrow the DV Ds. While I think the two lead actors are great, and the first episode was good, the second and third dragged interminably and I had a hard time staying engaged with the plot. And when "Jim" Moriarty finally revealed himself I found him incredibly absurd and over the top and I was rolling my eyes the whole time the shrieking harpy of a villain was on screen.

I still haven't moved on to season two or three, because I really didn't like most of first season. And if Jim is going to be the main villain, I'm really going to have a hard time taking any of it seriously, because he's really terrible.

edited 29th Sep '14 7:22:24 AM by andersonh1

Anderson, don't talk out loud, you lower the IQ of the whole thread!

(I'm sorry, I had to because of the name.)

Kidding aside, yeah, that's probably a valid point about Moriarty- he's certainly not to everyone's tastes. That said, you may still enjoy Season 2- only the final episode features him prominently- the other two eps are about 95% camp evil Irishman free.

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I mean.

I like him a lot in Season 2.

I think he gets some good lines. And he gets really unsettling at a few points.

So this video is awesome and has a lot of weird out-of-context spoilers.

EDIT: I mean, the fact that he pretended to be Molly's fake gay boyfriend just to mess with Sherlock is actually kinda funny.

They watched Glee together.

...And there are still some moments where I think he's actually kinda terrifying. He switches from camp to serious very quickly.

Spoiler article thingies.

The Sign Of Three.

His Last Vow.

edited 29th Sep '14 6:11:13 PM by unnoun

Ooh, yeah. I mean the five or so minutes you see of him at the end of TGG, while it's a memorable first impression, does not even begin to cover what he's capable of making you feel. And yeah, he's a campy supervillain that seems like he should be in an 80's Batman movie, but he acts that way because he's completely batcrap insane, an it's terrifying.

I also forgot to mention that the pacing in Season 2 picks up immensely.

(BTW, unnoun, you should probably warn that the video is all kinds of out-of-context spoilery for any newcomers, awesome though it is)

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Yeah, I figured I'd better skip the video. :)

I'm giving myself some time, and then I'll probably plunge in and try the second and third seasons. After all the praise the series gets, I had just expected more, and I came away disappointed. That's the danger of high expectations I guess.

Cumberbatch and Freeman are excellent though. I'm happy to say that.

You know, a lot of people were unhappy with Moriarty after the first season (and with the second episode, which is still considered by many the weakest of the whole show). But he won over a lot of fans during the second season.

I really liked Jim, personally. Specifically, I liked the contrast he had with the original character of James Moriarty.

The biggest distinction between this show and the original stories is the update to the setting. It seems like a small thing, but it's not. The age of calculated master-planners and powerful manipulators, of grandiose intellectual chess-games, of invention and foresight and education, died a long time ago. The world is automated now. Whatever knowledge you could ask for is a few button presses away. Bored geniuses are a dime a dozen, and are no longer captains of industry, great leaders, and other guiding titans of the world.

Unlike the greats, Holmes and Moriarty, Sherlock and Jim exist in a world that has no use for men like them. They reflect the plight of many of today's college graduates, exiting from the womb of intelligence and receiving little more than a resounding "meh" for their accomplishments and abilities. Two men with incredible skills, adrift in an existential quagmire, desperately competing against reality itself for a purpose to justify the fact that they exist.

edited 30th Sep '14 10:44:46 AM by TobiasDrake

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Conceptually Moriarty is fine. It's the performance that grated with me. I'm not normally averse to some good old scenery chewing, but for whatever reason I really didn't like it this time.

I think his performance in Season 2 is better.

Or.

...I mean, it's the same performance, but. It has a lot more room to breath.

And he's not all that present in the first two episodes of it. Just enough to remind you he's out there and a reckoning is coming.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

The thing is that most of Moriaty's text from season one is actually straight from the book. It is like the writers just forgot all the adaptations of Moriarty, went back to the source text and then did their interpretation based on that.

I think their interpretation past that was warped by the performance they got out of Andrew Scott.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I don't know...I mean, Moriarty was always considered the cold calculating Professor. But looking at the words again I realized for the first time how deranged the words he uses in the one talk he has with Holmes actually are. And then he sets all his energy on taking revenge on him, even for the cost of his own life. The guy has to be very crazy, hyper-intelligent or not.

The Richard Brook thing was really well-done.

The Reichenbach Fall

edited 1st Oct '14 3:20:08 AM by unnoun

I'm gonna have to agree on not finding this show's Moriarty interesting, I kind of get the point they were trying to make with him, but I don't think it was well executed and Andrew Scott's acting didn't help at all, especially when he does that thing that some actors do when they're playing villains and start monologuing and then ALL OF THE SUDDEN THEY START YELLING REALLY LOUDLY TO SHOW HOW EVIL THEY ARE. I'm not against that, some actors can pull it off, Andrew Scott can't.

I had high hopes with Lars Mikkelsen as the villain on series 3, but that went down the drain too.

I can't have you close, so I become a ghost and I watch you, I watch you.

Why? I mean he was really creepy. And they used all the material they had on Milverton on him. Most of the monologue Sherlock did about him were even verbatim.

Yes he was creepy, and that was about it, the way Sherlock describes him and the lenghts Mycroft goes to keep people away from him makes you think he going to be this horrible monster, and while his actions are reprehensible, he doesn't feel like much of a threat, and he didn't end up being much of a threat. I think the problem with him is that they painted him to be a dangerous man that could bring ruin not only to Sherlock and friends but to all of the nation, and I think he would haver worked better if they have kept his threat as a personal one, directly to them and not try to make into this huge level thing, which frankly it's a problem a lot of movies and tv shows have nowadays, everything has to be of massive scale even when it really doesn't need to.

I can't have you close, so I become a ghost and I watch you, I watch you.

If he weren't that dangerous it would be hard to believe that Sherlock can't outwit him. They needed to make him that powerful (and I disagree, I think he was very threatening), otherwise you wouldn't believe that Sherlock is not able to pin something on him.

I think it's the same effective contrast that is found in the original story, actually. You have a powerful man who controls so many others like puppets, so that even Holmes fears him. He sits in a seemingly impregnable fortress of blackmail and connections. But he is brought down in both cases in a simple, direct way, by an intended victim seeking to protect their own. Milverton/Magnusson saw that victim as little, controlled and unworthy of his attention - he had already won over them. But for all his power, he could not prevent his death.

"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - Bocaj

Don't have a problem with Moriarty myself.

Milverton was so focused on how untouchable his intelligence made him, that he failed to account for the blunt, stupid, direct route. He was so busy playing chess that he missed the fact that you can't outsmart a bullet.

Personally, one of my taglines is that when all intelligent options fail, it's time to try something stupid, so I liked this resolution. He couldn't be outsmarted, so he was outfought instead.

edited 20th Oct '14 8:58:56 AM by TobiasDrake

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"Can't outsmart a bullet."

That only says you aren't smart enough to catch the bullet.

Akira Toriyama (April 5 1955 - March 1, 2024).

Except Milverton wasn't a national threat, Magnussen is completely build up to be one, otherwise why the goverment would want to punish Sherlock so heavily after how he dealt with him? And that's another issue, after everything was said and done there were no real consequences to the whole issue, they even lampshade it in the final moments of the episode.

I can't have you close, so I become a ghost and I watch you, I watch you.

Magnuuson works as a villain for me because, well, I work in news and he's really quite realistic. It's scary how much reach and influence people like Rupert Murdoch have over mass media. There's that infamous story where Murdoch outright said to John Major's face that he didn't care for the government's policies and they should change to suit his interests.

edited 20th Oct '14 10:19:17 AM by PurpleDalek

Yes, why would the government still punish you for killing someone, even though it was someone they didn't really like?

Maybe you'd be less disappointed if you stopped expecting things to be Carmen Sandiego movies.