Series/Sherlock

In this case I feel that also means moving away from what was enjoyable about the show in the first place.

That is not a universal experience.

As I've said, I liked the second series best.

You're not the only to feel this way. While there are elements I enjoyed, as a whole I felt it was a poor season. I think I liked it more than 3 though, since it got more emotional suspense out of me for the 3rd episode. I have pretty much no feelings for 3 beyond satisfaction I was right with how Sherlock survived.

Wasn't the answer "no solution works, but it doesn't matter"?

No, Sherlock told the truth. It's just not as glorious as people would expect.

Also, why is this on our trope page?!

Alas, Poor Villain: Eurus isn't evil or megalomaniacal. She's just tragically, heartbreakingly insane - completely broken by a lifetime of being totally unable to relate to those around her and be related to in turn. All she wanted was a friend.

Why does it say she's not evil?!?!

He told the definitive story and then Anderson points out all the problems with it, including that Sherlock would reveal it to him, which I took to mean that we're supposed to doubt it.

Sherlock told the truth.

If anything, his response of trying to tear it down to find something more "clever" and poke holes in it because the reality could never live up to the fantasy is representative of fans. Just like all his other theorizing.

Oh and how I deduced it, an airbag just seemed the simplest method. Moriarty had just got done speaking about simplicity and spectacle and as I've learned from studying Sun Tzu, the spectacular often arises from the mundane. So I just thought about it like a confidence game. The jump was the convincer, it explains why the stay there to stall, the people were extras prepared in advance and it explained the bike to me to buy some time for something real quick. The fake body out the window which was quickly switched out I admittedly hadn't thought of the precise details, but I did have feelings a double had to have been substituted.

edited 18th Apr '17 12:15:14 AM by Prime_of_Perfection

I actually dislike the fourth season because it managed to ruin the previous season retroactively for me...just like the reveal that the only one who was actually witnessing Sherlock's jump was John ruined the whole scene for me, too.

Somewhat unrelated, but "Sherlock Holmes scared off a gang recently." :p

edited 2nd Jun '18 6:34:55 PM by Soble

The fourth season, especially episode two was just confusing.

And no one's seen this video?

So apparently there is a Sherlock Manga out now. Unless it's been out for awhile and I just discovered it.

Anyway the ones that are out now follow the first three episodes of the series basically beat for beat with some neat art though I gotta admit, Moriarty seems kinda dead eyed: https://imgur.com/5GjZd9l

So as I was watching through some of the hbomberguy's video, I've came across his critique of this series, which is linked in few posts above me.

Long story short, the point that I agreed on the most was the bit about how every episode had to ultimately be connected to Moriarty. Many times I found myself groaning out, "Oh God, shut up about Moriarty already" from Series 3 and beyond. Or at least, if the show was going to make such a big deal out of him, it should've made Moriarity the final villain and ended with defeating him in Series 4 (don't delude yourself, Series 5 is never coming out).

Ultimately, I think Moriarity's constant presence is one of the reasons (along with the obscenely long release terms) that made me lose interest in this series.

But hey, this series made me read the original Sherlock Holmes stories, so yeah.

I find Moffat in general thinks he's a little bit smarter than is actually the case. He's often got enough genuinely good ideas for a season or two but tends to fall off a cliff when he goes beyond that.

Sherlock is a good example, more recently and dramatically was his Dracula adaptation which had two great episodes and the last being such awful dreck it retrospectively tainted what came before, Go T S8 style.

"Adapting" the Final Problem that early was a huge mistake. Especially since the way Moriarty goes out is just bizarre and doesn't make any sense and the writers didn't actually come up with a way Sherlock survived. The result is that an episode that should have been a huge shock ended up just falling completely flat in context.

If they needed to make Moriarty such a big deal, there were a bunch of other ways to do it. Like, have three seasons of mysteries where it turns out Moriarty is a puppet master and we find out more about him, the Final Problem adaptation happens at the end of the third series and then the fourth series revolves around Sherlock assuming there's a big conspiracy and big bad (maybe work Irene Adler in here? He assumes she's the big bad but she's just this person who bested him once) but the whole thing he concocts is just garbage and it's his talents working against him and getting in the way of actually solving anything. You'd be able to work Watson back in because he'd be noticing that most of Sherlock's "evidence" doesn't actually make any sense and some of it literally isn't there at all.

But that would require the show to have actually told us what most of Sherlock's evidence was.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 8th 2020 at 1:49:18 PM

The final problem is supposed to be the end or at least the biggest challenge Sherlock faces (assuming you don't add a twist that old morairty survives too). Putting it the second season was a bad idea since its supposed to come after a bunch of adventures.

Edited by miraculous on Dec 8th 2020 at 11:01:17 AM

Would be interesting to have had an arc homage to The Seven Per Cent Solution.

Yeah, I think the name dropping of Moriarty as early as in ep 1 was a bit of a mistake. On a flip side, I think "Jim" should've been introduced much earlier, instead of the same episode where Moriarity makes his debut.

@Zen They did come up with a way he survived. I mentioned it on this very page.

Edited by Prime_of_Perfection on Dec 13th 2020 at 4:46:27 AM

They came up with like 20 somewhat plausible survival plans and made a point of having none of them be definitive.

Yeah, having a Word of God confirmation rings a bit hollow in the face of the actual episode. It spends a big chunk of runtime on the various theories, Sherlock himself refuses to state one way or the other which one is right, and the episode has a weird thing about like, the "what happened" isn't as important as the "why did it happen". Which would maybe be okay, except that the entire gap between seasons 2 and 3 had the writers talking about the mystery and how it'll be confirmed what happened. The one Sherlock said is heavily implied to be the true one, but it's not confirmed, seemingly just to screw with the guy who was trying to figure it out.

It doesn't help that the episode makes the people who want to know what happened into kind of a joke and not actually confirming what happened is a pretty obvious example of writers who think they're way more clever than they actually are trying to make a point about how the "what" of a mystery isn't that important in an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. Maybe not a great place to put that idea.

On top of it just being a follow-up to a bad adaptation of the Final Problem that gave Moriarty one of the single most baffling deaths I've seen on TV, but the bad adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story is kind of the standard for this show. Not doing accurate adaptations is one thing, but a lot of the changes seem to be the writers thinking they were going for clever twists and then just...not managing it right.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2020 at 7:54:51 AM

I actually like Moriarty's suicide, but I agree both that "The Final Problem" happened too early and that too much of the show is about Moriarty.

The reason Moriarty's suicide works for me is because of the way Moriarty and Sherlock parallel the plight of the Millennial generation. Here they are, two of the most brilliant visionary minds of their generation, and the world doesn't really need them. In the 21st century, there are no dragons left to slay. There are no frontiers left to explore. There are no huge puzzles left to solve. The world has a surplus of talented people, wasting away with nothing left to actually do.

People like the BBC show's Sherlock or Moriarty are just left to drift through the world, just existing, trying to find either something worth living for or something worth dying for. On some level, many millennials have lost the plot of what we were supposed to be doing, and are just left winging it through life while counting down the days until it's our turn to die.

Solving the mysteries is BBC Sherlock's reason to live. It's literally his drug. It drives away the ennui and gets him going. Makes him passionate. Makes him excited. But it's only ever a temporary fix. Once the mystery is solved, it's over. It's done. He needs to find a new one, or else the ennui settles back in.

Sherlock uses mysteries the way many millennials use games or TV shows. Like many of his generation, Sherlock doesn't have a career; his identity is wrapped up entirely in his favorite hobby.

For all that the show revolves too much around Moriarty, we don't actually get to know Jim very well. But it's implied that he uses crime the same way. Brilliant criminal plots are what drive away Jim's ennui. He's a "consulting criminal" for the same reason Sherlock is a "consulting detective"; it gives him something to feel passionate about in short spurts.

When Moriarty starts enthusiastically thanking Sherlock and then shoots himself, that always clicked for me. Because Sherlock gave Moriarty a reason to die. Moriarty isn't suicidal, not any more than any other millennial is suicidal. He's just not particularly invested in being alive. He's staving off the ennui and waiting for death. Sherlock gave him a way out. He gave him a scenario in which Moriarty could play his final master stroke by dying. He gave Moriarty an opportunity to have a meaningful death, rather than waiting around for his inevitable one. And that's why Moriarty was so happy to kill himself and win the game.

This worked for me. Conceptually.

But it would have worked better if we actually got to know Jim as a person. If, instead of every episode taking twenty minutes of its runtime to go "Whooo spooky-noises MORIARTY whooo," Jim had been an actual presence in the story. Moffat wanted the characters to be the centerpiece of his show rather than the mysteries, but he didn't really let the characters do that. Only Sherlock. All Sherlock, all the time.

Moriarty's suicide didn't feel, for me, like it came out of nowhere. But it did come out of thematic and character choices that the show hadn't done a very good job of developing ahead of time. Moving "The Final Problem" to a later season, not making every fucking episode about Moriarty, and letting Jim actually establish himself as a character would have been to the show's benefit.

"But Drake, don't you think audiences would have figured out that Jim is Moriarty right away if they tried to introduce and develop a character named Jim?"

Yeah. Of course, the audience will immediately know that he's Moriarty. So what? Why does that even need to be a twist? A lot of adaptations have gotten great mileage out of introducing a character audiences immediately recognize as a villain and then developing them alongside the hero. Dramatic irony, a circumstance in which the context of a situation changes dramatically due to information that the audience is privy to but the characters are not, is a classic staple of story writing.

Sherlock wanted (and still wants, two seasons after killing off the character) to be centered around a deadly battle of wits between Sherlock and Moriarty. But it is not very good at actually depicting that battle of wits, in large part because one side of the equation is sorely lacking in physical presence within the show.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 14th 2020 at 11:26:37 AM

That is a fantastic meta.

Yeah, if the show had done that stuff clearly and competently, the opinion around it would probably be much different.

An incompetent show where the writers just don't know what they're doing is a lot less frustrating than a show that has a strong core but the writers don't seem to know what it is or are just incapable of taking advantage of it. There was actual potential in Sherlock but the writers didn't seem to know how to unlock it or use it properly.