Man, that little romp through Sherlock's mind was great. It's cute that he's internalized Molly and Anderson.

Sherlock and Watson and Mary are all so cute together it hurts.

Spoiler

Re: Moriarty: of course Moriarty's really dead. Just like Sherlock- ohwait. Moriarty is the Joker to Sherlock's Batman, of course they're not gonna kill him off permanently.

 

Transcript of a Q&A session with Moffat and Gatiss. Some spoilers, obviously.

 

There is a question I had since watching the episode and Moffat may refer to it in this Q&A session. Is the other one mentioned by Mycroft a possible third brother?

I wouldn't be against "Sherrinford" showing up (preferably not played by Moffat though), but with a twist. He could be a normal brother or, since Mycroft apparently somehow dealt with him, an evil one.

 

That's what I thought actually. It might be the third brother since they did mention it right before the reveal. I'm going to guess that its him just fucking with Mycroft since Moriarty is the one person that had him bested.

 

Just watched episode 3.

What was the fucking point in fleshing out the deliciously hatable Murdoch stand in if they are going to immediately kill him off in order to bring back the reject villain.

Moriarty is by far the worst thing about this show and now they are going to show more of him down our throats?

Sorry i just now finished and am rather pissed off. I honestly liked the idea of killing off Moriarty this quickly. After all he is Sherlock, but with the ability to actually use the gifts for personal gain, a fully functioning Sherlock that is. Having such a person burn out young was brilliant, apparently too brilliant for Moffat.

 

Maybe Magnusson will come back in Season 5?

 

Ha! Knew there was something off about Mary.

 

I just... don't buy Magnusson at all. Man. What a letdown.

The whole episode set him up as this awesome and terrifying guy, and I was really expecting him to be the next great villain, but seriously he sucked balls. How did he last this long as a villain if he's operating the way he has been? The show seems to want us to believe that Magnusson just stared people down and won all the time, but what happens when people don't give in to blackmail? Let's thin kabout it for a second. In the show, they say 'he doesn't need proof. He just needs to print it'. And I mean... to a degree, maybe. But nothing will ever happen to the people he's threatening if Magnusson just says 'look guys, trust me, this totally happened, this dude fucked a fifteen year old I saw the letters this one time'. Maybe some people believe him, but nothing permanent is going to happen when it comes out that there is literally zilch for proof. And sure, the show wants us to believe that his influence is so vast that he can just manipulate events so that proof doesn't matter, but how does he get to the point where he is without somebody just saying "Nope, I don't care, not doing what you want" and everyone else realizing that he's got fuck-all? The general thought would then be that Magnusson was smart enough to choose victims who would fold under pressure, but he was utterly indiscriminate in who he threatened from all we saw.

And the last thing, the utterly unforgivable thing that made him just incredibly stupid was that he didn't have them frisked before coming into his home. No matter what deal is going on, he's not going to let anyone keep weapons in his presence when his mind is literally the only thing holding his empire together and he is planning on revealing that. Except he does. God knows why, but he does.

So a villain that started off as interesting and dynamic had, by the end of the movie, just succumbed to the stupidest of stupid villain tropes and died because of a monologue.

If this is the best the writers can do these days, I hope Moriarty doesn't come back; with writing of this caliber they'll ruin him.

Fuck.

I'm still really irritated because the first half was so good. I loved it. I was so incredibly into it. I don't know about the Mary reveal, I don't really see why she had to be brought into it -- it really didn't add anything to the story at all aside from perhaps adding an assassin to the group, which seems... lazy. But still. The setup for Magnusson was amazing. And then they flushed it all down the toilet.

Beyond Magnusson I don't know how I feel about Moriarty returning. I loved his character, but I also thought his death was brilliant. He achieved what he had been aiming for with such a brilliant stroke at the end that nobody would expect, perfectly suited to the character. I'm hopeful that it's not Moriarty but either a) an impersonator, b) Sherlock manipulating things so that he gets to stay alive, or c) Mycroft manipulating things to save Sherlock.

I am also getting rather tired of the lovey-dovey feels crap. We get it, they care about each other. I get that a lot of the fandom wants to see that, but I don't like it. You have to dole it out in small bits so people are left wanting more, instead of shotgunning it down our throats -- or at least, that's my opinion on the matter.

 

He doesn't need the proof, but he does have it. He said "occasionally I need to send for something" meaning that he can fetch the proof from a remote location, if it comes to it. It's just it doesn't normally come to it. And really, with the UK's libel laws, he would have needed to provide proof at least a couple of times before people got the message that he can.

I agree though, it's unbelievable that someone didn't put a bullet in his head before Sherlock did, as apparently he has no dead man's switch.

 

Oh, I must have missed that line. Really ought to watch a bit more carefully if I'm going to go on forum rants after the fact...

I don't know much about UK law either, so that's interesting.

 

The UK is sometimes referred to as "the libel capital of the world" because of how easy it is for the "victim" to win. All the burden of proof is on the person who made the claim.

 

That really casts a different light on the threats he was making, and renders a lot of my points moot. I think I'll rewatch the episode with that thought in mind (though I'm still not sure how he managed to stay alive as long as he did).

 

Kind of a shitty season. I mean, there was almost no well, detective work. The big reveal? "I have all the blackmail material in my head with no backups, so there is no chance that a government black ops team which I'm trying to blackmail the superiors of won't disappear my dumb ass."

That and we still didn't get a non-halfassed explanation to how he survived.

 

Magnusson isn't a criminal. He's a businessman. He deals with politicians and civil servants and celebrities day-in, day-out. The sort of person that would cut the Gordion knot and just put a bullet in Magnusson doesn't even appear on his radar, until Holmes spent literally months creating a persona designed to appear on Magnusson's radar. And the only reason that Holmes was able to do so is Magnusson got cocky enough to reveal that there is no Vault - which he only did because he's a scummy, disgusting piece of shit who doesn't just want to win, he wants to grind people's faces in the fact that they lost. Hell, if it weren't for that Lady Whatsherface probably wouldn't have been angry enough to sic Sherlock on him.

There's an interesting theory bouncing around - Mary was a freelance assassin between working for the CIA and meeting John. When would a freelance assassin meet John? When they were hired by Moriarty.

 

Right, but now the brother of arguably the most powerful man in British Politics knows that you have no back ups. Seriously, if Sherlock had just shouted "he has no contingencies" it wouldn't have been far off for Mycroft to go "oh, bugger that then, take the shot."

I also admit I half expected Watson to shoot him

 

I almost thought when John said "Sherlock..." that it was less of a plea and more of a warning, like "If this fucker keeps doing this, I am going to kill him." But not so much.

 

All I have to say about episode 3 is that Freeman must have had the easiest piece of acting in the world when Magnusson was flicking him in the face. I would have been struggling not to punch someone who did that to me as well.

 

M. Night Shyamalamadingdong could have written better twists than what we got.

 

Being that mad at his own wife, on the other hand, might have taken a little more effort.

Is there any possibility that Moriarty was Magnussen's failsafe?

 

I am scared they will do a 'Moriarty is a title!' twist, so another person will claim to be Moriarty and act as the villian. Or another antagonist will be Jim Moriarty Senior, and hate Sherlock for killing his son.

See how the show could get a lot worse?

All in all, it was an entertaining season, if a little low-action, low-stakes, and low-mystery.

Didn't I hear that he already has series 5 and 6 planned out?