Davina wrote:

If she was set up with a false identity her financial arrangements would have been sorted out as well.

But people who are set up with a new identity don't do things which draw attention to themselves, and managing to live in London on a part time nurse's pay is the sort of thing which instantly draws attention.

Even where the new identity is provided by the state, for example witness protection schemes, the person involved is expected to earn their own living wherever possible; working part time is not normal for a woman of Mary's age...
 

The obvious answer is that Sherlock is waiting for Mycroft to arrive; he doesn't want CAM summoning his own security people and the best way of avoiding that is to allow CAM to torture John.

CAM certainly loves doing it...

saturnR wrote:

This is the weirdest episode I've ever seen. I didn't get the plot until I read the plot summary of "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" on Wikipedia. The difference being that the original CAM adventure narrative actually makes sense. This episode doesn't...

If you read 'His Last Bow' then quite a bit of 'His Last Vow' slots into place; they are both about information and it's uses and abuses, as well as the love of one's country. One of the earliest questions asked in the hearing chaired by Lady Smallwood is about the exceedingly large numbers of meetings between a foreign businessman and the British Prime Minister; I suspect that the original Holmes' response to that would be identical to our Sherlock's.

The MP asking the question is subsequently shown on the news as having been arrested on charges of corruption; the implication is that CAM punishes anyone whoever dares to challenge him in any way.

The nice thing about complicated plots is that you can spend happy hours working through them 
 

Sherlock Holmes wrote:

I've heard that Mary's real initials are a canon nod, but I'm missing it, can't think what it is. Can anyone elaborate?

My first thought was - "oooh, A...A...Amanda Abbington"

It's taken from 'The Sign of Four', the story in which we meet Mary Morstan; Agwa was a place, and the villains were after the Agwa treasure.

It's a nice little riff on the original story...
 

Well, for 4 minutes there was no relationship between Sherlock, John and Mary; Sherlock genuinely thought he would never see them again.

Those 4 minutes are where Sherlock distances himself, literally, from everyone and everywhere he loves; having said goodbye he is looking down, for one last time, at the green and pleasant land of Blake's hymn.

We really have no idea whatsoever of what the relationship between Sherlock, John and Mary in the future will be like, based on this season, because the writers have chosen to decisively break the chain; there can be no going back to a humdrum chug a lug life where John inspects people's bunions, Mary gives people their flu jabs and Sherlock solves a few cases here and there.

It doesn't matter whether Moriarty is real or not; someone is capable of an apparently impossible technical feat which puts the fear of God into anyone with any sense. England needs Sherlock, in England, and John has a very good idea of what it is like to be on the receiving end of a psychopathic rampage. I cannot see him deciding to forgive and forget the guy who wrapped him up in explosives, or anyone clever enough to make it seem that they are Moriarty, and when he signed up to serve Queen and Country back in his Army days it didn't include an 'unless my wife is pregnant' clause.

'His Last Bow' is about patriotism, or love of country, however you wish to express it; we know where Sherlock and John Watson stand. We don't know where Mary stands, but on the information we have so far it is unlikely to be alongside them; once the plane turned back all bets are off...

I

Swanpride wrote:

In the interview they said that she scaled the building.

Honestly, can we keep her? Just imagine what Sherlock would be able to do if he had someone with her abilitities available.

 
Well, Sherlock already has access to the finest agents the country has to offer; his brother is their boss.  I'm sure that Mycroft would lend him one if he asked nicely 

And whilst Moftiss are having fun, as they always do, they filmed a number of scenes which were specifically red herrings to deliberately confuse the people watching the filming.

They also deliberately lie about what is happening; I love the straight-faced way in which they can dismiss someone climbing a skyscraper, managing to find a window which opens, and slithering through it as 'boring'. Impossible yes, boring no.

This is not in any way a criticism of Moftiss; they do it to make the show more interesting for us, and for them.

But Mary's character is not Mrs Smith; John is not another assassin working for a different agency. What works for Mr and Mrs Smith isn't what works for Dr and Mrs Watson; I doubt that there is anything which works for them.

If Mary's obsessive love for John is actually real then people are going to get hurt because she is deep in bunny boiler territory. She has come very close to killing Sherlock and yet all is apparently forgiven. She now has carte Blanche to do anything she wants with the justification of 'I did it because I love him so much'.

This is not a recipe for a happy ending...

clareiow wrote:

Well i think the shot was pretty serious, Molly and Mycroft both say in the mind palace that he is going to die, and indeed momentarily he does.

And someone on twitter (hardly reliable I grant you) who claims to know a thing or two about such injuries said if the bullet didn't pass through, it means it hit bone or artery. The latter sounds more probable given the internal bleeding he suffers later on. Which means he will have required more surgery to fix "the leak". So I can imagine he will have been out of action for quite some time.

I'm thinking about this too much....

Nonsense! There's no such thing as thinking too much about Sherlock

But I agree that Sherlock would have been in hospital for a lengthy period, particularly the second time around. I suspect his surgeon's reaction to him going AWOL would be unprintable, so I shall refrain from speculating on his precise terminology...
 

Mary Me wrote:

Willow wrote:

Tetrisash wrote:

Sherlock told him to. "Did you bring your gun as I suggested?" "Why would I bring my gun to your parents' house for Christmas dinner?" "Is it in your coat?" "Yes."

Of course, Sherlock may have requested it should Mary decide to take out the entire Holmes Family and leg it; with one decent gun in the house she might reconsider...
 

Yeah, of course. She was all about to do that.

Well, there's the head of the British Secret Service, who devotes his free time to running the British Government, and any other government that he can get his hands on, plus his brother, the finest detective in the world, who must have very high prices on their heads from any number of people who want them dead.

In the circumstances it seems not unreasonable to wonder whether someone who used to specialise in terminating people with extreme prejudice might conclude that this looked like an excellent method of making a great deal of money which would in turn enable her to run like hell...




 

SusiGo wrote:

Very good explanation, Willow. 

 

That is kind of you!

sherlocked wrote:

I have to say, I belong to the faction, which has a lot of problems with Sherlock's action. Yes, CAM is particularly loathsome, but that doesn't give anyone the right to murder him. I believe in the integrity of human life. To take a life, you better have a very good justification, like self defense or saving another life. Sherlock's justification of saving the marriage of his friend to a freelancing assassin, seems to be an extraordinarily bad justification, IMO.  If nothing new transpires in season 4 , which throws a new light on this business I really hate, what they have done to Sherlock's character with this plot development.

 
I agree that it is a very important thing; I think the sheer amount of time it took Sherlock to make the decision and shoot CAM reflects that fact.

However, I do not think that Sherlock killed CAM to save John's marriage or to save John's wife; if that were so then much of what led up to the scene would be entirely meaningless. I think an important part of it is a reflection of the central meaning of 'His Last Bow', where Holmes has devoted years to his undercover work pretending to be an Irish American feeding (false) information to the Germans so that Britain would not lose the war; it's about patriotism, or love of his country, which is perhaps a less loaded term in 21st century.

CAM himself recognises this; he exults that Sherlock has not only failed all those people he holds dear but destroyed the things he holds dear. And the things he holds dear most certainly include Britain; there's a nice echo of the scene in an earlier episode where he says that Mrs Hudson cannot leave Baker St because the nation would fall. Admittedly that also involved Sherlock violently making reparation for the act of attacking Mrs Hudson; his selective amnesia as to how many times the villain had fallen out of the window is one of my favourites 

I have no doubt that Sherlock knew that CAM was striking at Mycroft throu