Well marriage is a real thing and fairy tale endings and happy ever afters are the idealists dream.

I've just started to watch it for the... about 4th time and I still wonder about how they cut the scenes from the other episodes together in the very beginnig. For instance, not all of them are in the right order. I  especially think about those points:

- voice-over from Sherlock saying 'those things will kill you' while seeing the the beginnig of the fall (of course we don't get to see the entire fall. And as we know, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing - which we don't see. ;) But I guess it's just a nice nod from the cutter.)

- Sherlock getting attacked by a very angry John at the beginnig from TEH cut together with 'We're going to need to coordinate' from TRF. Just seems a little weird to me.

- Sherlock: "Who needs me this time?" - Moriarty: "Miss me?" - Mycroft: "England."
Once again, it most probably means absolutely nothing, but later on in the episode, Mary gets a message from someone who calls himself 'M' and says to Mrs. Hudson, that a friend needs help, and as Mrs. Hudson asks who it is, she answers: England. I assume it's a hint at Mycroft as we later on see her working for him and him being a part of the British Governement in the modern version. But as there are many people going by the letter M (Mycroft/Moriarty/Moran/Magnusson), of course it is possible she refers to someone else.

That's it, I just had to write down what crossed my strange, strange mind. I'm quite sure it doesn't mean anything.
 

Last edited by James Norrington (January 9, 2016 7:26 pm)

James and Besley I agree . Next time I watch TAB maybe with a list of the order of the modern scenes.

Watching TAB yet again today (and I loved the big screen experience last week!) ,  I am struck again about how beautifully the music is woven in and out of time periods,  with nods to previous themes.  Lovely snippet of the ASIB "The Woman" theme (Sherlock's violin composition) for example, just as we see the legion of hooded women for the first time...

Anyway, another bravo on the soundtrack efforts.

You know how we in the Sherlock fandom have over active imaginations?
I almost got a shiver at that line: it actually never really happened, thinking perhaps it had some hidden meaning.
But maybe it was rather just to tell us that some of the things in the Special, weren't going to be real.
But then they presented them as : first there was this...with dates.
Only when it came to the Victorian, did it hint at an alternative version...
The pastiche of real and imaginary, is really like Sherlock's near-death experience in HLV, but also the versions of his jump in TEH.
After the jump, Sherlock was dead to the world but in reality was dismantling Moriarty's web.
After his near-death, he comes back.
The bride rises again and murders...
What does this all tell us about Moriarty?

Yes, the 2 pistols one isn't really something I've addressed...
It's possible Moriarty could have done the same!

I definitely think the sequence at the beginning was giving us clues - it was very odd.  And I agree about the two-pistol solution - that's the bit that doesn't make sense to me - why is Sherlock so sure Moriarty didn't fake his death after just working out how Emilia faked her death?  Do we just have to accept that?  And are they going to say later "Ha ha, you believed us, but missed this vital clue" even when we didn't?

So IS the whole purpose of AOB to lay Moriarty to rest for good?

@Liberty: They should know by now that the longer they keep us waiting, the more we're looking at every single picture of every episode hundreds of times, so my guess is that they know very well what they gave us: Other riddles to keep us busy and confuse us until series 4. :D

More things I just thought about (and I'm sure they have been brought up in this thread before, but I can't help myself):

- In the waterfall-sequence, is Sherlock (with a little help from his John) getting rid of his 'Mind Palace Virus' once and for all? Because only Sherlock states 'I always survive a fall', before he flies down.

- After that, he wakes up and goes 'miss me?' Now there was this strange thing that maybe Sherlock has risen as a new Moriarty because him always being a part of him? I don't know exactly myself what I mean by this, it's just something that crossed my mind. But, and that's almost as unlikely as my sentence before, he assumes that Mycroft is behind the entire 'Miss me?' story (that was something I once started to think of after the series 3 finale, that it could be Mycrofts way to save his little brother after all or that he'd gone bad, but after the special that seems a bit more unlikely) and therefore addresses him with it.

I know, I'm tired and my mind starts to make up stupid things, but just one more:

"Of course he’s dead. He blew his own brains out. No-one survives that. I just went to the trouble of an overdose to prove it."
Sherlock always thought Moriarty was dead. Before Mycroft called he - I guess - didn't know anyone doubted that. So his conclusion of 'he blew his own brains out, no-one survives that' is just the same he already had after TRF and didn't come from his overdose-caused deductions. And after all, it really is a fact, but the point remains: What if he didn't really blow his minds out, how could he have survived then?

2. In this overdose-sequence he actually found out that the bride didn't kill herself in the first place but faked it using another pistol but killed herself afterwards and was then replaced by other persons claiming to be her. If the bride was a stand-in for Moriarty all along:  Moriarty didn't fake his death, then came back to murder someone and then killed himself (but of course, yes, he didn't seem to have a second pistol as well). If we are to believe the rooftop-shooting, he was dead after that straight away, so there was one step left out. Unless of course Sherlock knows something we can't know because it was never shown, but that would be disappointing and I want to believe that the writer's wouldn't go that way.

 

Last edited by James Norrington (January 9, 2016 9:26 pm)

I hope they wouldn't go down the route that Moriarty really is a creation of Sherlock's...mind!