TammanyT wrote:

It would be lovely if the Beeb and Moffat/Gatiss would give us a rough timeline of the seasons....

Never underestimate the fans.
Have a look: http://sherlock.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=395

The timeline has Sherlock attempting to X-ray the phone on Jan. 1, and John posting the entire blog on The Woman in March, as though it's done by then. But trees even in mild England are not in full leaf in January, and for the story to be posted in March Sherlock can't have had the phone for six months.

Swanpride wrote:

Ah, I forget the "Six months" remark....I have to add it....
but even then, it contradicts the 18 month timeline....unless HoB happens before Irene's presumed dead.....
it might work though, if Irene doesn't count the six month from the moment she gave him the phone but from the moment they had their first encounter (after all, Sherlock had six month to think about the right password).

Ok. let me see if we're on the same page, here.

In TRF we have the therapist say to John that it's been eighteen months since his last appointment, right? But we a) have no indication that his last appointment is the one we see in Study in Pink...he may well have had appointments since that are not mentioned. Similarly we have no way of knowing if John went in after Sherlock jumped--and then refused to come in again until he knew he wasn't hanging on well on his own. (wry grin) Or Mary M might chivvy him into it.

Now, if that's not what you're talking about, you may need to jog my memory. Mainly I see the eighteen months as being less clearly secured than, say, the six months Irene mentions or the two months Mycroft mentions.

Swanpride wrote:

The point of the timeline was NOT to do one conclusive one, but to collect the dates we are given, allowing people to decide for themselves which information they want to disregard. That's why I pointed out inconsensties on two different occosations and made a point of emphasising that the one date we are definitly given is the 22.03.2010. In fact, I did the whole thing mostly for you, so that you and everyone else who want to figure it out for themselves can get all the dates given in one list and can decide if they only consider the bold ones or the ones from the blog, too, instead of getting all of them and having to figure out which information are episode based and which aren't


I think I was fairly specific that the 18 month are problematic because it is not clear when exactly the "last appointment" happened...for all we know, it could be the scene at the very beginning, but even with this one I am not sure if it happens before the murders or shortly before John encounters Mike and the murders are shown in back. But as I pointed out in my last post, even if we believe that John saw Ella (whose name is not given in the show itself, btw) after his limb was cured, there is still the three month we is definitly given. If you think that SiB ended in autumn, based on the assumption that when Irene talks about "six month" she means "six month since christmas" and not "six month since he held the cameraphone in his hand for the first time, then it clashes with TRF, which is definitly set in summer/early autumn if it is a particularly warm one. Plus, in the scene with Mycroft the trees are green, not coloured like they would be in autumn.
The thing is you are basing your assumption on an interview you remember in which one year was mentioned...one year from the first scene, which is definitly set in spring, something we know because we can see the date of this particular blog post on screen (check for yourself), would again NOT mean autumn. Therefore I question your belief that "six month" means "six month after christmas"...it just doesn't work out, even if you disregard additional sources.
 

No. Look, that six month statement is absolutely simple and unavoidable.

Mycroft, arguing with Irene, tries to indicate his people can break into her phone.
Irene responds that she's already tested that by allowing Sherlock to try to break into the phone for six months. Even assuming she's a bit hyperbolic, we know exactly when Sherlock got the phone: Christmas Eve, prior to the morgue scene on Christmas Day. If the story ends in March there is no rational way to get even a sloppy six months in by March. There is no time for the CIA agent to heal. There is no time for leaves to flush out on trees prior to Sherlock atttempting the Xray of the phone. There isn't even time for the two months after her death to pass prior to John posting that she's in a witness protection program in March.

The ENTIRE logical structure of the episode itself falls apart with your timing. You have to rule out multiple canonical points inside Scandal in Bohemia to get that timeline. You have to have six months or at least close to it after the time Sherlock gets the phone or there is no time for the trees to leaf out, the CIA agent to heal, and most critical of all, for Irene's comment about her phone withstanding Sherlock for six months to have any real weight at all. And then you need a minimum of two more months for her to be captured and then for Mycroft to wait prior to telling John about her presumed death.

The Moffat quote, while real, is only secondary to that--confirmation of intent, rather than a primary piece of evidence. 

Edit: That's the thing: there are multiple clear and specific bits of time evidence in Scandal in Belgravia that relate to that post-Christmas period, the most obvious being three time statements by Irene, Mycroft, and Sherlock.

Irene gives us six months.
Mycroft gives us two months from the time of Irene's actual presumed death to the scene in Speedy's Cafe.
Sherlock confirms that two months with his comment about when Irene last emailed him, "a few months ago."

Those time reference are sensible and consistent with the less overt time cues in SiB. Without those time references the story doesn't even make much sense: trying to collapse all the plot from Christmas on into under three full months (Jan. 1 to John's posting in March) makes the entire rest of the story peculiar at best. No time for Sherlock to really properly attempt to solve the phone problem, no time for the CIA man to heal, no time for Irene to survive beyond the Bond Air confrontation, no time for Mycroft to delay before talking to John, no time for John to comment on Sherlock's attitudes toward Irene after the event. Collapsing the timeline down to end with John's blog post undoes the internal logic of the story itself.

And that, for me, is where it falls apart. Any time you have to unmake the logic of an episode itself to favor and/or conform with information from secondary sources, you're putting the cart before the horse. To overrule primary canon you've got to have very strong secondary canon, and John's blog is not strong seconary canon--especially when it doesn't even fit the amount fo time needed for Irene to even die, much less the rest of the plot to occur.
 

Last edited by TammanyT (December 6, 2013 5:05 pm)

You are not going to like my answer, but...

Ok, we have reason to believe that The Hounds of Baskerville occurs after Scandal in Belgravia, due to two major details: Lestrade loses his wedding band, which he had during the Christmas sequence in SiB, and Moriarty's been taken captive, which is foreshadowed in Mycroft's comments during SiB. It can, however, come before the resolution of SiB, when Mycroft shows up to tell John about Irene's "death." We also know that Riechenbach has to happen after both of them. Beyond that I honestly do not think we know much.

Now, I do want at some point to try doing a scouring of the eps for dates to see if there's a clear pattern. But I'd do eps long before I'd attempt to factor in other material, especially John's blog.

Here's the thing--this is the reason I keep wishing the BBC would put out a timeline. You see, my own gut instinct is to treat everything but the episodes as non-canon, and to expect errors within the stories, too, so long as those errors do not ruin the overall internal logic of the eps. In the original canon John Watson was notoriously slapdash about his points of fact. We're talking about a man who can't track how many wives he has, or where his war wounds are, among other things. Much of the fun of the past century and more for fans has been the attempt to rationalize John Watson's weird records.... and there is simply no question but that Moffat and Gatiss know this. They've saturated themselves not only in the Holmes canon, but in the Holmesian fan culture that's followed Holmes for decades and decades. The odds of them letting *their* John Watson be anything other than the rather unreliable witness the original always was seem very slight. Indeed, I would expect far more for them to turn John's blog into a screaming obstacle course of things that never seem to mesh up quite right.

They can't afford to do that as extremely with the episodes: there's a point at which that turns into a breach of faith with the viewers/fans, though they can certainly use it to brush normal continuity flops under the carpet. Holmes material never was reliable in that sense. But they're absolutetly free to play with the blogs, and treat them as the meta-fiction they are: pastiches of everything about the show and about the original.

So I tend to trust time as it is shown in the episodes, and internal clues (Lestrade's wedding ring going missing by Hounds, for example) but do not trust much else, and even the eps leave room for continuity quirks so long as the overall logic of the episodes is respected.

.The thing is, the episodes are the one thing you can't allow to be totally muddled. At rock bottom the stories have to hold up, or they're no longer valid stories.

So, anyway, I'd tend to place Hounds toward the end of the Scandal arc, and I'd put Fall after Mycroft reports on Irene.  Which does make for an interesting question, as it place Mycroft testing John with lies and truth and Sherlock just prior to that becoming a major issue going in in Fall: what can John know, what can he be told, what can he be trusted with. It might turn that sequence into Mycroft testing John's reactions. After all, we do know Mycroft tests people.

Swanpride wrote:

The dates from the eps are written in bolt in my timeline, with explanations where they came from. It's actually quite interesting how TBB is so precise, but with TGG, it was already impossible for me to determine if the case happens in three or four days, because they show keeps jumping to different daytimes which contradict themselves. For example, when they get the third pip, they are just having breakfast and John mentions that they didn't have time to eat because of the second pip. The third pip comes in at 8:05. But if that is correct, then Janus Car must be open unusually early, and the car must have been found in the middle of the night. I noticed the same problem in HoB, too.
TRF on the other hand is pretty clear about the timeframe it is working with, even though there is no exact date given.
I have the feeling that it really depends on the writer.

But you didn't answer my question. Hounds happens in a time frame of two or three days. You can put it at nearly every date which is not in the middle of the winter. Where would you put TRF, though? We are talking about three months, here, and they are definitly set in summerly weather.

Actually, I did. I'm not convinced the two additional stories can be accurately time plotted without further help from the Beeb. However, I'm willing to try.

Let's see. Hound can't easily happen prior to the resolution of Scandal, as Moriarty is still free at that time. Mycroft and his people collect Moriarty after that point. I place Scandal as "ending" in the fall after a year of plot playing out. I'd tend to place Hound in spring of the following year, though that fall is possible. But spring gives Lestrade a full year after the Christmas sequence to finally concede his marriage won't survive, and go through the preliminaries leading to a divorce, and winter is so very much the time Brits love going on vacation to tropical, sunny climes. So if one postulates that a bit over a year after the Christmas sequence in SiB Lestrade goes on a winter/late winter vacation to someplace sunny at the end of which he discards his wedding ring, then we get Hounds as a latwinter early spring event of the year following Scandal. This allows Mycroft's team time to find Moriarty, capture him, and question him extensively. Given Moriarty's skills, I think Mycroft and his people do fairly well to get that taken care of within just over six months from the time Mycroft comments that he can definitely start paying attention to Jim.

So if Hound is in, say, March of the year following Scandal, then there's time for Moriarty, once released, to organize his vengeance against Sherlock for once more interfering with him over Scandal, as that was Moriarty's threat: continue to interfere with Moriarty's plans (In this case plans against Mycroft and plans to help Irene) he would burn Sherlock. Which, for what it's worth, also adds the layers to Moriarty's obsession: Sherlock blocked Jim, and Jim's now committed to vengeance. So from March to, say, early summer, Moriarty puts his plan in place, and in the weeks following we get the break ins. Trial won't be immediate: late summer early fall, perhaps? That then makes room for the start of the main arc, beginning with the kidnap of the children, which happens during the school holidays. Costume suggests that the holidays would be October/November fall half-term.  That leads to the actual Fall itself happening (edit correction) mid fall...which is not only a super pun, but also mood and theme appropriate.

Now, you will note that this, to me, has all of Season two happening over a two-year stretch, or thereabouts.  

Again, IMO I'm not sure one can plot the entire thing this closely. I'd have to dig further. But it makes more sense to me this way.

Last edited by TammanyT (December 7, 2013 1:20 pm)

How? I thought it was an official tie-in.

Okay, just trying to help...

Swanpride wrote:

There is also the problem that if we go for a two year timeframe for season 2, most of it played in the future when it aired...I guess as soon as season 3 airs, this will not work out anymore....

Or that the timeline goes back farther than we've tended to assume. Which, at the very least, works out a bit better, allowing us to pretend that all the things we see happen not in real-time, but are being reported forward from the past into the present. Of course that really does turn the blog into a meta-fiction.

Swanpride wrote:

Yes, but "one year" would be mean that it can't end in fall like you say, because we have a definitive date in spring at the very beginning when John writes into his blog. One year would mean that it starts and ends in spring.
The interesting part of the interview is that Hound might be set during the timeframe of Scandal...it can't be set before the confrontation in the plane, because Moriaty is still free at this point, but ignoring the blog it might be set before Mycroft informs John about Irene's dead. Though it seems like the writers thought that the episodes went for a chronologically order.

That's assuming that they're counting the resolution of "The Great Game" as part of the story proper. And, once again, there's simply no logical escape from Irene's six-month clause. You have to fudge too hard to get out of that. She gives the phone to Sherlock in the box on Christmas Eve, and returns for it approximately six months later, at the time of Bond Air.

I honestly do not see ANY way out of that which does not involve messing the h*ll out of any sane interpretation of the script. Even if we push it back on your terms, to their first meeting when he retrieves the phone only to lose it again, that carries us through to midsummer for the report of Irene's death.

And yes. As we both say, the only time in SiB that Hound could possibly occur is between Bond Air and Speedy's Cafe/Mycroft's revlations. But I tend to lean toward their own base assumption that Hounds occurs fully after SiB. Which gets us back to eighteen months to two years to play out all the events of season 2.