Be wrote:

There is no such thing as right and wrong in an absolute sense. There is always a shade of grey between black and white. Or pink if you fancy that.
Something is right today and might be wrong tomorrow under other circumstances. Something is right for you but wrong for me. Rules change in changing times. Everything is a matter of perspective, distance and how you percieve things, how you are brought up, what experiences you made in your life.
IMO, you need to make your choice in life and be respectful towards others and you still can get it wrong or change your mind and look at your decisions in retrospect. You need to forgive yourself and others. Judgements are easy about what is right and wrong. The canon stories are perfect examples of crimes or not-crimes and the background story Holmes deduced about how and why people did what they did.
His Last Vow gives us the chance to really look...

 
I am so very thankful that the world isn't really like this at all. Of course there are absolutes of morality. When people fail to believe that, they begin to justify all sorts of heinous and cruel acts.

When people begin these "live and let live" arguments, I fell they are failing to look at the natural end of such thinking. Do you have children, Be? Parents? Would it ever be okay for someone to apply your concept of a "shade of grey between black and white" in regards to harming them?

Just because we don't all agree on the standards doesn't mean that they don't exist. I would submit that some things are a matter of perspective, informed by our upbringing, environment, etc. (whether or not we eat meat, social protocols for usages of slang words, types and styles of clothing we wear, and so forth), but making allowances for those types of issues in no way abbrogates laws of morality.

Swanpride wrote:

I bet when it comes to protecting said children, most of us would be ready to go into a grey area, morality be damned. Sherlock is right, "Love is a more vicious motivator".

 
I don't think protecting our children in such a scenario puts us in a grey area at all. In fact, I would say it would be morally wrong not to do anything necessary to protect our children (or anyone else's, for that matter) if they were in danger. I don't know about any of you guys, but I'd take a bullet to protect any of you if someone were threatening your life, and I'd also expend a bullet (which I'd much rather do than be shot myself) to protect any of you.

silverblaze wrote:

Willow wrote:

Actually, they do use colour symbolically; back in the dim and distant past I studied theatre arts, which includes costuming. I appreciate that people who haven't studied it are unlikely to realise that they are being intentionally manipulated by the designers, but the designers are manipulating them all the same. And red, in our culture, spells danger; that's why traffic lights look the way they do.
 

Possibly. But by that logic, Sherlock's coat has been screaming 'death' at us for three series. Though to be fair he dies a lot. And God knows the meaning of John's jumpers, straight out of hell, they are. 
 

Don't get me started on the jumpers! I mean, it was a blindingly obvious symbolic lead in to what was going to happen in TRF and not one of the critics noticed! 
 

I don't think many of us would disagree,,,
Is this all about Marys unborn child?

It's also John's child, after all. Since John means a lot to Sherlock, it's quite doubtful the child in turn would mean completely nothing to him. 

LightPurple wrote:

Willow wrote:

Don't get me started on the jumpers! I mean, it was a blindingly obvious symbolic lead in to what was going to happen in TRF and not one of the critics noticed!
 

This just made me laugh out loud in the middle of the night. I hope that my neighbours will be forgiving!  But how blind have we been, indeed!
 

It could be worse; they could be living below Archimedes, in which case him leaping out of his bath with cries of 'Eureka', and running off to explore his great theory, would result in an exceedingly expensive re-plastering bill. And at least Sherlock kept his sheet on 
 

sj4iy wrote:

Personally, I'm positive that there were hidden messages encoded into those jumper patterns.  

There speaks a person who has never lost control of their cable needles; frankly it's hard enough to make the wretched things work at all without introducing a finely calculated code hidden in those cables.

On the other hand I have now an excuse for my screw ups; it's meant to look like that, due to matters of matters of sucurity, and you can't ask any questions because then I would have to kill you.

Works for me...


 

I'm now seeing an image of Bond style secret agents, communicating solely through knitted jumpers. 

mujie wrote:

From what I got, when the helicopters came, Sherlock realised something. It was all in Magnussen's mind. Without a proper archive, there was no evidence against him. And so, even though the entire world could know how evil Magnussen is, it would be impossible to bring him down via the justice system. Sherlock made a decision. To save himself or to protect many more people from Magnussen. Because only in that moment could he stop him. Tell me if I'm wrong. I may have misinterpreted something.

To me, this should have gone the other way. I don't see why Sherlock couldn't have just let Mycroft & co in, and showed them the absence of any files, and then they could have spread the word to all of CAM's alleged victims: "Go ahead and laugh in this guy's face, testify against him, whatever. He has no actual evidence."

(Granted he's probably right about much of it, but he can't do anything but SAY it.)

I often struggle with "is the good guy really the good guy and is the bad guy really bad" questions, but I must say, up until the revelation about the absence of vaults, I was NOT struggling with that question...I found CAM thoroughly evil and thought Sherlock's crusade to bring him down was one of the more heroic things Sherlock had done.

Also: why did CAM have Sherlock in his power after the absence of vaults was revealed? Had he set it up so it looked like Sherlock had done something bad?
 

Also, because Sherlock realized that he would never be able to free John & Mary from Magnussen's threat AND that he just handed M. the leverage on Mycroft he had been trying to get for such a long time.

It just struck me, that S. waited to shoot M. when the helicopter & special forces were in sight, because he wanted it to be absolutely clear that John is not involved in the murder. He could have "dealt" with M. in a more discreet way but in that case John would be almost certainly be considered his accomplice and Mary's past would be also investigated by the police.