dartmoordoggers wrote:

Think you have to define 'fans'. There is a proportion of fandom on sites such as this one who believe that theories have been lifted from such forums. I don't buy into that.
But what did happen was that the Fall took on a life of its own and it made headlines in the national press for a considerable time This is what I believe the writers tapped into. In the same way that Sherlocks love life made front page headlines in HLV. Sherlock lives in the modern world. It would be difficult; and somewhat odd, for that side of things to be ignored. The guy is a good looking celebrity sleuth who solves high profile cases. He can't do that operating in a bubble.

I understand your thinking. It's true, the last season's 2 episode (the structure of the series itself) was two years ago. That's a lot of time. I really think that BBC has just one plan after the Fall. I thought, at that time, that they were going to come back with the explanation (like other cases).
But two years later, and a lot of theories involved, made the case to not present how actually things had happened. 
I don't believe that every single part of the S03E01 was taken from the forums. But we have to consider the winks on the episode as a part of the fandom circles. 
And when I say fans, I mean everyone involved in presenting theories and discussing them.
Thank you so much for presenting your thoughts

nakahara wrote:

I think the theory No. 3 of Sherlock survival was the theory BBC wanted to present in the series from the very start. But after their fandom created so many clever and crazy theories in the hiatus, they couldn′t help themselves and as a homage to the fandom (as well as slight parody of that part of the fandom) they included theories No. 1 and No. 2 in the finished series. No surprise then that those theories are presented by Anderson and Laura, who are a substitutions of crazy Sherlock fan and the Sherlock audience in the story.

I know that many fans weren't agree. And they felt really bad, as used by the BBC. So much effort trying to understand what happened, and then... well, the episode. You say "slight parody", but some people have the opinion that they laughed on our faces. I'm just asking cause I wanna know what actually Sherlock's fans feel, with all the answers.
Can I ask you why you don't feel an agression to the audience and the fans by the BBC on presenting the theories that way?

Be wrote:

Anderson accuses Laura for not taking it seriously and that's what we can say to the writers, too, now if we want. That's acutally very funny and can make you just throw every theory and every "serious" approach out of the window. Series 3 fixes this way of thinking in a way and makes me just let go with taking myself too seriously which is a good thing.
 

Very well put, Be, and my approach to it exactly. I felt a little mocked, but not offended at all by their solution (well, I was new to the fandom and didn´t spend much time on elaborate theories anyway). It was entertaining, and I´m fine with it because it´s again a nod to canon where ACD didn´t bother to explain Holmes´ survival at all.

 

Last edited by Zatoichi (April 17, 2014 9:30 am)

Zatoichi wrote:

Be wrote:

Anderson accuses Laura for not taking it seriously and that's what we can say to the writers, too, now if we want. That's acutally very funny and can make you just throw every theory and every "serious" approach out of the window. Series 3 fixes this way of thinking in a way and makes me just let go with taking myself too seriously which is a good thing.
 

Very well put, Be, and my approach to it exactly. I felt a little mocked, but not offended at all by their solution (well, I was new to the fandom and didn´t spend much time on elaborate theories anyway). It was entertaining, and I´m fine with it because it´s again a nod to canon where ACD didn´t bother to explain Holmes´ survival at all.

 

That's actually interesting. 'Cause in the serie Sherlock didn't die. ACD killed him, and in his own moment, "fans" went crazy, so he had to write a lot of other stories about him. Do you think that BBC people understood that if they presented just 1 theory or the explanation without any complications it would be a "mistake" like ACD's one? 
I tell you this, there's no return from death and that's terrible for a loved character. So BBC didn't take 1 clean theory, cause it could be read just as death: 1 way to escape from the problem. Let me now please

Be wrote:

pellizaramiro wrote:

Be wrote:

This is a very interesting question I asked myself when it became obvious that we were going to see fake explanations. In fact I expected a bit more outrage by the fans. Similar to the incident with the first airing of ep 1 when fanfiction was read by the actors.
But seemingly nobody felt humiliated. Or nobody admitted it. Some people argue that the "blue airbag theory" is correct and they live with that knowledge just fine and in believing this they can at least feel that they knew it all or predicted something.

Another aspect is of course the way the plot is presented. The fake solutions are in a way presented that they are funny and ridiculous. Nobody actually thought that Moriarty and Sherlock sat on the roof and did a conspiration. The same applies to the bungee rope scene with crashing through the window and kissing Molly. By choosing this slightly over the top and ridiculous twist the writers made sure that nobody felt offended, but entertained.
At the end you just sit there and ask yourself what's real and what's not. When we laugh about Anderson collapsing over his post-its on the wall we can laugh about ourselves.

Anderson accuses Laura for not taking it seriously and that's what we can say to the writers, too, now if we want. That's acutally very funny and can make you just throw every theory and every "serious" approach out of the window. Series 3 fixes this way of thinking in a way and makes me just let go with taking myself too seriously which is a good thing.


 

Thanks a lot for your answer.
I've goy a question for you, too: do you think that the way they presented some "funny" moments it can be done in another series? 'Cause it seems to me that there's a particular conection between the audience, fans and the show. They didn't try to hide that, like happened in other series (ex. Lost)

I seriously don't expect to see another overly-comedic series like Series 3 but we are meant not to expect reliability for we are told that taking anything seriously is seemingly misleading.

In a way fans in the 21 century are just as perplexed now after series 3 with obvious fake solutions and one not that obvious fake solution as the readers were after Holmes died (was written of).
We have the advantage to know that Sherlock lives. Our outrage (if you can call it that) is that we have to live with the big questionmark of "How he did it" and why. Somehow we are still living in an empty space or vacuum of knowledge. That's a clever parallel to the past to give the audience a bit of the same experience to learn to cope with intolerance of uncertainty aka not knowing what will happen next.
The breaking of the fourth wall was in retrospect the whole point of Holmes' comeback and we see allusions to it everywhere throughout the series. No need to hide that, not even in plain sight.

I think it's really incredible one thing that you point. "Empty space or vacuum of knowledge". Those are great words to talk about a serie that says: "everything is in the observation and deduction". And they played the role, hidding some things. But the fans learn really fast. I think that BBC producers also asked themselves: how they (fans) did it?