I do not think that these things are always solved within one episode. The Mary arc begins with Sherlock's muddled/confused/false/ignored deductions in TEH, not as late as HLV. 

As I have said before, I think that Sherlock is lying about Mary calling the ambulance. He is unreliable as a narrator because he must have been unconscious the moment the call took place. 

SusiGo wrote:

As I have said before, I think that Sherlock is lying about Mary calling the ambulance. He is unreliable as a narrator because he must have been unconscious the moment the call took place. 

BTW there are several sequences in which you see Magnussen reaching for the phone before Sherlock loses conciousness. Just to mention another person who could have called the ambulance.

Yes, this is true. But is does not contradict the idea that Magnussen could have phoned. He must have been keenly interested in keeping Sherlock alive because he was his pressure point for Mycroft. 

Oh, it doesn't rule out anything for definite - all if it is deduction rather than direct observation. 

Magnussen phoning is possible, but a little more complicated.  It would have meant that ..

- Mary was unsuccessful at knocking him out (well, she was unsuccessful at either killing Sherlock or not "killing" Sherlock, so possible ).
- Magnussen wants to keep secret the fact that he phoned for an ambulance (but we're not given a reason why)
- Magnussen phones, then lies down on the floor and pretends to be just coming to when John arrives
- However, he takes the risk that the ambulance will arrive before John (in which case his secret would be exposed).

I think we're just seeing a more simple deduction.  Perhaps Sherlock started by wondering why Magnussen hadn't been killed.  He doesn't mention his sources, but probably mainly John, perhaps medical notes, speaking to staff, etc.  He deduces that Mary knocked Magnussen out because Magnussen is coming round when John arrives (John probably told him).  He knows that somebody must have called an ambulance before John did because it arrived too quickly.   The only person who was conscious and could have done it is Mary.   Which then seems to rule out Mary wanting him dead, so on to the next deduction that Mary shot to incapacitate. 

There are lots of holes where something else could have happened, or there could have been things that Sherlock missed, but I think that's the basis of the deduction we see on screen - fairly simple in the end. 

(All this written from the point of view that Sherlock believes his deduction, because otherwise it gets confusing to write!  If he didn't believe it and is faking it, then his reasoning for the deduction still stands, I think).

A bit of an aside, but I do think the deductions need to be simple enough that audiences can follow them.   They should be satisfying, the way they are in the stories. 

@ Mary calling the ambulance...its possible but..
Its based on a timing Sherlock took while dieing ..and notoriuos London traffic......and that Mary was stupid enough to leave her voice recording of it..
The idea that Magnussen called 999 while Marys back was turned looks likely from the images you see him reach and grab for the phone and the phone in his hand...and then John also called within moments...so.....

@The medical jargon metas are interesting...but Mofftis aren't writing for them...or people like us that analyse everything...j

@with the Mary accidentally killed him SP....how does that thought process work for Mary?
Mary refused help right then..but decided I will shoot you now and then ask /threaten you for your help / silence the moment you wake up....
if she just wanted to take a safe shot.....that doesn't instantly silence him..or necessarily make him instantly unconcious or unable to talk?

lil wrote:

@The medical jargon metas are interesting...but Mofftis aren't writing for them...or people like us that analyse everything...j

@with the Mary accidentally killed him SP....how does that thought process work for Mary?
Mary refused help right then..but decided I will shoot you now and then ask /threaten you for your help / silence the moment you wake up....
if she just wanted to take a safe shot.....that doesn't instantly silence him..or necessarily make him instantly unconcious or unable to talk?

I agree about the medical metas - they are probably looking deeper than was intended, with greater knowledge than Moftiss. 

Also agree that it wouldn't be instant silence - but bleeding out would probably quite quickly make somebody incoherent and then unconscious.  If Sherlock's deduction was right, then I think that is what she was aiming for.  She did want him to be seriously injured enough that he wouldn't come round quickly (unlike Magnussen). 
 

True.  Mary doesn't give any information.  I think it's interesting how they've done it, as there's plenty of room to move in different directions in S4. 

I do think some of Sherlock's deductions are very likely to be correct (that Mary was an assassin, that she changed her identity, etc.). 

About the question of who phoned the ambulance. I’m not sure. I think it is very likely that Mary would knock CAM out. Especially now that he knows there is someone else in the office. He might actually quite enjoy outing her to John. So I think the safer prospect for Mary was to leave no one conscious in that room. CAM might have come to much earlier than we where let to believe. Or he had already send for help, I don’t own a Smartphone, but surely there’s an app for that. We don’t see Mary take off her gloves, but they could be of the kind that still allow you to work a touch screen, so that part is not really conclusive for me. Also Sherlock’s ambulance arrival time theory is absolute rubbish. The average arrival time might be 8 minutes, but depending on the start location of the ambulance and the location of the emergency, the standard deviation would be huge, and I’m not even taking traffic into the equation. Of course one could make an estimate if one knows the start location and the destination of the ambulance, but testing that again with another destination (Baker Street) and presumably even another start location the results would not allow for a valid control. So it is also possible that is was simply John who phoned the ambulance, which happened to be much closer to the site of emergency than Sherlock presumed.

This maybe isn't clear but here's a screenshot ... John has found Sherlock and is trying to rouse him, then turns as Magnussen raises his head:


Magnussen has been lying on the floor, presumably because Mary knocked him out.  That's why Sherlock guesses it was Mary who called the ambulance. 

If it was Magnussen that called the ambulance, it would have meant that after he'd done it, he'd taken his glasses off and put them on the floor, then lain down on the floor and waited for John to arrive.  He could have done that, but we're not given a reason why he would.  It needs a whole new set of hints, clues, deductions and motivations for that. 

(Another very minor point is that I think John would have said "call an ambulance" to Magnussen as soon as he walked in, if Magnussen had been conscious.   Or he might have asked "Have you called an ambulance?").

I completely agree about the ambulance timing - it's pretty ludicrous.  But I do think we're set up to stretch our belief to include it - it seems that Sherlock can accurately predict the arrival of paramedics, because we see that happen, even though it's just as unbelievable that it would be exactly 8 minutes the second time as it is the first time.   It feels almost like a nod to the audience: "Obviously, this is farfetched, but look, in this universe, it's plausible".   In other words, I don't think that the unpredictablity of ambulance arrival time in the real world is supposed to be a clue that Sherlock is lying/mistaken.