Smarter and quicker.
Yes, that was annoying after a while.

Swanpride wrote:

Yeah, I mean it is not like Sherlock just killed a man to protect Mary or anything like that...or that Mary needed his help to rescue John....she does all this on her own and never makes a mistake.

?

Sherlock killing Magnussen has nothing to do with Mary being a Mary Sue... why is it neccessary to mention it in this context?
 

I wasn't missing it a bit. And I'm still not sure -as a woman who works and raises children!- if that is the way I want strong females to be seen.

I am still of the opinion that Mary's hacking and the scene in the graveyard are firmly in the MP.  They are there to further illustrate Sherlock's fear of Mary not only taking John away from him but being more clever than even Mycroft.  

Remember, the majority of the episode is how Sherlock sees things.  No matter whether it's "overdramatic"  "exaggerated" or "Mary Sued"  For god's sake, look at what he did to Mycroft!  

Swanpride wrote:

@stoertebecker Thanks for putting this in words...those were my feelings too, I was initially so elated about the episode and then suddenly the Mary nit-picking started again. I love your Kästner quote, btw, it's one of my favs.

Thank you. 

besleybean wrote:

@Lily...be my guest! 

Thank you

I have never stopped loving Sherlock either. But boy did the episode renew the flame!
 

Yitzock wrote:

Don't send anyone away.  I like Mary fine in this episode, nothing about her bothered me.  I know it's not what everyone thinks, so I don't mind not getting into it.  There really just isn't much to get into except I laughed.

Did anyone else noticed that Sherlock was playing the wedding song on the violin in the scene where he plays?

Agreed. Everyone has an opinion, and it should be quite shameful to fight over differences.That's what makes good discussions richer, in my opinion.

As for the wedding song, I did notice as well, and thought it was a very nice echo to TSoT...and that Sherlock is still mourning the loss of John.

mrshouse wrote:

  the story of the bride started full of suspense but in the end the solution....well. I awaited it to be a bit more interesting. When the theories of the women from the match factories flooded the web I found that an interesting idea. Like that it felt a bit forced upon me, the topic of the women treated badly and with no vote. I think if that was an issue for Mofftiss it could have been done with a bit more build-up. It felt a bit out of the blue.

I also felt that the whole pagan-Druid-KKK scene came out of the blue. I actually sat there and thought, well, someone writing this has a women's rights agenda they wanted to put forward, and there it is. Made me scratch my head.

Hell, Moriarty was creepy. And I'm glad he's dead. That's it for him and as much as I loved him I'm happy he's not dragged along any more.

All of the Moriarty scenes were inside Sherlock's mind palace, so we could clearly see that as scary and weird as we thought M was back in the day, Sherlock had built him up in his mind to be even more so. Because this M put the old one to shame in the weird and wacky category. Ugh.

I loved the take on the Reichenbach fall! John coming to rescue Sherlock! Wonderful! And the classic fall after the jump from St. Barts! I feel, all of us might move along now from it!

Notice how quickly Moriarty kowtow'd when John came on the scene. Inside Sherlock's mind palace, Sherlock conjured up John-to-the-rescue. Good old John, who can always be depended on to arrive at the right moment and back Sherlock up. But besides that, Moriarty actually became quite meek and not very mouthy anymore, the instant John arrived. He allowed himself to be pushed into the abyss without so much as a peep or a struggle at all. Even the theatrical screaming seemed to not start until he was halfway to the bottom.

Mary. What I dreaded the most: everything swept under the rug and part of the inner circle of trust. After seeing her like that I see even less a future in the series for her. In every scene where she's involved she takes away from the two leads, that's the way I see it. And she's set up in a very unsympathetic light, stalking John at Baker Street and starting a domestic there. Even less sympathetic the plane scenes where just everybody is less smart and skilled than her. No thanks. The last we get to see is the " Better!" with a look that made me want to run away. Mofftiss, is that what a strong female character in2016 is for you? Double no. 

Yeah. I have never liked anything about her, not one thing, ever. When Sherlock saw her out on the street and all his descriptions of her were floating around her head in His Last Vow, one of the words that loomed large was LIAR. And that says it all for me. And although I know it's not AA's fault, I'm sure she's a perfectly good actress, but why oh why oh why did they ever cast Martin's RL partner in the role?  So jarring, so easy to get taken out of the story, just remembering that. I know others disagree, which is fine.

  But if Solar is right and this is the set up for Mycroft dying and Mary taking the place of the superclever " England's government" that shall be my last day in fandom.

They better not do that, not unless they plan on having a few million new fans come alongside to pick up the support for the show as a lot of us old timers fall away in disgust. I don't think the Sherlock fandom will be forgiving of replacing or eliminating any of the major characters.

kgreen20 wrote:

I haven't seen the episode myself, so I really don't have anything to add to this discussion as yet.  I just want to mention that I'm wondering if this one-shot Victorian special can really be expected to tide us over until Season 4 finally comes out.  From what I've read in the customer review section on Amazon.com, since filming won't begin until this coming spring, the Series 4 episodes are not going to come out until January, 2017, and that's a whole another year! 

Yes, this will be it until season 4 is released (what the Brits call series 4). And we already waited close to a couple of years for this thing we saw last night. Too long. It's really more than a bit silly, the waiting, and yes, I understand the whys of it, but it's silly anyway (to me).

I was disappointed, maybe stupidly so, but I admit it anyway, because I had heard TAB spoken of as "the Christmas special", and because I went into the viewing completely unspoiled, imagine my shock when it ended up being a Tales From the Crypt type Halloween story!  Dreadful.


 

nakahara wrote:

  Glad it´s not just me who feels that Mary was even more Mary Sue-ish here than in S3. Seriously, the moment she appeared around any other character, she reduced them to bumbling fools immediatelly.... John´s "Mary would take me home" was so over the top... every man in Mary´s vicinity must be symbolically castrated now to make her look cool?  

bwahahahaha!  Well said. Sherlock could use a couple new writers, and if one of them were female, that'd be nice, too. But in all fairness to the current writers, most authors don't know how to write strong women without making them OTT and as you say, castrating bitches.  Or worse, sex symbol Pretty Women with lots of hair, big boobs and only one thing on their minds.