sherlocked wrote:

gently69 wrote:

Tbh I was disappointed. Any fear I had were fulfilled. But I still try working on it. To get more references.

I really disliked it, too, at first. I'm still not very fond of it. I found it muddled, too busy with all the onscreen overlays and messages and I didn't like the overall action saturated story arc. But I decided to postpone final judgement until I've seen all episodes. I said elsewhere that the script might turn out to be a lot cleverer and more multi-layered than we thought at first viewing. I do hope I'm right about this. Otherwise the many continuity errors would add up to a staggering number.
While I don't enjoy analysing the episode very much I sure got very interested in how it all will play out in the following episodes.
 

I had a similar response.  All of the visual and tonal weirdness was so jarring that it's made it hard to separate it from what happened (and whether I liked it or not).

ewige wrote:

Maybe the bad rap for the first ep is the price Moftiss are willing to pay for making TV history with this season. I just hope they are not setting up the second ep in the same manner too! TLD reviews indicate that we'll be getting some serious payoffs, so I still trust Moftiss to do the right thing.

I read somewhere, in a short review, that TLD is supposed to be "trippy" and from Sherlock's perspective.  They also said it might be divisive among fans.  And it worries me, considering how divisive TST actually was, that they only thought the second episode would be that way.  Makes me wonder how far they plan to go in episode 2, and how off the wall it might be.
 

Unless we do have to wait right until the end.

I think TST made sense - it fitted with what went before, the cases kind of made sense, we got Mary's story completed and answers to our questions (not all, but many!).    I think TLD can be "trippy" but still make sense (even if we don't get it until the end).  I'm not too worried.  I'm actually surprised that TST was so divisive!  (And it sounds like Moftiss might be too!).

I suppose the thing that bothered me a little about TST was that it seemed too pat, the way Mary's story was resolved.  Maybe that's the way it should be (it did seem to nicely tick all the boxes!), or maybe there's more to come. 

I think I read in an interview that the crew amused themselves by making up facts about sharks.  So all those tweets to Amanda that I spent hours trying to work out the meaning of ("sharks drive on the right", etc.) were probably just a continuation of that fun!

I call some writer's choices here strange because they look like lazy writing to me. Tiny details that struck me as OOC at the first viewing, you know?

I've always been a big fan of Mary as a storytelling device because she brought so much angst and tension into the show. Her shooting Sherlock, "not so obvious a trick", "because you chose her" - I loved HLV to bits thanks to Mary!

I knew she had to go and hoped Moftiss would make her death/disappearance really count. Well, they did, obviously, but I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS DRAMA. HLV was believable, every second of it, while TST felt like a shaky tower of mismatched Lego bricks. This is why I'm hoping there's more to it and that the ep's "strangeness" was meant to tipp us off.

Mary's death scene and the cheating. I hope there's more to both.

Also, I cringed at Sherlock's "Because I love it!" at the Whitehall (Ben delivered that line like a mix between a Bruce Willis film and a shampoo ad), but I can hardly hope THAT will be shown to us from a different perspective and thus gain a new meaning in the future

(Also, about Mary: I don't mind at all that she saved Sherlock, I can believe in her doing that. I also appreciate symmetry in storytelling. The way the scene was shot raises a lot of questions tho and doesn't sit right with me, but I'm not alone there.)

Last edited by ewige (January 8, 2017 11:31 am)

Yes, I think there will be more to the cheating.  But I don't think it's OOC, as far as it went. 

I agree. It was partly the slow motion, although I don't see how else they could have done that.  We needed time to get our heads around what was happening.   Maybe showing it in real time, then a slow motion action replay?  No, I suppose that would have been worse.

I feel that it would have been impossible for Mary to react so quickly (after the bullet was half way there), so in my head canon, she anticipates when Norbury is going to shoot.

I also think an awful lot was hinging on this episode because we'd waited so long.  For instance, to resolve whether Sherlock and John were plotting against Mary at the end of HLV.  It's an hour and a half to sort out three years of speculation!

Last edited by Liberty (January 8, 2017 12:10 pm)

Liberty wrote:

I agree. It was partly the slow motion, although I don't see how else they could have done that.  We needed time to get our heads around what was happening.   Maybe showing it in real time, then a slow motion action replay?  No, I suppose that would have been worse.

I feel that it would have been impossible for Mary to react so quickly (after the bullet was half way there), so in my head canon, she anticipates when Norbury is going to shoot.

I also think an awful lot was hinging on this episode because we'd waited so long.  For instance, to resolve whether Sherlock and John were plotting against Mary at the end of HLV.  It's an hour and a half to sort out three years of speculation!

I will also settle for thinking Mary anticipated the shot if we've been shown the real version of events.
And I agree about the three years' worth of speculations and expectations to deal with

Last edited by ewige (January 8, 2017 12:13 pm)

It's a shame - is there really criticism because she's female.  I thought she did a wonderful job on Doctor Who, and as I keep saying, she directed my favourite Doctor Who episode by far.  I liked what she did with this, mostly.