Yes, possibly.  There must be a lot of guilt there.  I wonder if he carries guilt about taking over from Uncle Rudi with Eurus too.   I remember he also felt guilty about putting The Woman in Sherlock's path.  With Magnussen, I still have that half-baked idea in my head that Mycroft set that up, expecting that John would be the one to kill Magnussen.  I'm not sure if the scene when Mycroft tries to get Sherlock to shoot him in TFP (as he feels John is more important to Sherlock's future happiness than he is) disproves that, or shows guilt over it! 

Giving Moriarty to Eurus was a "calculated risk" for the greater good, and I'm not sure in the end how much harm it did - after all, Sherlock was courting Moriarty in TRF and in the end successfully conspired with Mycroft to bring him down.  Maybe the five minutes with Eurus actually helped in that process?  Or at least didn't hinder. 

It's an interesting thing to look at.  A bit like watching Memento in chronological order!  I'm thinking now about Mycroft being worried about Sherlock's feelings that Christmas, after Irene supposedly died - did he think it might trigger memories for him?   And at the end of ASIB, when he's talking to John about how to tell Sherlock about Irene's death/disappearance, he mentions Sherlock wanting to be a pirate, so he does feel the childhood experience is connected.  I wonder if he's thinking then about how Sherlock dealt with it the first time (amnesia), and whether that's a sign that he doesn't actually want to know the truth (not that it's the actual truth anyway, as it turns out Irene is alive and well after Sherlock saved her!)?

Funnily enough, I think it's the other way round for me!  I always loved seeing him on screen, and enjoyed his arrogant, sinister, calculating side (obviously if I thought he was plotting to have John kill Magnussen, then I wasn't seeing him as saintly!), but I think I warmed to him more during S4 than I ever had before.  

Last edited by Liberty (December 22, 2017 10:20 am)

“Throat mic. Puts me through the speakers.”

I kept wondering about this and had a look around. Each and every throat microphone I could find - be it WWII or new - is visible from the outside because it is not placed in the throat but receives the sound waves from the outside. Which means that Eurus’s mic would have been visible for Sherlock - and for us. She may have hidden the earpieces under her hair but not the transducers, i.e. the sensors picking up speech. 

Even if she had been able to hide it somehow, the voice sounds quite distorted via the microphone. Which is clearly not the case with Eurus. 

And then there is Sherlock as well. He runs out of Musgrave Hall and searches between the ‘funny gravestones’ to solve the riddle. While he’s doing this, he talks to the girl on the plane as well as to John in the well …. but how would he have been able to to this? 

More impossible things in an impossible episode.

I think it's still worth analysing.  Who knows - we might find something new!  But I agree that there have always been things that don't make sense.  It's always been more about the drama than the "science", I think. 

I just accept that Eurus has access to the latest technology (as with the drone) which we might not even know about, and that it looks better than obvious headsets and so on.  I try not to think too much about how John woke up standing up in the well! 

But apart from that, I think there's sometimes an unreal, dreamlike quality, particularly in this episode (but also at points in others).  I'm happy with that in other films/TV if it's done well, and happy with it here, but I understand people might want more realism.  (I also wonder if Steven, and maybe to some extent Mark too, were influenced by so much writing for Doctor Who, which is kind of fantasy and anything can happen?  They were used to going outside the usual constraints?  It's interesting that their next project is also fantasy (and previous ones have been too). 

SusiGo wrote:

“Throat mic. Puts me through the speakers.”

I kept wondering about this and had a look around. Each and every throat microphone I could find - be it WWII or new - is visible from the outside because it is not placed in the throat but receives the sound waves from the outside. Which means that Eurus’s mic would have been visible for Sherlock - and for us. She may have hidden the earpieces under her hair but not the transducers, i.e. the sensors picking up speech. 

Even if she had been able to hide it somehow, the voice sounds quite distorted via the microphone. Which is clearly not the case with Eurus. 

And then there is Sherlock as well. He runs out of Musgrave Hall and searches between the ‘funny gravestones’ to solve the riddle. While he’s doing this, he talks to the girl on the plane as well as to John in the well …. but how would he have been able to to this? 

More impossible things in an impossible episode.

This episode is really one big halucination of Sherlock, so it seems....

Liberty wrote:

I also wonder if Steven, and maybe to some extent Mark too, were influenced by so much writing for Doctor Who, which is kind of fantasy and anything can happen?  They were used to going outside the usual constraints?

Probably yes. Can´t imagine a different reason for why they were so blase about all those overly unrealistic things they put into the show.
 

And what exactly were there aiming for, in your opinion?

I think it was a deliberate flight of fantasy, for which they do not have to apologise and I neither expected nor wanted them to.

kgreen20 wrote:

....
They could have done that, but they decided to go with canon in having Sherlock beat corpses, since that's what ACD Holmes did.

Yeah, but at the time medical databases didn't exist. That's where one should make a decision to either update - or not. As it is the series is some crossbreed that just doesn't make sense to me.

Not to mention that learning how much is not original Moftiss doesn't endear the writers to me. I have consciously avoided reading ACD or watching any other adaptations.

besleybean wrote:

I think it was a deliberate flight of fantasy, for which they do not have to apologise and I neither expected nor wanted them to.

Well, if that´s the case, they should try harder. Sherlock as a nonsensical fantasy farce was already made - by Asylum. And unlike TFP, it was quite hilarious:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1522835/reviews?ref_=tt_urv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbAEtFuahuI