BBC Sherlock Fan Forum - Serving Sherlockians since February 2012 / Still unexplained secrets?

**Posted by besleybean** December 22, 2017 6:50 am

I think his other Xmas reactions were out of guilt over what he'd just done!

**Posted by Liberty** December 22, 2017 8:48 am

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!)?

**Posted by Kittyhawk** December 22, 2017 10:10 am

For once I completely agree with SusiGo! But then, Mycroft has always been the one I've hated most from the supposedly "good guys", right from his first appearance. By season 4 even Mrs. Hudson dislikes him...

**Posted by Liberty** December 22, 2017 10:18 am

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)

**Posted by Vhanja** December 22, 2017 12:29 pm

Same here. To me, Mycroft became more and more interesting as a character as the seasons progressed, culminating in TFP. Great character, the most interesting one apart from Sherlock and John, I think.

**Posted by SusiGo** March 24, 2018 9:20 pm

“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.

**Posted by Kittyhawk** March 25, 2018 12:33 pm

SusiGo wrote:
....

More impossible things in an impossible episode.

I'm surprised you still go to the troube of analysing it. And that suddenly the impossibilities bother you - the stories didn't really make sense from the very beginning and have always been full of impossible things...

**Posted by Liberty** March 25, 2018 1:00 pm

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).

**Posted by Kittyhawk** March 26, 2018 9:11 am

Liberty wrote:
.... (I also wonder if Steven, and maybe to some extent Mark too, were influenced by so much writing for Doctor Who, ....

That has been my suspicion from the moment I learnt that they wrote Dr. Who. Because BBC Sherlock was never reality-compatible, right from the moment Sherlock beat a corpse to learn about post-mortem bruising (a Google search would have done, besides I'd have expected a modern-day Sherlock to either have at least one subscription to a medical database - or the ability to hack into them).

And my other suspicion is that maybe Moftiss just wanted to see how far they could go, till where the fans would follow them. Because the majority seems to have happily accepted all the whoppers they produced in series one to three - so why not really jump the shark in number 4? Or of course it might have been a desperate attempt to get rid of fans bothering them about future series (commercial suicide, as they say in France - does the expression exist in the english-speaking world?) Or maybe they honestly did the best they could...

**Posted by nakahara** March 26, 2018 11:55 am

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....

**Posted by Vhanja** March 26, 2018 1:47 pm

Well, as Moffat said about the mind palace sequence in HLV after Sherlock got shot - he researched the medical accuracy of it, then he skipped it all anyway when writing the scene. A bit tongue in cheek comment, but I think it's fair to say that Moffat (and probably Gatiss as well) put dramatic effect over scientific accuracy in their writing of Sherlock.

**Posted by nakahara** March 26, 2018 2:15 pm

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.

**Posted by Liberty** March 26, 2018 2:36 pm

I think maybe also because it doesn't matter! It comes across as almost an alternate universe (in fact, it definitely is, because it's one in which Conan Doyle's Holmes never existed!), in the way that superhero or comic book stories do. I think there is a place for an interpretation which is more "real world" accurate, and has amazing scientific deductions, but I don't think this is what the writers were aiming for.

**Posted by nakahara** March 26, 2018 2:49 pm

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

**Posted by Liberty** March 26, 2018 3:17 pm

I think something with the focus on drama and story-telling, and the relationships between the characters: a story about a detective rather than a detective story, as I think they said. The world as we know it is slightly adapted to fit, whether it's taxis always passing at the right time, ambulances taking exactly the same time to reach any part of London, or a completely homophobia-free world. I just think TFP stretches the connection to reality that little bit further.

**Posted by besleybean** March 26, 2018 3:33 pm

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.

**Posted by kgreen20** March 26, 2018 7:00 pm

Kittyhawk wrote:
Liberty wrote:
.... (I also wonder if Steven, and maybe to some extent Mark too, were influenced by so much writing for Doctor Who, ....
That has been my suspicion from the moment I learnt that they wrote Dr. Who. Because BBC Sherlock was never reality-compatible, right from the moment Sherlock beat a corpse to learn about post-mortem bruising (a Google search would have done, besides I'd have expected a modern-day Sherlock to either have at least one subscription to a medical database - or the ability to hack into them).

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

**Posted by Kittyhawk** March 27, 2018 10:49 am

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.

**Posted by Liberty** March 27, 2018 11:00 am

I like the references to canon, myself!

It's got me thinking, though, that if it was real life, beating a corpse is perhaps quite an awful thing to do, depending on your personal morality around those things. We do have a certain amount of respect for the departed, usually, and it could be very distressing for relatives to know that their loved one's body was treated that way. Of course, Sherlock was doing it for the cause of good, even though there's an uncomfortable parallel with Culverton!

**Posted by nakahara** March 27, 2018 11:47 am

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