I wonder if any resolution to the cliffhanger would be anything but clumsy. I understand the impulse for Gatfat to say, "Let's do something outrageous and write outselves into a corner that will be so difficult to get out of that everyone will think it's impossible!" That kind of cliffhanger, the "OMG, how are they going to get out of this?" clifhanger, keeps people talking. Unfortunately, the cliffhanger they chose -- Sherlock pretty publicly shooting Mangusson in the face -- is a box that's pretty difficult, if not outright impossible, to get out of cleanly.
It's not just that, though. The problem is that they reversed it
in the same episode. Sherlock shoots Magnussen. Oh, no, now he's in deep trouble and he's being exiled, oh, whatever will become of him? But then, just moments after his plane takes off into exile, the Moriarty videos surface and he's immediately called back, his exile over before it begins. They couldn't even bother to commit to an actual cliffhanger resulting from the homicide. They swept its consequences away entirely before the episode even ended. That's just crass, lazy writing. At least they could've kept us in suspense for the two years between "His Last Vow" and "The Abominable Bride," but they didn't even have the patience to let the threat of consequences stand for five minutes. And if they had no interest in Magnussen's death having consequences
even within the episode where it happened, then it was a completely terrible and unnecessary storytelling choice to have Sherlock kill him at all.
In a strange way, by the midpoint, the story felt very much like an old-school Doctor Who companion departure story -- "Let's characterize Mary and explore her past, because she's leaving and it's our last chance!" The ending felt very much like a fridging to me, just so that John and Sherlock can both have Manpain(TM).
Exactly. I didn't feel any sadness when Mary sacrificed herself, just a sigh of disappointment that they fell back on such a predictable cliche. But then,
Elementary has always had a clear advantage over
Sherlock in its handling of female characters. I guess I shouldn't have expected anything better.
Also, why does Watson blame Sherlock for Mary's death? Sherlock invited both Watsons; Mary and John mutually agreed that she should go while he stayed behind to arrange a babysitter. If they'd chosen differently, it could've been John who took that bullet -- or who stood by helplessly while Sherlock was shot down. So there's really no reason for John to hate Sherlock for this, and it's really extraordinarily sexist to ignore Mary's own independent choices as a capable, responsible adult and assume that it's somehow Sherlock's fault for failing to live up to his manly manly vow to protect the frail womenfolk (even though, of the two, Mary was the far more capable protector). Not only is it obnoxiously patriarchal, but it's a contrived excuse to create a gratuitous rift between Sherlock and John for the sake of manufactured drama.
Not to mention the stupidity of having Sherlock somehow able to watch the bullet's approach in slow motion and Mary suddenly tapping into the Speed Force and being able to move to intercept it after it was more than halfway to Sherlock's chest. An average bullet travels at around twice the speed of sound -- it would've hit Sherlock before Mary even heard the shot. At the distance shown, the bullet would've hit him maybe less than 5 milliseconds after being fired, and the fastest human reaction time for movement ever recorded is more than 100 milliseconds. Okay, maybe we can assume that what we saw was stylized, that maybe we were in Sherlock's "Mind Palace" thingy and he anticipated the shot before it was fired and Mary actually started moving before the gun went off -- but as presented, it's cartoony and ridiculous. This show has always valued style over sense, and it's just getting more so over time. The canonical Holmes disliked the way Watson placed dramatic flair over factual accuracy in his
Strand stories; he would have utterly deplored Moffat and Gatiss's approach.
One thing that I almost complained about was that the secretary was able to pull out the gun and get off a shot when there were a bunch of cops all around her. Why didn't they shoot her before she fired? But then I realized -- oh, yeah, it's England. The cops aren't armed as a matter of routine. They would've had to call in the special weapons squad.
I've seen people on social media justify it with, "Well, it's in the Canon," which I think is nonsense masquerading as a reason in an attempt to sound like it had to happen. It didn't have to happen; at this point, Sherlock is as divorced from the Canon as its American cousin, Elementary. And if we're going by Canon, it should happened off-screen before "The Empty Hearse," even though "The Sign of Three" hadn't happened yet.
Yes. Canon is a starting point for an adaptation, not a straitjacket. Sometimes departures from canon can be improvements on the original, as with
Elementary's innovative handling of Irene Adler and Moriarty. And it's not like the canonical Mary Morstan was an ex-mercenary.
I agree largely with
Paste's review of "
The Six Thatchers," that
Sherlock has become a show that
thinks it's more complex and interesting than it really is.
I think it's been that for years.
The sad thing is that the mystery of the week-old dead body found in the car was actually a pretty clever one, but it was incidental to the story as a whole. I guessed right off that the kid had been in the car and the call from Tibet had been faked, but I couldn't figure out the rest. (Also, I never expected a reference to the
Power Rangers to appear in a Sherlock Holmes story. Appropriately, it was an action figure of the Mighty Morphin Blue Ranger, aka Billy Cranston, who once
dressed up as Sherlock Holmes for a Halloween episode.)
I'm not as disappointed by the Thatcherized update of "The Six Napoleons" being dealt with so casually, because that mystery plot has become a bit too well-known by now. Both the '40s radio show and the '50s TV series of
Superman did episodes based on the same mystery setup, criminals inexplicably smashing a series of statues.
I was going to ask the same thing, but I think I may see his reasoning.
When last we saw Mary, in the ending of the Christmas special, she wasn't obviously pregnant. She could have been, three or four months maybe, but she didn't show. Over the course of this episode, we see Mary have at least the last five or six months of her pregnancy, and then the baby ages to about four or five months.
So, a year from the beginning to the end of "The Six Thatchers" is reasonable.
Exactly. I was just guessing when I said "over a year," but it seemed likely based on the pregnancy and the age of the baby. More basically, though, it's been
three years in real time since "His Last Vow," so I assumed the montage was meant to account for at least a fair portion of that interval. I mean, heck, Martin Freeman has visibly aged between HLV and this. They couldn't just go on pretending it was still 2014.
