violethuntress: prettyarbitrary: You guys dont understand just how badly I want to demonstrate to you how Johnlock is real. And maybe its homosexual and erotic or homosexual/asexual or…
(PA’s note: condensed this to the relevant part of the conversation. Link to everything so far is above.)
I actually don’t buy that sherlock wouldn’t have done a follow up either. Even in regards to John he’s never held back before.
I really honestly think they lost a bit of the nature of sherlock here. I think they needed the idea to work so they made sherlock much “lighter” this season to make room for all the times he has to drop the ball in order for the plot to “function”. I think it was less about his affection for John and more about making the plot work.
Well, in all honesty I think it was about Moffat deciding that he just HAD to have Sherlock get shot and nearly die, so any other points where he couldn’t find a way for that to make sense got fudged. If they’d found another way to go about the whole reveal and lead into the end of HLV, I think they would’ve ended up with not only a stronger episode, but a stronger season (because if you follow backwards from that, the plot threads laid in place—or more accurately skipped—to make it possible are consistently the ones that don’t jibe).
This is why he should have season finales taken away from him.
Yeah it’s pretty obvious looking at it that this is just about making his idea work. It’s too bad because that moment was more of a nail biter than the actual end. I mean I freaked out because I do love Moriarty, but prior to that it wasn’t much of an end.
There’s a reason that even though there are some really stupid plot holes in this season, I’m willing to overlook them. And it’s because, while logically they’re problematic, they don’t change the truth the story is telling.
The confrontation with Mary, starting from coming face to face with her in Magnussen’s office and continuing through to the three of them at Baker Street, was absolutely the culmination of the season’s plot. You can FEEL it when the three of them finally arrive in Baker Street. The way the tableau is laid out, the way the three of them re-orient between each other as they move through the room and the way the physical positioning of the characters and the room speaks to the reshuffling happening between them. The intensity of the moment when they sit Mary down and, with a cut of the camera, it all comes to rest as Sherlock and John, and their client—it’s one of the most intense moments in the entire show so far.
Which means that the final confrontation with CAM is not, in fact, the climax. It’s a loose end to take care of. We get a few more revelations—the explicit laying out of the exact dynamics between all the characters through the device of ‘pressure points,’ for one—but at that point, the high point of the episode, and the season, is over with. So the reason it feels anticlimatic is because it is. CAM is the villain, but not the main conflict. And we’re further pointed to that by the fact that the ‘end’ turns out to be a teasing wink of a moment.
The stakes we’ve really been playing for all season is Sherlock and John’s relationship. As, I like to think, has Sherlock. He got forgiveness at the end of the first episode, but as John says, just because he forgives isn’t the end of it. Sherlock spends the second episode of the season (and a few months of wedding planning) doing his best to show John just how much he values him, how he can be trusted to always be there when John needs him from now on, and then he spends the third episode proving it.
The third episode is ALL about saving John Watson. From CAM, from Mary, from everything up to and including losing Sherlock again.
And he failed, you know. In the end, Sherlock had to sacrifice one of the things that was most important to John Watson. The very thing, in fact, that John had begged for and screamed about and forgiven him for at the beginning of the season.
Sherlock failed.
But sometimes, through no special grace of our own, we get another chance.
The plot of season 3. Sherlock spoilers.