Reaction Picspam: Sherlock 2015 Christmas Special (Part 4 of 4)
Live-Bloggish Picspam Reaction/Recap for Sherlock 2015 Christmas Special
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR - "The Abominable Bride"
-Victorian Baker Street has a hell of a lot more foot traffic than the modern day version. Or the version in Sherlock's head does. Hm. I wonder if the 'Baker Street' part of the Mind Palace generally is where Sherlock keeps an image of all the random people he's walked past who've got his attention in some way, or prior suspects that turned out to be innocent. Or victims/witnesses of crimes? Just walking along Baker Street in perpetuity...
-Ah, cinematography.
-"You must tell me what's going on!" A common Watson's lament, good to see Victorian!Watson showing a bit of fire about the danger Mary's in now, at least.
-"Oh good old Watson, how would we fill the time if you didn't ask questions?" HA! Also, it's your mind palace version of him, and that's one of the features of John you've chosen to emphasize for this Victorian subroutine, so blame your own head on that one, Sherlock.
-Wait, hello, modern John! Sherlock's mind palace has sprung a leak!
-"Sherlock, tell me where my bloody wife is ya pompous prick or I'll punch your lights out!" Yep, that's our John! :-D
(Though I am a little concerned that it seems to be getting so suddenly dark on John's side of the cab but still light on Sherlock's....)
-"Holmes! Where is she?" And back to the Victorian, who I don't doubt would also call Holmes a prick and punch his lights out if he wasn't just a cog in the Mind Palace.
(and it's brighter again? or is it just the angle on the setting sun? No idea.)
-"A desanctified church. She thinks she’s found the solution and for no better reason than that, she’s put herself in the path of considerable danger." Yes, well, a desanctified church is a fantastic place to hang out when you might be dealing with the undead (which we might be now, if Sherlock has revised his Mind Palace subroutine's requirements for things considered 'impossible'). Or of course if you want to make it seem like the undead are walking about. Brings ambiance either way.
-"What an excellent choice of wife." Given what he just said before that, I don't think he's being sarcastic, really.
-Ooooooo...
-Hi Mary, lurking in a crypt or something.
-"I found them." Okaaaay, so either she was investigating something at Mycroft's behest and not part of the army of ghostly bridesassins, or this is a misdirect somewhere on the level of Hot Fuzz's Neighbourhood Watch Alliance.
-Open flaming braziers in a desanctified church. Always a good sign, that.
-"This is the heart of it all John. The heart of the conspiracy." And now there's chanting. Another excellent sign. Ooo, and the camera angle thinks so too. We're all good and wonky now!
-Oh. Oh wait just a frigging second. That. That, seriously, is a visual callback to Young Sherlock Holmes. Like directly. Holmes and Elizabeth (Mary in this case) in one window, Watson in another, (or was it Holmes and Watson in one and Elizabeth in the other?) looking down on the chanting cultists.
I can't find a good cap of the scene in Young Sherlock Holmes, but it's giving me very distinct callback vibes. Well, that's unexpected! And delightful! And if Mary or John ends up laid out on a slab as a human sacrifice, I will be mightily distressed.
-"Mr Holmes asked me."/"Holmes, how could you?" Hee! No the other one that gets people to do ridiculously dangerous things that suit his purposes.
-"Not him, the clever one." *SNERK* and also aw, because, again, mind palace, all in Sherlock's head, and Holmes in the background isn't even sending a dirty look towards the back of Mary's head. Aw.
-"'The clever one'?" No, wait, he's just on a long delay. Considering he's had his mind palace eras scrambled and now appears to be delving into the occult, it's understandable.
-"I thought I was losing you. I thought perhaps we were neglecting each other."/"Well, you're the one who moved out."/"I was talking to Mary." Heeee!
-"Has it ever occurred to you that your wife is excessively skilled for a nurse?"/"Of course it hasn't." Well, given this is Sherlock's Victorian Male Archetype Watson, not being aware of his wife's (or any woman's) true capabilities is a given. Also, nurses kick ass.
-"Because he knows what a nurse is capable of." Yeah, like what she said.
-"Must be difficult, being the slow little brother." Ooo, Mycroft has given Sherlock some truly deep-seated issues, hasn't he?
-"What’s all this about? What do they want to accomplish?"/"Why don’t we go and find out?" Yes, by all means, let's take our small party of adventurers and go confront the large group of hooded cultists. Because that always goes well. *eyeroll*
-I love you too, location-finding person. *sighs happily*
-Bursting into a room full of chanting cultists. Which are somehow part of Sherlock's Mind Palace Moriarty subroutine. Which makes them possibly worse. Really though, it's a group of women pretending to be the deceased Bride and going around murdering men who are jerks or whatever, so it's not likely they're going to summon Cthulhu to eat the group. Although again, it's Sherlock's mind palace and he's recalibrating his probability filter so... maybe? O.o
-"Sorry, I could never resist a gong, or a touch of the dramatic." NO, REALLY??? (The look on Mary's face! XD)
-Oh dear, they've gone with an ACD callback on the costume design here. Though at least the robes aren't white.
-Victorian style dress does suit them. I just have to say again: that moustache is a vast improvement over the Empty House griefstache.
-"Let's take the events in order." Ah, the 'how it was done' explanation. Amelia killed herself and the rest of the women kept faking reappearances to murder men they felt needed to die. Probably. Though there is still a slight chance of zombies.
-She did shoot up random men in the street before killing herself (or perhaps 'killing' herself), so something must've been behind that too. Or did she not actually hit any of them?
"While actually firing the other into the ground." Hm. Moriarty only had one gun, but he also had snipers... hm. Did one hit him in the back of the head with a splat round? Not accurate enough at that range. I still say it could have been a blank and a squib and a blood bag, something that requires no accomplices at all and isn't available to Victorian science, so the Mind Palace Subroutine would gloss over it here.
-"An accomplice sprays the curtains with blood." With a fireplace bellows, in two distinct (uncappable) spurts though? Well, I suppose the audience on the street, still being in shock from the apparent spree shooter would subconsciously edit the spurting into either being one splat, or being a secondary arterial spray? Distressed perception is often tricky.
-Sherlock as a series is fond of substitute corpses. Doesn't speak well of the state of forensic science in Sherlock's universe that they can swap in corpses willy nilly, except if Molly is in on it, as she was with his own corpse swap, that would be reasonable. Irene managed it without Molly's help though. And Sherlock can't possibly believe Molly'd have been in on a corpse swap for Moriarty. No. *headshake*
-And then fresh off faking her death, the Amelia goes across town and murders her husband. As one does.
-"Mrs Ricoletti persuaded a cab driver, someone who knew her, to intercept her husband outside his favourite opium den." More accomplices. *nods* Sherlock knows quite well how many people it takes to fake a death with maximum drama.
-Ah, and escaping through Victorian London's capacious sewers.
-Eeep. And then she actually went through with the dying part. Not sure why, since the substitute corpse and Molly's (probable) collusion meant she could've carried on however she liked and set up a new life elsewhere, but it's definitely dedication to the plan to die for it. Really want to know why though.
-"This time should anyone identify her it would be positively absolutely her." Well there's that I suppose. Still. The morgue is dark, and some facial damage from the shot would be reasonable to expect. Hm.
-"But why would she do that? Die to prove a point?" Exactly. Although I'm really not sure what the point was right now. I must have missed something somewhere along the way. I'm getting a little unnerved at how these cultists/conspirators are just standing so silently they're like part of the furniture.
right,
-"One half of the human race at war with the other." Ah, right, it does involve women's rights in the Victorian era. Still, a little extreme. There's a wide berth between rioting for the suffragette movement and going around murdering people while pretending to be a zombie in a wedding dress.
-Wow, I thought that was Dame Maggie Smith there for a second. O.o
-"This is a war we must lose." Hm. True enough, and murdering aside for a second, how does that fit in with all this being a construct to figure out how Moriarty came back to life (supposedly), and, ooo. The 'war we must lose' bit. This is a stretch, but is that foreshadowing for a future actual trip to Switzerland, mutual assured destruction Reichenbach for Sherlock and Moriarty? Because that would be.... unusual. There's also the Damoclesian Sword of ACD's fate for Mary still dangling, but I don't know that this would be connected to that at all. Hm. Thinking too much. Must stop.
-"Clear signs of consumption, I doubt she was long for this world." WELL YOU COULD HAVE MENTIONED THAT EARLIER, WATSON. Thanks for concealing evidence. Twit. [Actually he did mention it to Dr. Hooper, right before all the 'I know your secret' business, but I missed it. Holmes wasn't there to hear that either, so he could have said something, really.]
-"Familiar with the secret societies of America." And picked the KKK for the robe design? Could be Masons, I suppose, but really. This is a baroque and bloody way to try to bring about societal change. Not that baroque and bloody is unusual in such things through history. :-/
-"He knew her out in the States." HI MOLLY!! \o/ Ah, so he was an even bigger jerk than just being an ass to his wife. Promises of marriage and status, empty after he got what he wanted. Definitely deserving of censure and retribution, and in Sherlock's Mind Palace his sense of justice tends towards the deadly.
-"Hooper." Yes, the one who gets to slap him in the face when he's being a dick or not paying enough attention in his mind palace. Not someone who doesn't count. (And if she's slapping him now, what has he missed in his mind palace.)
-Too adorable for words.
-"For the record, Holmes, she didn't have me fooled." Ha. She probably didn't have Holmes fooled either, Watson was just enough of a Victorian era male in the mind palace to actually confront her with it.
-Ah, that moment when you realize your household staff is in on a murderous conspiracy. *starts peering through the crowd looking for Mrs Hudson*
-Oh hi, Janine! Now I'm really wondering where Mrs Hudson is in the crowd.
-"Amelia Ricoletti was our friend. You have no idea how that bastard treated her." *nods* It's hard to know what's going on in the confines of a relationship when the victim is socially isolated and too terrified to speak out. Friends are a literal life-saver. Or in this case, co-conspirators in getting rid of the problem.
-"An old theatrical trick." *FACEPALM* IT WAS A REFLECTION. there was one 'ghost', in the house, and the sighting in the garden was a reflection on glass. Which she then broke somehow...? Slingshot from the shadows?
-"Their only mistake was breaking the glass when they removed it." Or there's that. I keep forgetting somehow that there is an army of co-conspirators involved and that it doesn't have to be one person doing all the things.
-"Once she had risen, anyone could be her." Yep! Of course. I'm feeling like Sherlock has been kind of bogging his processors on figuring parts of this out, but I'm going to put it down to the fact that underlying all this is him trying to figure out how Moriarty was alive while being dead, and also throwing everything into the Victorian era to solve the cold case using the science of the time.
-"A legend to strike terror into the heart of any man with malicious intent. A spectre to stalk those unpunished brutes whose reckoning is long overdue." BATMAN!! Or the Sherlock's-mind-palace-Victorian-feminist version. Whee! \o/
-I'm not sure why, but Molly looks like she's having a hell of a lot of fun with her turn as the Bride.
-"This is the work of a single-minded person, someone who knew first-hand about Sir Eustace’s mental cruelty. A dark secret, kept from her closest friends including Amelia Ricoletti." Oh so there's a mastermind now. Of course there is. It's going to be Moriarty in a wedding dress, isn't it, because that's what this run through the mind palace is actually for. (Well, perhaps not for the dress, but definitely for Moriarty.)
-"Isn't that right, Lady Carmichael?" Naw, she's just flying the plane. That height, that hairline, it's definitely Moriarty under the veil.
-"It doesn’t quite make sense, this doesn’t quite make sense, of course it doesn’t make sense, Sherlock, because it's not real!" Pffffft. Yep. HI MORIARTY!
-...You know, antique lace kind of suits him?
(Note for anyone who watched this live: Was this reveal surprising at all? It just seemed obvious where this was going. Despite the very unfortunate implication for the Victorian Feminist Batman League that it was all being run by a man all along. Which I am sure other metas and rants have covered in the intervening 8 or 9 months since this episode aired.)
-"Speaking as a criminal mastermind, we don't really have gongs and special outfits." Heee! At least he's read that part of the Evil Overlord's Handbook.
-Uh oh, Sherlock, reality check incoming!
-"Is this silly enough for you yet?" I passed my silly point a long while ago. Moriarty's looking a little fed up with Sherlock's Victorian Mind Palace side-track/vacation.
-"You're dreaming." You know you're in trouble when a hallucinatory Moriarty in a wedding dress provides your successful reality check. And now there are some interesting faces from Sherlock.
-Meanwhile, Real!John is attacking Sherlock on the plane with a pen-light because he's gone unresponsive from drugs or whatever. Nice beds on that plane. Or is it not the plane?
-"Is this what you mean by 'controlled usage'?" *snerk* Valid. Also, judging by the sirens in the background and the venetian blinds in the windows, we are no longer on the plane. Good to know.
-"That would take weeks to find, if those records even exist. Even with my resources-"/"Got it." This is why I love Mary. A few seconds on a smart phone to cut through Mycroft's bullshit and condescension and get on with whatever needs to happen next.
-...which is apparently a little daylight grave robbery? Of course an even worse reality check than hallucinatory Moriarty in a wedding dress is a bit of 120-year old exhumation. Seriously though, what is whatever they find in that grave going to prove about Moriarty being dead or not?
-"I need to know I was right, then I’ll be sure."/"You mean how Moriarty did it?"/"Yes." Okay, so it's a confidence check. But. Wouldn't it still be Amelia in the grave either way? Either she died with the first shot and was buried, or the second shot and was buried and her friends engaged in this fantastic conspiracy that began with her death and burial. So either way, she should be down there. Or have I missed something?
-Oh, and apparently I've been spelling her name wrong all along. Emelia, not Amelia. Not going back and correcting it though.
-I can just imagine the conversation had at some point on the ride over. "It's your delusion, you do the bloody grave digging yourself." Considering normal procedures for an investigative exhumation involves Winchesters heavy equipment, and the age of the grave means the earth is going to be well solid and run through with thick, hardy roots from that nearby tree/shrub, one guy with a shovel is going to take a couple days to get six feet down in any useful, casket-opening capacity.
-"They found a body just like Molly Hooper found a body for me when-"/"*synchronised Watsonian side-eyeing*"/"-yeah well we don't need to go into all that again, do we?" Heheheheh. Not really, no.
-Ah, they've got a PC with a shovel too. That should cut the digging time down by a day or so. Pft.
-"Everyone lets you do whatever the hell you want. It's how you got in this state." Ha. Also valid.
-"I'm taking Mary home."/"You're what?"/"Mary's taking me home."/"Better." *draws little sparkly hearts around the Watsons and their intramarital snarkery*
-"So what if he's right, he's always right, it's boring!" Probably a good thing John didn't hear Sherlock say that, he's never let him forget it.
-"...will you help me?" Sorry, I've had a sudden attack of AWWWW for Sherlock asking Big Brother Mycroft for help. I rather hope it's not just with digging up the centuries-old corpse or figuring out what's up with Moriarty because the drugs thing is obviously getting out of hand.
-Hehehehe. Mycroft exchanging a glance with Lestrade, like 'so, whose problem child is he today?'
-And they're going to let him dig up the grave on his own and yes, it's going to take a long time. Sherlock is not a Winchester and therefore cannot dig a perfectly squared off grave in under two hours.
-Whoops, no, he's roped poor Lestrade into this too. Of course he has. *pats Lestrade*
-Well, it seems too heavy to be empty. Though it would be made of actual wood, so maybe not...
(Those are some pretty squared off grave edges. Maybe Lestrade and Sherlock are part Winchester after all.)
-EW!!! Not screencapping the gooey corpse because A) Ew. B) The insect life should be well done with the corpse after over a hundred years and it should not be in any way still gooey, so if it's not another hallucination for Sherlock, I will be side-eyeing the department of forensic fact-checking for Sherlock heavily. And if it is a hallucination, I will be side-eyeing Sherlock's awareness of long term corpse decay.
-Apparently not a hallucination since Sherlock's physically digging around in it. *side-eyes the department of forensic fact-checking for Sherlock heavily*
-"They must have buried it underneath!" Sherlock Holmes, leaping over a casket. Not something you see every day.
-And again with the shared 'whose problem child is he today?' looks. You can tell these two have a long shared history of trying to 'manage' Sherlock.
-...yeaaaaah, creepy whispery voices are never a good sign when you're digging in a grave for a possibly-unhallowed second buried body.
-ESPECIALLY IF PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT RECENTLY BEEN DOING ALL THE DRUGS AND HALLUCINATING VICTORIAN ENGLAND CAN HEAR IT TOO! WHAT THE ACTUAL FFFF-! O.O
-Oh she's a zombie now, so Sherlock's still hallucinating. *redirects side-eyeing to Sherlock's awareness of long term corpse decay* No worries then. Still not screencapping the gooey forensically inaccurate corpse. Unless it starts tap-dancing or something. Here's Sherlock looking freaked out though.
And this is why drugs are a bad idea Sherlock. Remember how freaked out you were that you couldn't trust your senses when you saw the Hound? Well, now your senses are messing with you again, and this time, you chose to take the drugs that caused it, so this is all. Your. Fault. You colossal dumbass. ...What? John went home, and someone's gotta fill in for him. *shrug*
-And now you're back in your Victorian Construct Mind Palace, while meanwhile in the real world you've probably passed out face first in a century-old grave. I hope you're happy.
-*rolls vid for a second listening to the sound then pauses again*...waaaait. Waaaait just a minute. That sounds like... waterfalls. Are they really going to do a Victorian Reichenbach scene!? Oh, well then. This should be interestingly meta. *eyes several thousand words of story notes worriedly and sighs* Have at it!
-"Still not awake am I?" Nope. Aw. I say the same thing to myself every morning before coffee.
-Ahahahahah.
-OH WELL HI MORIARTY. I mean of course he was going to be there, but still.
-Flat out laughed at Sherlock's little uncappable "I am so done with this crap" head roll.
-"You'll be the first man in history to be buried in his own Mind Palace." Mentally, maybe. Physically would take, like, a microsingularity to pull Sherlock's physical body into whatever parts of his brain are active right now. Very messy.
-"I'm Moriarty. 'The Napoleon of Crime.'" I think he's a little unimpressed with that nickname.
-"Moriarty's dead."/"Not in your mind. I'll never be dead there." Nope. Sherlock's been keeping him chained up in a straight jacket in the Near-Death-Experience/Emotional Apocalypse Head-Bunker.
-"You once called your brain a hard drive. Well say hello to the virus." HA!!! I guess a blindered obsession is like that, really. Takes over your every thought.
-"This is how we end, you and I. Always here, always together." *curses* Well, it's a common Holmesian thing, so Moffat almost certainly doesn't have a bug watching the WIP folder in my Google Docs.
-"You have a magnificent brain, Moriarty. I admire it. I concede it may be even be the equal of my own." Yeah, that's it. distract him with flattery until you get in shoving range.
-"You're going in the water, shortarse." *chokes on tea* BWAHAHAHAHAH! XD
-*BLURRY MORIARTY HISSING SNAKE STRIKE TO THE THROAT* EEK! That was sudden. O.o
-Blurry ear pulling! Blurry kicking in the face! Woo! Fight! \o/
-"You think you're so big and strong, Sherlock. Not with me!" Yep. This isn't 'ten tons of psychotic murdery bastard in a 140 pound bag' Moriarty. This is Sherlock's head-Moriarty, which could represent just his obsession in tracking down all of Moriarty's operations while he was being 'dead', or could be attached to some deeper root value in Sherlock's mind. He's not fighting 5'7" actual Moriarty on a cliffside by a waterfall, he's fighting an aspect of himself. And as himself, he knows where all his weaknesses are.
-"I am your weakness!" Okay, or there's that. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
-"Lie back and lose!" Heh. So Moriarty is actually Sherlock's negative inner voice, running rampant? A therapist would have a field day with Sherlock.
-"At the end, it's always just you and me!"/*Watsonian throat-clearing* YEAH!!! \o/ BECAUSE IF MORIARTY IS SHERLOCK'S NEGATIVE SELF-TALK, JOHN WATSON IS SHERLOCK'S SELF-CONFIDENCE. OR HAPPY PLACE. OR SOMETHING. WHATEVER. GET HIM, JOHN! \o/
-"There's always two of us, don't you read the Strand?" Well, there's always two of you if one of you doesn't get side-tracked by a false alarm from the Hofmeister about a sick English woman at the hotel, or a faked call about Mrs. Hudson dying.
-Ah yes. It would be tricky to have one aspect of your psyche completely destroy another part, so let's just arrest him and stuff him back in the round, padded Apocalypse Bunker section of the Mind Palace.
-"Since when do you call me John?" Your eras are slipping, Sherlock. Although there was that once in The Adventure of the Devil's Foot...
-"You'd be surprised."/"No I wouldn't." *shakes head* Silly boys.
-"I'm a storyteller, I know when I'm in one." Okay, maybe Moffat is snooping around in my Google Docs. Damn it. O.o
-"So what's he like? The other me, in the other place?"/"Smarter than he looks." Right. Okay. So. This is Sherlock's self-confidence/self-awareness querying Sherlock's evaluation of John and... I need either more or less brain for this, I'm not sure which. *headdesk*
-"Why don't you two just elope, for god's sake." *sneeeeerk*
-Ahahahahahahahaha, okay, fine. I still say that's just the short route back to the padded cell of the Mind Palace, but I think everyone has days where they really need an avatar of their self-confidence to kick their negative self-doubting voice avatar off a cliff, so this is more than a little cathartic.
-Or maybe it doesn't go to the near-death experience padded cell. Jumping again? Really? Although in this case I suppose it's more like Inception. Sort of...?
-"Between you and me, John, I always survive a fall."/"But how?" And he's still not going to give a straight answer, is he? Considering he's talking to a part of himself.
-"Elementary, my dear Watson." Bwahahaha bite me. Pffft. XD
-And of course the hat goes first.
-Man, the soundtrack seems to think this is an epic dramatic moment, but I'm stuck with a case of the giggles at Sherlock's fussy diving form.
-What can I say? I'm a sucker for a silhouette.
-Sherlock seems to also have jumped right out of his Inverness cloak.
-Oh, well, crap. They never left the plane. That explains much. Like the zombie, the perfectly straight grave-edges, the time frame, and the willingness of Lestrade and Mycroft to go along with and enable the digging up of a century-old grave on Sherlock's drugged out say so. Though in the Mind Palace, Mycroft isn't usually that supportive of Sherlock's whims. Mind-Palace Lestrade seems to be quite supportive though, which is touching, in a way.
-"Sherlock. Promise me?" Just. Mycroft's voice there. The genuine care and worry for his little brother, and the sadness of having been through this with him before.
-"Shouldn't you be off getting me a pardon or something, like a proper big brother?" Meanwhile, Sherlock is still Sherlock. And an ass. Sigh.
-Awww, Mycroft.
-"Doctor Watson... Look after him? Please?" AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!! *smishes Mycroft's little voice*
-That is an awfully full little red book. I rather hope it's a general use book and not just a record of what Sherlock's taken when. Is it the same book he took out when he first met John? *checks A Study In Pink* That one was more brown and had an elastic rather than a ribbon, so not the same book.
-Hello! We have Redbeard, Vernet (being their mother's maiden name in canon, I believe) 6 numbers which do not form into a date (unless some of those ones are slashes which makes... day first, not second.... Ha. January 6th, Sherlock's hypothetical birthdate from canon, I think, updated to 1974), "Scarlet Roll M-something" and some math involving the figure delta which usually denotes the amount by which something has changed, and another thing that looks like it's doing something with binary numbers, but I haven't seen negative binary numbers before, so I don't know. Their mom's a mathematician, so I really doubt they'd have any kind of childhood sibling code based in math or she'd have no trouble reading it at all. Anyway, probably clues for future or we wouldn't be getting them on the screen long enough to see them.
-"I never said he was alive, I said he was back." YEP. It's a couple second video clip and a GIF. Seriously, anyone could be using that to reboot the crime for hire franchise. Has anyone checked if Moran's still in jail?
-"So he's dead?"/"Of course he's dead, he blew his own brains out, no one survives that." Actually there are people who have, depending on the angle, but it's never pretty afterward, particularly with the shot Moriarty had lining up. If he faked it though... *still not 100% convinced*
-"But more importantly, I know exactly what he's gonna do next." Well, their first step was to get as much attention as possible, and as a result, keep Sherlock from being exiled. *side-eyes Mycroft* So, they wanted Sherlock in the country, and they wanted his attention. This probably means they already have a big comeback plan underway, though the finishing touches may not be on it yet since they would have had to scramble to put out the 'get Sherlock's attention' signal, since the whole 'shooting Magnussen' thing was a bit extemporaneous. Dunno. Something. Probably something really painful and grim for Sherlock and the Watsons and their friends, or at least planned to be. Vengeance and all that, or if not vengeance, starting off by taking out the biggest impediment to their future plans. By any means necessary.
-*theme music grinds to a halt* Oh great, what now?
-Ah, a little more Victorian subroutine silliness. Sherlock talking to himself some more. Really man, lay off the god damned drugs! (Weird to see a fireplace in the kitchen!)
-"The Adventure of the Invisible Army? The League of Furies?" Oh, naming the Abominable Bride business. Which, really, if Moriarty is 'back' and someone is faking that he's back, it's entirely possible that the army of Brides' techniques of pretending to be one person could easily be the way whoever's 'brought back' Moriarty intends to keep him 'alive'. Much easier to fake that identity when the majority of contacts and operations would be online.
-"The Monstrous Regiment!" Aw, a Pratchett shout-out. Random, but nice. :-)
-"It'll sell. It's got proper murders in it too." Right, he got some blowback at the start for Blue Carbuncle not having any murders. I watched that part about 9 months ago, so it's a bit fuzzy.
-"But then I've always known I was a man out of his time." And I think that's as close as Moffat will ever get to doing any sort of Doctor Who crossover. A vague implication using a quote I'm fairly sure is altered from the original canon or early Holmes-fandom meta, that maybe Sherlock went back in time and- yeah, no.
-Ahahaha, and the pull-out from the Victorian sitting room to the modern street. Very cute.
All in all, a generally entertaining side-trip into Sherlock's drug-addled brain to accomplish some thinking we'll only see the full result of when series 4 airs (starting January 1st 2017 I've heard?), and a chance to see everyone in Victorian clothes and settings. And a proper Watsonian moustache for John. Other than that, it's a 2 hour post-credit scene. Which is fine.
WELL. That only took ten months to watch through while typing comments. Two bouts of bronchial pneumonia, many other health issues, a job from hell, computer issues (including posting all this with a failed RAM chip, meaning everything takes about ten times as long to wait for the buffers to clear and watch the beachball spin), and a lot of personal crap. Not sure if I'll be doing these screencap reactions for series 4, but we'll see.
(PLEASE, NO SPOILERS OR RUMOURS OR REFERENCES TO ANY INFORMATION FOR SERIES 4 OF SHERLOCK IN COMMENTS)
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR - "The Abominable Bride"
-Victorian Baker Street has a hell of a lot more foot traffic than the modern day version. Or the version in Sherlock's head does. Hm. I wonder if the 'Baker Street' part of the Mind Palace generally is where Sherlock keeps an image of all the random people he's walked past who've got his attention in some way, or prior suspects that turned out to be innocent. Or victims/witnesses of crimes? Just walking along Baker Street in perpetuity...
-Ah, cinematography.
-"You must tell me what's going on!" A common Watson's lament, good to see Victorian!Watson showing a bit of fire about the danger Mary's in now, at least.
-"Oh good old Watson, how would we fill the time if you didn't ask questions?" HA! Also, it's your mind palace version of him, and that's one of the features of John you've chosen to emphasize for this Victorian subroutine, so blame your own head on that one, Sherlock.
-Wait, hello, modern John! Sherlock's mind palace has sprung a leak!
-"Sherlock, tell me where my bloody wife is ya pompous prick or I'll punch your lights out!" Yep, that's our John! :-D
(Though I am a little concerned that it seems to be getting so suddenly dark on John's side of the cab but still light on Sherlock's....)
-"Holmes! Where is she?" And back to the Victorian, who I don't doubt would also call Holmes a prick and punch his lights out if he wasn't just a cog in the Mind Palace.
(and it's brighter again? or is it just the angle on the setting sun? No idea.)
-"A desanctified church. She thinks she’s found the solution and for no better reason than that, she’s put herself in the path of considerable danger." Yes, well, a desanctified church is a fantastic place to hang out when you might be dealing with the undead (which we might be now, if Sherlock has revised his Mind Palace subroutine's requirements for things considered 'impossible'). Or of course if you want to make it seem like the undead are walking about. Brings ambiance either way.
-"What an excellent choice of wife." Given what he just said before that, I don't think he's being sarcastic, really.
-Ooooooo...
-Hi Mary, lurking in a crypt or something.
-"I found them." Okaaaay, so either she was investigating something at Mycroft's behest and not part of the army of ghostly bridesassins, or this is a misdirect somewhere on the level of Hot Fuzz's Neighbourhood Watch Alliance.
-Open flaming braziers in a desanctified church. Always a good sign, that.
-"This is the heart of it all John. The heart of the conspiracy." And now there's chanting. Another excellent sign. Ooo, and the camera angle thinks so too. We're all good and wonky now!
-Oh. Oh wait just a frigging second. That. That, seriously, is a visual callback to Young Sherlock Holmes. Like directly. Holmes and Elizabeth (Mary in this case) in one window, Watson in another, (or was it Holmes and Watson in one and Elizabeth in the other?) looking down on the chanting cultists.
I can't find a good cap of the scene in Young Sherlock Holmes, but it's giving me very distinct callback vibes. Well, that's unexpected! And delightful! And if Mary or John ends up laid out on a slab as a human sacrifice, I will be mightily distressed.
-"Mr Holmes asked me."/"Holmes, how could you?" Hee! No the other one that gets people to do ridiculously dangerous things that suit his purposes.
-"Not him, the clever one." *SNERK* and also aw, because, again, mind palace, all in Sherlock's head, and Holmes in the background isn't even sending a dirty look towards the back of Mary's head. Aw.
-"'The clever one'?" No, wait, he's just on a long delay. Considering he's had his mind palace eras scrambled and now appears to be delving into the occult, it's understandable.
-"I thought I was losing you. I thought perhaps we were neglecting each other."/"Well, you're the one who moved out."/"I was talking to Mary." Heeee!
-"Has it ever occurred to you that your wife is excessively skilled for a nurse?"/"Of course it hasn't." Well, given this is Sherlock's Victorian Male Archetype Watson, not being aware of his wife's (or any woman's) true capabilities is a given. Also, nurses kick ass.
-"Because he knows what a nurse is capable of." Yeah, like what she said.
-"Must be difficult, being the slow little brother." Ooo, Mycroft has given Sherlock some truly deep-seated issues, hasn't he?
-"What’s all this about? What do they want to accomplish?"/"Why don’t we go and find out?" Yes, by all means, let's take our small party of adventurers and go confront the large group of hooded cultists. Because that always goes well. *eyeroll*
-I love you too, location-finding person. *sighs happily*
-Bursting into a room full of chanting cultists. Which are somehow part of Sherlock's Mind Palace Moriarty subroutine. Which makes them possibly worse. Really though, it's a group of women pretending to be the deceased Bride and going around murdering men who are jerks or whatever, so it's not likely they're going to summon Cthulhu to eat the group. Although again, it's Sherlock's mind palace and he's recalibrating his probability filter so... maybe? O.o
-"Sorry, I could never resist a gong, or a touch of the dramatic." NO, REALLY??? (The look on Mary's face! XD)
-Oh dear, they've gone with an ACD callback on the costume design here. Though at least the robes aren't white.
-Victorian style dress does suit them. I just have to say again: that moustache is a vast improvement over the Empty House griefstache.
-"Let's take the events in order." Ah, the 'how it was done' explanation. Amelia killed herself and the rest of the women kept faking reappearances to murder men they felt needed to die. Probably. Though there is still a slight chance of zombies.
-She did shoot up random men in the street before killing herself (or perhaps 'killing' herself), so something must've been behind that too. Or did she not actually hit any of them?
"While actually firing the other into the ground." Hm. Moriarty only had one gun, but he also had snipers... hm. Did one hit him in the back of the head with a splat round? Not accurate enough at that range. I still say it could have been a blank and a squib and a blood bag, something that requires no accomplices at all and isn't available to Victorian science, so the Mind Palace Subroutine would gloss over it here.
-"An accomplice sprays the curtains with blood." With a fireplace bellows, in two distinct (uncappable) spurts though? Well, I suppose the audience on the street, still being in shock from the apparent spree shooter would subconsciously edit the spurting into either being one splat, or being a secondary arterial spray? Distressed perception is often tricky.
-Sherlock as a series is fond of substitute corpses. Doesn't speak well of the state of forensic science in Sherlock's universe that they can swap in corpses willy nilly, except if Molly is in on it, as she was with his own corpse swap, that would be reasonable. Irene managed it without Molly's help though. And Sherlock can't possibly believe Molly'd have been in on a corpse swap for Moriarty. No. *headshake*
-And then fresh off faking her death, the Amelia goes across town and murders her husband. As one does.
-"Mrs Ricoletti persuaded a cab driver, someone who knew her, to intercept her husband outside his favourite opium den." More accomplices. *nods* Sherlock knows quite well how many people it takes to fake a death with maximum drama.
-Ah, and escaping through Victorian London's capacious sewers.
-Eeep. And then she actually went through with the dying part. Not sure why, since the substitute corpse and Molly's (probable) collusion meant she could've carried on however she liked and set up a new life elsewhere, but it's definitely dedication to the plan to die for it. Really want to know why though.
-"This time should anyone identify her it would be positively absolutely her." Well there's that I suppose. Still. The morgue is dark, and some facial damage from the shot would be reasonable to expect. Hm.
-"But why would she do that? Die to prove a point?" Exactly. Although I'm really not sure what the point was right now. I must have missed something somewhere along the way. I'm getting a little unnerved at how these cultists/conspirators are just standing so silently they're like part of the furniture.
right,
-"One half of the human race at war with the other." Ah, right, it does involve women's rights in the Victorian era. Still, a little extreme. There's a wide berth between rioting for the suffragette movement and going around murdering people while pretending to be a zombie in a wedding dress.
-Wow, I thought that was Dame Maggie Smith there for a second. O.o
-"This is a war we must lose." Hm. True enough, and murdering aside for a second, how does that fit in with all this being a construct to figure out how Moriarty came back to life (supposedly), and, ooo. The 'war we must lose' bit. This is a stretch, but is that foreshadowing for a future actual trip to Switzerland, mutual assured destruction Reichenbach for Sherlock and Moriarty? Because that would be.... unusual. There's also the Damoclesian Sword of ACD's fate for Mary still dangling, but I don't know that this would be connected to that at all. Hm. Thinking too much. Must stop.
-"Clear signs of consumption, I doubt she was long for this world." WELL YOU COULD HAVE MENTIONED THAT EARLIER, WATSON. Thanks for concealing evidence. Twit. [Actually he did mention it to Dr. Hooper, right before all the 'I know your secret' business, but I missed it. Holmes wasn't there to hear that either, so he could have said something, really.]
-"Familiar with the secret societies of America." And picked the KKK for the robe design? Could be Masons, I suppose, but really. This is a baroque and bloody way to try to bring about societal change. Not that baroque and bloody is unusual in such things through history. :-/
-"He knew her out in the States." HI MOLLY!! \o/ Ah, so he was an even bigger jerk than just being an ass to his wife. Promises of marriage and status, empty after he got what he wanted. Definitely deserving of censure and retribution, and in Sherlock's Mind Palace his sense of justice tends towards the deadly.
-"Hooper." Yes, the one who gets to slap him in the face when he's being a dick or not paying enough attention in his mind palace. Not someone who doesn't count. (And if she's slapping him now, what has he missed in his mind palace.)
-Too adorable for words.
-"For the record, Holmes, she didn't have me fooled." Ha. She probably didn't have Holmes fooled either, Watson was just enough of a Victorian era male in the mind palace to actually confront her with it.
-Ah, that moment when you realize your household staff is in on a murderous conspiracy. *starts peering through the crowd looking for Mrs Hudson*
-Oh hi, Janine! Now I'm really wondering where Mrs Hudson is in the crowd.
-"Amelia Ricoletti was our friend. You have no idea how that bastard treated her." *nods* It's hard to know what's going on in the confines of a relationship when the victim is socially isolated and too terrified to speak out. Friends are a literal life-saver. Or in this case, co-conspirators in getting rid of the problem.
-"An old theatrical trick." *FACEPALM* IT WAS A REFLECTION. there was one 'ghost', in the house, and the sighting in the garden was a reflection on glass. Which she then broke somehow...? Slingshot from the shadows?
-"Their only mistake was breaking the glass when they removed it." Or there's that. I keep forgetting somehow that there is an army of co-conspirators involved and that it doesn't have to be one person doing all the things.
-"Once she had risen, anyone could be her." Yep! Of course. I'm feeling like Sherlock has been kind of bogging his processors on figuring parts of this out, but I'm going to put it down to the fact that underlying all this is him trying to figure out how Moriarty was alive while being dead, and also throwing everything into the Victorian era to solve the cold case using the science of the time.
-"A legend to strike terror into the heart of any man with malicious intent. A spectre to stalk those unpunished brutes whose reckoning is long overdue." BATMAN!! Or the Sherlock's-mind-palace-Victorian-feminist version. Whee! \o/
-I'm not sure why, but Molly looks like she's having a hell of a lot of fun with her turn as the Bride.
-"This is the work of a single-minded person, someone who knew first-hand about Sir Eustace’s mental cruelty. A dark secret, kept from her closest friends including Amelia Ricoletti." Oh so there's a mastermind now. Of course there is. It's going to be Moriarty in a wedding dress, isn't it, because that's what this run through the mind palace is actually for. (Well, perhaps not for the dress, but definitely for Moriarty.)
-"Isn't that right, Lady Carmichael?" Naw, she's just flying the plane. That height, that hairline, it's definitely Moriarty under the veil.
-"It doesn’t quite make sense, this doesn’t quite make sense, of course it doesn’t make sense, Sherlock, because it's not real!" Pffffft. Yep. HI MORIARTY!
-...You know, antique lace kind of suits him?
(Note for anyone who watched this live: Was this reveal surprising at all? It just seemed obvious where this was going. Despite the very unfortunate implication for the Victorian Feminist Batman League that it was all being run by a man all along. Which I am sure other metas and rants have covered in the intervening 8 or 9 months since this episode aired.)
-"Speaking as a criminal mastermind, we don't really have gongs and special outfits." Heee! At least he's read that part of the Evil Overlord's Handbook.
-Uh oh, Sherlock, reality check incoming!
-"Is this silly enough for you yet?" I passed my silly point a long while ago. Moriarty's looking a little fed up with Sherlock's Victorian Mind Palace side-track/vacation.
-"You're dreaming." You know you're in trouble when a hallucinatory Moriarty in a wedding dress provides your successful reality check. And now there are some interesting faces from Sherlock.
-Meanwhile, Real!John is attacking Sherlock on the plane with a pen-light because he's gone unresponsive from drugs or whatever. Nice beds on that plane. Or is it not the plane?
-"Is this what you mean by 'controlled usage'?" *snerk* Valid. Also, judging by the sirens in the background and the venetian blinds in the windows, we are no longer on the plane. Good to know.
-"That would take weeks to find, if those records even exist. Even with my resources-"/"Got it." This is why I love Mary. A few seconds on a smart phone to cut through Mycroft's bullshit and condescension and get on with whatever needs to happen next.
-...which is apparently a little daylight grave robbery? Of course an even worse reality check than hallucinatory Moriarty in a wedding dress is a bit of 120-year old exhumation. Seriously though, what is whatever they find in that grave going to prove about Moriarty being dead or not?
-"I need to know I was right, then I’ll be sure."/"You mean how Moriarty did it?"/"Yes." Okay, so it's a confidence check. But. Wouldn't it still be Amelia in the grave either way? Either she died with the first shot and was buried, or the second shot and was buried and her friends engaged in this fantastic conspiracy that began with her death and burial. So either way, she should be down there. Or have I missed something?
-Oh, and apparently I've been spelling her name wrong all along. Emelia, not Amelia. Not going back and correcting it though.
-I can just imagine the conversation had at some point on the ride over. "It's your delusion, you do the bloody grave digging yourself." Considering normal procedures for an investigative exhumation involves Winchesters heavy equipment, and the age of the grave means the earth is going to be well solid and run through with thick, hardy roots from that nearby tree/shrub, one guy with a shovel is going to take a couple days to get six feet down in any useful, casket-opening capacity.
-"They found a body just like Molly Hooper found a body for me when-"/"*synchronised Watsonian side-eyeing*"/"-yeah well we don't need to go into all that again, do we?" Heheheheh. Not really, no.
-Ah, they've got a PC with a shovel too. That should cut the digging time down by a day or so. Pft.
-"Everyone lets you do whatever the hell you want. It's how you got in this state." Ha. Also valid.
-"I'm taking Mary home."/"You're what?"/"Mary's taking me home."/"Better." *draws little sparkly hearts around the Watsons and their intramarital snarkery*
-"So what if he's right, he's always right, it's boring!" Probably a good thing John didn't hear Sherlock say that, he's never let him forget it.
-"...will you help me?" Sorry, I've had a sudden attack of AWWWW for Sherlock asking Big Brother Mycroft for help. I rather hope it's not just with digging up the centuries-old corpse or figuring out what's up with Moriarty because the drugs thing is obviously getting out of hand.
-Hehehehe. Mycroft exchanging a glance with Lestrade, like 'so, whose problem child is he today?'
-And they're going to let him dig up the grave on his own and yes, it's going to take a long time. Sherlock is not a Winchester and therefore cannot dig a perfectly squared off grave in under two hours.
-Whoops, no, he's roped poor Lestrade into this too. Of course he has. *pats Lestrade*
-Well, it seems too heavy to be empty. Though it would be made of actual wood, so maybe not...
(Those are some pretty squared off grave edges. Maybe Lestrade and Sherlock are part Winchester after all.)
-EW!!! Not screencapping the gooey corpse because A) Ew. B) The insect life should be well done with the corpse after over a hundred years and it should not be in any way still gooey, so if it's not another hallucination for Sherlock, I will be side-eyeing the department of forensic fact-checking for Sherlock heavily. And if it is a hallucination, I will be side-eyeing Sherlock's awareness of long term corpse decay.
-Apparently not a hallucination since Sherlock's physically digging around in it. *side-eyes the department of forensic fact-checking for Sherlock heavily*
-"They must have buried it underneath!" Sherlock Holmes, leaping over a casket. Not something you see every day.
-And again with the shared 'whose problem child is he today?' looks. You can tell these two have a long shared history of trying to 'manage' Sherlock.
-...yeaaaaah, creepy whispery voices are never a good sign when you're digging in a grave for a possibly-unhallowed second buried body.
-ESPECIALLY IF PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT RECENTLY BEEN DOING ALL THE DRUGS AND HALLUCINATING VICTORIAN ENGLAND CAN HEAR IT TOO! WHAT THE ACTUAL FFFF-! O.O
-Oh she's a zombie now, so Sherlock's still hallucinating. *redirects side-eyeing to Sherlock's awareness of long term corpse decay* No worries then. Still not screencapping the gooey forensically inaccurate corpse. Unless it starts tap-dancing or something. Here's Sherlock looking freaked out though.
And this is why drugs are a bad idea Sherlock. Remember how freaked out you were that you couldn't trust your senses when you saw the Hound? Well, now your senses are messing with you again, and this time, you chose to take the drugs that caused it, so this is all. Your. Fault. You colossal dumbass. ...What? John went home, and someone's gotta fill in for him. *shrug*
-And now you're back in your Victorian Construct Mind Palace, while meanwhile in the real world you've probably passed out face first in a century-old grave. I hope you're happy.
-*rolls vid for a second listening to the sound then pauses again*...waaaait. Waaaait just a minute. That sounds like... waterfalls. Are they really going to do a Victorian Reichenbach scene!? Oh, well then. This should be interestingly meta. *eyes several thousand words of story notes worriedly and sighs* Have at it!
-"Still not awake am I?" Nope. Aw. I say the same thing to myself every morning before coffee.
-Ahahahahah.
-OH WELL HI MORIARTY. I mean of course he was going to be there, but still.
-Flat out laughed at Sherlock's little uncappable "I am so done with this crap" head roll.
-"You'll be the first man in history to be buried in his own Mind Palace." Mentally, maybe. Physically would take, like, a microsingularity to pull Sherlock's physical body into whatever parts of his brain are active right now. Very messy.
-"I'm Moriarty. 'The Napoleon of Crime.'" I think he's a little unimpressed with that nickname.
-"Moriarty's dead."/"Not in your mind. I'll never be dead there." Nope. Sherlock's been keeping him chained up in a straight jacket in the Near-Death-Experience/Emotional Apocalypse Head-Bunker.
-"You once called your brain a hard drive. Well say hello to the virus." HA!!! I guess a blindered obsession is like that, really. Takes over your every thought.
-"This is how we end, you and I. Always here, always together." *curses* Well, it's a common Holmesian thing, so Moffat almost certainly doesn't have a bug watching the WIP folder in my Google Docs.
-"You have a magnificent brain, Moriarty. I admire it. I concede it may be even be the equal of my own." Yeah, that's it. distract him with flattery until you get in shoving range.
-"You're going in the water, shortarse." *chokes on tea* BWAHAHAHAHAH! XD
-*BLURRY MORIARTY HISSING SNAKE STRIKE TO THE THROAT* EEK! That was sudden. O.o
-Blurry ear pulling! Blurry kicking in the face! Woo! Fight! \o/
-"You think you're so big and strong, Sherlock. Not with me!" Yep. This isn't 'ten tons of psychotic murdery bastard in a 140 pound bag' Moriarty. This is Sherlock's head-Moriarty, which could represent just his obsession in tracking down all of Moriarty's operations while he was being 'dead', or could be attached to some deeper root value in Sherlock's mind. He's not fighting 5'7" actual Moriarty on a cliffside by a waterfall, he's fighting an aspect of himself. And as himself, he knows where all his weaknesses are.
-"I am your weakness!" Okay, or there's that. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
-"Lie back and lose!" Heh. So Moriarty is actually Sherlock's negative inner voice, running rampant? A therapist would have a field day with Sherlock.
-"At the end, it's always just you and me!"/*Watsonian throat-clearing* YEAH!!! \o/ BECAUSE IF MORIARTY IS SHERLOCK'S NEGATIVE SELF-TALK, JOHN WATSON IS SHERLOCK'S SELF-CONFIDENCE. OR HAPPY PLACE. OR SOMETHING. WHATEVER. GET HIM, JOHN! \o/
-"There's always two of us, don't you read the Strand?" Well, there's always two of you if one of you doesn't get side-tracked by a false alarm from the Hofmeister about a sick English woman at the hotel, or a faked call about Mrs. Hudson dying.
-Ah yes. It would be tricky to have one aspect of your psyche completely destroy another part, so let's just arrest him and stuff him back in the round, padded Apocalypse Bunker section of the Mind Palace.
-"Since when do you call me John?" Your eras are slipping, Sherlock. Although there was that once in The Adventure of the Devil's Foot...
-"You'd be surprised."/"No I wouldn't." *shakes head* Silly boys.
-"I'm a storyteller, I know when I'm in one." Okay, maybe Moffat is snooping around in my Google Docs. Damn it. O.o
-"So what's he like? The other me, in the other place?"/"Smarter than he looks." Right. Okay. So. This is Sherlock's self-confidence/self-awareness querying Sherlock's evaluation of John and... I need either more or less brain for this, I'm not sure which. *headdesk*
-"Why don't you two just elope, for god's sake." *sneeeeerk*
-Ahahahahahahahaha, okay, fine. I still say that's just the short route back to the padded cell of the Mind Palace, but I think everyone has days where they really need an avatar of their self-confidence to kick their negative self-doubting voice avatar off a cliff, so this is more than a little cathartic.
-Or maybe it doesn't go to the near-death experience padded cell. Jumping again? Really? Although in this case I suppose it's more like Inception. Sort of...?
-"Between you and me, John, I always survive a fall."/"But how?" And he's still not going to give a straight answer, is he? Considering he's talking to a part of himself.
-"Elementary, my dear Watson." Bwahahaha bite me. Pffft. XD
-And of course the hat goes first.
-Man, the soundtrack seems to think this is an epic dramatic moment, but I'm stuck with a case of the giggles at Sherlock's fussy diving form.
-What can I say? I'm a sucker for a silhouette.
-Sherlock seems to also have jumped right out of his Inverness cloak.
-Oh, well, crap. They never left the plane. That explains much. Like the zombie, the perfectly straight grave-edges, the time frame, and the willingness of Lestrade and Mycroft to go along with and enable the digging up of a century-old grave on Sherlock's drugged out say so. Though in the Mind Palace, Mycroft isn't usually that supportive of Sherlock's whims. Mind-Palace Lestrade seems to be quite supportive though, which is touching, in a way.
-"Sherlock. Promise me?" Just. Mycroft's voice there. The genuine care and worry for his little brother, and the sadness of having been through this with him before.
-"Shouldn't you be off getting me a pardon or something, like a proper big brother?" Meanwhile, Sherlock is still Sherlock. And an ass. Sigh.
-Awww, Mycroft.
-"Doctor Watson... Look after him? Please?" AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!! *smishes Mycroft's little voice*
-That is an awfully full little red book. I rather hope it's a general use book and not just a record of what Sherlock's taken when. Is it the same book he took out when he first met John? *checks A Study In Pink* That one was more brown and had an elastic rather than a ribbon, so not the same book.
-Hello! We have Redbeard, Vernet (being their mother's maiden name in canon, I believe) 6 numbers which do not form into a date (unless some of those ones are slashes which makes... day first, not second.... Ha. January 6th, Sherlock's hypothetical birthdate from canon, I think, updated to 1974), "Scarlet Roll M-something" and some math involving the figure delta which usually denotes the amount by which something has changed, and another thing that looks like it's doing something with binary numbers, but I haven't seen negative binary numbers before, so I don't know. Their mom's a mathematician, so I really doubt they'd have any kind of childhood sibling code based in math or she'd have no trouble reading it at all. Anyway, probably clues for future or we wouldn't be getting them on the screen long enough to see them.
-"I never said he was alive, I said he was back." YEP. It's a couple second video clip and a GIF. Seriously, anyone could be using that to reboot the crime for hire franchise. Has anyone checked if Moran's still in jail?
-"So he's dead?"/"Of course he's dead, he blew his own brains out, no one survives that." Actually there are people who have, depending on the angle, but it's never pretty afterward, particularly with the shot Moriarty had lining up. If he faked it though... *still not 100% convinced*
-"But more importantly, I know exactly what he's gonna do next." Well, their first step was to get as much attention as possible, and as a result, keep Sherlock from being exiled. *side-eyes Mycroft* So, they wanted Sherlock in the country, and they wanted his attention. This probably means they already have a big comeback plan underway, though the finishing touches may not be on it yet since they would have had to scramble to put out the 'get Sherlock's attention' signal, since the whole 'shooting Magnussen' thing was a bit extemporaneous. Dunno. Something. Probably something really painful and grim for Sherlock and the Watsons and their friends, or at least planned to be. Vengeance and all that, or if not vengeance, starting off by taking out the biggest impediment to their future plans. By any means necessary.
-*theme music grinds to a halt* Oh great, what now?
-Ah, a little more Victorian subroutine silliness. Sherlock talking to himself some more. Really man, lay off the god damned drugs! (Weird to see a fireplace in the kitchen!)
-"The Adventure of the Invisible Army? The League of Furies?" Oh, naming the Abominable Bride business. Which, really, if Moriarty is 'back' and someone is faking that he's back, it's entirely possible that the army of Brides' techniques of pretending to be one person could easily be the way whoever's 'brought back' Moriarty intends to keep him 'alive'. Much easier to fake that identity when the majority of contacts and operations would be online.
-"The Monstrous Regiment!" Aw, a Pratchett shout-out. Random, but nice. :-)
-"It'll sell. It's got proper murders in it too." Right, he got some blowback at the start for Blue Carbuncle not having any murders. I watched that part about 9 months ago, so it's a bit fuzzy.
-"But then I've always known I was a man out of his time." And I think that's as close as Moffat will ever get to doing any sort of Doctor Who crossover. A vague implication using a quote I'm fairly sure is altered from the original canon or early Holmes-fandom meta, that maybe Sherlock went back in time and- yeah, no.
-Ahahaha, and the pull-out from the Victorian sitting room to the modern street. Very cute.
All in all, a generally entertaining side-trip into Sherlock's drug-addled brain to accomplish some thinking we'll only see the full result of when series 4 airs (starting January 1st 2017 I've heard?), and a chance to see everyone in Victorian clothes and settings. And a proper Watsonian moustache for John. Other than that, it's a 2 hour post-credit scene. Which is fine.
WELL. That only took ten months to watch through while typing comments. Two bouts of bronchial pneumonia, many other health issues, a job from hell, computer issues (including posting all this with a failed RAM chip, meaning everything takes about ten times as long to wait for the buffers to clear and watch the beachball spin), and a lot of personal crap. Not sure if I'll be doing these screencap reactions for series 4, but we'll see.
(PLEASE, NO SPOILERS OR RUMOURS OR REFERENCES TO ANY INFORMATION FOR SERIES 4 OF SHERLOCK IN COMMENTS)