Sherlock - "The Abominable Bride" Grade and Discussion thread

[Mojochi]

I just wish Donovan had also made a brief appearance, alas.

In truth, Donovan has been absent ever since her only appearance in season 3, in "The Sign of Three", during the Water's Gang montage with Lestrade. The actress works another show in the U.S, & it keeps her away. I'm kind of hoping Moffat can spin her unexplained absence into a clever plot point some day. Seems a shame to just let her fall by the wayside

 

[Mr Light]

Bizarre but enjoyable. I basically went into it assuming this was going to be Sherlock's dream state. It was chocked full of great lines, which got me googling, which all turned out to be direct pulls from the original material. Did the previous episodes do that as much? I only watched them once.

 

[BeatleJWOL]

I loved it. Bring on the new season. I did enjoy how Victorian!Watson was so much crankier than Modern!Watson.

Also the mind palace twist was delightful, a complete suprise, and I absolutely despise anybody who saw it coming.

But clearly Sherlock's knowledge of Victorian culture is incomplete, or he would've known that no English gentleman would ever wear a deerstalker in town. That's strictly for the countryside. In the city, Holmes would always wear a top hat.

Yeah, and literary Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson" either. Some Holmes adaptation tropes just won't die.

trust Moffat to try some kind of mind trip

Yup. This episode has "Moffat being Moffat" all over it. Done well here, though.

So is all of the Holmes literary canon just Sherlock projecting himself back into Victorian/Edwardian times, or is all of Sherlock just Holmes extrapolating the future?

is this a scenario in modern Sherlock's mind palace or is modern Sherlock a scenario in Victorian Sherlock's mind palace

I'm really okay with the stated motivations behind this:

Moffat stated, “[We did this] just because we can, really. We said, ‘Could we maybe do one scene or a dream sequence?’ Then we said why don’t we just do it? We never bothered explaining why he’s in modern day London. Why explain why we’re in Victorian [London]?”

http://popgeeks.net/stephen-moffat-drops-details-on-victorian-era-sherlock-special/

It doesn't matter, and it shouldn't matter. This is a "very special episode" that happens to be a little kick in the pants to get the viewer excited for new Sherlock. I say mission accomplished!

 

[Kane2026]

I thought it was a decent episode, but the ending only made sense during the second viewing. I was certainly not anticipating the story being Sherlock's imagination.

After Christopher put forth the idea of doing Elementary in the same time-period I am slowly warming up to it. Marcus would be a problem, but Joan could be introduced as Watson's wife without there being a John Watson

 

[Christopher]

It was chocked full of great lines, which got me googling, which all turned out to be direct pulls from the original material. Did the previous episodes do that as much? I only watched them once.

Oh, the whole series has drawn heavily on the original material, as much its plots as its dialogue. Elementary does so as well, though generally in a less self-conscious/winking way and more subtly interspersed within the original content.

I'm really okay with the stated motivations behind this:

Moffat stated, “[We did this] just because we can, really. We said, ‘Could we maybe do one scene or a dream sequence?’ Then we said why don’t we just do it? We never bothered explaining why he’s in modern day London. Why explain why we’re in Victorian [London]?”

http://popgeeks.net/stephen-moffat-drops-details-on-victorian-era-sherlock-special/

It doesn't matter, and it shouldn't matter. This is a "very special episode" that happens to be a little kick in the pants to get the viewer excited for new Sherlock. I say mission accomplished!

Except the whole story was built around explaining why present-day Sherlock would imagine himself as a Victorian detective. The whole thing served a specific narrative reason in the context of the modern storyline. So Moffat saying there would be no explanation was surely just a smokescreen for the press, because the fact that this was really part of the modern storyline, rather than just a random sidebar, was a surprise twist within the story.

After Christopher put forth the idea of doing Elementary in the same time-period I am slowly warming up to it. Marcus would be a problem, but Joan could be introduced as Watson's wife without there being a John Watson

I think it would've been pretty scandalous for a Victorian English gentleman to take a Chinese (or Chinese-American) woman as his wife. Maybe not impossible, if Dr. Watson were sufficiently progressive, but certainly disreputable.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Where in the 21st century does a story require being beholding to the 19th?

 

[Christopher]

^I'm sorry, I don't understand your question.

 

[Mojochi]

Where in the 21st century does a story require being beholding to the 19th?

In Sherlock's head

 

[Kibbin]

Not a fan, though haven't been a fan for a while so no surprise. Tuned in for a one off Victorian Sherlock Holmes and I have to say I enjoyed it while it was doing that. The acting was decent as everyone brought a slight modernity to their classic character such as the house keeper annoyed at getting no lines and the best Sherlock we have seen from Bennedict since the show began. Figured we were gonna link to "Sherlock" about a quarter of the way through, figured it was "Sherlock" about half the way through and kind of lost it when it smashed the two together as though trying to please fans of "Sherlock" and people after "Sherlock Homes".

 

[ancient]

The whole time I watched the first two seasons I kept thinking that this show was ridiculous & aimed at teenage girl slashfic writers. But then I somehow ended up watching the entire thing. In that sense it's similar to Twin Peaks...it's almost so absurd in every way that I became a fan somehow. It's a rare kind of magic trick - to play with an audience without annoying them.

 

[Christopher]

^I think if it were aimed at slashfic fans, then it would be more open about the slash rather than just making it a running joke about everyone assuming they're lovers when they aren't. It's more like it's aimed at rabid Holmes fans like Moffat and Gatiss themselves.

And its indulgences definitely do annoy me, although it has other qualities I appreciate. I find it a frustrating and inconsistent show. Oh, and Andrew Scott's Moriarty is nothing but annoying.

 

[EnsignRicky]

I thought it was a pretty good episode but if Sherlock couldn't tell that the coroner was a woman the second she opened her mouth, he should just hang up his deerstalker.

 

[Christopher]

I thought it was a pretty good episode but if Sherlock couldn't tell that the coroner was a woman the second she opened her mouth, he should just hang up his deerstalker.

But that's part of Holmes's character in the original stories -- his misogyny is his blind spot, as Watson said. People like to read his fixation with Irene Adler as a romantic one, but Watson's narration in the story quite clearly explained that it was nothing of the sort. He just couldn't wrap his head around the idea that a woman could be his intellectual equal, because in his worldview, intellect was the province of men and emotion the province of women, and emotion (and therefore the entire female sex) was nothing but a useless distraction from intellectual pursuits. So his worldview just didn't include the possibility of a woman functioning on the same level as a man, and thus he couldn't see what was right in front of him.

I suppose it could be a similar principle to what was established back in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes is only a genius about the areas of knowledge he considers important and completely ignorant of everything else -- for instance, not knowing that the Earth revolved around the Sun because it had no relevance to criminal investigation. So if he could be that ignorant about whole fields of knowledge, he could be similarly blind about women. He just wouldn't admit any ideas into his head except the ones he considered worth having.

Although conversely, I suppose that in the context of this episode's version of Holmes (or rather, Sherlock's imagined version of himself as a Victorian gentleman), it's possible that Holmes was completely aware that Hooper was a woman disguised as a man, but simply didn't care, because it wasn't relevant so long as she provided useful information.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Although conversely, I suppose that in the context of this episode's version of Holmes (or rather, Sherlock's imagined version of himself as a Victorian gentleman), it's possible that Holmes was completely aware that Hooper was a woman disguised as a man, but simply didn't care, because it wasn't relevant so long as she provided useful information.

I have been considering this, and I think one could make an argument in both directions -- he knew and didn't care, or he didn't know until he confronted the society.

I lean towards he knew and didn't care. Holmes himself is a master of disguise (in the Canon, anyway), and he probably made note that Hooper was actually a woman, then decided to let it go because she had her reasons. The tell, for me, was Watson's statement that he knew in the crypt when she revealed herself; I felt they were drawing a bit on Nigel Bruce for the characterization of Victorian!Watson, and stating the bleeding obvious is in line with that.

Her annoyance with Holmes in the morgue probably stems from her real fear that he would out her as she couldn't be sure if he knew or not. She may have thought that being annoyed with him would impel him to leave and keep him from taking too close a look at her, because if he did he could probably deduce that she was a woman in disguise. Heck, Watson knew, after all.

 

[EnsignRicky]

Fair enough; But how stupid were everyone else in the morgue?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Fair enough; But how stupid were everyone else in the morgue?

Very.

Lestrade and Anderson are bewilderingly stupid because Sherlock (in 2014, imagining them in 1895) sees them as bewilderingly stupid anyway, and his imagined caricatures of them are amped up on the stupidity scale even more.

 

[Christopher]

Lestrade and Anderson are bewilderingly stupid because Sherlock (in 2014, imagining them in 1895) sees them as bewilderingly stupid anyway, and his imagined caricatures of them are amped up on the stupidity scale even more.

You could say much the same about Watson, who was a little more Nigel Bruce-ish here than usual, as you said.

It's interesting, then, that although Sherlock's fantasy version of Mycroft was grotesquely fat and gleefully participating in his own self-destruction, he was nonetheless still the smarter brother. You'd think that was the one part of Mycroft's character that Sherlock would most want to leave out of his fantasy world. Instead he kept that trait and gave Mycroft other unpleasant traits around it.

 

[Galileo7]

It was a bit silly but it was a lot of damn fun, too!

I really enjoyed it.

Agree.

 

[Bisz]

Fat!Mycroft

Can we say... Fatcroft?


I have mixed feelings on the episode. Overall I enjoyed it, but like with the later episodes I find that they are nowhere near as clever as the first season.

 

[Romulan_spy]

Just got around to watching it. I enjoyed it. But I definitely wish the entire episode had just been in the victorian era. The victorian era sherlock felt like classic Conan Doyle sherlock holmes. You had the amazing deductions, the visitor coming to 221B and narrating their case to Sherlock, Sherlock and Watson trying to catch the criminal in the act, and the conclusion with Sherlock solving the case and explaining how everything happened. If they had stuck with that, it would have been a great homage to classic sherlock holmes. I am not sure the writers needed to make it more complex with the Moriarty and mind palace subplot.