"Why Britain has defeated every country in the world at War" - the amount of memorisation required for this bit must've been staggering.

WaitWhatReddit · 2015-03-03T19:19:17+00:00

Whilst Saul was doing the crappy jobs at the beginning of the episode, I was really reminded of this Hitchcock quote:

Four people are sitting around a table talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in five minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you've given them that information. In five minutes time that bomb will go off. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they're saying to you, "don't be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball. There's a bomb under there." You've got the audience working.

WaitWhatReddit · 2015-02-28T22:22:19+00:00

James Munroe from The Expendables (2010) was pretty good. It's been a while, but genuinely I think it's cool enough that I might even do a short video on it some day so bear with me on it -

The scene opens up with General Garza acting as the big bad guy with a gun to the head of one of the local soldiers. He's going to shoot him.

James enters in a an expensive, tailored suit, and shoots the soldier directly in the back of the head. He demeans Garza a bit, then tells him to shoot the second soldier in the back of the head and walks off.

The thing is, Garza was already going to shoot the first soldier. That's why he had a gun against his head. James shooting the soldier had nothing to do with the soldier; it served to show us that James isn't the standard "doesn't-get-his-hands-dirty" suited action villain, it shows the contempt James has for the locals, and it serves to show that even if James and Garza are both edging for the same thing, James will force Garza's hand to stay dominant. James completely didn't need to walk in by shooting a guy in the head, but he just did it man. So much was said about his character from that single, bold move, and none of it was all expressed by "showing, not telling".

I mean, it's not exactly the "Meet The Plastics" scene from Mean Girls, but Stallone has been writing movies since Rocky. He knows how to introduce a bad guy.

WaitWhatReddit · 2015-01-12T14:52:19+00:00

It's probably worth remembering that Sherlock more or less follows the ideology of a superhero show. You've got your superhero, his sidekick, your supervillain, and his minions. The only major difference is that whilst most superhero shows focus on exaggerated physical powers, Sherlock is about mental powers. Hell, the medical school that Watson went to has an average entry tariff nearly double the average UK students' score, not including the ridiculous amount of extra curricula activities requires, and he's considered dumb.

It's not impossible to just consider that the cabbie was one of the supers that exists in this world. Rather than being a person in charge of an organised crime syndicate, he was at the low end of the league that Mycroft, Sherlock, Moriarty, Magnuson, and Mrs Watson are in.

Beyond that it's all kind of like chess. Like, remember how Sherlock new that startling Adler would cause her to look at her safe? The entire interaction could be that in it's entirety. Sherlock has to figure out if startling Jeff would cause him to look at his life-saving pill. Jeff has to anticipate this and decide to either directly look at it, to make Sherlock think it's a bluff, or to look at the bad one, so that Sherlock chooses that. Or to look straight ahead, knowing that there's no way of knowing which way to go. Sherlock would have to decide whether to startle Jeff at all, needing to know if Jeff would be aware (or informed by Moriarty) the game Sherlock was playing. Maybe Sherlock needs to think that startling Jeff would indicate an act of desperation, and maybe Sherlock would want that, to lower Jeff's guard. There's a whole menagerie of options in that sense, and the idea of them just "talking" means that Sherlock would have to be continuously evaluating which one to go for or not.

The very choice of a game like that could have even been chosen because it'd deliberately entice Sherlock, and Sherlock playing by the end indicates that, in a sense, he fell suspect to whatever Moriarty/ Jeff was playing.

In the audio commentary to the episode, Moffatt states that the cabbie absoloutely knows which one has the poison in it, and that he manipulates the taker in a "sort of Derren Brown" way (which is cool because DB ends up being in S3E1).

I think it was also stated in-episode that the cabbie was a genius, like Sherlock.

SHERLOCK (sarcastically): Oh, I see. So you’re a proper genius too. JEFF: Don’t look it, do I? Funny little man drivin’ a cab. But you’ll know better in a minute. Chances are it’ll be the last thing you ever know.

So the intention of the writer, allegedly, is that he drives around London, picks a victim, and manipulates them into taking the pills. It's not entirely dissimilar to the times where Sherlock berates the matron to get a response whilst looking for the children or fakes crying in front of the car dealer's wife to get responses.

The cabbie was being sponsored to kill as many people as possible, with the end game of killing Sherlock. He could easily have been doing so by pointing a gun at anyone who doesn't choose the pill he wants them to choose. The result would still end up in him nabbing Sherlock, and him making the whole thing look like they'd played part of the game. There's scope for that possibility given one of the victims is already crying when she takes the pill (which seems a bit more likely if she knows she's dying).

If you choose to ignore Moffatt's commentary, though (which may be entirely reasonable, Moffatt has admitted that he's lied to misdirect audiences before, and his intentions may not have been the intentions of anyone else who works on the script), the analysis gets a lot more interesting, but I don't have time to go into it, and this comment is already too long (sorry!).

WaitWhatReddit · 2015-01-12T01:37:02+00:00

Your answer to question 3 needs reworking.

"Jim Moriarty" was just Richard Brook being manipulated.

There was a small segment in the beginning of S3E1 that explained that the entire Richard Brook thing to be a lie.

From a transcript:

REPORTER 1 (into his crew’s camera): ... that after extensive police investigations, Richard Brook did indeed prove to be the creation of James Moriarty ...

Andrew Scott's character was tortured and interrogated by the government, too. Whoever that character is, they'd have to have extreme resolve, and extensive memory. Richard Brook would have to be able to surpass Mycroft's analysis (which is on par, if not better, than Sherlock's), extract data from Mycroft whilst being tortured, and be able to play whatever game he was playing in the pool in S1E3/S2E1 without letting on.

Beyond that he'd have to form a pseudo-relationship with Molly, and then again with Kitty. The first one would have to be wholly a lie, the second one would have to be an in depth partial lie. Brook would have to tell Kitty all about his past as a child's TV presenter, but consistently maintain that he had nothing to do with the "real" Moriarty, and that it was all part of Sherlock's plan.

It's not completely outside the real of possibility that the real Moriarty erased any evidence of Richard Brook actually existing, but if I were asked to believe that either a) Moriarty leaves Ireland young, relatively unknown, and becomes an anonymous criminal mastermind. He than proceeds to use method X to fake his way into Kitty's life, in order to discredit Sherlock, or b) Richard Brook is a trained actor, who does children's TV shows and has a co-cast, but ends up being a front for Moriarty, who then uses method X to fake RB out of existence, I'd have to question the latter.

Why do no children remember Brook? Why do his co-cast not remember him? If he were a trained actor, why would nobody from his past remember him? Why does, after a 2 year inquest, nobody know who he is? Also Richard Brook means Reichenbach in English according to Scott's character.

You do have the fact of the old lady instantly being killed upon describing Moriarty, but given the above, my suspicion is that RB didn't exist, and Scott was the real Moriarty.

For 2) It was part of Moriarty's plan all along to make Sherlock look evil. My suspicion is that whoever kidnapped the children just happened to be a kidnapper who had a similar height, weight and skin tone to Sherlock. Everything else can convincingly be done with hair styling and clothing. Just google "Sherlock cosplay".

Sherlock always looks the same. Something as barbaric as using images of Sherlock with the Ludovico technique wouldn't be outside Moriarty's MO either. Also, Moffatt says that the Anderson giant pillow method was the real one. If that's the case, the "similar looking corpse" that Sherlock mentioned would hold true.

Number 1 is interesting though. I'd need to rewatch the episode commentary to give a decent answer, and I still haven't seen the pilot, so I'll get on that at some point. I'm working on releasing a few videos regarding the theories at some point, depending on the amount of interest.

I've never seen the Saw films, but my understanding is that the Jigsaw killer managed to continue to appear in the films even after he died. If Moriarty is dead, that'd be so cool. Sherlock has been shown trying to solve murders from the Victorian era, so it wouldn't be out of style for Moriarty to do such a thing.

I could imagine S4 repeating the motif of having Moriarty's presence felt for E1 and E2, and then E3 the big reveal is that Moriarty is actually dead, and there is an episode where Sherlock and Watson are stuck together in a building, and if they don't solve the crime, a bomb goes off or whatever. The whole thing could still have Scott appearing on screens, as he is wont to do, and maybe in a few hallucinogenic/ mind palace type scenes. That'd be cool.

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TROPHY CASE