Carol the Dabbler

Thanks, Bev! No, it wasn't cut (they stopped doing that after series 2), just been a while since I watched it. Yes, I remember now -- she says something about didn't it ever occur to John that Sherlock's secret brother might actually have been a secret sister. That whole series is basically one long episode, isn't it?

Well, they knew she wasn't a real therapist, that's for sure! But Sherlock didn't remember his sister, or that Redbeard was a boy, till the end of Final Problem, yet he and John had a fake girl to scare Mycroft at the beginning of that episode. OK, so maybe they figured if the woman on the bus was also John's fake therapist, then she was a significant person to them (and of course she would have previously been a little girl). But she had appeared only to John, so how did they connect her with Mycroft? Added: No, wait -- Alex reminds me that Sherlock knew about the sister in the scare-Mycroft scene at the beginning. Ariane Devere's transcript shows that he "deduced" it, but apparently the episode did not disclose his methods. So I guess my question remains open.

You're right -- I just checked Ariane Devere's transcript of Last Vow. When Sherlock is saying goodbye to John before his plane leaves, he says "the East Wind takes us all in the end," and then explains it's something Mycroft used to tell him (because "he was a rubbish big brother"). Then when Sherlock's plane is returning, John says to Mary (incidentally quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes) "There's an East Wind coming." And then in the let's-scare-Mycroft scene at the beginning of Final Problem, there's a child's voice repeating that line, and then John repeats it again on his way out the door. So basically, in the show, it's all based on what Mycroft said as a kid, and Sherlock finally figures out that it actually meant something. I don't see how he could have known what it meant, though, since he didn't consciously remember his sister -- so how did he know to have a (fake) little girl scare Mycroft?

Oh, of course! I was thinking I had known of a reason, but could not for the life of me remember what it was. Should have looked up Euros! And of course the mention of the East Wind is Doyle-canonical -- though in that case it was pretty clearly not referring to a sister, but rather to the approach of what's now known as World War I. Added: But hang on a minute -- wasn't the East Wind comment made by John? Is he psychic? Now if Moriarty or Mycroft had said it, then it could have been a reference to Ms. Holmes -- but John???

Actually that's not just us, it's show-canon; i.e., that's how her name was spelt in the credits. The mythological being's name can be spelt either Euros or Eurus (I assume the former is an approximation of the Greek spelling and the latter is the Latin spelling). On the show, they've chosen to spell it Eurus (presumably, as Bev says, to avoid confusion with the EU's monetary unit), even though they've pretty consistently pronounced it the other way. Does anyone have any idea why they called her that in the first place -- other than it (like Sherlock and Mycroft) is an unusual name? I think it's basically a masculine name, which seems odd, considering all the feminine or androgynous names they could have picked from. And once they realized they couldn't spell it the way they wanted to pronounce it, they could have chosen a different name, but they didn't. All of which leads me to suspect they had a specific reason for choosing it.

It's my impression that what upset Mummy was being *told* about the affair, apparently by one / both of the boys. Maybe she truly had not known about it, but I suspect she was intentionally ignoring her suspicions -- until having the facts brought into the open made that impossible. And yeah, none of that is canon, merely something that the writers had considered including, but then changed their minds -- or at least postponed their decision.

Curiouser and curiouser! I can see your photo now. But mine is still just a box. Think I'll go to bed. Maybe this is all a weird dream, and when I wake up everything will be back to normal.

Before I forget to mention it, the discussion of the scene between Mycroft and Lady Smallwood in "The Lying Detective" has been moved to that episode's thread, beginning here. It's interesting, and I plan to join in as soon as I get a chance. And before I try to tackle your question, welcome to Sherlock forum, CGRaines! Thanks for jumping right in and posting. As for Sherlockology, I can't seem to raise their website right now either, and I seem to recall noting at some point that it was no longer very active. The last newsfeed we got from them was in February of 2018, but that's about the same time this forum switched to different software, so perhaps we simply stopped accepting their feed then. HOWEVER!!! Their Twitter account is alive and well, so you might want to check that out.

Oh dear -- I assumed I simply wasn't looking in the right place. After all, the forum now shows your photos as those boxes, just like mine: Or do you still see the photo there (or in your actual post)? (I do not, just the box.) Could you either post or PM me the address of your account? (I assume that's public knowledge anyhow, since you've been hotlinking from it.)

It's not exactly a matter of contesting the charge, more like nipping it in the bud. That opportunity typically lasts a day or two or so, depending on something or other. If I could save the photos now, I certainly would, but at the moment I can't even get logged in. I clicked the "forgot my password" option in order to see if resetting it might help, but so far there's no email from them. I also tried logging in on a different computer, in case my usual computer was the problem, but nope, same results -- at least, when I actually get any results. I may try emailing them for suggestions, but to be frank I'm not optimistic that they'd be much help. Remember when using the internet was a straightforward matter, even with a dial-up connection? Gahhh!

Well, the good news is that they did -- just charged it to my credit card without even notifying me this time. And my photos are no longer watermarked -- because they now look like this: Just in case they decide to change tactics again in the near future, that's a small box saying "Sorry. This image is currently Unavailable" with a small Photobucket logo at the bottom. I still can't log in. And I can't seem to get at my account without logging in, like I did the other day -- maybe I should have bookmarked that URL, though for all I know that wouldn't work now either. I even tried logging in via Edge, with the same results. The $19.99 is still a pending charge at the moment, so we could tell the credit card company to reject it. But for all I know PB would take that as an excuse to cancel my account altogether, and I haven't (quite) given up hope completely. Unless somebody has another idea, I guess I'll just keep trying to log in, hoping that the auto-download will eventually work.

Hopefully they'll also put those things on DVD / Blu-ray -- eventually.

Getting ready to move is my idea of purgatory. I am NEVER moving again!!! Next time you're in London (if it's about the right time of year), check out the rose garden in Regent's Park. A lot of their roses are old-fashioned types that smell really nice. Pretty sure there are no black ones, though!

Just got up my courage to try again, and cannot log in. Again. However, I did find that I can look at my account regardless, and can copy the photos (one by one) onto my computer. So, considering that logging in seems to be a hit-or-miss proposition nowadays, I may just do it that way. If I can copy a dozen or two every day, I should be able to finish in about a month. (Just call it "How I Spent My Summer Vacation.") I'll put 'em in a special folder, and I'll also keep trying to log in, in which case I may eventually be able to use the auto feature (miracles do happen). One advantage of the individual method is that I can name the photos as I go along (using the captions from Photobucket), rather than letting it use its own rather uninformative file names. That would make it easier to figure out which photo goes where for forum hotlinks (once I get the photos re-copied onto Imgur, that is). Note that my "paid membership," which was said to include hotlinking, is still supposedly in effect, for all the good that it's done me.

Thanks again. I got to playing with it later on, and found that it will search on everything that follows the g!, regardless of what the next character is. Google ignores leading spaces, so it doesn't really matter whether you put a space after the g! or not. That's a well-designed algorithm -- though if you wanted to search on a string that actually begins with "g!" then I guess you'd need to use Google directly, rather than going through DuckDuckGo.