Boton

I think the drifting apart is part of the poignancy. John will never get to know what kind of relationship he could have had with the "real" Mary because she was killed before they could really get to know one another. I think Moftiss like to have real life on steroids. No one really knows their spouse when they get married, and it isn't really a lie. We all discover things we didn't know that color how we see our spouse, and it takes time to adjust to how that alters our fantasies. It's just that most of us haven't married assassins. Well put, Carol. In some ways, Mary is the British assassin version of Don Draper: "This never happened. It will shock you how much it didn't happen. So figure out what you have to say to get out of here, and move forward." (paraphrase; it's been a while)

Totally agree here. Molly has become a realistic woman and thus a pleasure to watch. I think even the ACD Irene was always a little bit of a cliche, so I don't mind if they turned it up to 11 for this. But Mary was a complete waste, because, if they didn't do the "die tragically off screen" thing, they could have done anything. And they went with...assassin. I would have rather seen John not marry at all, and just gift him with an ex-wife or something who's mentioned once and never heard from again. I'm actually a little annoyed with Mrs. Hudson. Yeah, OK, maybe the woman does have a sports car, and maybe she did pay for 221 with drug money. But the woman I watched for three seasons does not clean house to death metal and hold Sherlock Holmes at gunpoint, even when she's sure he's high. Actually, come to think of it, are Molly and Janine the only women so far that haven't held someone at gunpoint? Because if that's the Moftiss formula for "strong woman," I think they're setting the bar pretty high.

Great photos, Herl! Looking forward to more!

I think the whole Mary-as-assassin thing started off with ACD canon and then took a turn for the stupid. I think they wanted to replicate the fact that ACD CAM was dispatched by one of the women he wronged with Holmes watching. So far, so good. But instead of stopping there (and then going into the triad relationship where Sherlock has these two friends who will both shoot bad guys he's pursuing), they had to make her into an Amazon. She's not just a woman - she loves cats, and bakes bread, and has 12 separate identities, and has been freelancing as an assassin for MI6. See, we write strong female characters! We do!

I guess I see why Moftiss had to off Mary in some way, but the S/J/M triad (sexual or not) has always been my preferred solution, once Mary was on the scene. Just admit that the three of them make a half-way sane "couple" most of the time. Three Continents can have the physical part of the marriage, and Sherlock can have an accomplice in crime-solving. That and the fact that the only realistic way I see for working people to raise a child well is to have three or more adults in the family who rotate being at home with the kid.

Hey there! Haven't been in for a while, but this looks like an interesting discussion. I actually like the entire score from SiB, but especially "Irene's Theme," or whatever they call the piece Sherlock composes when he thinks of Irene. It carries a lot of emotion, and I think it tells you a lot about his state of mind when he considers her.

Actually, I'd be OK with a dubious anime set in a hospital too.

I would watch BC in any medical drama he cares to be in. MF too. In fact, all my favorite male actors ought to get together and make a medical drama. We can call it "Hottie Hospital" or something.

I do *a lot* of background viewing. I'm doing a complete rewatch of Grey's Anatomy right now, and then I have two more medical dramas to catch up on. I mostly watch medical shows these days.

*Offred, not Ofglen. Clearly time for a reread. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I agree that Gilead is not very realistic. I haven't seen the show, as I said, but yes, in the book it is implied that Ofglen (she never gets her real name) escapes. The question is, where does she escape to? Clearly, in the book, she can't remember a darn thing about about her life pre-Gilead other than these flashes of her family and of different kinds of freedom. I doubt the book Ofglen would have gotten more than a mile out of town before she blew her own cover. But yes, the proximity of a fascist experience in history has to put an additional layer on things. I personally don't think most of us would jump into the forefront of a resistance, mostly because it is difficult to tell when you are in the middle of it. I think it was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem that made clear to me how easy it is to make these little decisions that as long as your own family is relatively safe, there is always the overriding desire to keep flying under the radar. That's another problem I have with the book. The way it was portrayed, Gilead came on way too quickly. An awful lot of men and women would have had to be not just flying under the radar but flat out complicit in order for the take-over to happen that quickly.

I haven't watched it, but we had to read the book as part of our freshman reading program in college, and I've read it a few times since then. I understand the first season, at least, tracks pretty closely to the book. I think whether it is "emotional horror" is down to whether or not you personally feel threatened by the possibility of an intensely-patriarchal society where women are given only highly delineated roles. If it doesn't feel too personal to you, it is a good dystopian story with a couple of pretty major flaws in plausibility, which is typical for any utopian or dystopian fantasy.

Oh, absolutely. The challenge of being human is the struggle of overcoming the default settings. An imperfect analogy: fight or flight. That's a default setting for sure. But most of us encounter things regularly that trigger that impulse, and we know how to suppress the impulse and use our minds to judge whether the situation is really a threat and the cost/benefit of reacting. So, am I a bad person for feeling the urge to punch my boss in the nose, or a good person for knowing that this action goes against my moral code? Yeah, people are complicated.

I agree, but I think that accepting visible difference is only one dimension of understanding that people belong in your tribe. Honestly, accepting different races in your playgroup is not inconsistent with the whole idea that you look for a small group you identify with. I'm from a (formerly) very small town in the Midwest. Although our ethnic diversity was pretty much limited to Black and White, we all played on the playground together without a second thought of it. I can't remember ever hearing anyone say anything racist that would apply to anyone in town. (Give or take the odd linguistic appendix that needed to just be dropped out of the language.) But if you were talking about people from "the City" (whether that be the nearest one, or LA or NYC), there was an intense suspicion of those folks; they weren't our tribe, and it was hard to accept their opinion. I think that the human default is suspicion of the other, but "other" can be defined a lot of different ways, and we can't limit it to race/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexual orientation, etc.

I've often thought of the "aliens" solution myself. It doesn't hurt that I'm a sci-fi fan, so intelligent life from elsewhere is pretty much a win-win in my book. I think we also have to deal with the idea that human beings didn't evolve to think of things on a global or even a national scale. For most of our evolution, we existed in groups of a few hundred up to a few thousand people, at most. Asking people to understand the complexity of dealing with millions or billions of people may not be realistic.

We had a discussion in one of my classes in undergrad about the human need to identify the "other." Like you say, it has good survival value - if you are living in a cave or tribe of a couple of hundred people, it makes sense to be wary of the people you don't recognize coming over the next ridge. Understanding that is the key, IMHO, to having productive dialog - in order to get anywhere, you have to make your "opponent" into something that is not "the other." That's why I like forums like this or discussions with people I already like for another reason; people are already a part of my "tribe," so it is much easier to listen to their perspective and see what information they can add to my understanding. Hopefully they feel the same.

I remember debating this vigorously in grad school, when my profs were mostly Baby Boomers who protested in the 60s/70s. They contended that there was no such thing as objectivity, so it was useless to try to create anything objective or unbiased, because it would always be tainted by the beliefs of its creator. I agree that we are all trapped in our own perspective, so to speak, but I do think that we have just given up on trying to be objective. I think that anyone can learn to recognize ways to remove one's own bias from the equation. The attempt to be objective gets you asymptotically closer to the goal, even if you can never reach it.

I lay a lot of the blame on the shift from comprehensiveness to speed. Everyone is so interested in getting the "hot take" - the most retweeted tweet, the most-shared online news item, etc. - that we aren't doing a very good job saying "This is what we know now, but it is subject to change as we get more information."

Thank you, Arcadia! JP, I used to depend on Snopes a lot, but they were bought a couple of years ago by some company or other (escapes me at the moment), and the feel of independent fact checking that I used to like seems to have lessened. So I use it as one source but not as a definitive one.

I would need to see evidence that this is occurring. But yes, “illegal” should mean “not using proper channels.” I would also like to know more about the conditions that need to be met to be granted asylum. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Sort of resurrecting this post from Arcadia, but I thought I'd check into this thread, and Arcadia is spot on. In fact, I have to say that I have actually had some very good and well-though-out debates on Facebook with a group of friends from high school. Half of the group is very conservative, half is very liberal, but we've all been exchanging views and sources and occasionally raising our "voices,," but we always go back to commenting on one another's gardens and dogs and children and 5K times.

Hey, JP. I was on Red Bubble yesterday updating my (non-Sherlock) store, and I have to tell you that I love so many of your designs! They are awesome!

I suspect that Moftiss wanted to recreate the canon idea that Holmes is good in some areas and completely lacking in others, but it fell apart structurally very quickly. Besides, the guy who was researching the ubiquity of the ecliptic in TAB is not ignorant of whether the Earth goes around the sun.

Really good point, Hikari. I think the Thatcher thing was played for a cheap laugh, and I didn't much care for it. Nor do I care for Sherlock "forgetting" ERII. It seems to me that Sherlock can't have the highly compartmentalized knowledge that the original Holmes did - he can't really "forget" the solar system or who the Queen is, because so much of this knowledge is central to solving his cases. Even the whole solar system joke, which I know is a direct homage to ACD, doesn't work for me because in TBB, Sherlock shows a perfectly good understanding of celestial rotation such that he knows that the date on Seb's watch is off because of crossing time zones. So, somehow, he's retained the bit involved in keeping time, but he has forgotten heliocentrism. Right.

I hear yanny. I even sat last night and tried to look at the word Laurel and make myself hear it, and I couldn't do it. Most people around here seem to hear Laurel.