@brightnessrandom There were several things in it I liked, the interaction between Mycroft and Sherlock, the little details like the mirrors, and the story telling techniques like the constant parallels. A lot of it was very odd though. Half done and very fake feeling – very different from the feeling of the Doyle stories, or from Sherlock.
There’s a lot of great stuff out already about how Sherlock was obviously telling a lot of the story and how he has proven himself an unreliable narrator before. There’s also a fan theory going around that John shot Mary – which I think is very possible. There’s also a fan theory that Mrs. Norbury symbolizes John, but I think its far more likely that she’s a red herring entirely, and that if she isn’t that she symbolizes Sherlock.
It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen even if you want to assume everything happened as told, there was good acting and good moments in it. From a critical standpoint though, even if they were being very clever and it was all a carefully crafted frame story, so much of the audience shouldn’t have felt so unmoored.
The strength of the Doyle stories was that they were capable of standing on their own or as a canon because of their serial nature. Likewise BBC Sherlock is designed to essentially be a series of movies though stricter than the Bond franchise. What this means as far as narrative choice is that the episodes can and should interact with each other as far as story goes as well as enrich each other, but they shouldn’t be dependent. In other words, anyone should be able to pick up a random episode and understand what’s happening without ever having seen any of the other episodes.
So far all of the Sherlock episodes have been able to manage that, but very quickly it became obvious that Six Thatchers couldn’t. If the story happened as told the characters and story telling was not sufficiently in character to represent the series. If the story was an unreliable frame story than it could only be recognized as such by someone who’d viewed other episodes. Also, if it was a false story, that is entirely meaningless outside of the context of why which one would need the other episodes to know.
So an episode which depends on more information to determine its quality – which is a bit telling in and of itself, and which deviates from its genre format at its peril, but which had some fun moments.
Speak with Tenderness 