"He doesn't see that they can cook up anything truly dangerous, since Euros is jail, Mycroft is under surveillance."

"What if Readbeard was a parakeet? What if Redbeard was a metaphor?"

Also, the bit offscreen where Mycroft somehow manages to get down the stairs, into the kitchen, grab an extremely confused Mrs. Hudson and get out the door. In *three seconds*.

I don't give a good goddamn about 'shipping' Sherlock and John or anyone else, I just want a decent TV show to watch, and this was garbage.

So aside from the overall ludicrous nature of the plot, the other thing that made me entirely tune out emotionally from the episode was the old 'the psychotic big bad is playing a game, ha ha!' conceit.

"How do Sherlock, Mycroft, and John infiltrate Sherrinford? By stealing some boats and wearing some costumes, apparently."

We all know there's only one person, and one column, that can settle this…but do either of them count as flops? I don't know how their box office was.

Yeah, I mostly really liked this episode, but that part was straight up dumb.

Yeah. It's just meant to illustrate the force of his personality; it's a question which can cause you to question yourself in all kinds of ways, when a guy that powerful just asks it and then repeats your response back to you in a sort of half-believing way. I thought it was rather nicely done…

Or it could have been "Faith". That would certainly turn your life around in a hurry, and doesn't require a surname.

Good lord, and here I always thought Terry Pratchett made that up.

Sigh, that's really stretching things a bit. I code on a PC, doesn't mean Don Estridge gets to take the blame for my awful Python…

"This lack of quote sophistication is odd, because the web’s design
origins owe a lot to choices Steve Jobs made at Apple and later at his
second computer firm, Next."

No, it was just basically dangled occasionally throughout the episode. That thread wasn't meaningfully advanced at all.

Lots of us were bothered by that whole area of the plot for that and many other reasons. There's a discussion of it further up. It really doesn't hang together very well at all.

That's a fascinating interview, but at the same time, really bloody odd. If they knew all along that the format 'doesn't work' with Mary-the-super-spy, why did they write her in in the first place?! Just for one episode's worth of not-very-plausible hijinks and that wedding episode eveyone hated? I mean, yeesh. If you…

Elementary's a pretty interesting comparison actually. I pretty much stopped watching that one lately, but it didn't have any complete messes like Sherlock has had, at least not that I saw (I dipped in and out of it a bit). It's just been subject to the more-or-less inevitable American Procedural Gradual Decline,…

Yeah, we covered that below. It's all completely ridiculous.

Sure you would. Just get the dog from the police.

Doesn't really seem relevant at all. Sherlock has never followed the original stories terribly closely, so why would it be bound to that choice, whether or not I actually agree that it's the case?