Sherlock Episode 3.1.3
Finally, finally, The Empty Hearse lurches toward its finale. Such as it is.
Sherlock 3.1.3
When last we left our newly reunited pair, they were poring over a whole bunch of random facts, trying to fit them into a narrative that would a) explain why someone bopped John over the head and left him in a bonfire, and b) contain the word “terrorist.” Why “terrorist?” Because terrorists are trendy, I guess.
The solution to the question of “how did a man get on a train at Westminster and vanish by the next stop?” is that it wasn’t just the man who vanished, it was the entire train car. Now, this is something that maybe you or I wouldn’t necessarily notice, especially with London Tube cars being designed the way they are, but . . . does it really take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out? Recall that the guy who gave him the security footage wasn’t just a Tube employee - he was a trainspotter. The kind of obsessive fan whom even obsessive fans think is obsessive. This guy is an expert on trains literally to the exclusion of all else in his life. The number of cars on that train might be a detail that a civilian would miss, but how the hell did this guy miss it? Not a Sherlock Holmes-worthy problem, show. Do better.
Sherlock fails to distract from this by rattling off really fast the fact that the driver dumped the train car, but John returns with Iteration #17 of This Episode’s Theme: Why?
It seems that it’s the Fifth of November . . . waitaminute. Isn’t the evening of the Fifth of November the night when the bonfires and fireworks are supposed to happen? If this is the morning after John’s little Guy Fawkes adventure, shouldn’t the date now be the sixth? How long has it been the Fifth of November, anyway? Are the terrorists going to turn out to be Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell? Well, whoever they are, they’re planning to blow up Parliament. Because that worked out so well the last time.
Here we get to something actually interesting. Like a lot of old cities, such as Ankh-Morpork, London is built on itself, and there are ghost stations all over the place. Trainspotter Dude identifies one at Sumatra Road, which Sherlock thinks would be a grand place to hide a train car containing explosives with which to blow up Parliament. They’d have to be pretty damn good explosives, since Sumatra Road is actually about five miles away from Parliament. It’s in Hampstead, which means that it would be more likely to blow up a whole bunch of synagogues, and possibly strengthen the “terrorist” theme, although at the expense of the “people that Mycroft Holmes gives a shit about” theme.
We cut to the news, which is somehow not reporting Parliament’s decision to up and move to the Hampstead Synagogue, but is instead wurbling about a terrorist bill. Lord Moran, who opposes the bill, is not present at the debate, in favor of chilling at home watching the news. He seems to be the guy behind the “blow up Parliament” plot, which I don’t think is the usual method of expressing your opposition to a proposed piece of legislation. That would be stick fighting, thankyouverymuch.
Sherlock and John descend into the Underground at . . . Westminsterstead . . . and debate whether or not John should call the cops about the bomb on the hidden train car. John thinks that evacuating Parliament is a good idea. Sherlock, who lives in a world where Sumatra Road and Parliament are in the same place, thinks that it’s more efficient to use a GP as a bomb disposal squad. They descend onto the strangely rat- and homeless-person-less tracks and chew up far more run time than this episode can afford at this point wandering around and shining their flashlights at the camera to make lens flares.
After a while, they mosey their way into an abandoned train station, only to find . . . no dice. Sherlock imagines himself into the car, and what might happen when the bomb goes off. It’s actually a really cool sequence, with a rushing fireball that gets sucked up an air shaft, right into Westminster Abbey, where the heating vents shimmer with hot air before the whole thing goes boom and collapses. It’s right up there with blowing up the White House, and I suspect that there was probably at least a fraction of the viewing audience who wouldn’t have been too terribly disappointed if Sherlock hadn’t figured it out. Josh Lyman feels their pain.
In addition to providing a spark of entertaiment, this almost-a-thing helps Sherlock to remember that The Terrorists™ aren’t stupid, and of course they wouldn’t hide their car bomb right in the abandoned station. He and John hop back down onto the tracks and trek a bit further. Eventually, they come across the bomb car and start poking around. The music tries to make like “abandoned train car” is a spooky thing like “abandoned mental hospital,” but the doofy pattern on the seats and the bright green passenger poles just aren’t up to that kind of snuff. Taking their sweet time, Sherlock and John eventually figure out that the whole car is wired to explode. Well, then. I believe that this is why God invented bomb disposal units, isn’t it?
Moving as if through molasses, Lord Moran opens up a briefcase containing the remote control for the bomb. Ever so slowly, Sherlock pries up the floor of the train car to find the bomb’s local control center. In real time, wounded Afghan War veteran John begins to pant his way through a PTSD flashback, but no one, and by this I mean “Sherlock,” really seems to care. The train bomb hasn’t quite been activated, but a little tiny Logic Bomb goes off as Sherlock is hit in the face with the reality that, yes, John was right, they do in fact need Bomb Disposal, and that a GP and a guy who wears a coat really well aren’t quite the same thing. Well, too late for that. Shoulda thought of it earlier - oh, wait. Someone did. Lord Moran activates the bomb, giving them two and a half minutes until eternity.
Which they decide to spend arguing, of course. Sherlock tries to send John away, and, while it’s really kind of touching that he thinks John is badass enough to walk away from an explosion, John thinks that the Mind Palace is more realistic. Sherlock twitches and grunts, but comes up with nothing but another apology.
There’s touching music and apologies and “If I’d only”s and Difficult Emotional Honesty, and . . . hang on . . . didn’t they only have two and a half minutes? Hasn’t this scene been going on for at least fifteen minutes? What, does the bomb run on NFL Clock Time? Can they just pause it for huddles or beer commercials or stuff?
Actually, we do get a bit of a pause so that Sherlock can explain the plot to us poor insensate souls via - and I really wish I were making this up, but I’m not - yet another damn recap of The Reichenbach Fall. Moriarty’s criminal network - which, I might add, we’ve never seen any evidence that it’s all that vast or all that much of a threat - somehow required specialist tools to take down. Lacking RICO, Mycroft came up with the spy-plot equivalent of a Rube Goldberg device and fed Moriarty just enough information about Sherlock so that Moriarty could ruin Sherlock’s reputation.
The whole thing turns out to be yet another “how I did it,” that is no more or less interesting than either the two previous “how I did it” breaks or any of the bajillion other fan theories. It answers no questions, and in fact opens up several more plot holes, and you can pretty much fast-forward through this without losing any of what passes for momentum at this point in the game.
For some reason, we get all of this through the device of Sherlock sitting on a sofa recounting all of this to Anderson and Anderson’s video camera, and how these two men can stand to be in the same room as each other is a question that no one dares to raise on the off chance that the answer will be something along the lines of “she who smelt it dealt it.” In a brief, shining moment of actual relevance, Anderson unexpectedly becomes the voice of the viewing audience, proclaiming himself “disappointed.” Well, says Sherlock, everyone’s a critic.
Yes, Sherlock. Yes, we are.
Anyway, Anderson thinks about this story for about thirty seconds, and then the plot holes devour his brain, and he goes gibbering mad without ever having found out why Sherlock thought that so much effort was needed to arrest a piker like Jim Moriarty in the first place. I never thought I’d say this, but . . . oh, Anderson. We feel your pain.
Back to what passes for reality. We now have to sit through a scene that I hope that both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were paid extra for, because it had to be three times as humiliating to act as it is to watch. The gist of it is that, in fact, the previous train car scene was running on NFL Clock Time. Sherlock had paused the bomb clock - which he’d said that he couldn’t do - just to force John into forgiving him for being a dick . . . and now he’s being a dick by laughing at John’s terror. Is this actually the same character who took John on a laughing follow-that-cab chase through London as an in-retrospect-subtle way of taking care of his psychosomatic limp? What do these two personalities have in common, except the (if there is any justice in this world, extremely well-paid) face of Benedict Cumberbatch?
Hey, it’s a tray of room service, with a giant bottle of wine! Yes! That’s what I want right about now, as compensation for sitting through the past thirty seconds. Alas, no one gets the wine. Lord Moran gets nabbed by the fuzz. At least, we assume it’s the fuzz. They don’t identify themselves, just pull guns on him, so for all we know, he might just have stiffed the bellhop on a tip.
Back at Baker Street, Sherlock is on the phone, as the chorus of Les Mis belts out the Act One finale. Do you hear the viewers sing? / Singing the song of angry fans / It is the music of a fanbase / That will not be bored again!
Mycroft is begging Sherlock to come rescue him from an afternoon at the theater with Mummy and Daddy, and Sherlock happily tells him no dice. He’s enjoying a little welcome-home party with John, Mary, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson, and in walks Molly. Surely this party will go over better than the last party Molly attended at Baker Street. This time, she has her new boyfriend Tom in tow. He’s fairly similar to Sherlock except utterly lacking in personality, so we know that Molly has a type. Sherlock and John are a little wigged out but agree to ignore it.
So, John asks, desperate for one of the many “why” questions of this episode to be answered. Why did They (who are “They,” anyway? We never did find out, really.) go after him and stick him in that bonfire. Sherlock doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care all that much.
We end on an unexpectedly sweet note, in which John recalls weeping over Sherlock’s grave and begging him not to be dead. I know, Sherlock says. I heard you. John got his miracle in the end. We may never know how, but that’s not important. We will never know why, which is irritating and pretty bad writing to boot. But John did get his miracle, and in the end, that’s really the important thing.
A coda shows us a guy sitting in a darkened storage room, watching footage of Sherlock and Mary rescuing John from the bonfire. He is . . . well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, he’s just another guy waiting for this episode to grow a plot.
So. The Empty Hearse. Sherlock Returns From The Dead. What a crock. Thus far, the show has still not topped The Great Game, from back in Series One, for quality. This one is actually competing with The Blind Banker for Worst Sherlock Episode. Let’s see how they stack up.
The Blind Banker had a nonsense plot and was egregiously, at times viciously, racist. On the other hand, it was visually interesting and it did have the fantastic Sarah Sawyer.
The Empty Hearse didn’t go in for racism. I’ll give it that. Mary seems like a fun and intriguing addition to the cast. And we did get to meet the Parental Units, which was cool. There were a few bright character moments. But by God, was this episode a mess! What was it about? Nothing. It wasn’t about anything. Sherlock showed up, completely unchanged, and we never found out why he had to plot the elaborate deception that he did. Frankly, given that we heard three different options from unreliable narrators, we never really found out how he did it, either, which was the softball question. We never learned who the villain was, or why he plotted to do what he did, or how he managed to pull it off. We never even learned who kidnapped John, or why that happened. Where The Blind Banker was bad, it was actively bad. The Empty Hearse . . . just isn’t. It isn’t anything. It’s just there, wurbling on and on and on and never really amounting to a hill of beans.
But it’s not racist.
So, to everyone following along at home, what do you think? Which one of these two godawful episodes is the bottom of the Sherlock barrel? Or do you have another nomination? Inquiring minds want to know!
Sherlock 3.1.3
When last we left our newly reunited pair, they were poring over a whole bunch of random facts, trying to fit them into a narrative that would a) explain why someone bopped John over the head and left him in a bonfire, and b) contain the word “terrorist.” Why “terrorist?” Because terrorists are trendy, I guess.
The solution to the question of “how did a man get on a train at Westminster and vanish by the next stop?” is that it wasn’t just the man who vanished, it was the entire train car. Now, this is something that maybe you or I wouldn’t necessarily notice, especially with London Tube cars being designed the way they are, but . . . does it really take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out? Recall that the guy who gave him the security footage wasn’t just a Tube employee - he was a trainspotter. The kind of obsessive fan whom even obsessive fans think is obsessive. This guy is an expert on trains literally to the exclusion of all else in his life. The number of cars on that train might be a detail that a civilian would miss, but how the hell did this guy miss it? Not a Sherlock Holmes-worthy problem, show. Do better.
Sherlock fails to distract from this by rattling off really fast the fact that the driver dumped the train car, but John returns with Iteration #17 of This Episode’s Theme: Why?
It seems that it’s the Fifth of November . . . waitaminute. Isn’t the evening of the Fifth of November the night when the bonfires and fireworks are supposed to happen? If this is the morning after John’s little Guy Fawkes adventure, shouldn’t the date now be the sixth? How long has it been the Fifth of November, anyway? Are the terrorists going to turn out to be Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell? Well, whoever they are, they’re planning to blow up Parliament. Because that worked out so well the last time.
Here we get to something actually interesting. Like a lot of old cities, such as Ankh-Morpork, London is built on itself, and there are ghost stations all over the place. Trainspotter Dude identifies one at Sumatra Road, which Sherlock thinks would be a grand place to hide a train car containing explosives with which to blow up Parliament. They’d have to be pretty damn good explosives, since Sumatra Road is actually about five miles away from Parliament. It’s in Hampstead, which means that it would be more likely to blow up a whole bunch of synagogues, and possibly strengthen the “terrorist” theme, although at the expense of the “people that Mycroft Holmes gives a shit about” theme.
We cut to the news, which is somehow not reporting Parliament’s decision to up and move to the Hampstead Synagogue, but is instead wurbling about a terrorist bill. Lord Moran, who opposes the bill, is not present at the debate, in favor of chilling at home watching the news. He seems to be the guy behind the “blow up Parliament” plot, which I don’t think is the usual method of expressing your opposition to a proposed piece of legislation. That would be stick fighting, thankyouverymuch.
Sherlock and John descend into the Underground at . . . Westminsterstead . . . and debate whether or not John should call the cops about the bomb on the hidden train car. John thinks that evacuating Parliament is a good idea. Sherlock, who lives in a world where Sumatra Road and Parliament are in the same place, thinks that it’s more efficient to use a GP as a bomb disposal squad. They descend onto the strangely rat- and homeless-person-less tracks and chew up far more run time than this episode can afford at this point wandering around and shining their flashlights at the camera to make lens flares.
After a while, they mosey their way into an abandoned train station, only to find . . . no dice. Sherlock imagines himself into the car, and what might happen when the bomb goes off. It’s actually a really cool sequence, with a rushing fireball that gets sucked up an air shaft, right into Westminster Abbey, where the heating vents shimmer with hot air before the whole thing goes boom and collapses. It’s right up there with blowing up the White House, and I suspect that there was probably at least a fraction of the viewing audience who wouldn’t have been too terribly disappointed if Sherlock hadn’t figured it out. Josh Lyman feels their pain.
In addition to providing a spark of entertaiment, this almost-a-thing helps Sherlock to remember that The Terrorists™ aren’t stupid, and of course they wouldn’t hide their car bomb right in the abandoned station. He and John hop back down onto the tracks and trek a bit further. Eventually, they come across the bomb car and start poking around. The music tries to make like “abandoned train car” is a spooky thing like “abandoned mental hospital,” but the doofy pattern on the seats and the bright green passenger poles just aren’t up to that kind of snuff. Taking their sweet time, Sherlock and John eventually figure out that the whole car is wired to explode. Well, then. I believe that this is why God invented bomb disposal units, isn’t it?
Moving as if through molasses, Lord Moran opens up a briefcase containing the remote control for the bomb. Ever so slowly, Sherlock pries up the floor of the train car to find the bomb’s local control center. In real time, wounded Afghan War veteran John begins to pant his way through a PTSD flashback, but no one, and by this I mean “Sherlock,” really seems to care. The train bomb hasn’t quite been activated, but a little tiny Logic Bomb goes off as Sherlock is hit in the face with the reality that, yes, John was right, they do in fact need Bomb Disposal, and that a GP and a guy who wears a coat really well aren’t quite the same thing. Well, too late for that. Shoulda thought of it earlier - oh, wait. Someone did. Lord Moran activates the bomb, giving them two and a half minutes until eternity.
Which they decide to spend arguing, of course. Sherlock tries to send John away, and, while it’s really kind of touching that he thinks John is badass enough to walk away from an explosion, John thinks that the Mind Palace is more realistic. Sherlock twitches and grunts, but comes up with nothing but another apology.
There’s touching music and apologies and “If I’d only”s and Difficult Emotional Honesty, and . . . hang on . . . didn’t they only have two and a half minutes? Hasn’t this scene been going on for at least fifteen minutes? What, does the bomb run on NFL Clock Time? Can they just pause it for huddles or beer commercials or stuff?
Actually, we do get a bit of a pause so that Sherlock can explain the plot to us poor insensate souls via - and I really wish I were making this up, but I’m not - yet another damn recap of The Reichenbach Fall. Moriarty’s criminal network - which, I might add, we’ve never seen any evidence that it’s all that vast or all that much of a threat - somehow required specialist tools to take down. Lacking RICO, Mycroft came up with the spy-plot equivalent of a Rube Goldberg device and fed Moriarty just enough information about Sherlock so that Moriarty could ruin Sherlock’s reputation.
The whole thing turns out to be yet another “how I did it,” that is no more or less interesting than either the two previous “how I did it” breaks or any of the bajillion other fan theories. It answers no questions, and in fact opens up several more plot holes, and you can pretty much fast-forward through this without losing any of what passes for momentum at this point in the game.
For some reason, we get all of this through the device of Sherlock sitting on a sofa recounting all of this to Anderson and Anderson’s video camera, and how these two men can stand to be in the same room as each other is a question that no one dares to raise on the off chance that the answer will be something along the lines of “she who smelt it dealt it.” In a brief, shining moment of actual relevance, Anderson unexpectedly becomes the voice of the viewing audience, proclaiming himself “disappointed.” Well, says Sherlock, everyone’s a critic.
Yes, Sherlock. Yes, we are.
Anyway, Anderson thinks about this story for about thirty seconds, and then the plot holes devour his brain, and he goes gibbering mad without ever having found out why Sherlock thought that so much effort was needed to arrest a piker like Jim Moriarty in the first place. I never thought I’d say this, but . . . oh, Anderson. We feel your pain.
Back to what passes for reality. We now have to sit through a scene that I hope that both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were paid extra for, because it had to be three times as humiliating to act as it is to watch. The gist of it is that, in fact, the previous train car scene was running on NFL Clock Time. Sherlock had paused the bomb clock - which he’d said that he couldn’t do - just to force John into forgiving him for being a dick . . . and now he’s being a dick by laughing at John’s terror. Is this actually the same character who took John on a laughing follow-that-cab chase through London as an in-retrospect-subtle way of taking care of his psychosomatic limp? What do these two personalities have in common, except the (if there is any justice in this world, extremely well-paid) face of Benedict Cumberbatch?
Hey, it’s a tray of room service, with a giant bottle of wine! Yes! That’s what I want right about now, as compensation for sitting through the past thirty seconds. Alas, no one gets the wine. Lord Moran gets nabbed by the fuzz. At least, we assume it’s the fuzz. They don’t identify themselves, just pull guns on him, so for all we know, he might just have stiffed the bellhop on a tip.
Back at Baker Street, Sherlock is on the phone, as the chorus of Les Mis belts out the Act One finale. Do you hear the viewers sing? / Singing the song of angry fans / It is the music of a fanbase / That will not be bored again!
Mycroft is begging Sherlock to come rescue him from an afternoon at the theater with Mummy and Daddy, and Sherlock happily tells him no dice. He’s enjoying a little welcome-home party with John, Mary, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson, and in walks Molly. Surely this party will go over better than the last party Molly attended at Baker Street. This time, she has her new boyfriend Tom in tow. He’s fairly similar to Sherlock except utterly lacking in personality, so we know that Molly has a type. Sherlock and John are a little wigged out but agree to ignore it.
So, John asks, desperate for one of the many “why” questions of this episode to be answered. Why did They (who are “They,” anyway? We never did find out, really.) go after him and stick him in that bonfire. Sherlock doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care all that much.
We end on an unexpectedly sweet note, in which John recalls weeping over Sherlock’s grave and begging him not to be dead. I know, Sherlock says. I heard you. John got his miracle in the end. We may never know how, but that’s not important. We will never know why, which is irritating and pretty bad writing to boot. But John did get his miracle, and in the end, that’s really the important thing.
A coda shows us a guy sitting in a darkened storage room, watching footage of Sherlock and Mary rescuing John from the bonfire. He is . . . well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, he’s just another guy waiting for this episode to grow a plot.
So. The Empty Hearse. Sherlock Returns From The Dead. What a crock. Thus far, the show has still not topped The Great Game, from back in Series One, for quality. This one is actually competing with The Blind Banker for Worst Sherlock Episode. Let’s see how they stack up.
The Blind Banker had a nonsense plot and was egregiously, at times viciously, racist. On the other hand, it was visually interesting and it did have the fantastic Sarah Sawyer.
The Empty Hearse didn’t go in for racism. I’ll give it that. Mary seems like a fun and intriguing addition to the cast. And we did get to meet the Parental Units, which was cool. There were a few bright character moments. But by God, was this episode a mess! What was it about? Nothing. It wasn’t about anything. Sherlock showed up, completely unchanged, and we never found out why he had to plot the elaborate deception that he did. Frankly, given that we heard three different options from unreliable narrators, we never really found out how he did it, either, which was the softball question. We never learned who the villain was, or why he plotted to do what he did, or how he managed to pull it off. We never even learned who kidnapped John, or why that happened. Where The Blind Banker was bad, it was actively bad. The Empty Hearse . . . just isn’t. It isn’t anything. It’s just there, wurbling on and on and on and never really amounting to a hill of beans.
But it’s not racist.
So, to everyone following along at home, what do you think? Which one of these two godawful episodes is the bottom of the Sherlock barrel? Or do you have another nomination? Inquiring minds want to know!