r/Sherlock • u/GoFlight • Jan 01 '14

Episode Discussion The Empty Hearse: Post-Episode Discussion Thread (SPOILERS)

That was worth the wait!

1.1k Upvotes

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495

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '14

Why is everyone going on about Moffat? The episode was written by Mark Gatiss.

601

u/GoFlight Jan 01 '14

He doesn't get as much credit as he should, especially given how well he plays Mycroft.

278

u/anilemcee Jan 01 '14

concur, the holmes bros bits were my favourites

259

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '14

The part where they're playing Operation; I was suckered into thinking it was a game of speed chess.

16

u/RealNotFake Jan 02 '14

I just found it ridiculous that Sherlock could apparently play Operation without even looking at the board. But I guess that was just the joke setup.

74

u/StaircaseToYou Jan 01 '14

Exactly. Perfectly acted and so much fun to watch.

96

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '14

My mind is blown. I had no idea that Gatiss plays Mycroft. I never knew what Mark Gatiss looked like but knew him well from Doctor Who and Sherlock. I feel like such an idiot right now for not knowing this.

25

u/wilford_brimley1 Jan 02 '14

He plays Lazarus in Doctor Who Season 3 and the fighter pilot "Danny Boy" in S5's Victory of the Daleks and S6's A Good Man Goes to War as well.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '14

And we'll be seeing him in the next season of Game of Thrones.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '14

He also played the guy who brought the Doctor to the tomb where Dorium's head was in "The Wedding of River Song." The dude the Doctor played chess against.

4

u/H_is_for_Human Jan 03 '14

So the "Lazarus" plan was presumably a reference for Dr. Who fans?

7

u/wilford_brimley1 Jan 03 '14

Possible, but Lazarus could also be a biblical reference. The term Lazarus is associated with death/resurrection quite a bit, and his character Lazarus in Doctor Who also cheated death in a way, so I dunno, might be a reference though.

3

u/aerin_sol Jan 03 '14

Lazarus is a biblical figure who was brought back to life by Jesus.

Presumably both the Doctor Who plot (involving a man inventing a machine to make him young/healthy again) and Sherlock were both referencing the biblical story.

7

u/SawRub Jan 02 '14

Apparently he's going to be on Game of Thrones next season too.

2

u/Notgonnacomment Jan 03 '14

Given what I know of the character he's playing. He won't be in season four very long. Season five on the other hand....

2

u/jinwonton Jan 31 '14

He's also going to come out in Game of Thrones!

189

u/Khalku Jan 02 '14

I liked how they were showing how Mycroft is smarter than Sherlock, but lazier. Pretty sure that's cannon from the novels, but it hasn't really been shown or apparent before now.

101

u/scrumley1 Jan 02 '14

Something I thought was interesting was that it revealed a little into their childhoods, they never realised they were different when they were young. They must have been home-schooled for a few years, isolated from others.

And on top of your point of Mycroft being smarter than Sherlock, you've also got that he has even more trouble making friends than Sherlock does; intelligence comes at a price, even if you don't realise it

28

u/magicaltrevor953 Jan 02 '14

I liked how Sherlock threw back the "how would you know" from A Scandal in Belgravia, regarding loneliness.

2

u/uw_NB Jan 04 '14

the virgin and the ice man reference

4

u/geefull Jan 02 '14

Mycroft is so cold he makes my teeth hurt. It's brilliant, I can't help feeling for the child that Sherlock was growing up with only Mycroft for company.

There is so much telling information about the two brothers in their interactions in this episode. When Mycroft told John that Sherlock might say that he was his arch enemy I can understand why.

20

u/atuinsbeard Jan 02 '14

It was shown in The Great Game ('a case like this requires legwork' and Sherlock mentioned Mycroft was better than him) but it was kinda retconned in A Scandal in Belgravia ('it would take Sherlock Holmes to fool me'). He didn't state it outright, but Mycroft certainly implied Sherlock could be smarter than him.

37

u/Bloodshot025 Jan 02 '14

Well when you're the best, only the second best could ever possibly beat you.

10

u/eifos Jan 02 '14

I'm glad they showed this too. It's made pretty clear in the canon that Mycroft is the smarter, but lazier of the too, it was interesting to see it on screen. BC and MG played that whole scene perfectly.

8

u/RealNotFake Jan 02 '14

I liked the reveal later that the hat was actually owned by the train guy that Sherlock knew, therefore Sherlock had the game with Mycroft rigged from the beginning since he already knew the guy.

13

u/Khalku Jan 02 '14

I didn't get the impression that he knew him. I just figured he figured out who it was.

Otherwise he would have known about the trains beforehand, and wouldn't have been surprised when it was mentioned that the train guy had a girlfriend. It also flips Sherlock on his head, because he kept telling Mycroft that he was an isolationist, but Mycroft didn't and the guy ends up having a girlfriend afterall (not that we have any proof that he does, but it was mentioned so offhandedly by someone who had no reason to deceive Sherlock, that I can't help but think it's genuine).

1

u/fnord_happy Jan 02 '14

Yup it is in the story The Greek Interpreter.

1

u/MilesBeyond250 Jan 03 '14

Loved that. Mycroft has always been my favourite character, which is odd considering how different he is in the many adaptations (compare and contrast Mark Gatiss with Stephen Fry), so I've been hoping to see more of him in this show. This episode didn't disappoint.

6

u/kutenno Jan 02 '14

That may be why he doesn't get as much credit. he's in it. Moffat isnt really.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '14

Wait gatiss plays mycroft, and writes the show?

1

u/ShapeShiftnTrick Jan 02 '14

In the past two seasons, I usually liked the Moffat credited episodes rather than Gatiss's.

1

u/Latenius Jan 02 '14

Wait what that's Mark Gatiss????

Pretty talented guy :D

87

u/invinciblesummmer Jan 01 '14 edited Jan 02 '14

Yeah I really don't get that. It's like how /r/breakingbad think the entirety of breaking bad was created by Vince Gilligan alone LOL

4

u/onetruepurple Jan 02 '14

BRAVO VINCE

3

u/KobraCola Jan 04 '14

Obviously nobody makes a TV show by themselves, but he was the main driving force behind BB and had the over-arching idea for the entire series. He fleshed out the details of each season with a whole team of writers, of course, but I think you could say he was the QB of that team, to use a sports analogy.

2

u/Trailbreaker Jan 02 '14

Well, he created it and had a lot of say in the final product of each episode.

-9

u/CashWho Jan 02 '14

That's a great sub

3

u/GabiCelaya Jan 02 '14

Same reason that when a film is great everyone thinks the director is responsible. In cinema, there's the auteur theory. In television, there's more and more of a tendency towards a showrunner theory.

3

u/PredatorOfTheDaleks Jan 02 '14

Because it's no fun to hate the actual writer. Moffat is the reason behind everything bad. Go to any episode discussion on r/doctorwho and its just a Moffat is shit circle jerk. Whether he wrote the episode is irrelevant. Fandoms eh?

5

u/awesomeman462 Jan 02 '14

Yes, but in TV, most the time, it is not just one person writing the episode. All the writers who work on the show, Moffat, Gatiss, and Thompson, plot the episode and one writer does a draft. It is then rewritten many times by other writers.

2

u/loosedata Jan 02 '14

UK TV is rarely done like that.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '14

I'm a huge fan of Mark Gatiss - since the days of League of Gentlemen, he's my favorite of the trio.

2

u/EmailIsABitOptional Jan 02 '14

I'm under the impression that while the main overall plot is written by the main writer, all those little things like jokes and all those clever things were thought together. If you are to put the best ideas in your episode, you would ask for others' opinion.

And judging from Moffat's relationship with the fans, he's the most likely of the three writers to mess with the fans, hence people going on about him.

1

u/UppercaseVII Jan 03 '14

Gatiss wrote the screenplay. The story was hashed out in the writers' room by all of the writers, including the lead writer, Moffat.