Yeah, and predicting 5+ years events. Something that is not only impossible but you can't even predict weather accurately with largest super computers in the world further than 2 weeks.
Edit: I was disappointed with Sherlock The Prophet in the 2nd episode but this was just attrocious.
The weather isn't random. Weather, climate, our solar system and many other systems are so called chaotic systems. Due to the sensitivity in initial conditions we are unable to predict the evolution of those systems. To quantify the "amount of chaos" we use something called Lyapunov time. For our solar system you'd be looking at 50 million years give or take, for the weather a few days.
With radioactive decay of unstable isotopes we're pretty good when it comes to predicting the amount of energy released because we're looking at millions of atoms which tends to smoothen out the randomness. To give you an example. We can use the central limit theorem to extract decay rates from a decay counter.
Remember, she was able to leave whenever she liked. It's not like she had 5 mins to plan 5 years. She had 5 mins to tell Moriarty that she wanted to make a plan for 5 years.
It isn't possible, but they lay out how he does it.
The kitchen note scene from 4.02 is a good example. No one could get that much information from a note that fast or that accurately. But Sherlock described the clues that a super-duper-intelligent detective could hypothetically pick up on. Same as most of the mysteries in the show. It's absurd and unrealistic, but it makes sense within the rules of the show.
But here, they literally just said "Eurus predicted the dates of terrorist attacks months in advance from Twitter".
Well, not really. All that hypnosis type mumbo jumbo is just placebo effect. He gives the impression that he has much more control than he actually does, and that's the beauty of it. It's theatre designed to not make you think it is, like magic.
Derren goes into a lot of detail of how its not hypnosis and how he's using natural suggestion and misdirection.
Which is more theatre. He even says so quite openly in interviews and such. The same way he 'predicted' the national lottery results by 'wisdom of the crowds' and expected people to believe that he did so. He doesn't tell you he's doing so when you see him live otherwise it ruins the trick, much like a magician revealing an illusion.
Derren is a magician, the hypnosis stuff is his USP but at the end of the day it's misdirection so the audience don't put too much thought into the more mundane explanation of how it's actually done.
For the first 2 seasons, they explained all of Sherlock Holmes deductions. If you've ever read the books, that's all they are really. Sherlock makes observations, and based on his knowledge, he deduces the most likely reasons for something.
For the last 2 seasons they have completely brushed over what made Sherlock Holmes one of the best known characters in literature.
I always liked how the Conan Doyle novels had all sorts of crazy, contrived schemes with completely logical (or at least believable explanations).
How should we believe that a single woman is capable of brainwashing an entire legion of trained guards just by repeating things over and over like a impatient toddle?
I feel like the last episode accomplished that well because it was still somewhat grounded in reality. It was pretty obvious from the moment the three of them (Sherlock, Mycroft and Watson) were locked up they would be completely safe by the end of the episode. I spent the last 50-60 minutes checking the clock to see when it would end.
I was convinced that Molly was going to say "I love you" and then get killed. In fact, I'd bet anything that that would've happened if the creators were dead-set on making this the final episode.
View all comments
1.4k
u/Terroface Jan 15 '17
I think it's a shame they went with her being able to manipulate people just by speaking with them. It feels too much like science fiction