User Reviews

I have to agree with the other reviewer who said that this is the first episode of season 3 that really seems to come together in the sense that the characters seem to be working together with a purpose, and it's good to see.

The only issue is the ending. One murderer caught, the other going free. And we are left with Sherlock asking question to a computer only to get the typical response "I don't understand, can you give me more information?" As Sherlock might say, it's quite as Sherlock might say, it's quite vexing.

Not what I'm use to. Feels like the writer hardly tried. Didn't feel like an ending. I was waiting on a "to be continued". Bell asked the suspect who confessed to prove she could write code. She said no....and they left it at that? Then Holmes tried to blackmail a man into confessing....and then doesn't follow through? It seemed like they couldn't figure out a solution so the episode was just dropped.

1) Could you even call sending someone a CD with a program that flashes images a murder? Especially seeing as the recipient would have had to willingly run the program himself in the first place. 2) Bella is running on what appears to be a mainframe computer. It's very unlikely that that server would run a windows operating system like the computer they tried the program on when they found it on the CD. It's much more likely that that computer ran either a custom OS, a UNIX variant or an IBM mainframe OS. 3) The executable is playing a video. There are video editing programs that will create a standalone executable from video footage. So it could be done without any programming expertise. 4) Playing a data CD in an audio player, and I know from experience having accidentally played the data track on a cheap portable CD player, you either hear absolutely nothing at all, or you just hear a kind of white noise as the raw bit data from the data track is being interpreted by the drive as audio data.

All in all a lackluster episode best forgotten as quickly as possible.

Just a thought.

Anyway, the review by "lovhurts" is troubling. I agree that an unresolved ending was unexpected and confusing. The review mentions two problems but here is my take. The woman who confessed all but admitted that she is not a computer programmer but that doesn't mean she wasn't part of the conspiracy to commit murder so it wasn't up to Bell. Captain Gregson will always seek charges with that type of confession. Sherlock bluffed Dr. Pike to get him to confess and it took a minute but Dr. Pike called his bluff. He made Sherlock think about being publicly humiliated which could end his tenure as a consultant or worse if Dr. Pike's brother was charged under the felony three strikes law. I didn't like the unresolved ending but I think the point is that there was no obvious solution to hold Dr. Pike accountable, ever.

In terms of the original question posed to Sherlock, Kitty and Watson, it is reasonable to think that information about the internet was programmed into Bella so it asking to be connected to a network is not a big deal. Information IS useful, after all. If this episode was more recent, they would have to talk about misinformation on the internet, which adversely affects the potential for it to be useful.