Another Monday. I get up early and make a slightly better stab at my first draft than the day before. The rest of the working day proceeds with a sufficient number of meetings to provide a degree of distraction and I leave work having been reasonably productive. It’s about the best one can hope for from a Monday.
I talk to the Elderbeast about trying to make more productive use of his internet access. If only a few words sink in it’s probably still worth it.
We watch what may well end up being the final episode of Sherlock in the evening (given the previous episode’s cliffhanger, watching the subsequent episode immediately was a necessity). It starts off well, with probably the most terrifying villain the series has produced–an impressive feat after Toby Jones’s effort in the last episode–but then loses itself somewhat. There are still moments of brilliance throughout. Even when Sherlock fails, it only ever fails because it shoots higher than most and refuses to fall back on the same thing that has worked before. On reflection I decide that the series has perhaps strayed too far from the path: instead of compelling mysteries for the main characters to solve, the writers now feel they have to delve ever deeper into the mysteries and challenges of the characters’ own lives. It may be a superior form of the genre, but at the end of the day it’s basically soap opera.