There has to be a story here....

[graycardinal]

 I  had originally planned to see Skull Island today, but matinee showtimes worked out to make Beauty & the Beast a better fit. (I definitely recommend the new version, but this is not that post.)

No, this is the post about the trip home again on the bus, and the trio of teenagers who occupied  the seats across from  mine. There were two girls, one with dark hair and washed-to-almost-white denim jeans, the other not quite blonde with a black skirt  and top plus white sweater.  Their companion was a young man with neatly waved wheaten hair and pale grey jeans. All in all, not quite clean-cut enough to be Mormons on mission, but considerably more tame of dress than one tends to see in the weekend bus-riding teen population out here in the burbs....

...except that one of them was carrying  a small rectangular shopping bag clearly labeled and striped as coming from...

...wait for  it...

Victoria's Secret.

And it wasn't either of the girls.

And what I realized only just now: there is no Victoria's Secret  in the shopping center where we all boarded that bus.

Clearly there's a story here, but I am not at all sure what it is.

Comments

[graycardinal]

And as to the Moriartys in particular:

You're right that it's a conversation with Leander that supplies the history of Holmes/Moriarty rivalry -- but even in that conversation, Leander is at pains to note that it was mostly rivalry rather than vendetta, that the only direct Holmesian casualties of any of it were Araminta Holmes's cats, and that there had been no run-ins between Holmeses and Moriartys for 20 years at the point when Alistair hired August.

In short, what this tells me is that if the Moriartys had launched a revived vendetta, it would most logically be targeted against Alistair and/or Milo. As the climax makes clear, though, everything that happens in Germany is based on the illusion of a vendetta rather than the real thing. Emma wasn't poisoned; Leander wasn't taken by a Moriarty. (Whether there was a Moriarty plot to poison Emma is open to discussion; that allegation is made, but I'm not entirely sure I believe it.)

Which gets us to that ending, which is very rushed indeed (and I think deliberately so, to avoid anyone's being able to stop and really analyze any of the "evidence").

As I've indicated previously, I just don't see a viable candidate for Evil Mastermind in any of the onstage Moriartys (and given that we've never actually seen Lucien onstage, I am wary of casting him in that role too cavalierly). We're left to look on the Holmesian side, and that pool of candidates is pretty narrow. Alistair is evidently both venal and corrupt, but just as obviously he flunked Masterminding 101 long ago; he controls no one at all. Emma is more competent, but we see very little of her and what we do see is mixed at best. Leander? He's evidently the real Sherlock of the clan -- a lone wolf with enough resources to do as he likes -- and seems content in that role.

And then there's Milo. Who built Greystone into an army of ninja enforcers because there were things machines couldn't do. Who's all about control and information management. Who wiretaps his sister's phone (and Watson's) as a matter of course before any of the other villainy in the book has happened. And who has, by all appearances, been doing most of the escalating of the Holmes/Moriarty feud for some years now. If he's not this trilogy's Evil Mastermind, he's doing a really good job of faking it.

And I do not believe for one second that he thought he was shooting Hadrian, because that would imply that his own team was less than competent at keeping Hadrian in hand. If Hadrian actually escaped, it's because Milo gave his team orders to let that happen. (Also, that would require "Hadrian" to have gotten into the house and then come out again with the Holmeses, and that's another can't-possibly-have-happened-that-way scenario.)