#we were robbed of the unaired pilot

[lailuhhh]

okay but you got me thinking so much about how young Mac looks when they're in the Sandbox. Like. Mac looks like a kid, he's baby faced anyway (tell us your secrets Lucas Till, I'm begging you), but something about the long hair from the original 2016 pilot is just. Ingrained into my brain and is NOT letting my brain worms escape.

I need Jack half teetering on the edge when he realizes just how young his EOD is; yeah he's gonna have to be somewhat competant bc he isn't dead yet, y'know? But Jack had never thought he'd be partnered up with a baby faced know it all that looks even younger than he actually is, like is he old enough to drink? Old enough to drive?

Jack is about to actually have a fucking aneurysm everytime he looks at the damn kid and the big bruise on his face, spreading across his temple. Looks like a damn smacked puppy, Jack grumbles to himself, and has to resolutely shove thoughts of Riley out his mind, but then the worst happens.

Mac and Jack bond and Jack is just confronted with the fact that this baby faced know it all is his responsibility and Jack did that. Jack did that himself and he might as well through himself a baby shower with a sign yelling congratulations its a twenty plus year old baby and he just has to scream into his helmet for a few seconds every day to try and work on his PTSD and the absolute anxiety attack this damn kid gives him.

Meanwhile Mac is happily playing with bombs and thinks his overwatch is a weird weird man that desperately needs to fucking chill, and this is Mac thinking that so he definitely needs to.

Right???

Canonically, Mac’s around 21-22 when they actually meet, but with a face like that?? That screams 17-19. Like all my army days writing, it’s never really clicked that Mac is so much younger than what we see on the screen

Jack’s had younger guys as partners before, but they always looked their age. Last guy was early to mid twenties and he looked it, or more so, he looked aged. Everyone Jack had been partnered with either looked their age, or older than they were because of what war does to people

Mac was the first one that was young that looked young, despite him being captive for however long, and somehow that made it worse. Mac saw the horrors of war and had been living as a prisoner, yet he still looked his age

Ignoring canon though, Jack knows it’s a new guy messing with his stuff because he doesn’t recognize the back of his head and it just sets him off and he spins Mac around and just decks him

Then maybe later after everything happened and they go on their first outing, a good portion of Mac’s face his all bruised because of just how hard Jack got him, Jack does feel a bit guilty because maybe he did overreact and was having a bad day and he shouldn’t have taken out the anger on Mac, so it’s just—

“I’m sorry man; some shitbag up the ladder is ridin my ass and stressin me out. Ya didn’t deserve that and I’m sorry for takin my anger out on you. Looks like I messed up yer pretty boy face— how old are ya anyways?”

And when Mac says however old he is, that’s when it hits Jack of oh my god he’s a literal kid it’s not just a case of baby face

That’s when the panic sets in of Mac shouldn’t be there and shouldn’t be disarming bombs and should be at college and what the fuck was the military thinking of letting him enlist, and then Mac’s already been there two years, which makes him panic more because the realization of Mac enlisting at an even younger age was the aneurism inducing fact of he needs to get this fucking kid out of the army

And yeah Mac’s just over here like wow man I’ve never seen this kind of IED before and don’t know where to start. Let’s shake it and see what happens and Jack’s doing his best not to keel over from panic and heart attacks every time they go out

[jcbbby]

mad forever we were robbed of a GoT role for Jamie not once, but TWICE.

LOOK AT HIS LIL BABY FACE IN THE UNAIRED PILOT FROM GoT. JUSTICE FOR JAMIE’S WAYMAR ROYCE.

[farminglesbian]

i’ve never heard of this and now i’m cracking up

[justdecadentcollectiondestiny]

On the Unaired Pilot

So last night I found a link to the unaired pilot episode of Sherlock and I was SO HAPPY because I have heard SO MANY THINGS about it and had been dying to watch it. And after watching it my head is full of Thoughts™. So I am doing what I always do in this situation which is writing a long-ass Tumblr post with a "read more" button because, let's face it, I could probably talk about Sherlock for literal hours and nobody wants their dash clogged up with like ten paragraphs of my bullshit.

To get this out of the way first, I do prefer the aired version. There are a bunch of things it did way better and I'm very glad that's the version I saw first. But that's not to say the unaired version isn't good or at least very fun to watch. With that, I want to get into the main differences and similarities (at least that I noticed).

So first thing I noticed is that Mycroft doesn't appear at all (okay fine, except at the very beginning when Sherlock sends him an email). The scene where he meets John and asks him to spy on Sherlock is cut out entirely and at the end, it's Lestrade, not Mycroft, who says the iconic "Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson." I do think it's a loss because it means we were robbed of the fantastic expectation subversion of Mycroft appearing to be some sort of "criminal mastermind" (John's words) only to find out that he's Sherlock's big brother with whom he bickers like a six-year-old.

I noticed there was no "Rache", the pink lady didn't leave a message letting law enforcement know her password so they could track her phone and therefore the murderer. In this version, Sherlock says that he's unsure whether the pink lady accidentally left her phone or whether she purposely planted it on the murderer, which makes another difference, since the leaving of the message in the aired version pretty much proves that she did purposely plant it to help catch the murderer even after her death. This also means we didn't get the "drugs bust" with the "Rachel! ...Don't you see? ...Rachel!" and "If you were dying, if you were being murdered, in your very last few seconds, what would you say?" lines.

Speaking of, Sherlock figured out that the murderer was a London cabbie much quicker in the unaired version. I don't know how universal of an experience this is, but I did guess that it was a taxi driver pretty early on, as soon as Sherlock said that the murderer was someone who you'd trust even though you've just met them. In the unaired version, they also made a point of saying that no one noticed a strange car parked outside the crime scene, leading Sherlock to talk about an "invisible car", slipping around unnoticed, with someone who could get anybody to get in without any sort of coercion, therefore, a taxi driver.

I have to say, I like the way the aired version did John forgetting his cane much better. In the unaired version, John runs out of the restaurant after Sherlock and immediately the camera zooms in on his cane left at his seat and it doesn't get mentioned again until the very end when Sherlock mentions that the limp is gone. I think the aired version did it better with John and Sherlock running off together, John as well as the viewer forgetting that John is supposed to need a cane, and then Angelo showing up with it, allowing Sherlock to prove his point. There was also a great part later, after the "drugs bust" and right when Sherlock goes off with the cabbie, when John sees the cane, goes to grab it, but then connects the dots and realizes that Sherlock is driving off with the murderer, and purposefully puts the cane down to go run after him. I feel like this really shows that it's no accident anymore, John knows and acknowledges that he doesn't need that cane anymore, and it really is because of Sherlock.

Something else I noticed is that during the part where Sherlock brings John to Baker Street to send a text, John reacts very differently to seeing the pink lady's case. In the aired version, he just seems surprised and confused, but in the unaired version he seems legitimately scared, obviously thinking that maybe Sherlock was the one who murdered her. It's clear that in this version, he listened to Donovan a lot more than in the aired version, and thinks that maybe Sherlock really is a psychopath who murders people because he's bored. I think that, along with just generally how the whole episode is framed, really shows that John, at least at first, is unnerved by Sherlock and doesn't entirely trust him, which is quite different from the aired version where John seems to trust Sherlock wholeheartedly from the very beginning.

The whole situation with Sherlock's confrontation with the cabbie also played out very differently. From the start, it was more like Sherlock was captured against his will and forced to play this game with life-or-death stakes. The cabbie drugs him and stuffs him into his cab instead of inviting Sherlock to get in so he can find out how he killed his victims. The cabbie threatens to pick a pill for Sherlock and force it down his throat if he doesn't pick one instead of pulling a fake gun on him and Sherlock calling his bluff, but still deciding to play the game anyway. Sherlock seems frightened and not in his right mind from the drugs instead of calm and confident and determined. I feel like the aired version did a better job of really proving the point in this scene that Sherlock is addicted to anything that stops his mind from being bored, that he really will "risk his life to prove he's clever", even when he is under no threat or obligation to.

And then there's John. In the unaired version, we see nothing of him from the moment he dashes out of the restaurant after the cab to the moment where Sherlock looks across the street and realizes he shot the cabbie. But in the aired version, we see him running through the building, frantically searching for Sherlock and calling out for him. I do really like what he says about what he did in the unaired version though. "I've seen men die before. Good men. Friends of mine. I thought I'd never sleep again. I'll sleep fine tonight." And then Sherlock's smile and soft "Quite so." God it made me smile so much.

Okay, in rewatching that very last scene just now I noticed another thing that I love so much. In the aired version, it's slightly implied that Lestrade is aware that John is the one who shot the cabbie, but it's never shown for sure. However, in the unaired version, Lestrade had taken notes of Sherlock's description of the shooter, but after Sherlock tells him to ignore him and walks off with John, Lestrade rips the page of notes out of his notebook and crumples it up. I really love this because it shows that not only does Sherlock have Lestrade's full trust, now so does John.

One actual fault I believe the unaired pilot has is that the way it's shot seems very dated. I don't know that much about cinematography, but when you watch this episode, it just looks old. I think the BBC also thought this, which is why they got a different director, a different director of photography, and a better camera to reshoot the pilot.

And now on to some similarities. Of course the general plot of the episode is pretty much the same, but most scenes have some changes. However, there are a few that are nearly word-for-word identical, like when Sherlock and John meet for the first time, when they're riding in the taxi and Sherlock tells John how he knew everything he knew about him, and the "it's all fine" conversation at the restaurant. But more than that, there were a few little similarities that really stuck out to me and seemed very deliberate - two to be exact.

One is the line from Donovan: "One day we'll be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there." This was probably kept the exact same so that later, in The Reichenbach Fall, Donovan could bring it up again, but it's also just a really good line and I'm glad they kept it.

The second is something more subtle, and it was something that I saw other people point out in the aired version and was so glad that it was clearly deliberate as it appears in the unaired version too: When Sherlock and John are leaving the crime scene after John shoots the cabbie, John walks right toward the crime scene tape with his hands in his pockets expecting Sherlock to lift it up for him, and he does. It's a little hint of how close they are already and their friendship to come. I saw someone say once that it's Sherlock's version of pulling out a chair for John at a restaurant and I absolutely love that.

I'm done rambling now but I'll leave with the best difference between the unaired and aired pilots: the unaired pilot has about 200% more heart eyes.

I mean come on, look at this face.

And this one.

[fromtheboundlesssea]

am I the only one who thinks that we were robbed of Tamzin Merchant as Daenerys? she seemed to be a perfect choice (and also Jamie Campbell Bower as Waymar Royce in unaired pilot).

We TRULY were.

EC is a decent comedy actor, but I feel like Tamzin would have brought more nuance to the role.