Plot Twists & Turns

Sherlock Holmes. This particular story made me very delighted as there is finally a competent adversary to face off against Sherlock, the woman. She consistently outwits him and stays one step ahead of all of Sherlock’s plans. This was very much seen in the extra credit video that we saw Tuesday night from the television/mini-series Sherlock. In the video we saw that “the woman” managed to poison Sherlock, faked her death, and managed to throw him through a loop when it came to trying to figure out the pass-code to her cell phone. This is such an uncommon situation when it comes to Sherlock because he is known for being one of the greatest – if not the greatest – deductive specialists. He never misses anything, not even the minutest detail. So this makes it very interesting that this random woman is able to “pull the wool” over Sherlock’s eyes. The shows makes it clear that Sherlock and “the woman” have feelings for one another, whether those feelings are love or just admiration for a fellow genius is still to be seen. Nonetheless, it is quite clear to me that whatever the feelings he had for the woman made him vulnerable to her tactics – just as her feelings for him allowed him to beat her in the end. It truly is a riveting story line.

Another really intriguing story we read was Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. The story of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan going into the foreign land of Kafiristan to make themselves kings is a dream that most people have – I am referring to the being a king/queen, not taking over another land. They accomplished this by making the Kafiristan locals believe that the two of them were Gods among men. However, Daniel gets greedy and tries to take a wife which was against the rules. The woman was frightened and ended up biting Daniel causing him to bleed which showed the locals that the two of them were in fact not Gods, but mere humans like themselves. The locals turned against Daniel and Peachey, killed Daniel by making him fall to his death, and staked Peachey with wooden stakes – that is quite the grotesque scene when seeing the movie version. In the end, all Peachey has to remember his time as a king is the decapitated head of his dear friend (Daniel) and the crown that was upon his head when he fell to his death. Now if that isn’t a story that you can really sink your teeth into, than I don’t know what is!

These two stories both kept the three of us on the edge of our seats because they both included many plot twists. The fact that they were able to capture our attention so vehemently really shows how intriguing the two authors wrote their stories! This being said, we believe that the best stories frequently have thrilling endings that nobody sees coming (or at least, that is the idea the authors have in mind).