Sherlock - The Final Problem

Mary Entry, My Dear Watson

Sherlock 4.3 - The Final Problem
UK Airdate: 15th January 2017 BBC 1

Warning: Some slight spoilerage here.

Oh rats. This is absolutely not the review I wanted to be writing today, in the wake of last night’s season finale of Sherlock. The show has been a bit hit and miss since it first started and there’s usually one clunker per series but... yeah, The Final Problem isn’t good. In fact, I would go as far to say that it’s not only the worst episode of this series... it’s the worst of all four series. Not a good one at all and, ultimately for me, very disappointing.

Okay... so was fully expecting the re-entry of Mary Watson into the plot this week. Perhaps a continuation of her back story thread and how it was, maybe, intertwined with Moriarty and Euros Holmes but... nope. She has a brief cameo where she enters the show via another video clip at the end and I mention this here purely to justify the title of this blog post. I was going to be using this title whether she reappeared or not, you see... I didn’t want to waste it. Alas, my ideas at the continuation of her storyline seem almost blown out of the water... up to a point.

And that point is... I’m now forced to give up on the idea that Molly Hooper was behind everything. The Molly-arty figure, so to speak. Alas, she remains a footnote in the lives of Holmes and Watson and I think that’s a waste of a great character and, indeed, a great actress. In fact, the entire episode seemed a waste of great actors and actresses, to be honest, because if there’s one thing you couldn’t fault here... perhaps the only thing... it’s the quality of the acting from all the usual suspects in this. So Cumberbatch, Freeman, Gatiss etc were all exceptional in this one... they just didn’t do very well as characters, I would say. I know the plot was dealing with things from childhood but I don’t think they had to make all the dialogue that childish. Also... it all seemed a bit too theatrical and cypherish, to me. Which is a shame.

On that subject, though, the one member of the cast who really won out in all this stuff was, in fact, the wonderful Louise Brealey in her one scene here as Molly Hooper. She played it in such a way that you really wanted to know what kind of day she’d been having and why she was responding like she was. It was a brilliant scene and pretty moving and her performance made you wonder why the heck the rest of the characters hadn’t been written as well as that this time around. This scene between her and Sherlock, at least her side of it, seemed to be the only ‘real’ and moving thing happening in the entire show, to be honest.

On the subject of Mary Watson... well there’s room for another series in a few years if they decide to go down that route and it would be a fairly simple matter, I would have thought, to bring her back into the role. Of course, the split between Amanda Abbington and Martin Freeman probably makes that highly unlikely now but, I’m certainly not going to rule that one out yet. Especially since I want to know who mailed the P.S. DVD she’d recorded at the end of the episode.

Okay, so there was a lot not to like in this and I really don’t want this to turn into a laundry list of complaints. Especially since I’m still really keen on the series and most of the people I know have now given up entirely on it and haven’t even bothered with Series Four. I still think it’s a good show and, honestly, one really bad episode out of three is not too bad an average, is it?

Okay... so things like the absurd skill at reprogramming people that Sherlock’s sister has really does go into the realms of fantasy. Yeah, I know there are real life precedents for this kind of thing but they really whacked this up to the Nth degree here. On the other hand, Sherlock is pretty much an invincible breed of super science hero and, maybe it’s fitting that his latest nemesis also has super powers of her own, so to speak.

There’s also the question, by way of an example of shoddy ‘run through the wet paint before someone sees you’ writing issues inherent in this week’s installment, of why Sherlock, Mycroft and Watson would feel the need to break into the compound in which Sherlock’s sister, Euros Holmes, is supposedly imprisoned when Mycrioft pretty much outranks the top brass there anyway. If they suspected the lunatics were already running the asylum then they should surely be better prepared for what was waiting for them. If they weren’t then... why the heck would they break in there in the first place? They could just walk in with authority over everyone there. So, yeah, taking the time to prove that security is lax seems a bit of a stretch of an excuse to show those kinds of action scenes here, methinks.

But all this, however, is distracting me away from one of the main reasons why I had a hard time with the episode.

It was dull.

Simple as that. I kept checking my watch to see how long we had to go because it was dragging. There were no interesting plot twists or developments and even the media induced enhancements were few and far between and certainly didn’t add much when you noticed them. About the only little clever thing I did like was the shot of the ashes from Musgrove Hall continuing to rain down on Mycroft in Sherlock’s study at the aftermath of his story... quite liked that nice little touch but there just wasn’t enough of this kind of inventiveness, I felt, in this episode. I got quite bored by the end of this one.

So there you have it. The Final Problem was not much of a series finale and, from what I understand, I’m not alone in that conclusion. I was actually going to part with some cash in a week or two to buy the complete series blu ray coming out next week but, after seeing this clumsy nightmare of an episode, I’m not sure I’d want to after the disappointment of that climax. I’m still hoping that we’ll get another series in a few years’ time (preferably with lots of Mary and Molly in it) but for now... well... I’m kinda glad they’re all taking a break from it, to be honest.

Sherlock - The Lying Detective

Mary-tricious

Sherlock 4.2 - The Lying Detective
UK Airdate: 8th January 2017 BBC 1

Warning: Spoilers from the outset.

And here we go again. This is an almost text book episode of what Sherlock is all about and what it’s always been about since the very first episode aired... It’s all about being very clever in its use of the media to both play with the way the content and information is delivered to good dramatic and comic effect while still using the flexibility of this rug-pull of a malleable breaking of the fourth wall, on a purely narrative level, to be able to wriggle out of anything. For that reason, I really loved it. However, another thing that has remained consistent throughout the majority of the series is the fact that on the level of the actual content delivered... and I mean the writing and its inability to use those same techniques to sustain trust or be anything less than obvious, for the most part... it lives up to its normal standard and is also, unfortunately,  fully represented in the chemical make up of this weeks episode.

In other words, it was an entertaining romp but, unfortunately, not clever enough by half.

Now then... this didn’t stop me enjoying this one, I have to say, and I found it to be a much stronger episode than the previous one but... it felt like a stop gap so Holmes can get Watson on board again after the ‘possible’ death of his wife in the previous episode. And, yes, I’m still not buying into that whole ‘Mary is dead’ idea just yet... if I’m going to make myself look stupid on that front then I can at least drown properly without flapping my arms this way and that in terms of my suspicions of where the last episode might end up.

So, despite the excellent performances of all the usual suspects in this one... Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Una Stubbs, Rupert Graves and Mark Gatiss... not to mention the always brilliant Toby Jones playing a really unlikeable serial killer who, alas, because the writing telegraphed his character too much, wasn’t surprising anyone (but, as usual for Jones, he did it so well)... my attentions were fixated on just two things throughout this episode. One of them was the whole Mary Watson thing and I’ll get on with my one last chance at second guessing that in a minute. The other thing was... alas... thrown in my face, so to speak... and that also had its roots in the previous episode.

In last weeks episode, Dr. Watson had a dalliance, albeit in text form, with another woman. This week... after I was sure that Holmes wasn’t actually talking to a dead woman... another character in the story had some chips by the River Thames with Holmes and, at that point, my thoughts marinated  to... wasn’t that the lady on the bus from last week but with different coloured hair? And then I told myself I was probably wrong and moved on until another scene with Watson and his therapist and, looking at her I thought... no, wait! Isn’t that the woman from the bus from last week? And then I moved on again because... well I kinda stopped playing that game and I assumed my gut instinct was wrong. Well, it turns out I was completely right in that all three women were, in fact, the same person... the only thing I didn’t quite see coming was her relationship with one of the main characters but.... yeah... you know... my gut was right.

And so I’ll come to Mary. I’m still not convinced her death wasn’t staged... possibly by Mary (and Molly... and I’m still not giving up on my Molly-arty theory either, for now) and the reason I’m still clinging onto this sad conviction that she might still be alive (at least until the conclusion of next week’s episode, at any rate) is because Moffat seems keen to make it seem almost impossible to the viewers at home that she could be anything but dead. So we have the ghost of Mary Watson talking to John Watson and giving him advice... or do we? Well, it was stated and is quite obvious that the ghost of Mary Watson is just a projection created by John Watson to deal with her death and... well... that psychological manifestation doesn’t have to mean that she’s actually really dead, does it? As long as John believes that she’s dead then he can have whatever ghost he likes playing around inside his brain. And that’s where I am at the moment and part of me sincerely hopes I’m wrong in my suspicions because, frankly, it would be nice if Moffat and Gatiss were able to run my mind around in little circles because I hate being right about a lot of the stuff I see on TV and at the movies... kinda numbs the emotions, so to speak. Time will tell... seven more days of that man made temporal construction known as a week should reveal the end game on this one... we shall see.

Other than all that though... great little episode despite the obviousness but with the quality... and this is a gift that Moffat seems to have... to still inject great dollops of humour into the programme even when the two main protagonists of the series are in their darkest places. Some of the dialogue, as always, was pretty wonderful... it’s just the broader strokes on these things which sometimes screw these up a little, methinks. So... wonderful performances, cool and innovative use of the medium to show things in the usual, marvellous, Sherlock manner and, as always, a really nice score by David Arnold and Michael Price which comes out on CD on 27th January (if you were wondering... pre-order it specifically from Silva Screen before the release date here now and you should get the special limited bonus disc of the score to The Abominable Bride thrown in too, if you get your skates on).

Despite some obvious moments, not a bad bit of viewing for a Sunday evening. British television has still got it, I reckon, and Sherlock is very much one of our finest exports. Looking forward to the next one now... just to see if any of my wild theories are right.

Sherlock 4.1 - The Six Thatchers

Catching Mary Hell

Sherlock 4.1 - The Six Thatchers
UK Airdate: 1st January 2017 BBC 1

Warning: A big spoiler for this episode and a possible speculative spoiler for the third episode being broadcast in a couple of weeks. All this will be clearly marked in the text.

Okay, so we’re finally on what is being touted as the possible last series of the BBC programme Sherlock. I’ve been kind of a fan since the first episode although my level of enjoyment has been really hit and miss, to be honest. Usually, the easier I see the solution to the episode, the less I’m likely to enjoy it... although there have been some fairly interesting stylistic choices, coupled with some good dialogue writing, throughout the programme's run.

The latest episode is now, as I’m being continually reminded on Twitter and elsewhere by an audience who seem to be fast running out of patience with the last series, more of a soap opera rather than stand alone cases but, honestly, that’s part of the appeal for me. I always tend to value character development and progression above the content of a story so this show is absolutely doing something right for me... otherwise I would have stopped watching sometime in the first series, I suspect.

This episode is all about the perceptions of events, if I’m right about certain things...

For instance, we have John Watson being lured by a honey trap and there’s a certain feeling that the progression of what may or may not have happened between him and another, as yet unknown, character is somehow involved in a bigger end game than it first appears. In fact, the episode starts off with Sherlock Holmes being called to get rid of Moriarty and being asked what he will do about the very real ‘threat from beyond the grave’ of his regular nemesis. When he says that Moriarty is dead, I think he is right to a point but I suspect there’s a bigger end game which is ‘afoot’ here.

The episode was a rich in entertainment, if not quite as enthralling as I’d hoped, hotchpotch of absolutely top rate performances of all the usual suspects - Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Amanda Abbington (as Mary Watson, my favourite one in the show), Rupert Graves, Una Stubbs and Louise Brealey as Molly Hooper, who I’ll mention speculatively in my possible spoiler section. And, of course, we have Mark Gatiss playing Mycroft wonderfully and he also wrote this episode, with his usual display of good taste and furious pacing.

Okay, so all the red text below contains the big spoiler for the episode and also contains possible spoilers for the conclusion of the series...

When, a few weeks ago, Martin Freeman announces that he and Amanda Abbington had called off their long standing relationship I was somewhat disappointed (purely, I guess, because their on screen relationship is easily mistaken for their off screen one to casual viewers like myself and they make such a nice couple). It also signalled to me that there was a strong possibility that the Mary Watson character would be written out at some point in the near future and, as it happens, that’s what seems to have happened in last night’s episode. She knocks Sherlock aside and takes a bullet in the heart that was meant for him. And I was upset about this because a) I thought they’d wait until the final episode of the series to do this and b) I really love the character so much. However, after waking in the middle of the night where my brain must have been clearly occupied with this problem, I’m now beginning to think I was right... they might be waiting until the final episode to kill her off, or maybe not kill her off at all.

That is to say, and it may be very wrong and wishful thinking to say this, that I think there’s a strong possibility that Mary’s death could have been staged to help convince the real enemy that Holmes and Watson are no longer working together and then, in some way, get the villain of the piece to overplay their hand. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a character in the show has had their death faked. I might be wrong but... I don’t think we’re quite done with Mary Watson yet, to be honest.

I know it’s a wild theory and I kinda hope I’m wrong about it so my respect for Moffat and Gatiss goes up but... I think that the death was faked for reasons pertaining to a ‘long game’ Holmes is playing against Moriarty. And when I say Moriarty, I mean the person who created Moriarty in the first place. Now Molly was one of many at the big showdown and saw Mary Watson die. She’s even helping Watson with their daughter. However... isn’t she the first person we saw in Series One with Moriarty? Is she, and this sounds a little ludicrous as I type it but it’s just my fan theory so give me the benefit... but is there a chance the murder of Mary was staged specifically for her to witness and she could be, in fact, Holmes nemesis. After all, Moriarty’s ‘ghost in the machine’ seems to realise Holmes is still alive and Molly was the one who helped Holmes fake his own death at the end of Series Two. So maybe she is the mind behind the whole game, as it were? I don’t know and I’m probably going to be proven wrong about all this but at least I’m writing it here in this blog so, if it is just wild fiction on my part, you can all see me getting it wrong in public. Hopefully, if I am wrong, you won’t stop reading my reviews because of it. ;-)

End of spoilers...

And so that’s that for the latest Sherlock. We shall see where we are after next week’s episode, which I expect may be a ‘mostly’ stand alone story. I’m looking forward to it because it’s got Toby Jones in it and I think he’s a terrific actor. And I’ll try and get the review of that one up either on the Monday or, more likely, the Tuesday after it airs. So hope to see you here again in a week or so.

And for anyone playing this year’s cryptic movie quiz... I hope to get the results up either tomorrow or the day after. Hope you enjoyed playing.

Sherlock - The Abominable Bride

Data Fiction’s Fatal Diction

Sherlock - The Abominable Bride
UK Airdate: 1st January 2016
BBC 1

Warning: If you hadn’t already figured out certain things from the way this episode was marketed then there are some big spoilers right from the start of this review.

Okay... so this special episode of Sherlock, The Abominable Bride, is both a roaring success and a huge disappointment at the same time but I’m definitely happy to be able to say that because, truth be told, I thought it was just going to be a bit rubbish. So I’m glad that it turns out to be a well put together episode, despite it’s slight pretensions to supposedly setting Sherlock back where the series has never gone before... in the original times and places pertinent to the original character. Disappointed, however, because there weren’t any real surprises in this one and any suspicions you may have had about knowing exactly where it was going all pretty much come to pass by the end of the episode... and also into the next series, I suspect.

Being as I’m an avid Doctor Who watcher, I’ve learned to distrust Steven Moffat’s pre-publicity - often delivered via false words from the mouths of his actors when interviewed - intensely. The number of times I’ve heard something was going to happen on the show and then it’s been overturned and denied before, as it happens, it actually coming to pass just like it was planned to after all is... well, lets just say there’s no way I take anything coming out of one of his productions with anything other than several grains of salt.

Therefore, when the news hit that the new special episode of Sherlock would be set in the past, I failed to believe that was the whole story and, although the various photos coming from the set did seem to suggest that the episode would be taking place in Victorian London, I couldn’t really see that as being the end game of this one and I was pretty sure it was all going to be tied up with the actual running series, possibly even addressing the last season’s cliff hanger ending at some point in the narrative. So I kinda believed for a long time that the show would ‘actually’ be set in the present day, following on from the last episode, and I just hoped they didn’t do the reveal as... “Oh, this episode was all a dream.” Then, thinking about how they could possibly do it I figured out that probably the most plausible version would be to have the majority of the episode taking place in Holmes’ head... in his ‘mind palace’... but I similarly hoped that this wouldn’t be the case because, frankly, that pretty much amounts to the same thing as the ‘dream’ scenario in terms of cop out thinking.

Alas, right from the opening of the episode, before it even started, we are treated to a recap of the previous three series and from that point on I was pretty sure we were going to be tying up to the previous episode in some way. About 15 or 20 minutes in when Holmes starts talking about how ‘The Bride’ of the story could possibly survive a bullet to the brain was when it was completely confirmed... I was pretty sure the character was talking about Moriarty’s exit at the end of Series Two and it didn’t take too long before the bleed throughs from the ‘real world’ of the present day started playing out to that scenario. Which is  kind of a shame but I really can’t blame the episode’s writers, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss for taking that route. When the ‘original’ version of Mycroft Holmes, played as convincingly as ever (and more so) by Gatiss himself mentioned the term ‘virus in the data’, which the writers tried to cleverly conceal in a list of other euphemisms which were actually ‘of their time’, then it was all but spelled out for anyone noticing it. Unfortunately, I also believe that it also spells out where the next series is going to be going too, once it’s written and aired.

So, okay... that was the really bad stuff about the episode but, you know what, there’s some pretty great stuff too and the whole thing was nothing if not entertaining. The way Holmes’ mind plays with the past in a way which makes use of the critical deconstruction of the original Conan Doyle stories as published by The Strand magazine is really rather brilliant and I just loved Una Stubbs portrayal of Mrs. Hudson as she punishes her famous residents for Watson not giving her character any lines in the stories and, also, loved the suffragette angle to the episode... which seems to have been misconstrued as a bad thing from what I saw of Twitter last night but I can’t think why. Perhaps I didn’t understand that stuff properly... there was me thinking it was a positive support for feminism but... apparently no?

Actually, from what I saw of Twitter last night, this has been the one and only single handedly derided and badly received episode of the show to date and I really can’t think why that would be. Especially since, as I said at the start of this review, there really were no surprises in this one. Or maybe it’s the lack of the unexpected that people are complaining about?

Anyway, all I can add is my own support to the episode by saying that the performances of all in this were glorious and the general clever visual and audio syntax which has become synonymous with the style of the series is still very much in place. I was worried, actually, that this wouldn’t be the case because a shift back to the past is often mistaken by writers and directors as something which needs to be told in the language and style of that point in history but, luckily, the team behind the show once more got to have their cake and eat it by explaining away the dynamism of the storytelling by not, actually, setting it in the past. So it’s not intrusive unless, I guess, you really didn’t know what was going on but I suspect most of the viewers weren’t particularly surprised by this one, once they’d seen the necessity of having a recap at the start so... there you go.

Frankly, the main problem I have with this is, as Holmes concludes at the end of the episode, there’s no way Moriarty escaped death by his own hand. That means, therefore, the Moriarty which has saved Holmes from exile is, in fact, an electronic simulacrum or, as Mycroft so aptly names, a virus in the data. So the only real question as to the reappearance of the arch criminal of the series is... is this a 'legacy' virus or is it being controlled by a human being? If the latter, is it a new super villain or, is it indeed Mycroft resurrecting the appearance of Moriarty himself to help his little brother return credibly to the fold after the events of the last episode in Season Three? I don’t know when we’ll find that out but I’m guessing it’ll be a while because they seem rarely able to schedule the actors in a time slot together to shoot each series, it seems to me... even if a series is always only three episodes long.

But there you have it... some bad stuff but tastefully bundled into a sweet confection of an episode and with a lovely bit of scoring from the usual suspects David Arnold and Michael Price to boot. Disappointing, yes, but certainly tremendously entertaining and a heck of a lot better than I was expecting from it, I can tell you. Still looking forward to the next series when it comes... even if I do think I know pretty much all the answers in this case. Sometimes, the execution and professionalism with which the obvious is presented... can be enough.

Sherlock - His Last Vow

Bow Vow

Sherlock: His Last Vow
Airdate: 12th January 2014

Warning: One big spoiler at the end but I will warn you in the text before this happens.

Well this is an interesting contrast to the other two episodes comprising this third series of Sherlock. Whereas the previous two were trying to keep up the lightning fast pacing and the quick fire dialogue, they both seemed to be suffering from having a lot of padding to them... possibly as a symptom of that very same style of pacing they were trying to maintain.

This third and last episode of Series Three doesn’t suffer from the same problem. In fact, even though it’s crackling along almost faster than the speed of the imagination, it still feels like they’re kinda trying to cram too much into the episode and you maybe feel like you almost want it to slow down a little.

Almost.

It’s a good episode, though, tying up the arc started in the first of this series (a small arc, to be sure, with such stupidly tiny season lengths) regarding the man behind the John Watson bonfire in the first episode and it also has a kinda “surprise” arc which was almost... again, “almost”... something you didn’t see coming until it happened regarding a new, regular character who also started out in the first of these three episodes. And actually, that sums up the contents of this particular installment quite well...

It’s an episode where there are a lot of what are presumably supposed to be twist revelations throughout but, I’m afraid, one where everything is quite obvious before it’s actually revealed... Sherlock’s girlfriend and why; the identity of the assassin; the mind palace... which is what happens when you plot a convoluted story without enough episodes and years gone by to throw people off the trail by letting them become used to characters over a period of time, I guess.

However, where this one at least scores in that sense, depending on your point of view, is that you don’t see most of the twists until they’re almost upon you... for most, not all, of the episode I was only a few minutes ahead of the game and this is because, I would imagine, that the blistering pace of the editing coupled with the always excellent flair for visual metaphor was entertaining and distracting enough that, apart from the whole “mind palace” thing which is kinda obvious from the start, you’re only five minutes ahead the whole time.

Now, I’m trying to be cagey here because I don’t want to give away the ending to this one for people, but I still need to talk about it so forgive me if it seems like I’m talking around the subject for those who have seen the episode. Holmes' final solution to the problem was not, as some have said, out of character in any way in terms of violent solutions sometimes being used on a problem... these are sometimes required in the kind of milieu this character inhabits (and, frankly, it was an obvious move in this case). However, what is out of character is the fact that Sherlock couldn’t deduce what was really going on, and what his big mistake was, in plenty of time to work out another solution... especially when most of the audience had probably got there before him.

This kinda continues the theme which really hit home in last weeks episode, that they seem to be making Sir Arthur Conan Doyles character a lot less smarter than he used to be (especially after the way they’ve built him up in the last two series’) and a lot more human. I think they really need to be a little more careful here. Holmes should have been on top of things and if they carry on too much in this vein then the audience, let alone some of the other characters, may start to lose faith in him. This is, after all, Sherlock Holmes, the great literary detective, not Inspector Clouseau.

However, as I said earlier, the episode was extremely entertaining, and I was especially happy with this one because it was more in keeping with the tone of the first series in terms of having three very good, even excellent, episodes as opposed to the second series which had an absolutely brilliant opener and then kinda lost its way. So I am really pleased, in general, with this third series.

One other minor criticism of the episode is this though...

And it’s a big spoiler so please do not read further unless you’ve seen this or have no real interest in seeing it...

Like Mycroft, who is only mentioned in four of the original stories, Moriarty is not a regular character in the original source material. He actually appears only once and is mentioned a few more times. That’s it. So the bit at the end of this episode which very much seems to be signalling that Moriarty is not dead and has kinda come to Holmes’ rescue, probably quite deliberately, in that Holmes now seems to be needed and will therefore beat his murder charge, is more or less built on the reputation that this character has had over the years. He’s not a regular character but, since people seem to need a Napoleon of Crime type of counter-point for their heroes in modern day story telling, this is probably a good way to keep people’s interest without actually leaving it on a proper cliff hanger (thank goodness).

I would have to say, though, that I was kinda expecting something like this to happen with Moriarty before long. He is usually depicted as being the equal of Holmes in intellect and so, if Holmes can fake his own death, it should be no problem for James Moriarty to also figure out similar arrangements (and I never did believe that suicide at the end of the last series anyway). But so what... as per usual, the performances in this episode were all great and help make the characters believable, the imagery was fine, the editing and music stunning... etc. A real triumph of a TV show, once more, and veering away from the direction it was taking in the last series, which is a good thing. Looking forward to Series Four, preferably in less than two years though.

Sherlock: The Sign Of Three

Best Man Standing

Sherlock: The Sign Of Three
Airdate: 5th January 2014

Warning: When you eliminate all the stuff from this article which wouldn’t, in any way, spoil the episode for you, what you’ll be left with, no matter how improbable, will be a big bunch of spoilers. Sorry.

Okay... so that was a little bit different then... and when I say a little bit different I actually mean this episode seems to have taken a heck of a lot of us out of our regular Sherlock comfort zone and sent us orbiting at a tenuous distance for a while, before bouncing back down to planet Baker Street again.

And it wasn’t a bad thing either.

Which is a relief, actually, considering the track record of the middle episodes in past two series. This one was very much though, a Sherlock murder mystery masquerading as something entirely different... swallowing up its cake aggressively while still managing, just about, to maintain it at the end for future edification.

That is to say... the mystery element which is part and parcel of a Sherlock Holmes adventure was certainly not approached in the most straightforward manner and this episode, focusing on the wedding of Dr. John Watson and Mary Morstan (played in the most accomplished manner possible, of course, by Martin Freeman and Amanda Abbington), was more a picture of the way Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of Holmes perceives the world and how he thinks that world perceives him... which is not entirely as he would have thought, I believe.

So, a character study... but masking a murder mystery which approached the main narrative focus in the form of both anecdotes and intrusions into that story flow, before it all came together at the end. Let’s look at the opening sequence, for example...

Rupert Graves carried the first five minutes of frustration and rage admirably, in a manner that may seem, at first, a little over the top but was actually completely appropriate to the broad strokes required for such a fast paced opening. While a return to the series of Vinette Robinson as Sergeant Sally Donovan helped give Graves’ Lestrade character the sense of community and camaraderie needed to pull off a sequence worthy of a predictable, but no less humorous for it, punchline. He basically gives up on a collar he has been waiting to make, jumping through various hurdles for a couple of years and, when that final goal is in his sights, he drops everything and leaves Donovan “holding the baby” as it were, so he can rush off and respond to an “urgent” text from Sherlock. He brings all the back up he can in the form of responding police units and, when he rushes to Baker Street to find that he is only required to help provide funny stories about Watson for Sherlock’s best man speech his reaction is perfect... but so is Sherlock’s as we realise that he didn’t anticipate Lestrade bringing the cavalry with him.

Later on, in a scene told in flashback, like the majority of the sequences comprising this episode, Holmes reaction to Watson approaching him to be his best man, since he counts him as his best friend, is complete silence because he is unprepared for that possibility. This re-enforces the idea made evident in that earlier scene, that Holmes has no idea that he is valued by his friends in this manner.

Which is interesting and, to be honest, the whole episode was done with a large amount of humour but I noticed there was a general trend to humanise and chip away at the personae of this incarnation of Holmes which, while I might find that kind of approach a novel and interesting thing to do with an episode at some part in the life of this television series, is something which I think may have best been held off until the production team had got a more sizeable amount of episodes under their belt.

Even the brilliant Mary plays off Holmes and Watson against each other, to get them back into the groove of working together and it’s clear that each of them think they are both “in on it” to help out the other one’s piece of mind... unusual for Holmes to fall for something so obvious I reckon. They were definitely hacking away at the old IQ points in this one I can tell you.

The flip side of that is, of course, that it was both brilliantly acted and, for the most part, this character study was beautifully executed in terms of the way various scenes and incoming pieces of data invaded the storyline in an often metaphorical fashion - a courtroom doubling up in Sherlock’s mind for a jury rigged, multi-Macbook chatroom in his living room, for example. And, although I personally found the drunk scenes to be a little long and over-wrought (many people loved these scenes, though, judging from the tweets) and, quite possibly, just kept in at this kind of length as padding, the use of the standard typographic overlays reduced to vague and mostly unhelpful observations was a brilliant way of getting the information across and maintaining the humour of the situation.

For the most part though, the episode was pretty cool and pretty watchable. Although I am souring a little towards Mycroft’s personae, it has to be said... and a little bit of experimental transitioning using split scene wipes back and forth like a 1960s movie on acid was, I thought, badly executed in the way it was used in this episode.

The music was customarily groovy, with some nice variations on the sub theme which seems to be the “real” leitmotif for Holmes and Watson in action. I did, however, notice that, like Doctor Who lately, there was a fair amount of old music from the show recycled and tracked in at various places. Which is a shame but, you know, TV is mostly done on the cheap in this country, despite what they charge for TV shows on DVD and Blu-Ray.

So... kinda looking forward to next weeks season finale but really hoping they eschew the cliffhanger ending for something with a little more closure to it this time around. And also hoping that they don’t kill off Louise Brealey’s character anytime soon, as I think she has a lot more to offer the writers in terms of character development rather than to just go out dying while saving Sherlock’s life or some such. We shall see what we shall see.

Sherlock: The Empty Hearse

Hearse. Ay!

Sherlock: The Empty Hearse
Airdate: January 1st 2014. UK. BBC1

Warning: The spoilers are afoot!

Okay... this was all very good.

Written by Mark Gatiss, he got the third mini series of Sherlock off to a truly excellent start and I really hope this is a return to form for a series which was brilliant for most of the first season and the first episode of the second season, only to be dragged down by, relatively, duff episodes comprising the remainder of the second season.

After his death in The Reichanbach Fall (reviewed here) the team at the BBC foolishly showed that Holmes had survived... an unnecessary thing to do, I believe. After what has been two years of wild fan speculation as to the manner in which he faked his own death, this episode neatly sidestepped the question for a while by teasing us with versions of the wild theory, spouted by anorak figures not unlike those who write critical blogs, in an attempt to dumb down the importance of the solution to the fan base of the show, before springing the answer on you at a basic cliff hanger point. Actually, the timing and structure of that was quite unneccessary by this point because nobody believes that any harm is ever going to come to Sherlock or Watson in the series. At this juncture, I think it almost missed the point in a way... fans of the show weren’t really that worried about the explanation for Holmes death fakery, they just wanted to see how clever the writers were going to be at making it all reasonably credible.

Well I have to say, everyone did a good job on doing that, and more, in this first episode of Season 3. There was a welcome return to an abundance of the visual metaphor and typography, which permeated some of the earlier episodes, to show Sherlock’s thought processes and the humour and anger in the episode was all pretty good. The warmth of Rupert Graves’ Lestrade was absolutely a pleasure to watch and Cumberbatch and Freeman were, as usual, solidly spectacular. Watson’s fiance, played by Amanda Abbington is a very welcome addition to the cast and an extra special shout out for Louise Brealey, who regularly plays Molly Hooper in the series. This is probably the most we’ve seen of her in an episode and she’s pretty brilliant in it... which probably means she’s expendable and due an unwelcome and premature death at some point... but I sincerely hope not. She’s ace.

The story itself was a little less interesting than I’d hoped in that nothing was really actually solved. A plot is averted but there is obviously another criminal mastermind (or it’s Moriarty perhaps) waiting in the wings to come back in the final episode of this series. Hope they don’t leave it on yet another cliff hanger, to be sure. We’ll see. Perhaps Holmes is not the only one who can fake his own death in a clever manner.

I think my one real problem with it was that, at times, it did seem a little like it was being padded out. The fast pace which is part and parcel, it seems, of the adrenalin fuelled house style of the series seems to highlight that sort of thing all the more and perhaps the running time might have been better being a little chopped rather than include some of the sequences which seemed more “stand in the light of our brilliant characters and gaze at them lots” rather than actual sequences in the telling of a tale but, on the other hand, one person’s artistic decisions are not there to be agreed upon by the audience... only talked about. So it’s not really a harsh judgement I am making and I was, for the most part, absolutely riveted.

The music too, was its usual brilliant self and included the famous sub-theme we are expecting to hear in all the right places. Looking forward to buying Silva Screen’s compact disc of this sometime soon as they’ve already announced a release (although not an actual release date, which is annoying). Should be a good stand alone listen though, I expect.

And that’s that, I think. A real return to form but I’m not trusting it just yet. After all, I was very disappointed at how the way the second series went after that initial humdinger of a first episode so I’m really not going to expect too much. I will, however, be avidly awaiting the arrival of the next episode as soon as it comes on.