Sherlock: "The Abominable Bride"

Breaking up with the Joker.

An abominable episode of an abominable show, "The Abominable Bride" surprised me by not wholly falling into every prediction I'd outlined in my 2015 article disclosing my fears. That's not to say it wasn't pretty uneventful television, but it could have been worse. It could have been infinitely better, but it could have been worse. It's still pretty bad, like almost all Sherlock is, but in this case largely for different reasons.

Correct Holmes attire: the bow tie inexplicably tucked under the collar.

The overall premise of "The Abominable Bride", if you didn't know already, is that it takes the Sherlock characters and actors and places them in the setting of the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who seems to get a rather begrudging credit at the end of the title sequence after the "Written and Created By Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss" credit has made its rather doubtful claim - it's not as if they created the most important elements). Thus Holmes is a pipe-smoking sleuth who wears dressing gowns at home and a deerstalker and Inverness cape abroad, Watson is a moustache and bowler hat sporting Second Afghan War Veteran, Mrs Hudson is a housekeeper as well as a landlady, Lestrade is, well, Lestrade still but with mutton chops (this special overlooks his penchant for peculiar and affectedly fashionable outfits which Watson remarks upon in the original stories) and Mycroft is a fat bastard (actually in the original stories he was just a tall man of large build, probably overweight but not obese). To add their own flavour, Mary Morstan actually has a role instead of disappearing after The Sign of the Four, and Sherlock-specific character Molly Hooper works as a coroner disguised as a man.

Having a flashback to the Crimea.

This all works reasonably well and the characters can take on Victorian roles, that mainstay of British television drama alongside Jane Austen's era, quite competently. It is a little jarring to the trained ear, however, to note when the characters switch between the precise Victorian English of Conan Doyle's own writing, which is referenced heavily in this, and a flippant modern idiom which writers tend to use these days for the sake of humorous juxtaposition, which is to say characters in a historical setting speaking like modern people. Thus Holmes and Watson tend to slip into modern vocabulary to crack jokes, which doesn't particularly appeal to me. Nonetheless it's all presented reasonably convincingly, but to be fair Victoriana is very safe territory for the BBC.

T-shirts with these outfits printed on them soon for the BBC online store.

The plot, as is typical with Sherlock, is quite perfunctory and rather secondary to the main interest of the piece. Essentially, Holmes is investigating a woman who apparently committed suicide before coming back to life and murdering her husband. The resolution to this is all fairly predictable: a fake body was used during the suicide, then the woman actually had a friend kill her because she was dying anyway (which seems rather implausible for the time) and then a secret cabal of suffragists teamed up to enact vengeance on the evil men in their lives using her spectral reputation as a cover. This is more or less all stuff we've seen before in Sherlock, and it's not very surprising, but it's also not really the point.

"'But Holmes!' I ejaculated."

Time and time again I've outlined the fact that Sherlock has been constipatedly straining over two endlessly repeated points of dramatic interest for its entire existence: what is Cumberbatch's Sherlock really like? Are Holmes and Watson really friends? And of course the answer is always "An eccentric man, but fundamentally a good one" and "Yes." You'd better believe that this is once again the area of interest of this special, with time spent dwelling on Holmes' asexuality, his drug use and his isolation from the world. One particularly bizarre point is an inexplicable conversation Holmes and Watson have while staking out the mysterious bride in which Watson insists that Holmes must have some kind of carnal urges and bugs him about it until he is forced to utter one of Moffat's meaningless fake aphorisms: "I made me," whatever that means. Furthermore, in the final confrontation with Moriarty, Holmes is not alone - despite everything (like drug abuse and so on) Watson is there to help him. Hurrah.

Stop right there criminal scum.

So really in terms of character drama it's just the same old song and dance, apart from maybe a bit more affirmation of Mycroft Holmes' genuine interest in his brother's welfare and Holmes having some kind of unnecessary realisation that he and Moriarty weren't really equal and opposite and bound to each other and so on because he has friends whereas Moriarty was just some weirdo who shot himself. But it really doesn't leave one with much. The plot's simplistic. The characterisation is repetitive and simplistic. As such, the whole thing has to rely on gimmickry in order to do something interesting. Thus we truly enter spoiler country, in case you weren't already there.

"There are now parking spaces reserved for Spider-Man,
Doctor Bollocks and Rosemary West."

It turns out in the course of events that the entire Victorian scenario is just a sort of vision in the drug-addled Holmes' head as he returns on the plane from the end of Series 3, because he needed to re enact a cold case about a woman shooting herself and apparently surviving to see if Moriarty too could have survived. Surprise surprise: he can't. Moriarty's dead, but there's some postmortem plan or some other party is using his image or something. In any event, the entire thing takes place while Holmes is having some kind of hallucinogenic dream experience in a plane seat while Watson, Mary and Mycroft sit around berating him for his bad habits. Did you know that in the original stories, Holmes only ever used drugs when he wasn't on a case? The idea that they would assist him in a case is pretty ludicrous.

"Can I be shipped with someone other than Mycroft please?"

Thus, much like the 2014 Doctor Who Christmas Special, there are dreams within dreams, such that Victorian Holmes is in a dream of Modern Holmes in a dream of Victorian Holmes in a dream of Modern Holmes, before the ending establishes that there's also a Victorian Holmes imagining the modern day just as the Modern Holmes is imagining the Victorian era. Not only does this make the whole thing feel rather pointless - it's all in Holmes' head and conveniently for Moffat and Gatiss any plot holes or mistakes can be waved away with "it wasn't real" it only emphasises the absurdity of the ending of Series 3, in which Holmes was sent on a suicide mission after killing Magnussen, only to be immediately recalled moments later with no consequences whatsoever, an utterly ludicrous ending which Moffat and Gatiss presented to the audience with a straight face as if daring them to object.

Now with 30% more hot air.

Moriarty's presence in this episode is extremely unwelcome. I have nothing against Andrew Scott as an actor but I can't stand this portrayal of Moriarty, which is essentially just Christopher Nolan's version of the Joker with an Irish accent. Victorian Mycroft even describes him as a maths professor, but in the episode he's the same old creepy Moriarty, making gay jokes about Holmes and Watson, fellating his revolver barrel and acting like he and Holmes are in some kind of codependent relationship. There's that "cheekiness" I feared in my "concerns" article. Typical rubbish. Moriarty should never be more than a plot device to kill off Holmes, nothing more. Scott's version of the character has well and truly had his day and I sincerely hope that when Holmes says that he's really dead at the end that he means it.

"I'm as English as Queen Victoria!"

I also pointed out in my concerns article that Holmes shouldn't wear his deerstalker and cape in the city yet he does, despite Watson voicing concern about wearing the country tweeds he's still wearing from a rural adventure to the city morgue. On the other hand, Cumberbatch's Holmes does look quite snappy in the sequence at the estate of Sir Eustace (a desperate-for-any-work Tim McInnerny) in which he is wearing the deerstalker and cape with a snazzy tartan country get-up. That's probably the highest compliment I can offer it, however. The use of the Victorian setting just made me want to see these actors getting to do classic-style Holmes stories, perhaps with a touch of extra darkness in the vein of those tales Watson considers to be too sensitive for public release. To touch upon the cinematography for a moment, this special also features some dreadful spinning transitions which have been described as a homage but look totally out of place and jarring here.

Care for some crack?

Other than that, "The Abominable Bride" doesn't really even get away with being a sort of whimsical New Years' romp. It's the typical Moffat bag of tricks with some feeble efforts to bring in a gender theme in order to swat away accusations of sexism or misogyny. The women are nonetheless still heavily undermined, sidelined and used as shallow stereotypes and plot devices, however, so it hardly scores any points there. While this outing wasn't as bothersome as I expected, I nonetheless think that Sherlock has well and truly lost its way from the early days when there was some competence involved in balancing the mysteries with the exploration of character. These days it just seems to be narrative trickery intended to seem clever (without being clever) and a bunch of references for the sake of Holmes fans and, indeed, pure Sherlock fans, with the Victorian Holmes having confusing reminisces of the experiences of his modern-day counterpart. All the other stuff, like postmodern jokes about the illustrator and Holmes trying to use Watson's presentation of himself against him, fat Mycroft, the Reichenbach Falls and all the rest of it would be completely meaningless to the majority of the audience who apparently (to my horror) have never read any Sherlock Holmes, although to be fair, no one reads anything anymore. Much like Moffat's Doctor Who and its ongoing obsession with pointless references to bits and pieces of the old series, this is really just an exercise in self-indulgence, not written for a mainstream audience and not even really written for Sherlock's own diehard fanbase, but rather written purely for Moffat and Gatiss themselves, emphasising to a greater extent than ever the sheer irrelevance of this abominable production.

The 'Sherlock is Overrated' 1500 page views special

Whoa. Look at that! 1500 page views for 'Sherlock is Overrated' and 1600 for 'The Empty Hearse'! I know in the world of the internet that isn't really that many, but by Opinions Can Be Wrong's usual standard (given the regularly esoteric content) it's completely unprecedented. 1500 people who think that Sherlock is Overrated - or want to know why people think it's overrated, I suppose. I daresay some of them are repeat views and there's probably a bit of link jacking in there, but still. Still!

Now the 'The Empty Hearse' review doesn't count because it was linked on Twitter by a TV presenter here in Australia to whom it was shared by a friend of mine (quite without my knowledge) so it garnered a lot of views that way. 'Sherlock is Overrated' has succeeded purely on its own merits, I think by being an article with a title a lot of people were thinking but hadn't written about yet.

In hindsight I think the article is pretty imperfect, largely because it never actually explains how Sherlock is 'overrated,' just what I think is wrong with it. I suppose the logical conclusion is simply 'if it has this much wrong with it, it can't be as good as people say' but I ought to have made that more explicit in the article. In any event it's purely subjective, although I do think more and more people are admitting to themselves these days that the Emperor is walking about unclad. I just wish people would recognise that of a few more of the apparently unimpeachable touchstones of popular culture.

I sort of intend to compose 'Sherlock is Overrated 2; or, Sherlock is Still Overrated' but I haven't managed to do it so far because that would mean actually having to think about the show more, as well as trawling back through the episodes for screen grabs of Benedict Cumberbatch in the middle of sentences so he looks like he's pulling a funny face, and I simply could not be arsed at this point in time. Nonetheless it's good to see that I'm getting to someone or other out there who might otherwise be thinking "Why on earth does everyone think this show is so good?"

It's the same problem with current Doctor Who, really, especially given that they're co-written by the same man. These writers/producers have got good actors and a solid concept on their hands (even if both Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who are completely irrelevant in the modern day because they're products of radically different contexts to now). But they need to start realising that having a solid, substantial plot is just as important as characterisation. The problem with both of these shows is that they're so obsessively focused on character development that they don't achieve anything. Without both plot and character, they go nowhere, because pure characterisation doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. These elements should work towards some kind of thematic goal. Character studies only function within a broader text in service of themes. Otherwise you're just exploring fictional characters, and who cares about that? They're fictional characters, not real people.

But I won't bother getting into all that here. The point is, Sherlock is overrated. Actually, maybe it isn't anymore because people are starting to realise that it's a bit arsey. But we'll see what happens at the time of the next series. In the meantime, why not read the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? They're actually good. Well, most of them are.

Concerns before the Victorian "Sherlock" Special

If I know anything, it's that nothing gets people coming here more than me complaining about how much of a load of old wank I think Sherlock is. Nonetheless I must admit that, with a sense of disappointment in myself far greater than could be felt by any other towards me for saying this, seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in the Inverness cape and deerstalker with Martin Freeman sporting a bowler hat and moustache does stir something approaching guilty pleasure in the blackened recesses of my icy heart. I must confess, I'm a bit of a Holmes purist. I like my Holmes Victorian, and I don't think the concept actually works very well outside the confines of the late Nineteenth Century. Of course you can read all this and more on my extensive article on the subject.

In any event it looks like the next bit of Sherlock is an out-of-continuity piece set in the times of the original texts, and I'm all in favour of that, or I would be if I had any faith whatever in the two men who write the show, which I don't. One of my numerous issues with Sherlock is its insistence, like New Who, on "cheekiness." For instance, Holmes and Watson have to be mistaken for a gay couple a million times because "ooh wouldn't it be funny if we transposed their living arrangements from the books into the modern day, everyone would think they were gay." Or "ooh, wouldn't it be funny if Holmes met a modern person who was flirting with him, he wouldn't understand." And so forth. A result of all this "wouldn't it be funny" is that half the time characters in Sherlock don't remotely talk or act like people even do in real life in present times. Yet I'm sure we'll wind up with people cracking out fake Victorian euphemisms about Holmes being gay or whatever in the Nineteenth Century which will be even more unrealistic and jarring. So that's something to not look forward to.

Another element of course is the writing in general, the enormously laboured "drama" which characterises the writing of Sherlock and most modern "dramas" in general. What I mean is that "drama" these days mostly seems to constitute close-ups of characters staring into the distance while sad music warbles in the background, people giving big speeches full of hyperbole and slow-motion crying. Now as I stated in my review of The Empty Hearse, the Victorian age was an age of propriety. Emotions were to be expressed very privately, or not at all. Somehow I doubt that the writers will be able to manage this because it's not what gets viewers and sells DVDs in the age of the modern "drama." As a result I'll be incredibly curious to see how they handle that. The common argument is that Sherlock is "a show about a detective" and not "a detective show." That would make sense if the show, as I've said numerous times, didn't labour the same two points every single week: "is Sherlock Holmes a good guy?" Yes. "Are Holmes and Watson really friends?" Yes. Are we still going to get this in the special? It's a flawed premise. The concept of "Sherlock Holmes" as originally conceived revolves around the idea not of exploring the character of an eccentric detective, but of extraordinary crimes and mysteries solved by an eccentric detective. One of the reasons Sherlock never really says anything is because its "Sherlock Holmes," the protagonist it explores, is just some guy Moffat and Gatiss made up. He's based on Conan Doyle's character, yes, but he's far from being the same thing. Therefore too much exploration of his character borders on irrelevance. The transposition to a modern setting was presumably meant to shed light on the concept, but anything vaguely relevant to the original written character was thoroughly covered in the first series, and possibly the first episode. Maybe this 'special' is just going to be a "romp."

The third and final part of the unholy trinity of big problems with Sherlock is of course how incredibly smug the show is. As far as shows go, Sherlock has its head so far up its own arse that it's coming back out of its own mouth again. And now that you've digested that fairly disgusting image, consider this: we've already had tonnes of knowing nods to the old books, with puns on original titles, Holmes using the deerstalker as some kind of personal branding, and even awareness of its own fanbase in "The Empty Hearse." So how bad can we expect this to be in a show that fully embraces the smug self-awareness which consistently undermines the show's drama if it's set in the very era it so dearly loves to reference? Coy remarks about things that might happen in the future, perhaps? I dread to think.

I'll say this for starters: I hope to high heaven that the bits where Mister Cumberbatch is clad in the stereotypical Sidney Paget illustration gear (the deerstalker et al, don't you know) are set in the countryside, because as any right-thinking student of Holmes and Victoriana knows it would not have even crossed one's mind to wear such an outfit in the Metropolis. And I hope they tone down the cheekiness, the self-referentiality and the "drama" for the sake of the setting. On the other hand, of course, Victorian Britain had just as many drug addicts, perverts and public urinators as we have today, they just pretended that they didn't. So obviously there is room for Victorian-style Sherlock to be shocking... or, perhaps, Sherlocking? Anyway. It could be good. I'd like it to be good. I don't think it will be good, but maybe the fact that during Series 3 people seemed to wake up to the fact that the Sherlock Emperor was not wearing so many clothes as he first appeared has jolted Moffat and Gatiss out of their torpor. Or maybe they'll just do what this cabal of writers usually do - as recently witnessed in their associate Chris Chibnall's response to criticisms of Broadchurch Series 2 - and declare that all their critics are simply wrong and stupid and that there's nothing they could improve.

I really must make clear, and I know that this is a cliché thing to say, but if you want good, proper adaptations of Holmes stories that are true to the tone, setting and characters then you basically can't go wrong with the 80s and 90s Granada TV series starring Jeremy Brett as the Great Detective. I'd say Brett's Holmes is a little more flippant than the written character, but that's about it. Maybe this Sherlock special will approach that, but people have been making half-arsed Victorian Holmes telemovies for years and they never really seem to fully grasp the situation.

Urgh I just realised their Moriarty might be in it. Can't wait until December...

"No one's forcing you to watch it."

Piss off.

"Robot of Sherwood"

"Need a fresh bag Clara 'cause I'm so incredibly old."

Another series of New Who is upon us so it's time for the Mark Gatiss episode. I think I've come to think of Gatiss as Moffat's sidekick: they clearly have a much closer working relationship than Gatiss had with RTD, for whom he only penned two episodes. They also co-run the godawful Sherlock (which was always crap, not just the most recent series) and Gatiss has even done a few small performances in Moffat-era New Who as well. He seems to be always around: he's spoken about the Twelfth Doctor in talks, Paul McGann mentioned that he was there when they filmed 'The Night of the Doctor' and despite having no formal role in the New Who command structure whatsoever he seems very involved. I don't know what I think of Gatiss. I generally don't hate his episodes (although 'The Idiot's Lantern' is pretty dire), but they're rarely memorable. 'Robot of Sherwood' is more or less in the same Gatiss tradition. To his credit, we begin with no stuffing around, finding ourselves straight away in the TARDIS with the Doctor asking Clara where she wants to go, and her declaration that she wants to meet Robin Hood. There's some clunky exposition, where Clara points out that it's a story and the Doctor overtly describes the premise, a "heroic outlaw who robs from the rich and gives to the poor." Was this for the benefit of people who don't know who Robin Hood is? I guess New Who gets sold to a lot of non English speaking countries these days. Clara suggests that the Doctor is an "old fashioned hero" like Robin Hood, but he responds that his tendency to 'stop bad things happening' is "just passing the time," which I like as characterisation. If the Doctor goes looking for trouble, or if he's written as some kind of space-unwritten-moral-law enforcement, he becomes the Establishment, which is kind of contrary to the premise. This, I would argue, is one of the two themes of this episode: the Doctor's moral interventionism, and the nature of "heroes." Not exactly fresh material, but there you go.

How Gatiss understands the Twelfth Doctor's personality.

Oddly enough, the Doctor suggests to Clara that among other things they go to Mars and visit the 'Ice Warrior hives.' Has Gatiss been reading my blog? 'Cause in my review of his first 2013 episode, 'Cold War,' I suggested something along those lines as a superior alternative to the Ice Warrior story we were given. Anyway, the Doctor gives in after I think making a smutty joke - one of Gatiss' more tiring writing habits - and conveniently enough the TARDIS materialises right in front of Robin Hood at the exact right moment. Well that was expedient. Pacing will be an issue in this episode: sometimes things happen too quickly, at other times they're far too drawn out. There isn't much middle ground. Capaldi gives a pure slapstick comedy jump when Robin's arrow strikes the TARDIS, which sets us up for the tone as well. I like the fact that Robin rationalises the TARDIS as a trick with mirrors, and I like that the exterior of the TARDIS repairs itself. I don't much like it when the Doctor flat-out tells Robin that it's a TARDIS. It wouldn't mean anything to him, and Robin had already given him a perfect excuse for appearing out of nowhere anyway. Robin wants to nick the TARDIS, declaring that "all property is theft" to him, which sets up a recurring political element of the script. We get more unappealing characterisation for Capaldi's Doctor as he threatens to punch Robin in the face before fighting him with a spoon. Could have been a reference to him having duelling experience with Count Grendel of Gracht here, but sadly it was not to be. The most egregious part is probably the Errol Flynn knob gag. The Doctor tricks Robin and knocks him into the water: I was almost expecting him to drown in the low stream Men in Tights-style and Capaldi would have to become Robin like it was The Santa Clause or something.

"And you've seen a few girls running in your time haven't you?
Usually to go fetch a policeman."

Meanwhile, some generic knights led by seasoned British comedy actor Ben Miller are shaking up a town of thatched-roof cottages and the like, in a fashion reminiscent of the 2006 BBC Robin Hood TV Series, although if you've ever seen that then you know it makes New Who look like the height of sophisticated high-brow entertainment. There probably was an episode of that where the Sheriff had robots and a spaceship that someone had 'brought back for him from the Holy Land' or something equally fatuous. It certainly had holograms, what was virtually powered armour, near-clockwork devices and a host of other equally moronic anachronisms. Ben Miller abducts a lady and murders an old man in cold blood so that we know he's the bad guy. Back in the forest, Capaldi wanders around being even more of a dick in an effort to prove that the Merry Men aren't real. He also gets a horrendously ableist line, asking them if they're "all simple" because they laugh so much. Pretty thoughtless insertion from Gatiss there. The Doctor suggests as reasons for the apparent existence of Robin Hood and his gang the sci-fi cliché of a theme park as well as a pointless Old Who 'Carnival of Monsters' reference to a miniscope, which instantly evokes the previous week's episode. The Merry Men explain the usual deal: they help out because the "tyrant" Prince John is bleeding the people dry while Richard is away fighting the Third Crusade. Does anyone ever point out in anything that by participating in the Third Crusade Richard was probably just as bad as John was? The Doctor observes that the climate is too pleasant for the time of year, to which Clara facetiously suggests climate change, which the Doctor of course dismisses because "it's 1190." I'm reading way too much into this, but this is potentially another politicised remark in the episode if you consider our current political culture where climate change is genuinely perceived by some ideological groups as some sort of communist conspiracy theory. Robin's conversation with Clara is kind of nice, and he's actually far more endearing so far in this episode than Capaldi's Doctor, who's just wandering around complaining about the "banter" of Robin and his Merry Men and scanning things with the sonic screwdriver like a Matt Smith era nightmare. He actually feels like something of a bit player in his own show. He asks Clara "When did you start believing in impossible heroes?" which of course continues one of our themes.

Only £29.99 in a four-pack with bonus Ben Miller action figure.

Next we're off to Bodiam Castle for an archery contest where Robin intends to stick one, community-morale-wise, to the Sheriff. The two of them end up facing off, despite the fact that neither of them look like they've ever used a bow before: are the strings drawn back far enough? The Doctor interrupts requesting enlightenment from the Sheriff, and apparently this is the best way to do it. Gatiss' biggest cop out arrives, however, when the Doctor simply waves the sonic screwdriver and this causes the archery target to explode. It's a rubbish way of moving the plot along which places way too much focus on this gadget. All is revealed, however, as the Sheriff's guards' helmets slide open to reveal robot faces with crosses on their foreheads that shoot purple lasers, and they start running amok shooting at everyone. It's a pretty weak excuse to give the episode a bit of additional action. In the second pointless Classic reference of the day Capaldi busts out a Pertwee-esque "hai!" Venusian aikido chop to disarm Robin, with Gatiss feeling the need to spell out what he's doing to the audience: "Quickest way to find out everybody's plans - get yourself captured." Subtlety has never exactly been New Who's strong point, but this is a pretty fearsome example even still. I think it derives from the New Who writers' fear that their glossy new version of the show will be associated with a stereotype of emotionally-repressed twentieth century science fiction fans if anything is ever less than completely obvious. We cut to a bunch of extras slaving away in some yellow-lit dungeons that feel like something out of every RTD era episode set more than about three hundred years ago: Tennant wouldn't be out of place here, probably sweating and jutting out his lower teeth. One of the robots kills a tired old man with his head laser, and we cut away and cut back to see his quivering form replaced with a pile of ash. I'm surprised a pair of smoking boots wasn't left behind.

I was going to make a fart joke, but Gatiss
already exceeded anything I could muster.

Elsewhere in the Castle, Robin, the Doctor and Clara have been manacled up good and proper. This is probably the worst scene in the episode, as Gatiss drags out a completely pointless scene featuring nothing but Robin and the Doctor playing the "who's got the biggest cock" competition. It's a dreadful scene for Peter Capaldi which feels totally out of place with his performance in the previous two episodes, and even Robin is suddenly far more petty than he was a few scenes ago. It's a cliché scene of pure farce with the Doctor almost completely out of character, evocative of Tennant at his most poorly written. Why would he be so competitive with Robin? He's always been relatively cold in the previous episodes, why would this bother him? There are also loads of remarks about his age which aren't exactly necessary, and a lame reference from Clara to his being "Last of the Time Lords." It makes this scene feel like pure RTD from the light entertainment shit grinder. The Doctor has no plan to escape without the sonic screwdriver - again too much focus is placed upon it - and Clara predictably gets taken away to see the Sheriff as the apparent "leader" of the gang because she's the only one not acting like a moron. In the forest, Gatiss realises he has no way of doing plot exposition given the narrative cul de sac into which he's written his characters, so the Merry Men muse upon the Sheriff's need of gold and we see the robots forging gold circuitry in giant moulds. It's awfully similar to what happened in 'The Fires of Pompeii,' which of course also featured Peter Capaldi.

"Hold me."

Ben Miller has a cliché dining room scene with Clara, where again too much emphasis is placed upon the sonic screwdriver. Some have compared his performance here to Anthony Ainley's Master, especially in 'The King's Demons,' and I must admit that he does a decent enough turn as the generic villain of the piece. Heaping cliché upon cliché, in the dungeons Robin and the Doctor bust out the old "sick prisoner" routine, and the Doctor gets to look like even more of a dick as he claims that Robin's deathly afraid and pettily opines that Robin's "soiled himself." Not all of these clichés can be intentional. After the guard is knocked out, I smile guiltily when Robin incredulously exclaims "Soiled myself!?!" and the Doctor retorts "Did you? That's getting into character." They of course lose the key while dicking around. Get them out of this cell! Prison cells are where serialised fiction goes to die! Ben Miller starts getting a bit sleazy, but Clara keeps a pretty cool head. I guess she's been in tighter spots than this, like the time she was in all those horrific Series 7 episodes. She convinces the Sheriff to fess up about the robots. He himself is awfully blasé about them, but Ben Miller pulls it off by playing the role completely straight. The jokes about conquering Derby and so on are not, perhaps, necessary, however, verging upon pure comedy. In the dungeon, with the door open, Robin and the Doctor just pick up the manacle block and walk out. Right, well that was difficult. The Sheriff wants Clara's side of the story, but she admits that she was lying: why bother? Why not just give him a version of her own story, keep him talking and occupied for a while? Between scenes, Robin and Capaldi conveniently manage to free themselves, Capaldi tokenistically rubbing his wrist as they emerge into a room with a suspicious door.

Oh my giddy aunt.

On the other side is a spaceship set with a navigation computer aiming for 'The Promised Land' in a rehash of the robots from 'Deep Breath.' It's obviously part of the running story, but when ascribed this motivation it becomes clear that the surrounding premise - time travelling robots trapped in the past exploiting the human populace to help them repair their ship - isn't just consistent, it's pure repetition. How does the computer have its destination as 'The Promised Land' anyway? Do they have coordinates? I assumed the Promised Land was an epithet for an unknown location. By this logic you could put in 'My Ideal Holiday Destination' or 'Your Mum's House' into the computer and expect it to know what you were talking about and take you there. Capaldi decides that the radiation from the ship's engine is keeping the climate warm, and that the Sheriff and Robin are puppets the robots are using to establish a 'narrative' for the peasants to keep them docile. He flicks through some records of Robin Hood, glancing upon an image of Patrick Troughton playing the character of Robin. Does that mean Patrick Troughton exists in the Doctor Who universe? I guess the Second Doctor already had one identical double, Salamander. Why not two? Seeking Robin and the Doctor, the robots smash down the door of their own ship for no good reason and start shooting at but conveniently missing Robin, who grabs Clara and escapes. Why does Clara pass out, and get carried off by Robin? Makes her look like the weak one. Capaldi gets thrown in the dungeon after Ben Miller reveals his plan to take over England, which the Doctor claims will fail because the damaged ship will simply act as a "gigantic bomb." Could he really expect this twelfth century Englishman to know what a bomb is?

"Shoot your purple laser all over my gold plates you big robot."

Anyway, Capaldi meets the lady who got captured at the beginning of the episode, and they spontaneously manage to set up a rushed, generic Tennant-style battle where all the slaves are suddenly free and equipped with perfectly reflective gold plates that cause the robots to all blow themselves up. That's New Who for you: when in doubt, blow the bad guys up. The pacing has completely collapsed, events that would presumably take some time suddenly happening virtually instantly. Why did they have to spend so much time arseing around in that stupid dungeon scene? I can imagine Gatiss furiously typing away, realising he's only got ten pages left with which to wrap up the story. There's an unnecessary comedy scene with the Sheriff where he complains about "this turbulent Doctor," a horrifically cliché reference to the killing of Thomas Becket, before confronting him. The Doctor claims that Robin is part of the robot's plan, the "opiate of the masses" to keep them docile. So he's outright quoting Marx here, establishing further the political content of this episode. Both sides dismiss the theory as stupid, however, which completely kills anything vaguely interesting about the scenario. It's not that stupid. Robin reveals himself, and claims that "This legend does not come alone." Instead of the Merry Men all dropping in, however, it's just Clara, who we would have expected to be there anyway. Wasn't Robin interrogating her? Must have gone pretty bloody well. Robin has a big sword fight with the Sheriff, who reveals that he's a cyborg: "half man, half engine." Part of the set up for the finale, I think, although a scene showing him putting his head back on was cut as a matter of current taste. Clearly they needed a more elegant way of showing he was a cyborg in any sense, although in this instance it actually makes the scene far more subtle. Robin ultimately uses the Doctor's trick from earlier to dump him into a vat of molten metal like the Terminator.

Goldfinger did it more efficiently.

Everyone rather expediently escapes outside and to the other side of the moat before the robot ship takes off, but it doesn't have enough power and is going to blow up. It needs a boost, so they take the golden arrow prize from earlier and fire it at the ship where, chiefest of absurdities, the mere act of the arrow striking the side of the ship gives it enough power to make orbit. This is lazy writing at its finest, Gatiss either lacking the budget or the means to even show the robots catching or absorbing the arrow and adding its material to their circuitry. Nope, it's just a golden arrow somehow causing a rocket to fly. It's Tennant shoving the phone into the phone-shaped hole all over again, but probably lazier. This really does feel like an especially crap RTD episode, albeit in my opinion less offensive. The ship makes orbit and, like everything in New Who, simply blows up. I guess this is a theme - if your means of getting to the Promised Land involves exploiting and killing people, maybe you don't really deserve to get there. At least in this case it's not stated. Back at the TARDIS, Clara tells Robin to keep his chin and slash or pecker up and so on, and he muses to the Doctor that he'll be only a legend in the future, finding the situation agreeable. Somehow, he's completely believed Clara's story about the Doctor, laser-head robots apparently being enough to not only convince him of the existence of Time Lords from Gallifrey but also capable of rationalising such a concept even though it would have been completely incompatible with medieval religious culture and cosmology. Robin applies his own story to the Doctor, arguing that it's true of him as well that "a man born into wealth and privilege should find the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear," arguing that it's not just true of him becoming Robin Hood but also the Doctor leaving his home planet. That's not really the case though, is it? He's always been presented as having left through a combination of boredom, frustration and a desire for self-exile, and at the beginning the First Doctor seemingly couldn't give a shit about the 'plight of the oppressed and weak' until he'd mellowed out a bit in the company of Ian and Barbara, so that's not exactly very convincing. It seems like an effort to explain the Doctor as a figure of political opposition to the Establishment rather than how I feel like he's usually portrayed as someone who's actually outside conventional systems of politics and authority. The Doctor claims that Clara shouldn't have told Robin any of this, but he himself told Robin the instant he met him that his box was a TARDIS. He also claims that he's not a hero, but Robin argues that "perhaps others will be heroes in our name." This arguably concludes the episode's other theme, about the power of fictional characters to inspire us to do good: "I'm just as real as you are," which is to say not real. There's a really clunky "Goodbye Robin Hood, Earl of Locksley," farewell and we're done, with the last moment being virtually a complete objectification of our only other female character in the episode, Marion, who is basically left as a "present" to Robin from the Doctor.

"Let us never speak of this again."

'Robot of Sherwood,' then. Is it any good? Not really. It's let down by very bad pacing and a pointless and irritating characterisation of the Doctor, who's needlessly unpleasant and petty for much of the episode. The episode's protestation of the value of "old fashioned heroes" also forces Clara into the very 'damsel in distress' role that the Doctor mocks at the beginning, not really allowing her to do anything but give emotional support to the male protagonists and weasel some information out of the Sheriff that never amounts to anything. Ben Miller, like so much of New Who's guest cast, is wasted in a virtually throwaway role that doesn't allow him to really establish his character, and the robots are just so many arbitrary New Who goons who need a human spokesman because the writers are terrified that their audience, whom they contemptuously perceive as complete morons, will turn off in droves if so much as a character without a human face is given a major speaking role. It's lightweight comedy fluff but with a more serious or at least more thematic edge, but the two are fatally imbalanced from moment to moment, especially as a result of the awful dungeon scene with Robin and the Doctor. Robin himself is probably one of the best parts of the episode. I could almost see a story like this working back in the very early days of Doctor Who, with Hartnell and his companions having adventures in the forest and incredulously encountering fictional characters, but here the Doctor's just too unpleasant and the scenario's too limited and too consistent with the typical New Who routine for it to work. There are a few ideas that could be brought out, but they just aren't sufficiently allowed to with all the typical New Who time wasting, particularly due to the consistent lack of sub-plots. Plenty of people online who can't handle criticism of New Who think this episode should just be treated as meaningless comedy, but it actually isn't just meaningless comedy, and its failure to fully balance its halves lets it down. Even if it was pure comedy, you'd be better off watching Men in Tights again.

Sherlock is Overrated

"Nothing ever happens to me, because we're
too busy making jokes and crying."

As one of the few people on the internet to think that Sherlock is highly overrated at best and a big bag of shit at worst, I feel the need to express this sentiment in a few succinct paragraphs for the sake of any fellow travellers out there who might be wondering what mass delusion the television viewing public falls under when the scowling face of Benedict Cumberbatch swims onto our screens for three weeks every two years. But of course that's just my opinion. I don't give a shit if you like Sherlock or not. Fair play to you if you do. Sometimes I wonder, would it be nice to be as easily entertained as so many people seemingly are? Then I think, no, I'd rather think stuff was shit than enjoy stuff that's shit and think it's not shit. Not that I'm saying Sherlock is objectively shit, I just don't like it. My point is, I'd rather have my own tastes than someone else's because I feel like it makes actually enjoying things all the sweeter. I feel like being uncritical and liking every other show, film and book I encountered, probably because I'd fallen into a marketing trap of manipulated expectations, would be like having sweets for every meal. It'd take the zest out of life, eliminating all those other flavours that make up a tasty meal, and you'd run the risk of getting entertainment diabetes. I sometimes see people who can't handle criticism of what they like going "Why would you be miserable and not enjoy things when you could be happy?" Well, for a start, I believe we don't choose our own emotions. Sartre claimed that we do, but that's bullshit. I believe we do have a measure of conscious control over our emotions, but it's more complex than that. Secondly, what would be the use of being happy all the time? I'm not saying it'd be great to be in constant mortal terror, to be abused or to suffer any kind of horrible ill treatment that people even in "Western civilisation" (oxymoron fnar fnar) suffer every day, but that being happy all the time is just a bland, shallow existence like the World State in Huxley. What kind of life would that be? Maybe a life of promiscuity and drugs appeals to you, but it doesn't appeal to intellectually masochist stuffed shirts like myself. Anyway, let's get onto my summary of the problems with Sherlock. I have five main categories.

Just pull the trigger and then we never have to see
the New Who Master's stupider little brother again.

1. It's imbalanced

Sherlock is too concerned with character at the expense of plot. In Series 3 in particular, a full two of the episodes were more about character drama than about crime-solving. I've seen people say "Sherlock is a detective show about the detective, not about the detection." The implication is that you can throw on a Jonathan Creek or Castle or something if what you primarily care about is fanciful detective cases with surprising twists and astounding feats of deduction. But isn't the whole point of Sherlock Holmes that he's the man that people call in when they themselves (or the police) are utterly baffled and they need a particular genius for investigation? It seems like every other instalment of Sherlock's pitifully small number of episodes is more concerned with one of the following questions: Despite being a bit weird, is Sherlock Holmes a relatable character? Or, What is the nature of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson's relationship? And you know what the answer is, every time? In the former it's "Yes, he definitely has a human side to him even if he doesn't fit society's arbitrary rules" and in the latter is "They're very good friends." They've made their point. Do they have to make it again every two years? Do they think we've forgotten or something? Of course the real answer is the viewing public laps up "human drama" at the expense of everything else. "Human drama" is fine when it's part of a balanced diet of exploring other issues in our society. Making a show about a genius detective and then purely focusing on the human drama element isn't exactly making the most of the opportunity at hand. This leads me to my second point.

2. It wastes time

"I'mmm going to say something in a looong, drawn out manner
to increase my limited sssscreeeentime."

As of my writing this there are precisely nine episodes of Sherlock in existence which have been made over the last five years. Even by the standards of British television, that's not many. Sure, each episode is ninety minutes in length, but that's hardly out of the ordinary for a lot of British crime dramas. So let's put ourselves in the place of Mr Steven Moffat and Mr Mark Gatiss. You've got the job writing a modernised TV adaptation of one of Western popular culture's most famous and significant texts. You've got three ninety minute episodes to work with, and your two leads are fairly hot property who are in and out of Hollywood on a regular basis. What are you going to do? Are you going to write a bunch of filler, set pieces, pointless comedy scenes and angsty melodrama, or are you going to crack out a script that's like a well-crafted wristwatch, precise and necessary in every detail? But then the realisation crashes down on you that you're actually a sitcom writer accustomed to producing thirty minutes of silly characters making knob gags and insulting each other, and so you realise you'd better plump for the former option, writing the only thing you know that isn't sitcom scripting, the thing that's given you attention at the BBC outside the world of comedy: writing Russell T Davies brand Doctor Who. That's all Sherlock is, really, except instead of the Doctor it's Benedict Cumberbatch and instead of some woman who wants to sleep with the Doctor it's Martin Freeman, and so people crack loads of gay jokes which is precisely what would happen in New Who if the Doctor ever travelled only with a male companion. Consider the opening of "The Sign of Three" which features "Holmes" interrupting a high-stakes arrest just to get advice for his best man speech, or those bits in "A Scandal in Belgravia" he's walking around Buckingham Palace with no gear on. What's the point of all this dead air? This was exemplified in "The Empty Hearse" when they offer multiple explanations for Holmes' survival, but made clear as early as "The Blind Banker" where they go to that magic show. Then again, that episode was just racist. My point is that the episodes are flabby, and the writing tries to tie everything into the half-hearted plots using a few glib remarks from Benedict Cumberbatch at the end to make it seem like it wasn't all a complete waste of time.

Wall-running in the Sherlock video game.
"Based on something we imagined Conan Doyle
might have imagined if he'd lived today, maybe."

3. It's self-obsessed

You know that bit in "The Empty Hearse" when Holmes gets all excited about putting his trademark jacket back on? That's exactly the problem I want to explore in this point. Why is this show so in love with itself? It's like the bit where Watson says something about Holmes' "cheekbones", which is just pointless self-referential nonsense basically involving them all saying "this show is popular and successful, we're so brilliant." Maybe if it was justified, but it isn't, because Sherlock is shit! But that's just my opinion. My chief issue is how utterly unsubtle they are about everything, as if the writers are saying "look here, didn't we write something clever." It's like Moriarty going on about how he and Holmes are so unusual, or Holmes describing himself as a "high functioning sociopath" or Holmes, Watson and "Mary Morstan" having a big argument about Watson's preference in friends. The show is constantly yelling from the rooftops that it's done something unusual, that it's drawn up these unconventional and edgy characters, completely overlooking the fact that this is just taken from stuff written by a Victorian gentleman over a hundred years ago. In the same way the show is incredibly smug about the lip service it pays to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original work, through puns on original story titles and Benedict Cumberbatch slapping a deerstalker onto his curly-haired bonce. This is a show that's so self aware that we can't possibly be expected to take it seriously. When Holmes appeared to make the leap in "The Reichenbach Fall" we know he isn't going to be dead because, as Gatiss and Moffat themselves said, part of the Sherlock Holmes story is that he seemingly died and later returned. This is a show that doesn't believe it has to try because it can get by on reputation alone, and that's what makes its writing and characterisation so frustrating.

4. It's exploitative

"I need to get naked for no real reason?
Oh right, forgot Steven wrote this one."

As I discussed in my review of "The Empty Hearse" the original Sherlock Holmes narratives were written primarily in the Victorian Age where strong emotions were usually not the business of everyday people apart perhaps from fainting women in rooms full of settees. Modern-day Sherlock, however, is constantly being "emotional", which is to say twee, mawkish, sentimental and melodramatic. There are regular shots of characters staring into middle distance, and moody music playing in the background. It's a cheap trick to keep people engaged by making them cry or feel sad or what have you. It's the most trivial form of storytelling imaginable, manipulating your audience's emotional gullibility to get them invested in the show at the expense of a sound or consistent plot. A good example would be Holmes' big freak out at Watson in "The Hounds of Baskerville" when he goes on about how he doesn't have any friends. But we know of course that they're going to kiss and make up at the end, and of course it's all pointlessly subverted when Holmes traps Watson in the lab with the fear gas just to be a dick. This is a show that doesn't care about actually doing its job as long as it gets its viewers sobbing into their hankies or laughing so hard that they need to post quotes about it on social media. Emotionality is not and never has been the heart and soul of nor the entire purpose and basis of drama, and it's the domain of trash like soap operas. This is not a show that cares remotely about exploring how the issues surrounding "Sherlock Holmes" might fit into a modern context, and this leads me onto my fifth and final point.

"You know what's really going to fit into our edgy modern-day Holmes?
A guy who looks like he's out of Disney's Aladdin wielding a scimitar."

5. It's irrelevant

You know when it made any kind of sense beyond a commercial one to write a series of novels and short stories about two middle-class white dudes who fight crime in London? In the 1890s, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing "The Adventures" and "The Memoirs." The world in which Holmes functioned and which gave rise to him was killed stone dead by the First World War. Why would it be even remotely relevant to British society a century later? That whole Victorian world: colonialism, Anglo-Americanism, masters and servants, it barely existed by 1918. What Sherlock really needed to do was clue itself into the vestiges and replacements of those ideas in the 21st century: the subordination of British power in the West to the United States, modern capitalist heirarchies, race relations and changing class divisions. In Sherlock, however, "Britain" is Mark Gatiss in a three piece suit with an umbrella talking about the Queen, the London metropolis is under threat by the diseased, the foreign and the insane, and the West needs defending from the evil terrorists who want to blow us all up in the name of causes we're too politically correct to divulge. This attitude made sense in Victorian Britain, but it was already starting to show its age then. It's utterly, laughably antiquated now. You might as well do an adaptation of Plato's Politeia and still have it fixated on Athenian cultural anxiety after the Peloponnesian War. As a historical exercise it might be interesting, but what's the point of the adaptation? What, indeed, is the point of adaptations at all? Instead of changing someone else's text for your own time, maybe you should come up with your own characters and stories. They can make it relevant, but then it won't really be Sherlock Holmes anymore, or it can be irrelevant, but it still isn't really Sherlock Holmes. So choose your poison. Benedict Cumberbatch and his supporting cast of overwhelmingly white, predominantly male, exclusively middle class characters saving Britain from terminally ill people, Chinese people, Irish people, empowered women, non-specifically "European" people and so on have absolutely no purpose or relevance in modern culture. It's backward-thinking, redundant and out of touch. This is Sherlock's biggest problem. It doesn't achieve anything. It doesn't need to exist.

Cumberbatch upon discovering Opinions Can Be Wrong.

So there you go then. Agree? Disagree? Good for you, go tell/complain to your friends about it. I thought I could make a point about the show having annoying fans, but that isn't really the show's fault, and all fans are annoying when you get right down to it, so I might as well have said that Sherlock Holmes is predominantly but erroneously depicted wearing a deerstalker cap for all the original information I would have been conveying. I suppose I ought to be grateful that this show isn't a bigger presence in culture due to its very sparse schedule, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it. I think people are out of touch, which is to say, that you can't have watched that much TV if you really think Sherlock is that special, or if you have it must have been shitty TV. But again, that's just my opinion. You know what you shouldn't do if you like Sherlock? Take this as a personal attack, because I don't know you and can't judge you. You're safe. You're not going to die if the bad man on the internet doesn't like your favourite crappy show.

Sherlock: "His Last Vow"

"Thought I'd get a head start on the next two years of hibernation."

After watching the previous episode of this show I was in desperate need of relief from Moffat and Gatiss' smug-o-rama so I started rewatching the Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series which began in 1984 starring Jeremy Brett in the role of the Great Detective. It was astonishing how refreshing it was to watch proper adaptations of Holmes stories where the focus was genuinely on the mysteries and where the source material was reflected in dialogue and composition, not just the repurposing of vague references for the supposed titillation of Holmes anoraks like myself. These days Jeremy Brett is generally considered to be the definitive screen Holmes, at least as far as adaptations are concerned, and seeing his performance and those episodes really reinforced to me the difference between an adaptation of Holmes and a show that's just playing at being Holmes. This sense of unease with the current show was rather encapsulated in "His Last Vow", an episode the title of which is a pun upon the 1917 story "His Last Bow", set upon the eve of the First World War, but takes its plot almost entirely from 1904's "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", a more conventional tale set in 1899. Why these two were thrown together I can't guess, but it does eventuate in a now predictable Moffat case of a meandering narrative far more obsessed with twists and trying to trick the audience than actually providing any kind of substantial detective case.

"And that's for 'The Idiot's Lantern'!"

Villain du jour is Charles Augustus "Magnussen", an evil media mogul who has blackmail material on everyone in Britain, apparently, and likes to urinate in fireplaces. I've already observed this series' fetish for the glory days of British imperialism which are exemplified in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writing and evident in his political beliefs if one reads his correspondence, and it is compounded further here. Instead of a British Milverton whose entire career is blackmail, "Magnussen" is a European of evidently some manner of Scandinavian descent full of contempt for Britain and the British, considering them to be pliable, docile and weak. So poor old Britain is at the mercy of the evil Johnny Foreigner trying to compromise its secrets, and it's up to Sherlock Holmes to save the day. Magnussen is displayed as having powers of scrutiny over people evocative of something like the Terminator, scrawls of text manifesting across his vision. I was immediately exasperated with the apparent ridiculous cod-spy element - if I want to watch Inspector Gadget, I'll put on the DVD. But of course it's a big twist - Magnussen has no gadget glasses, nor does he possess a vault of compromising information. Rather, it's all in his head, and he trusts the public's capacity for believing anything they read in the papers to manufacture his proof for him. So are we honestly expected to believe that Magnussen, for all intents and purposes, sees text across his vision? At least with Holmes the words appear here and there where relevant to indicate to the viewer what he is noticing, not like some kind of computer readout. And of course this is an excuse for some tiresome Moffat cheekiness, as Magnussen's data-scroll reveals the subject's preference, among other things, for adult material. Of course he only performs this "scan" once upon a female character, indicating no preference, embellishing Moffat's insane gender perception. He seems to buy into some kind of Madonna dichotomy where women are either completely sexless or the reverse without being capable of a balanced portrayal of human sexuality.

A fitting label for whoever said that beanies look good on anyone.

Speaking of which, the other big revelation in this episode is that Mary Watson née Morstan is a former CIA killer whose name is taken from a deceased child and who has a dark past of covert deeds, all known to Magnussen. Watson is understandably exasperated, wondering if everyone he knows is a "psychopath." Much like in New Who, I don't think "psychopath" means what Moffat thinks it means. A "psychopath" is a person with a psychological disorder who is manipulative and has no capacity for empathy. Psychopaths are incapable of loving or even liking people, only seeing them as objects to use for their personal advantage. Mary cannot be a "psychopath" any more than Holmes can be a "high functioning sociopath", not only a scientifically meaningless term according to modern understandings of the concept but one not borne out by his own behaviour. Despite their own agreement, they are not "psychopaths" any more than Moffat's Doctor or River Song are. Holmes could not be Watson's friend, nor "Mary" his loving wife if they genuinely had those disorders. And of course we discover that Mary shoots Holmes in front of Magnussen to put Magnussen off the trail, and that in spite of uncertainty she genuinely loves Watson and that marrying him was not part of any kind of gambit, so the entire section of arguing that Watson has some kind of fetish for these sorts of personalities barely makes sense, at least not in the terms used in the episode. Holmes' constant self-reference as a "high functioning sociopath" just reeks of script-based branding as well, characters putting labels on themselves for the convenience of the writers.

Where every tumblr fangirl wants to be.

In the end there's no mystery or tension at all. Holmes sells Mycroft out to Magnussen in order to get the information he has on Mary, only to discover that everything is in Magnussen's head. Magnussen is going to attempt to make Holmes and Watson look like traitors and the cavalry arrives, Mark Gatiss barking orders from a helicopter as if he believes that his brother would have arbitrarily gone rogue. With no other choice to destroy the compromising information and spare Mary and Watson, Holmes kills Magnussen and is arrested. I honestly thought it was going to turn out that Mycroft was telling Holmes to move away from Magnussen so that they could kill the latter, but no, apparently this was a twist that didn't cross Moffat's mind, Mycroft arbitrarily becoming completely stupid at the end of the story for no obvious reason. Holmes' only hope of a reprieve is to go on a suicide mission to Eastern Europe, but before he can do so Moriarty hijacks the TV, Holmes' plane is turned around and, apparently, everything's back to business for the next series. What's the point? It's entirely manipulative, a big emotional farewell between Holmes and Watson set up just to be instantly subverted. This is, in my opinion, the worst kind of forced drama intended to trick the audience into ignoring the insubstantiality of the plot. It boggles my mind that after two years this was all they could come up with. How hard would it have been to just write a decent detective story?

"Tell me when to stop contracting my fingers."

There are, surprisingly, some decent nods to "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", including Holmes' fake proposal to gain access to him and the notion of Milverton getting murdered by his victim, although that isn't followed through with here. We also get a reference to "The Man with the Twisted Lip" when Watson discovers Holmes on a case in a drug den. On the other hand there's a bunch of random crap, like Mary's real initials being A.G.R.A., a reference to the Agra fort in India which is the location of some of the back story in "The Sign of the Four." Magnussen also I failed to find very interesting, being depicted as a typical enemy pervert who licks people and, as I've said, relieves himself beneath the mantle, as well as having a passion for classic 1982 arcade game Joust if the ostrich lancer statue in his house is anything to go by. Was "a better class of criminal" another reference to The Dark Knight? Molly slaps Sherlock repeatedly and we are reminded of how in Moffat's world, as we already knew, women have to resort to physical violence to make a point to men, because god forbid they're ever allowed to explain their frustrations or anything. No, they apparently just lash out. This is not egalitarian. It's condescending and crude. Holmes gets Mycroft in an arm lock for little reason, suggesting he's more like modern Mr Spock repressing his violent urges than operating on a different level. He also has an extended, utterly bizarre imaginary sequence much like last week where people he knows embody elements of his thought process and talk him through being shot, including a hallucinatory strait-jacketed Moriarty in a padded cell whose presence at this point totally undermines the surprise of seeing him at the end. Another Moffat cliché gets trotted out when imaginary Moriarty starts rhyming. The revelation of Mary's fake identity has no impact - oh, she was a spy, like every other character in this show - and nothing really happens for any particularly valid reason. Holmes' parents, a one off joke in an earlier episode, are now brought in as supporting cast, Moffat not understanding that less is more. For all Mary's secrecy, we hear more than enough to draw our own conclusions.

"No Steven, I won't play the Master opposite Capaldi."

Sherlock often gets described as "slick", which is really a nice way of saying "style over substance." There's so little to grasp in this episode, just a bunch of set pieces and jumps forward in time which apparently are what Moffat does when he's in a rush. I'm sick of all this crap with "mind palaces" and smug characters going on about how clever they are and then never really doing much at all besides stand around looking intense while dramatic music crashes in the background. I don't even know what I'm watching. Not only is this very far removed from anything really approaching Sherlock Holmes apart from a few character and place names and narrative devices, it's certainly not any kind of detective show anymore, more like an airport-bookstore thriller with loads of soap layered on. I'm hoping that Moriarty isn't really back but that he staged some kind of revenge act after his own death, because their interpretation is arse and Moriarty isn't meant to come back anyway, but who knows when a fourth series will even be made. As it stands I can't help but look at the third series of Sherlock as a terrific waste of time and money which has completely run its course. I don't care about the characters or the plots at all. Of course Holmes wasn't going to die on the operating table. Of course he wasn't going to fly off to his death in (scare quotes) "Eastern Europe" - one of those nasty uncivilised parts of the world where bad people live, apparently - and of course, I suppose, Moriarty wouldn't be gone forever. This is a show that cares more about titillation than earning its dramatic points. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the episodes of series four is eighty minutes of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman yelling at each other in a room followed by ten minutes of Holmes running up and down a corridor yelling things like "mind palace" and discovering that in the end poor old Britain actually is safe from all the evil foreign people who hate the Western way of life, interrupted briefly by Mark Gatiss slinking in, drawling and sneering while Moriarty takes up flashing old ladies as his latest dastardly scheme. Yeah, I didn't like "His Last Vow" much but pardon me if I'd prefer if Sherlock Holmes of all people actually solved crimes more than once per series.