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.

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.

Sherlock: "The Sign of Three"

Getting into the spirit of Victorian racial attitudes.

Was I expecting an adaptation of "The Sign of the Four" from the phenomenally witty and clever title of this episode? Not really. The basic gist of this episode is flashbacks, with crimes being served up in dribs and drabs. We begin with Lestrade acting like a tit as he gets more and more frustrated in the company of Donovan who, unlike Anderson, hasn't grown a beard and joined tumblr. There are some dastardly criminals, the Waters Family, on the loose. Their crime? Re enacting the opening scene of The Dark Knight apparently, robbing banks in clown masks. They eventually get caught in the act, a computer warning telling the police "Hacking Detected", some of the most hilariously pathetic Hollywood-style computing misrepresentation I've seen in a while. I'm surprised there wasn't a big red progress bar that beeped loudly when it was full. There's an emergency at Baker Street, however, so Lestrade rushes off to discover that it's just Holmes struggling to write his best man speech for Watson's wedding. Of course, we know it's going to be a joke, it's more predictable than the sun coming up in the morning, but for god's sake. Is this a comedy? How much humour does this show really need?

You either die a hero, or live long enough
to see yourself performing a Moffat/Gatiss(/Thompson) script.

Anyway, in a rather repetitious fashion, this episode, much like the one before, is primarily a character study. That's fine, but this show does three episodes every couple of years, roughly speaking. Does there really need to be another episode that's primarily character focused? The next one had better be pretty damn intriguing. Of course the crimes Holmes recollects in this episode during his speech all tie together but basically it's just a bit of the old stabby-stabby, foreseen from the outset when we get a long lingering shot of a horribly scarred military officer with burns all over one side of his face. Am I watching The Dark Knight? Anyway because it's Sherlock we can expect that he's probably the target, what with, as I mentioned last week, the general sense of nostalgia for Britain's glory days. If this was Castle he'd almost definitely be a former special forces mercenary, 'cause they love to show soldiers becoming criminals. And of course I'm not going to act like this episode is all "the army is brilliant" because we can see that clearly Major Sholto's scars are more than skin deep. Sholto's name is of course a reference to "The Sign of the Four" but these connections are, by contrast to this character's trauma, relatively shallow.

"Off the adult furniture, Martin."

So how does this episode go on the character front? It's all right, I suppose. The thing is, we already know this version of Holmes is really weird and that Watson is his friend in spite of it all. We see how he's been a positive, humanising influence on Holmes, which is something that comes out in the original stories. So that's all right, even if I think it's a tad laboured. In fact Holmes has changed so much he's actually started to act a bit like the Eleventh Doctor in the days of his dotage, running up and down, yelling, waving his arms around and slapping himself. We get a nice pointless cameo from Irene Adler - she must have been either really bored or in the need of some quick dosh - to remind us of that episode which should have been handling all this last series when the Holmes/Watson friendship fell, at times, by the wayside. And of course we get to see what Holmes would act like when he's drunk, which is basically just like any comedy drunk person in a TV show (and to a certain extent in reality): he stumbles around, falls asleep and throws up. At times funny, mostly a bit cliché, could have been better.

"I've just graduated from Harvard College Yale.
I aced every semester and I got an A."

We're suddenly all on board with Mary too, which is pretty startling given that we've known her all of one episode before this, but given that it's all fairly run of the mill Sherlock Holmes stuff I don't really care. I guess I felt slightly moved when Holmes was saying what a good chap he thought Watson was and all that? It just bores me to tears when character development becomes the focus. I'm generally in favour of plot-driven drama in cases like this because I think characterisation works better in the background. But Sherlock knows its audience, right? I mean, it knows that if anyone wants to see a slightly eccentric man in the modern day solving unusual crimes they can put on an old Jonathan Creek or something, so they focus on the character of the detective rather than the crimes he solves. But I feel like they've really wrung as much mileage as they can from poking and prodding Holmes' peculiarities and reassuring us that at the end of the day he's really a big softie like the rest of us by now, haven't they? I feel like there has to be a better compromise here, I mean, they've got ninety minutes to work with, serve us up a proper mystery.

Oh, was this written by Moffat? I wouldn't have guessed.
One letter short of a description of the episode.

The mystery in this episode turns out to be the connection between the murder of Dean from Harry Potter and the attempted murder of Major Sholto, each stabbed through the belt so that they'd die when they removed their uniforms. Interesting that they didn't notice the pain of getting stabbed. I'm not sure we're really offered quite enough explanation for why Dean or whatever he was called in this was so exposed to his killer that he thought he was being stalked by him. Why did the photographer need to hang around so much that he attracted suspicion? The revenge plot involving Sholto is pretty by the numbers as well. The tie in of course is with the photographer's role as a "ghost" dater who apparently found out information on Sholto by taking the identities of dead men and dating Sholto's staff. Makes sense, I suppose, but it was mostly worth it for Alice Lowe. It's ten years this year since Garth Marenghi's Darkplace first aired. Bloody hell. I dunno why, but I've always had a thing for Alice Lowe. I wish she was in more stuff. I dunno why I feel the need to mention it but what else is there to say? Oh, apparently Holmes' inner landscape sometimes is a kind of parliamentary room where Mark Gatiss dictates to him from a pulpit. Why does Mycroft need to be in this so much? He gets a scene in this for absolutely no reason, similar to related bits of padding with, for instance, Mrs Hudson. The second Mrs Hudson scene made me want to chew off my own leg with boredom. Are we supposed to assume that Holmes is always imagining Mycroft telling him what to do? I suppose Mycroft is supposed to represent his rationality but it still seems weird and kind of pointless.

"...are you done yet?"

There's a line Watson makes in this about "faking opinions" which is more or less reused from Coupling, Moffat seemingly resorting to cannibalising his own stuff. Is Sherlock doomed to always have boring middle episodes full of extraneous cushioning? Also, was the final scene meant to evoke the Third Doctor's departure from Jo at the end of "The Green Death"? Who knows. This episode feels a bit like a mash of a bunch of different things served up to Benedict Cumberbatch to make the most of when he's not playing the awkward "high functioning sociopath" bits that have been trotted out since the show began. I didn't mind his scenes with Mary's bridesmaid, although they veered into the blatantly contradictory when he was borderline flirty with her. Does he or does he not get people? Him getting along with the little kid was also kind of amusing, although the bit where his mum said Holmes had "promised him pictures as a treat" - I know the implication was gruesome crime scene images but like... well, never mind. "The Sign of Three" then. Oh, I suppose the little fellow with the blowpipe was a reference to the original novel. In any event, I had to take a break from this two thirds of the way through because I was so bored. Then again Alice Lowe was in it, so maybe it's the best episode of Sherlock ever? We need to put the heavy character focus to rest now and have a really, really good, interesting, perplexing crime. It's what Holmes would want, after all.

Sherlock: "The Empty Hearse"

"There's a Hollywood villain role going downstairs?
No time, get the bungee rope!"

Yeah, I never got around to finishing my review of "The Reichenbach Fall." One word summary? Shit. The point at which Sherlock, one of the most staggeringly overrated programmes of recent years on television, collapsed into nothing more than a hybrid of cheap thriller and psycho-drama with all pretence of being a detective story abandoned, it was a tedious and disappointing piece of television most objectionable for its overuse of the show's insufferable portrayal of Moriarty. Two years later and Sherlock is back for another series of three ninety-minute instalments. What does this episode have to do? Firstly, it needs to explain how Holmes faked his death. Secondly, it needs to explore the ramifications of this for Holmes' friends and colleagues, especially Watson. Thirdly, it preferably needs to tell an interesting story of its own. "The Empty Hearse" wastes time on the first, traverses cliché and predictable routes for the second and is entirely perfunctory on the third. It's not nearly as objectionable of content as "The Blind Banker" or "A Scandal in Belgravia" but it's rather routine and hasn't toned down the appalling smugness as much as is really necessary.

"David Burke? Never heard of him."

To summarise the plot, Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch have spent the last two years filming "The Hobbit" (italics reserved for the books, adaptations only get quotation marks) and other Hollywood projects like the godawful "Star Trek Into Darkness", while Moffat and Gatiss have been writing shit episodes of New Who, and as a result it has conveniently taken Holmes two years to disassemble what remains of Moriarty's international crime network. Despite the typical punning title, "The Empty Hearse" owes little to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original tale of the Great Detective's resurrection, being reminiscent only in the fact that it involves Holmes' return and that the antagonist is named Moran. Holmes must negotiate his reappearance to Watson and solve a terrorist plot, after being rescued from Serbia by Mycroft in another lame spy spoof scene. This second element is utterly humdrum, making the episode feel like a knockoff of, simultaneously, the lamentable Skyfall and the over-simplified film adaptation at least of "V for Vendetta", featuring an explosive-laden tube train intended to blow up Parliament, this time at the demands of a "Lord Moran." Rather than being Moriarty's second in command, Moran here is a character-less seditionist apparently in the pocket of Pyongyang whose only purpose is to be observed suspiciously disappearing on some security footage and pushing a button in a hotel room. Now that I think about it, all the imagery of Parliament getting blown up and MPs vulnerable in session actually rather strongly evokes nothing less than the first of the Guy Ritche-directed Holmes films, so it's hardly fresh stuff. But this episode cares little about the plot, being more interested in observing how Watson would react to his friend's return.

"So you wanna play Boggle, or Super Mario Bros.?"

And for what it's worth, "The Empty Hearse" doesn't do too badly in exploring how one might react if one's best friend was revealed to have faked their own death and apparently everyone knew but you. We do get some fairly predictable material featuring Watson repeatedly attacking Holmes as they get kicked out of more and more down-market eating establishments. The problem is that Holmes never gives a good enough account of himself for why Watson, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade were left in the dark - interestingly, the "canonical" characters. Gatiss/Moffat inventions Molly, Holmes' parents and the "homeless network" (replacing the Baker Street Irregulars) were all clued up. Of course, so was Mycroft, much like the original tales. Once again we get perhaps more scenes featuring Sherlock and Mycroft than are strictly necessary, and isn't it hilarious to see them playing Operation when we thought it was chess. Before the end I was sure it was going to turn out that Molly had gotten engaged to Mycroft. I did like them showing Mycroft's own powers of deduction, something the show has to this point omitted. Holmes saving Watson from the as yet unresolved bonfire scenario was a good enough way of reconciling the two, I suppose, but I still think Holmes should have emphasised that he faked his death to save Watson's life, not just because he thought he'd let something slip. We also get a ghastly "I'm not gay!" moment from Watson which is even lazier than the constant Holmes/Watson gay jokes of series gone by. Perhaps the most pleasant part of the episode, for some reason, was Holmes having Molly along as his substitute Watson, although that too got muddled up in all sorts of boring romantic tripe about how she's moved on by getting engaged to a man who looks a lot like and dresses identically to Sherlodict Cumberholmes. As a general rule there's a bit too much comedy in the episode, especially involving cutaways between Holmes and Watson where they appear, purely for the sake of jokes, to be finishing each other's sentences in silly ways. It's the same as New Who, really - this is what happens when you get comedy writers to do the job of writers actually experienced in the field.

It's this or the Guy Ritchie ones. Choose your poison.

As for how Holmes faked his death, we get three explanations: one from Anderson involving masks, bungee cords and action heroics, one from a fangirl involving a deliberate and appropriately amusing pastiche of the homoerotic dreams of the fan-fiction brigade, and one from Holmes himself which Anderson doesn't believe. I suppose it's nice to see Anderson get his comeuppance for being so disagreeable in earlier series, as well as the explanation for why that girl screamed in "The Reichenbach Fall" but I can't help but feel that it's too much. I get the impression that Gatiss and Moffat are trying to poke fun at how no explanation they gave would ever satisfy all comers, but maybe because I'm such an utter contrarian (among other things featuring the letters C N and T in that order) I actually thought that Holmes' explanation was fine. Well, I had one quibble. Watson needed to see a body, but did they need an actual corpse? Couldn't anyone in a wig and overcoat have done? Anyway, it was fine with me, but I think it was overdone. As for performances, they're all fine, and I actually liked the way Holmes seemed to have abandoned some of the overemphasised traits from the last series. With the Watson moustache I actually found Martin Freeman very convincing. Put him in a bowler hat and Victorian clothes and he'd probably be spot on as a canonical Watson. Speaking of, it's somewhat disconcerting to see from the titles alone how steeped this show is in the atmosphere of British Imperialism which was so vital to Conan Doyle. If British culture from Thatcher's time has become increasingly steeped in imperialist nostalgia perhaps this modern update of Holmes isn't so surprising. Sherlock is still, essentially, a battler for Britain, who in this goes even further in interfering in the business of other countries, most of which are fetishised in a very Victorian way. In this, Holmes is involved in defending Parliament during a rather simplistically-described debate of an anti-terrorism bill which is only given the most offhand scrutiny in a background voiceover. I would argue that Moffat and Gatiss try to make Holmes seem relevant, which he inevitably cannot be outside the context of late nineteenth century Britain, by immersing the programme in generic post 9-11 Western xenophobic paranoia, emphasised by the utter banality and effortlessness of the "terrorist threat" potentially sponsored in this narrative by the current cliché bogeyman of North Korea - I suppose Iran would have been the only other possibility. As an equivalent of the atmosphere in Conan Doyle's time of British power being threatened by the United States ascendant in the West and Germany similarly in the East it's probably appropriate, but as such comes across to my mind as rather small-minded, politically conservative and borderline jingoistic - but the show's been like that since "The Blind Banker" at the very least.

"Get a good angle, these need to be splashed all
over tumblr by midnight tonight!"

"The Adventure of the Empty House" always had the benefit of being set in the age of Victorian values when overt emotions were reserved and private, so there was no great need to explore the ramifications of Holmes' apparent death and subsequent reappearance upon Watson in extravagant detail. Indeed having simply escaped Moriarty's clutches, rather than deliberately staging his own demise, the real Holmes was to a certain extent off the hook, having never really misled Watson in the first place. The good Doctor faints, Holmes apologises, and we get on with things. I would have been interested to see a Sherlock interpretation of Colonel Moran but sadly it was not to be. "The Empty Hearse," perhaps without choice, bites off a bit more than it can plausibly chew even within the relatively relaxed constraints of ninety minutes of television. The plot isn't interesting enough to keep the narrative in momentum and the whole "how did he do it" aspect is over embellished, especially since, as Watson himself points out, the more important question within the framework of this show, and the part that doesn't really get satisfactorily dealt with, is why. It's arguably one of the stronger of the show's amusingly small number of episodes, but given that "A Study in Pink" is really the only good one that's not exactly difficult. A bit less smugness would be appreciated too; the show is frustratingly tiresome in its enthusiasm for being ironic, post-modern and self aware to the extent that it becomes impossible to take seriously, as emphasised by the moment of Holmes putting on the deerstalker, a piece of inaccurate shorthand for the original Great Detective. I'm sure die hard fans of this show could convince themselves that anything was worth the wait but for my part more of an emphasis on a new plot would have been welcome. By all means resolve what came before, but it's not necessary to spend so much time on it just for the sake of humour and deflecting criticism. In fact it comes across as a tad insecure and defensive on the part of Gatiss and Moffat, although that's not really surprising behaviour. Setting up a new villain arc, seemingly featuring some adaptation of Charles Augustus Milverton, isn't quite enough to sell me on an episode that spends too much time resolving the one that came before.