Review sherlock holmes special tv#
In fact, the character of Sherlock Holmes has always been a favorite of mine because I've always enjoyed the mystery/detective books, movies, and TV shows and that's exactly what Sherlock Holmes is. They didn’t even come close.Sherlock is easily one of my favorite shows on TV. “Contains upsetting scenes” warned the BBC website. Moffat and Gatiss just filmed 90 minutes of the internal monologue of a tortured queer genius drug addict off his tits on coke, wrapped it up in a gothic mystery, and then gave it to us as a late Christmas present. But the secret is that it isn’t that clever and it doesn’t completely make sense, because it’s not supposed to. This episode will be derided as Steven Moffat trying too hard to outwit the viewer and twisting what should be a perfectly simple whodunit into a plot device of labyrinth complexity. “I’m a storyteller, I know when I’m in one.” “What do you think about MI5’s security?” “I think it would be a good idea.” “Give her some lines or she’s perfectly capable of starving us.” Moriarty is every impulse Sherlock has never given into, he is Sherlock’s shadow self, the Hyde to his Jekyll, so of course Sherlock jumps, of course he follows Moriarty into the abyss – it’s not that he can’t be without him, it’s that he doesn’t want to. Moriarty is Sherlock’s shadow self, the Hyde to his Jekyll. Moriarty is the virus in the data, the thing that corrupts Sherlock’s mind palace – that corrupts Sherlock himself – and the thing about viruses is that they want to replicate. This isn’t Moriarty telling Sherlock that he’s his weakness – this is the great detective telling himself that. He even straddles Sherlock and kicks him about in a scene painfully reminiscent of Irene Adler. He’s been in Sherlock’s bed, he shows up dressed as a bride, he says the one thing everyone is thinking when he tells Sherlock and Watson to elope. Moriarty’s queerness, never subtle to begin with, is undeniable at this point.
The rest of the episode shuttles back and forth at a vertiginous pace between present day and the Victorian era, and who’s to say how real even the present day is? This isn’t a cheap cop-out, it’s seeing Sherlock’s mental disintegration from the inside, in all its confusing, non-linear glory. The explanation is that Sherlock was in his mind palace trying to unravel Moriarty’s apparent return, but in order to get there he had taken a dangerous cocktail of drugs and read up on an unsolved Victorian murder. The “…and then he woke up and it was all a dream” twist is maligned for a reason, but if it takes talent to make a good cliché work, making a bad one brilliant is Holmes-level genius. That’s when the penny drops – or rather, when we realize that it’s been dropping just at the corner of our vision the entire episode. It’s not the Reichenbach Fall that will kill you. Oh yes, it’s shot beautifully, but the anchronisms are painful – does 1890s Mycroft really need to use the phrase “a virus in the data”? How did that not slip past the poor intern on historical accuracy duty?Īnd then Moriarty breaks into the even-more-fictional-than-normal Baker Street, unapologetically flirting with Sherlock at a time when that could get you imprisoned or worse, twirling Chekov’s gun like a music hall villain’s mustache and reminding us that the abominable bride’s death mimics his own in the “Sherlock” universe we all know. In fact, the whole thing feels like a sporadically enjoyable but generally irritating conceit – a real shame when Mark Gatiss gives such good historical telly.
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