The Signs of the Fourth

SPOILER WARNING: This post ruins pretty much every big revelation in the 2017 series of Sherlock. (I'm going to rise above jokes about that being the writers' job.)

In July 2010, a new detective series – a contemporary reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat – began on BBC One. I watched the first series as it went out and I thought it was absolutely terrific, unquestionably one of the best things on television that year. A second series followed in January 2012, and although I had some problems with the handling of Irene Adler in the first episode I thought it was generally pretty great as well.

Then there was a third series in January 2014. And unfortunately I wasn’t so keen on that, or most of what came afterwards (a one-off special in 2016 followed by a fourth series in 2017). When that last series went out I decided to go back and rewatch the first episodes I’d enjoyed so much, compare them to the more recent ones, and try to pinpoint where, for me, the show went wrong, what was different about the later episodes that made me less keen on them. And I thought I could get a blog post out of it.

The first thing to note is that if you’ve only got three episodes in one series, then each one has to count. The third series of Doctor Who actually has a string of mediocre episodes in the middle, but they’re preceded by three very strong ones and followed by three of the best episodes in the show’s 53-year history before ending with a spectacular three-part finale, so people tend to overlook the wobbly bit. The Prisoner has ten episodes that creator Patrick McGoohan openly said “didn’t count” as he originally only planned it to run seven episodes, but the closing two-parter is so remarkable it’s all anyone ever talks about, as opposed to the one just before it that was a reformatted Danger Man script. I guess the middle episode of a run of Sherlock could get away with not being as good as the surrounding two, but with such a short run there’s less place to hide.

This is only exacerbated by the length of time between each run, and how hyped the returns are – Sherlock starves its audience like no other show I know, receives universal acclaim and is BBC One’s flagship drama whenever it is actually on air, meaning that each episode is under intense pressure to deliver – so some of my disappointment with later series almost certainly comes from that. It’s event television, but event television has to deliver. Each episode of Series 3 gets something wrong; moreover, they each get something different wrong.

First up is “The Empty Hearse”, which isn’t really an episode of Sherlock as much as it is a commentary about the show Sherlock. It constantly teases the audience with the solution of how Sherlock survived the fall two years previously, with the conceit of showing hypothetical solutions proposed by members of Sherlock’s ‘fan club’, to the point that at times that’s what it feels like the episode is actually about. I don’t have a problem with meta-fiction or leaning on the fourth wall; indeed, the previous episode, “The Reichenbach Fall”, did that to great effect by ingeniously deconstructing the show’s entire premise… but it wasn’t quite as overpowering as it is here. This is not helped by the fact that the episode doesn’t definitively give you an answer as to how he survived the fall, but the biggest problem with “The Empty Hearse” is that it feels like it’s being written for the people on Tumblr – and in fact it sometimes feels like it’s trolling that very small portion of the audience specifically. I didn’t really want to use the phrase “disappearing up its own arse” in this post… but it certainly feels like the show is at least seriously in danger of doing just that.

Next is “The Sign of Three”, which is a structural mess that doesn’t really have enough to do with any of the original stories for my liking (it’s mostly devoted to Sherlock’s best man’s speech at John and Mary’s wedding, something which has no basis in Conan Doyle at all – obviously any adaptation can and should try new things, but this just feels misplaced to me and not in keeping with the spirit of the original stories), and in fact strays dangerously close to feeling like a sitcom at times. I have to admit I find it quite hard to put into words how I feel about this episode, other than it’s generally a bit of a mess. (I feel I should mention that Colm McCarthy does an absolute first-class job of directing this episode.)

Finally, my problem with “His Last Vow” is simple: it’s a bit too silly, or at least hinges on two plot twists that are too silly. Maybe the show arguably always tended towards fantasy a little, but the early episodes were more grounded, had at least one foot in reality; Mary Morstan being revealed as an international assassin or Magnussen’s vaults actually just being in his head feel a world apart from that. In all three episodes, I think I can see what the production was going for; the execution just doesn’t really work to me.

 Unfortunately, the problems don’t abate with the 2016 special, “The Abominable Bride”. The special shows an alternative timeline where the show is actually set in the 19^th century London of the original Conan Doyle stories. However, midway through it unveils the totally unnecessary twist that this is actually all happening inside Sherlock’s mind palace after he gets high to try and work out how Moriarty could have survived shooting himself in the head. And he comes up with the answer: He couldn’t. I’m not sure you need to devote 90 minutes of television to the revelation that if you shoot yourself in the head you’ll die. You could go from “His Last Vow” to the series 4 opener, “The Six Thatchers”, without losing anything; this just felt like the show trying to be too clever for its own good. The special would have benefited hugely from just being an actual standalone, set entirely in 1895. (Although, that said, the visual of 1895 Sherlock looking out of a window into present-day Baker Street is rather cool.)

Since I’ve mentioned him, there’s another big problem that’s pervading the show since the end of the second series: the continued obsession with Moriarty. You’re probably aware that in the original stories, Moriarty only actually appears in “The Final Problem” itself, although he also played a part in The Valley of Fear, a novel written after that short story. Now, if Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat want Moriarty to be a bigger part of their version of Holmes, then obviously they can do anything they like, it’s their show – and I think Moriarty’s role in the second series actually works. But then Moriarty continues to be a plot point five years after the episode in which he’s killed off, which definitely doesn’t work at all – at least, not while he remains an on-screen presence in spite of being dead. Crucially, the twist of “Did you miss me?” at the end of “His Last Vow” is massively diluted by the fact that he’s already been seen in new footage not only earlier in that very episode, but also in the premiere less than two weeks earlier. If they wanted Moriarty’s network/global conspiracy to still be part of the show’s ongoing arc, then they could and should have done it without us seeing Moriarty again. If they still wanted Andrew Scott to be part of the show, then they shouldn’t have killed the character off. This just feels like the production is trying to have its cake and eat it. (The show does The Reichenbach Falls moment three times, albeit in different ways – in “The Great Game”, “The Reichenbach Fall” and “The Abominable Bride”. When the whole point of something is that both characters were meant to fall to their deaths I don’t think you should do it more than once.)

I wasn’t really keen on Mary’s past as James Bond, so it’s no surprise that a lot of “The Six Thatchers” doesn’t work for me, especially since the central mystery is wrapped up well before the end. This and “Bride” are carrying over the big problem from “His Last Vow” – silliness. As I said above, I liked the show when it was at least semi-grounded, and now it feels like it’s turning into James Bond (the one with the invisible car, not Skyfall). There had to be a better way of doing a story arc based around a global conspiracy, without losing what – for me – made the show such a success in the first two series (I felt the two Robert Downey Jr movies were successful at this).

Unfortunately, “The Lying Detective” then repeats the problem the show made with Moriarty again, this time with Mary Morstan, as after being killed off the previous week she continues to communicate with John by appearing as a delusion of his grief-addled imagination. If they’d kept Mary’s posthumous inclusion to the video message she recorded before her death, it might have worked – but this definitely doesn’t, especially when it’s done right after she’s died. It makes it feel like the show is too afraid or unwilling to move forward, and when John confesses to his imaginary Mary that he cheated on her and he isn’t the man she thought he was, again it feels like the show is trying to have its cake and eat it – and it has about as much success on that front as our Foreign Secretary. Once again, the show’s intended impact – this time of Mary’s death – is diluted.

Shame, because apart from that, the episode is actually really bloody good. Benedict Cumberbatch is as good an actor as everyone always says he is, and his performance as Holmes is possibly never better than it is here. Toby Jones is a wonderful guest star, and Steven Moffat writes a great character for him to play. The episode is a very clever take on its source material, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective”. It’s astonishingly well directed by Nick Hurran, with some of the more fantastical elements being well-handled as a rather impressive hallucinogenic sequence. There’s a twist ending that’s obviously been very well planned, with lots of little gems to pick up on a rewatch. I’m not sure about the James Bond-esque boardroom scene where Culverton Smith is first introduced, but that’s nit-picking. But I’m afraid the usage of Mary does spoil it a bit for me – which is a real pity, because in any other regard, it is absolutely on par with the first two series.

That brings us on to “The Final Problem”, which can be summed up with this visual aid:

“The Final Problem” is, I’m afraid, a genuinely dreadful piece of television. It starts off with Mycroft being terrorised in his own home by someone interfering with his film reels, mysterious ghostly voices, portraits crying blood and a clown he tries to fight off with his cane that has a sword hidden inside it that also turns out to have a gun in the handle… and then it all turns out to be an experiment set up by Sherlock, which doesn’t actually explain how the hell any of the sequence was possible anyway. From there, the cliffhanger is resolved by explaining that Watson was actually only shot with a tranquiliser dart by Sherlock’s secret sister Eurus, even though it never bothers to explain why she’d do that anyway or why she’d say she was going to put a bullet in his head if she was only going to use a tranquiliser. There’s then a baffling sequence where a drone pilots a motion-sensitive hand grenade into 221b Baker Street and they all stand around discussing Mycroft’s school play before doing anything, which is immediately forgotten in favour of Sherlock and John hijacking a boat for no real reason other than they can get a callback to pirates in, and then we get to Sherrinford, which is the name of the remote island prison where the clinically insane Eurus is being kept only it turns out she’s brainwashed all the guards and is secretly running the place.

Then Jim Moriarty shows up, only it turns out to actually be a flashback and some video clips he’d filmed before his death, and there’s no real reason for Moriarty to be in the story at all other than Gatiss and Moffat, for some reason, felt he should be and, once again, they just don’t know when to let things lie. Eurus then forces Sherlock, John and Mycroft who got in disguised as a seaman to play a series of ‘games’, starting with working out which of three brothers was responsible for committing a murder with only photos of the three suspects and the murder weapon to go on, only it turns out Eurus has somehow got the three brothers and is dangling them over a cliff, and she gets Sherlock to say who the guilty party is then drops the two innocent ones and AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

This is beyond silly. It’s utter nonsense. There’s another ‘game’ concerning some explosives that don’t actually exist (to give the show some credit, these games do throw up some halfway interesting moral dilemmas and the second one, before it's revealed the intended target was never in danger, is probably the high point of the episode), then Eurus tries to get Sherlock to kill one of Mycroft or John – hang on, in amongst all of this I’ve forgotten to mention that there’s a plane that’s about to crash where everyone including the pilot is unconscious except for a little girl Sherlock periodically gets to communicate with, and he can only save her by finishing all of Eurus’ games. After Sherlock refuses to kill either of his comrades but attempts to take the third option of shooting himself, Eurus drugs them all then when Sherlock wakes up it turns out they’re inexplicably back in England at the Holmes family residence a few hours later and Eurus has somehow had the time to build a replica of a room in the prison, and then there’s some genuinely incomprehensible stuff with a mystery concerning some fake graves and then it turns out Eurus was the girl on the plane and the big twist concerning the titular ‘Final Problem’ is that Sherlock’s childhood pet dog was imaginary only it was actually his childhood friend whom Eurus had killed. (The revelation of the truth behind ‘Redbeard’ might have been pretty good – it's an interesting idea on paper – but coming after the story hits you with stupid moment after stupid moment, and just before it hits you with the stupidest one of all with the revelation of what’s really going on with the girl on the plane, it just feels like another such moment.)

Oh, and during all of this last bit John is inexplicably chained to the bottom of a well which is somehow filling up with water, seemingly because Eurus can make it rain at will. I know the way I’ve written this doesn’t make sense, but it is impossible to write about this episode in a way that makes sense, because it simply doesn’t. Trying to write a coherent plot summary of “The Final Problem” is like trying to describe the colour red to a blind man. Not only that, it has no relationship to Sherlock Holmes beyond the names of the characters and places. Gatiss and Moffat have lost touch with Conan Doyle altogether, and that is perhaps the story’s biggest failing of all… which is quite remarkable given just how little sense its biggest plot thread makes.

After all of that, they then bring back Mary Morstan yet again, this time with a second message recorded before her death. This at least works better than her use in the previous episode (and they probably would’ve gotten away with it if she hadn’t been in “The Lying Detective” at all), but coupled with the totally unnecessary return of Moriarty there’s a sense that the show can’t bring itself to actually face the consequences of its actions, especially when we get given the earlier problem where one of Sherlock, John or Mycroft has to die and the show bails on it (admittedly in a way that actually makes relative sense, but still).

However, the episode then ends with a really nice sequence that actually feels like it captures the spirit of the original stories, and the feeling the show had in the first two series – but that only makes the preceding 85 minutes of totally random events, utterly divorced from the original canon or indeed any kind of logic whatsoever, even more bizarre. I mentioned the final episode of The Prisoner above – even that had its own internal logic, made sense in its own way and felt true to what had come before. This… doesn’t. But then it comes up with a scene that accurately surmises the show I actually want to watch, which is also the very last scene.

 

I can only conclude that this was a result of style over substance – Gatiss and Moffat went with whatever they thought would be cool, whatever would make a good gifset on Tumblr, rather than what actually made sense. (Comparing the explosion in Baker Street with a similar incident from the first series finale, “The Great Game”, is quite instructive.) I’ve barely scratched the surface of “The Final Problem” – if Eurus had access to loads of specially filmed footage of Moriarty why did she use a static image? I presume she was behind that? At the end DI Lestrade has a callback to his line from the very first episode, about how “Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and if we’re very, very lucky, one day he might even be a good one”, by saying Holmes is now a good man – oh, is that what the story was about? Well, tough, because that conclusion doesn’t feel earned at all. Even if it is a case of style over substance, I still can’t account for some of the decisions made here. Gatiss and Moffat clearly love Conan Doyle’s original short stories, so how we ended up with this is utterly, utterly baffling.

The conclusion I drew from all of this is, I think, that the show works best when it’s drawing from the original source material. “The Great Game”, is far and away the show’s finest hour and a half, ingeniously mashing up multiple Doyle short stories as subplots in a way you’re surprised no other adaptation of the stories has ever done; you can really feel Mark Gatiss’ fondness for the original text. “The Empty Hearse”, by contrast, is more or less the inverse of the original short story, where the explanation of Holmes’ survival was a minor element and it was mostly concerned with the next adventure; a lot of the episode is taken up with what I can only describe as trolling the show’s Tumblr fanbase, an unfortunate portent of how knowing of its audience the show will become.

It’s hard not to think that after “The Reichenbach Fall”, the writers looked at the mass speculation as to how Sherlock survived and concluded they should pander more to their online fanbase, which is where the show lost something... and perhaps set us on the path to the series 4 finale. The first two series are largely faithful to Conan Doyle’s work, whilst also giving us something new that sits well alongside the adapting of the original, and for me, the next two series (apart from about 83% of “The Lying Detective”) don’t strike any of those careful balances nearly so well – and with “The Final Problem”, it loses its footing altogether and goes over a cliff in a terrifying fall from which nobody survives.