![]() ![]() In the fourth season (and perhaps, series) finale, "The Final Problem," the show makes something of a thesis statement. He literally out-clevers situations just by talking very fast about being clever, and we don't really learn anything from it other than that Sherlock Holmes is very clever, which is something we knew before we started watching the damn show.īut there's one thing it never does, which few adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes canon ever bother with: addressing why we need Sherlock now, in the 2010s. But as Moriarty becomes more of a prominent figure, it stops being the way he solves mysteries, and instead becomes the means by which he escapes death traps built for him and others, outsmarting not just criminals but supercriminals, clandestine government operatives, and death itself. At first, this is just a way to show how Holmes brain is so very different from everyone else's, a way to dramatize the very undramatic act of thinking very hard. This is kind of apparent from the very start-one of the early strokes of genius that Sherlock landed on from the very start is in its portrayal of Holmes' thought process, summoning up text and images and maps onscreen he recalls them in his brain, sorting and editing and emphasizing as he races to a conclusion. It also meant that the mistakes that would sink the show were there right from the beginning, because Sherlock wanted to be a modern show, and Sherlock Holmes isn't really compatible with how we make modern shows. This meant the good episodes (usually two of them every season, sometimes one and a half) really stood out, while the okay or bad ones (usually the middle episode) didn't linger all that long in the memories of fans. It was also memorable because it was brief: The first season of Sherlock, like every one thereafter, consisted of three 90-minute mysteries, loosely tied together with a running thread that usually led to the climax of the final episode. It's a pitch-perfect reboot when reboot-mania was starting to take hold, playfully referencing famous Sherlock Holmes stories while also offering something new and modern, something that synthesized things both well-known (221B Baker Street, Lestrade, Watson) and less so (Mycroft Holmes, for example). and the following fall in the States, "A Study in Pink" was remarkably clever television on several levels. The first episode of Sherlock premiered in what feels like an entirely different world. ![]()
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