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Why did we fall in love with BBC’s Sherlock? Benedict Cumberbatch played the role of Holmes with such flair he seemed born for it, and Martin Freeman was equally compelling as troubled ex-soldier Dr Watson. Watching them solve crimes never seemed to get old, from the grand revelations at an episode’s conclusion to the frequent, imaginatively executed scenes wherein Holmes makes those little deductions to mysteries that seem so simple that you want to kick yourself for not already solving.
Think back to that first episode. Holmes gently runs his finger along dead woman’s coat collar and detects wetness. He observes her wedding ring and the dirt on her heels. We are given brief flashes of information, giving an insight into his thought process. Suddenly, he concludes she’s a serial adulterer who’d just returned from Cardiff. Now think to yourself: What tasty sample of his genius are we given in the latest episode: Sherlock: The Abominable Bride? Don’t be ashamed if you can’t think of any.
The most glaring problem in Bride is that Sherlock no longer solves any problems. All he does is insult the other characters, while they in turn constantly remark on how smart he is. Holmes’s genius is no longer something we’re shown, it’s something we’re told. In answer to my question above, the first mystery he solves is a rehash of when Holmes and Watson were introduced in the very first episode. You might say we’ve already had nine episodes of mystery-solving, it’s time for some character development. To which I say, read on.
Any development Holmes might have had was stalled by this needless departure into the nineteenth century. He battles a personal demon, yes, and maybe by the end he’s free of it, but it was something I never got the impression Holmes was tortured by. Spoilers, highlight to read: This incarnation of Moriarty is someone I’ve never got on board with. Moriarty is only Holmes’s archnemesis because that’s what we’ve been told. Just because they have ticks and eccentricities, that doesn’t mean they’re a good villain. Javier Bardem’s Silva from Skyfall was weird and creepy but he was a good villain because of his relationship to Bond, M, and had a fleshed-out back story that gave him motivation behind his crimes.
Holmes’s drug problem appears again but like all things Sherlock, there are no consequences for it. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised after he got away scot-free after shooting a man point blank in the face in front of a group of people, but how can we have any meaningful character arcs if his actions have no consequences? He gets high, gets a telling off from his pals, but since he solved the case it’s all forgotten about.
Perhaps most offensive of all was that it all seemed like a desperate attempt for Steven Moffat, who’s already come under a lot of fire for his inexcusable inability to write decent female characters, to prove to us that he cares about women. He fails worse than that time your grandmother started a statement with “I’m not racist, but…” The events in the past explore the suffragette movement, and tarnish it by (spoilers) turning into them into a bunch of murderers and having Holmes explain almost directly to the audience why feminism is a good idea (or “mansplain” I believe the kids say these days). Is the only way Moffat knows how to support women to go back to before they were treated equally? The one character he had an opportunity to do something interesting with, Watson’s wife, who was revealed to be a spy in the last series, was reduced to nothing more than a walking googling machine.
The fan service throughout the episode was also grating. Every few minutes a remark was made that I was expected to snigger at and appreciate the wit. And it all climaxed in a scene that was so overly indulgent that I wanted to switch off before the end. I didn’t care. It was a moment that the series of only nine episodes hadn’t earned. I’d already solved the central mystery so there was nothing more to keep me watching. And yes, yes, not everyone will solve it but that’s not the point – Holmes is supposed to be the smartest man in the world, nobody is supposed to be able to solve it before him.
Was there anything I liked? Despite hating the story I must say that it was well paced and if you get on board with it you’ll be engrossed from start to finish. Cumberbatch is great if not a little on auto-pilot, as was Freeman. And for the whole first act of Bride I was heavily invested. We were given a decent enough introduction, and a few of those scenes we’ve come to love in which we visually explore Holmes’s imagination and deductive process.
But it was nowhere near enough. It’s an episode that accomplished nothing in ninety minutes, sprinkled with absurd, childish ideas like Mark Gatiss wearing a fat suit (for literally no reason other than to see Mark Gatiss in a fat suit) and Holmes’s “mind palace” being transformed from a once-funny quip about the memory technique into a plot device farfetched even by the standards of the show.
It’s so in love with itself that I can hardly stomach it. And worst of all is a question I keep asking myself. Sadly, both answers signify that Sherlock might have run its course: Was this episode really necessary?
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