TV: Did You Miss Me? Sherlock Series 3

Spoilers galore here.  If you haven't seen all of Sherlock Series 3, go away.

Sherlock came to the end of its third series last Sunday, and it’s proved to have got a more mixed reception than the previous two.  Perhaps this is inevitable given the enormous weight hanging on it.  After the massive cliffhanger at the end of the second series – Hashtag Sherlock Llives! - two years of theories have built up and everyone has been waiting to see how it was done.  Something else missing was the constant threat of Moriarty – his non-presence was a presence in itself, whereas in this series the story arc that Mrs Watson turns out to be a bit of a wrong ‘un didn’t really stick.  But there’s also been plenty to enjoy; it’s just felt less flowing than previous episodes.

The big question on everyone’s lips was: ‘How did Sherlock survive?’  And it wasn’t really answered, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing but felt like a bit of a let-down after two years.  Probably the point being made with all the ‘fake resolution’ set-pieces was that any answer that the programme provided would be torn to bits by fans (just as Anderson immediately starts picking holes in Sherlock’s own version of (his)story), and that’s quite an amusing conceit.  But (and I’m sure this isn’t actually the case) it came across as though the writers had written themselves into a bit of a hole and couldn’t find a good way of getting out of it.  That’s an uncharitable take, but it’s a fact that lots of people seem to have found it a cop out.  Personally I think it trumps the lazy explanation Conan Doyle himself gives for Holmes’ survival in the books and it says interesting things about cliffhangers – do we enjoy coming up with our own theories more anyway?  The resolution to the first series cliffhanger was quite weak (Moriarty is about to shoot Holmes and Watson…  and then has to go and take a phone call) – perhaps we shouldn’t get hung up on them?  This would have been easier if the mystery in this first episode had been compelling, the episode felt more like a postscript to the second series, with the mystery a B-plot in its own story.  It did feel like an episode that didn't want to live up to expectations, and so it didn't.

The second episode, ‘The Sign Of Three’ was controversial amongst people online  (it might have been just as controversial with nonline people as well but I’ve not met anyone in the flesh who hated it as ferociously).  This was Sherlock as Rom-Com, and whether that sounds like a criticism or compliment depends on what you want out of Sherlock as a show.  If you are after solid police procedural (and to be fair, that is Sherlock’s remit), you wouldn’t have enjoyed this episode very much.  The crime business was mainly saved for the last third of the episode, most of the rest being taken up with comedy set-pieces. 

Not a scene from 'Love, Actually...' Honestly.

Luckily this is one of Steven Moffat’s strengths and I thought it worked as entertainment very well.  It didn’t necessarily work as crime drama, but this brings us back to having to think about why we like Sherlock.  I like Sherlock (and I’m talking generally here, not just the Cumberbatch incarnation) because he is so odd, detached and yet in the thick of life, someone hard to empathise with as a reader/viewer because empathy is alien to the character.  If I was only interested in seeing how the mysteries are solved, I doubt Holmes would have held my attention for as many years as he has.  Crime solving was not always heavily emphasised in the original stories – murder features in a significant minority of the books and some of the stories have no crime at all.  The crime solving aspect of the stories is a large part of the enjoyment of the stories but for me it’s not the most important.  So it’s fun to see this character taken right out of his comfort zone.  Holmes is a character who feels at odds with the fact that he is, in fact, a human just like us, and part of the appeal is seeing how he reacts compared to those around him.  Most of the time he is used to being the man with all the answers.  Dropping him in to a Richard Curtis Rom-Com (or, with the stag-do scenes, an episode of Coupling) puts him into a situation where everyone else is much more clued up than him; and inverting the natural order of things can be a refreshing way to look at a character.  And while I wouldn’t claim that the crime plot was one of the better ones, I rather liked how all the disparate elements came crashing together at once.  You couldn’t make a show out of it, but it’s fun to do once in a while.   

‘His Last Vow’ was back to normal(ish) for the series.  After the first week dealt with Sherlock’s resurrection and the second was a genre-bending curate’s egg, this was back to the usual territory.  Moffat and Gattis are still brilliant at bringing old things up to date – Wiggins, Sherlock in a crack den etc – but the best thing in the episode was Charles Augustus Magnusson (nee Milverton).  A genuinely disturbing villain, giving even Moriarty a run for his money, CAM has been changed from a fat, smug, gloating blackmailer into an emotionless, softly spoken, deranged one. Coming across like a weird cross between Julian Assange and Steve Jobs, he was particularly unpleasant and seeing him miming away in his own mind palace examined the nature of blackmail – it doesn’t require evidence as long as the threat of evidence existing is enough.

The reveal that Mary Watson isn’t all she seems didn’t particularly do it for me (as story-arcs go the Mary Watson one has felt pretty inconsequential) and the cosy Christmas scenes were pure padding.   But the  direction of the scene where Holmes is shot is fantastic.  And the climax, where Sherlock reminds us all that he is a psychopath, not Doctor Who, and ends the game with cold blooded murder is a brilliant reaffirming of this version of the character . 

And then the series ends exactly like the last one did, a cliffhanger with a seemingly dead character coming back to life and us lot trying to figure out how exactly for two years.  It’s been an up and down series, sometimes over-reaching or feeling unsure of its footing and at other times fully on top of its game, sometimes fluctuating between the two states within the same ten minutes.  But it has retained its own identity and has proved it can still be completely compelling if not as compulsive as before.  Another series will have to up its game and be more consistent in order to keep its fans sticking around but for now...  

Hashtag Moriarty Lives!