(Sherlock and a friend's dog in Season 4 - via Hartswood Films/BBC)
SHERLOCK, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson, is an event. When a new season is released, it’s three episodes where each feels like a film. In fact, each episode is longer than some films.
This Sherlock Holmes is one for the modern generation. He uses modern tool, smartphones, technology and techniques to solve all those puzzling mysteries. It’s refreshing.
Seasons 1 and 2 were amazing. Season 3 and the special were ok. How does Season 4 hold up?
*** This review contains spoilers, but it doesn’t matter.***
Season 4 begins well enough. Sherlock survives a suicidal mission abroad, penance for shooting Charles Augustus Magnus, the wealthy newspaper owner and notorious blackmailer whose mind palaces contained the misdeeds of nearly everyone, including Mary Watson, which is why Sherlock chose to put a bullet in his head using John Watson’s gun, the only logical thing to do - I guess.
Not to fear, MI6 alters the video to exonerate Sherlock because Moriarty’s picture keeps popping up on screens all over London and he’s supposed to be dead. The game is afoot.
Next we hear Sherlock’s monologue regaling us with the ancient Mesopotamian tale of “Appointment in Samarra,” the poor version, not John O’Hara’s epigraph in his book by the same name. So, it would appear the theme for Season 4 is the inevitability of death.
No—instead, as Sherlock proclaims: “Targets wait.” Wait for what? Why the posthumous Moriarty’s next move, of course. Meanwhile, Sherlock busies himself solving the dead Welsborough son in a car, which just happens to lead to the pursuit of “The Six Thatchers”, episode 1’s namesake and an allusion to Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Six Napoleans,” which was more fun in the 1944 film “The Pearl of Death” starring Basil Rathbone, where Giles Conover absconds with the Borgia pearl and hides it in a wet plaster bust of Napolean as he flees from the police.
So, what’s inside the Thatcher busts? Well, a memory stick containing information on the last surviving member (or so it’s thought) of a four-member freelance government task force that undertook a black op in Georgia where all but one of the assassins is killed. That agent is—are you ready for this?—Mary Watson!
Each assassin had a memory stick with all the information about the other assassins, just to keep them from selling each other out. Turns out Mary wasn’t the only survivor, though. Before being captured, one team member (Ajay) hid his memory stick in a bust of Thatcher. Then, while needlessly tortured, he overhears that an English woman betrayed them. Mary? Ajay wants revenge.
A hodgepodge of globe hopping and lunacy culminates in all the players at the London Aquarium, where doddering Vivian Norbury, an underling at MI6 and “the English woman” selling secrets, pulls a gun and shoots at Sherlock. Mary leaps in front of him and takes the bullet, dying in John’s arms. At the close of this convoluted whack storyline, Sherlock, blamed for Mary’s death by John, receives, a DVD containing a posthumous message from Mary beseeching him to “Save John Watson.” After the credits, Mary goes on to say: “Go to hell, Sherlock.”
Apparently this sends Sherlock back into drugs in episode 2, “The Lying Detective,” (an allusion to Conan Doyle’s “The Dying Detective”). Watson is hallucinating about Mary, carrying on conversations with her, but he is seeing a psychiatrist who looks surprising like the girl on the bus John flirted with and texted to.
Enter Culverton Smith (played marvelously by Toby Jones), the villain, a self-proclaimed “cereal killer” and philanthropic entrepreneur, who confesses before close colleagues and his daughter, Faith, that he is about to kill someone, but he had them all hooked up to a medical serum that inhibits their memories, except for Faith.
She goes to drug-addled Sherlock with a sheet of paper with one name on it and recounts vague memories of parts of the confession. Faith looks familiar, like Watson’s psychiatrist, who looks like the girl on the bus. Sherlock and Faith go on a romp through London, tracing out swear words for Mycroft to read as he tracks Sherlock’s every move.
This is followed by, for lack of drama and character development, a lot of blurred shots, slow-motion madness, and unearthly opera music, culminating in a high-speed car sequence with an Aston Martin followed by choppers ending at John Watson’s home, where Mrs. Hudson pops out of the Aston-Martin begging John to save Sherlock, who is in the her car’s boot (trunk). The A-M belonged to Mrs. Hudson’s husband, a drug dealer. What?
Sherlock takes an ambulance ride to the very hospital owned by Culverton Smith, who takes Sherlock and Watson on a tour, ending at his favorite room…the mortuary. Sherlock keeps prodding Smith into a confession until Faith shows up, but it’s not the Faith that drug-head Holmes remembers. Bedeviled by his addled thoughts, Holmes takes up a scalpel and moves on Smith. Watson jumps in and beats the crap out of Sherlock, taking out his anger for Mary’s death.
Sherlock is admitted to Smith’s hospital. Through a secret passage, Culverton Smith sneaks into Sherlock’s room and sets about to kill him, not unlike the 1942 film “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon,” where Moriarty slowly drains Holmes’ blood.
Meanwhile, Watson views Mary’s video at Sherlock’s digs at 221b Baker St. and rushes back to the hospital in Mrs. Hudson’s Auston-Martin just in time to save Sherlock, who secretly taped Culverton’s confession in their pre-murder chitchat.
John forgives Sherlock and confesses to his hallucinated Mary that he cheated on her, but only in texts, just an emotional cheat. (Please make this ham-fisting stop).
At his final therapy session, John’s therapist reveals that she is Eurus, the supposed sister of Sherlock and Mycroft, and then aims a gun at him and pulls the trigger. Makes sense, right? And what happened to all that nonsense about Moriarty?
Episode 3, “the Final Problem,” will surely clear all this up, right? Not hardly. Instead, we are served up a mix of improbable, twisted, psycho-nonsense and drivel.
The show did have some cool PR images though. (via Empire)