Sherlock Season 4 - Episode 3 Review (Finale)

Another series of Sherlock is over. Already! The end of the 4th series has left me unsatisfied, but not because the length of the series is so brief; more due to the distinct lack of deduction in a drama featuring the world’s greatest detective.

Last week’s The Lying Detective did feature an engaging villain and an intriguing case for Sherlock to solve, but it barely had time between the fallout of Mary’s death, John’s bereavement and the seeding in of the mysterious series arc of Eurus, to play out the case convincingly. After 13 episodes, solving crime in a credible way seems to be an afterthought for the writers. Rather than being given the building blocks of the crime, for the viewer to make their own deductions and guess the outcome if they can, confusion and misdirection is used to make Sherlock look unfeasibly clever when he rattles off the simple solution to the case. It’s not satisfying when the writers purposely make themselves seem clever by making you feel stupid.

The earlier series of Sherlock employed more classic story of the week crime-solving: yes we were impressed with how astute Sherlock was in his deductions, and the flashy shooting style felt dynamic and fun, but the viewer was able to enjoy the ride of the detective work, rather than aimlessly watching 90 minutes of something that felt entertaining but made little sense to any logical person. That was me during The Final Problem today. Indeed the final problem was that there wasn’t really a case to solve. Instead it was a convoluted exploration into the Holmes dysfunctional family, Sherlock being presented with task after task to save others’ lives.

There was no coherence to the story: Eurus is pure evil as she sets this trap on the island prison, seemingly intent on mindless killing, and yet Sherlock finds her by the end as a frightened girl in her childhood bedroom. What journey is that for Eurus’ character? In what way could the viewer have tried to work any of this out? Then, there are the frustratingly unresolved strands. What about poor Molly? We see her smiling at the end but that hardly resolves the emotional distress we saw her in earlier. And continuing to feature Mary on a pre-recorded DVD is indulgent and lazy. Moffat and co seem to think that writing an incoherent script makes them look really intelligent, but wouldn’t it be more intelligent to write something complex that, when unpicked, actually makes sense?

The core problem, I think, is that there has repeatedly been such a long wait between these short bursts of storytelling that the momentum of the characters’ story arcs is lost. The episodic crime stories could be engaging and entertaining, but the characters’ lives are getting too complicated for the format of this drama. We’ve been told that it is Cumberbatch and Freeman’s filming schedule that makes the sporadic nature of the series necessary, and we don’t know if Sherlock will return.

But instead of adapting to these limitations and using a simpler story of the week format, the writers have chosen longer form serial storytelling – which does not easily lend itself to 13 episodes over 7 years. With the writers repeatedly trying to outdo themselves for event television worthy of the wait, Sherlock has long run out of steam. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “His Final Problem”, Sherlock disappears at the Reichenbach Falls. Perhaps he should have stayed there.