Confidence, and consequence. Pride, and the fall. It’s the never-ending cycle of Sherlock. But with Series Four set to be the game’s final round (supposedly), is all that about to tumble irreversibly over the waterfall’s edge? It’s been three years since ‘His Last Vow’ saw the Watson family overcome devastating personal secrets, and the famed consulting detective driven to murder. Last year’s semi-self-contained special ‘The Abominable Bride’ may have put Jim Moriarty firmly in the grave, but death hasn’t stopped his webs from creeping through Sherlock’s mind palace. Caught between his vow to the Watsons and his obsession with solving the Case of the Posthumous Nemesis, something’s got to give, and Sherlock of all people knows that sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side.
Going into series opener ‘The Six Thatchers’ therefore, there’s promises aplenty of murder, mystery, mayhem, everything that Sherlock lives for and which we spend years waiting for. But just five minutes in, a somewhat unfamiliar sensation begins to take hold. A quick snap of Mycroft’s fingers, and Sherlock’s crimes are struck from all record. An even quicker series of snaps of our own fingers, and John and Mary Watson welcome daughter Rosamund into the world from birth to baptism to Sherlock’s babysitting. And all the while, Sherlock’s fingers are…tweeting. This isn’t just Moffat’s signature motor-mouth dialogue cranked up to eleven (writer’s credit here in fact going to co-showrunner Gatiss). It’s not just frenetic, it’s erratic, twitchy, impatient, like the storytellers have dabbled in Sherlock’s drug habits and are going through withdrawal symptoms. But storming viewers with such an opening onslaught, likely to alienate newcomers and irritate the rest of us into epilepsy, wasn’t the biggest red flag. The biggest red flag was that Sherlock Holmes, the man who abhors celebrity, gossip and every form of ‘social engagement’, who couldn’t care less about the opinion of anyone in the world who doesn’t bear the name Holmes or Watson (or Adler), is now on Twitter. We’ll come back to this, but five minutes in and that unfamiliar sensation has acquired a name: Disappointment.
Had these problems been confined to these five minutes, we wouldn’t dwell on them nearly so much, and such is the love for this show that most of us would happily chalk it up to a rare and relatively minor misstep. Unfortunately, they are not confined. They persist, and magnify, throughout the entirety of the episode. Just when things seem to be settling into more recognizable Sherlockian detective work with the mysterious death of a student supposedly away on his gap year, the episode turns the case into little more than a diving board into the real story of vandalized busts of the eponymous former Prime Minister, which in turn suddenly hurls us into a globe-trotting conspiracy thriller that’s somehow equal parts ‘Spectre’ and soap opera. Everything rockets along at such a pace that the only result in the end is a sense of lacklustre, since the chances we’ve had to let the various story developments sink in are few and far between. This leaves the episode feeling less a cohesive, fully fleshed out narrative, and more just a series of events and scenes loosely threaded together by recurring gags and plot contrivances (indeed, not unlike most globe-trotting conspiracy thrillers). Secrets of a character’s past are dragged into the light in an admittedly gasp-worthy, ‘bet you didn’t see that coming’ fashion, but that’s more because we assumed those skeletons in the closet had already had their day in the light. We didn’t see that coming because, frankly, we’d already seen it, and there isn’t anything to add. Yet by making it the core focus of the entire story, the episode is completely dependent on our wholehearted investment in recycled intrigue.
Oftentimes, in stories of criminals, crime-fighters and mysteries, it all boils down to the climax. How often has the ending to a detective story suddenly accounted for all the apparent flaws up until that point, the writers pulling a fast one, all those ‘flaws’ simply part of the design from the very first? What would ‘The Usual Suspects’ be without that iconic final twist? Well, this wasn’t ‘The Usual Suspects’. Honestly, it barely even felt much like Sherlock at all. Granted, none of us saw the identity of the real criminal of the week coming, but again that’s because we had no reason to. There was no build up to it, no clever thread to connect it to anything without a major last minute plot dump in classic villain exposition monologue style. But this all plays second fiddle to the real climactic twist, the death of a major character which pulls at the heartstrings to an extent, but coming at the end of an episode such as this it rings faintly hollow. It serves less as a goodbye to the character in question, but as a clumsy contrivance to dramatically shake up the relationship between our surviving heroes, a contrivance which suffers directly from ‘The Six Thatchers’ muddled focus that suggests something of an identity crisis for the show’s final series. What’s more, the wildly out-of-character actions and behaviour of one who shall here remain nameless overshadows the entirety of the heartbreak, by design certainly, but a fundamentally flawed design.
Taken simply as fun, action-adventure, crime-solving entertainment, ‘The Six Thatchers’ serves up ample spectacle, set-pieces and storylines to keep the viewer engaged from start to finish, and for all its pitfalls and problems it remains television of evident intelligence. Though the cycle of confidence and consequence is no new territory for Sherlock’s journey, it’s refreshing to see the show address its collateral impact head on, and certainly promises for a deep, dark, dramatic denouement to the Baker Street sleuth’s modern day adventures. What sours the experience more than anything is the knowledge that the show is fully capable of being better, smarter, tighter and above all more emotionally rewarding. There’s an inescapable sense of a juggling act at play here, and however dazzling that can be, after ninety minutes it just feels strained, especially when it comes at the cost of staying true to the characters we’ve embraced over the past seven years (yes it has in fact been that long). Sherlock tweeting, He Who Shall Remain Nameless cheating, it simply doesn’t fit in with who these characters are, at least not without the slightest hint of build-up. As an audience, we’re ready to see Sherlock and co. tumble off the waterfall’s edge this series, but we at least expect the tumble to make sense in and of itself, and to recognize our heroes as the same characters we’ve been rooting for all this time. Otherwise, what’s the point of going dark at all? Sherlock’s final problem seems set to be the saving of John Watson. Perhaps, however, the most in need of saving right now is Sherlock itself?
Quality: 3/5
Experience: 3/5
Final Score: 3/5
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