Some critics have been complaining about season 4 of Sherlock, but in spite of all the flaws, from with the utterly ridiculous denouement of episode 0 on, the series' high style and wit had me feeling that yes, the show is a mess, and yes, it's ridiculously over-the-top, and yes, it's painted itself into a corner, but man is it ever fun.
I was still feeling that way by the halfway point of The Final Problem. Sure, there were issues, but what a blast.
Somewhere around the middle, I started just getting annoyed at how stupid it all was.
The episode is a classic example of how the series keeps painting itself into corners. This begins with the antagonist, who is the super-est, most unstoppable antagonist ever.
This is because the series felt an obligation to out-do Moriarty, who was previously the super-est, most unstoppable antagonist ever. This shows a fundamental difference between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Steven Moffat. Doyle used Moriarty as a way to tell stories for a while, then got sick of the supervillain thing and killed him off. Moffat decided killing him off just meant he needed something more spectacular as a replacement. It reminded me of the way in Xena Warrior Princess Calisto had to keep becoming more and more powerful because once Xena beat her, she had to up her game. And finally, they had to kill her off because there was just nowhere for the character to go.
Moffat doesn't seem to accept that there is a limit to how big and crazy something can be. Instead, season 4 displayed a palpable desperation to be the very biggest, craziest, wildest Sherlock season ever. This means that the stories had to be insanely complex, and the solutions even more so.
The first half of this episode created such a build up that the second half floundered trying to match it, resulting in a crazy series of deadly puzzles that relied on a weirdly misguided trust that the game was being played fair. When the case was solved it was maudlin nonsense. The show followed up on that with this bizarre little speech by a dead character about how swell Sherlock and Watson were. It wasn't remotely in keeping with the rest of the episode and was so out of place that I thought it must signal that this was the final season and they wanted a kind of happy-goodbye sequence. But apparently, a fifth season is probably going to happen anyway.
This final episode shows how much fun can be had from Sherlock, but also feels like it's not just jumped the shark but has jumped on the shark for a soft-shoe routine. Overall, this season has been fun, but it hasn't necessarily been good.
