The Abominable Bride

The long-awaited Sherlock special, "The Abominable Bride," is supposed to satiate our hunger for Sherlock, since we see him so rarely.

It did and it didn't.

I want to disclose up front that I flew to London to see Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet.

This episode was as divisive as Cumberbatch's looks. Some people thought this was the worst thing they've ever seen, and others thought it was wonderful.

I'm somewhere in between. Without giving anything away, I'll say, given the idea behind this episode, the story as it unfolded made sense. It was chaotic, confusing, and filled with strange things -- it was supposed to be.

Instead of taking the idea so literally, I would have preferred something more straightforward with Sherlock returning to Victorian times. There were too many interwoven ideas and people popping up.

One thing I was very impressed by was how much, in Victorian times, Cumberbatch resembled the standard idea of Sherlock Holmes' appearance. He looked amazing.

The production values and acting were both excellent; besides the leads, Andrew Scott was incredible. A good deal of the dialogue was fun. "He said the crime solution was so easy that even I could have solved it," Lestrade tells Mrs. Hudson. "Oh, I'm sure he was exaggerating," she assures him.

I wish they would release more episodes before 2017. For a man the producers objected to when he was cast, Cumberbatch is now too busy to be available for episodes. The price of fame.

Very different from the episodes that precede it but still very enjoyable and well worth watching. I was looking forward to this episode for a full year and I was not disappointed. Now only another year plus until the 4th season...if I overdose now I should be able to sleep until then. Don't go into this expecting to be blown away. The cinematic intensity of the 9 episodes its elder is not present. The depth and complexity of the plot are less structured. However, even though it's not quite up to par with Sherlock episodes of days past, it is still superior to the majority of television programs and I would say enjoyable enough to watch more than once.

Is this silly enough for you yet? ...It's in the script!... A character (I won't spoil you who that is) says that to Sherlock near the end, but it is addressed to the viewers of this episode too.

This series jumped the shark, the whale and maybe even the ...dolphins. It tries soooooo hard to be different and surpass itself that becomes unbearable.

To tell you the truth I disliked the 3rd season too, but the 4th is abysmal. I liked Irene's Adler episode and the Reichenbach Fall but this series turned into crap.

The main actors have a credibility and a presence but there is nothing else there. The writers are buried under their own creation, trying to be edgy. They don't even have the answers to the questions are presenting themselves.

This is a terrible episode. A complete mess that only some remaining hardcore fans will find "interesting". Holmes is a caricature of himself and in the whole episode doesn't "deduce" or observes anything. He is lost. A puppet. All the hype but zero substance.

The episode sets a million questions "how this?" "why that?" but fails to answer any of them.

There are some cheap humor here and there. Lots of swirly transitions between scenes (without a reason). A few puns. Some "reveals" about Holmes's personality, even his (non-existent?) past with women, but it is obvious that the writers were only trying to fill 90 minutes of "film" to justify the pointless episode.

Overall: After the disappointment of the 3rd season, the fourth is reaching new depths of humiliation for our beloved hero. Maybe I should check if there is any new episode of elementary. At least the U.S. series is far more honest to itself.

The BBC has been trailing the return of three (okay, four) of its most popular detective heroes in a clever advertisement showing Stella Gibson from "The Fall", John Luther and Sherlock (and Dr Watson). "The Fall" re-starts next week although it is my least anticipated of the three, while "Luther's" comeback was very good but this dazzlingly brilliant episode was the best thing I've watched this Christmas.

The writing really was terrific with a plot that had more ups and downs than a mountain range, more ins and outs than Hampton Court Maze and more twists and turns than a dozen corkscrews, in short it was a triumph. Starting with a Victorian-era impossible murder with an even more impossible murderer, guest appearances by all the previous supporting cast including a massively-bloated Mycroft, surely a homage to Sydney Greenstreet and the return of the master-criminal we've all missed, a premonition of another husband-slaying in a big old house after dark, a recreation of the real Reichenbach Fall climax of yore, an ingenious denouement anticipating female suffrage years later but perhaps the best thing of all was the promise of a new series to come.

As ever, the technical aspects of the production were great, I'm a sucker for the multiple camera-angle, 360 degrees perspective, time-freezing, computer graphics and microscopic zoom shots employed. There was humour a-plenty and hosts of references to the Conan-Doyle original, including, if I'm not mistaken, the first time this Sherlock has ever said "Elementary my dear Watson".

The playing by Cumberbatch, Freeman and Andrew Scott as the three main protagonists was never better. I'm sure there will be Sherlock-oligists who can pick apart the complexities of the plot, which for sure seemed at times like a read-across from Moffat and Gatiss's other re-creation Dr Who, but let them, they won't spoil it for me. This was the best "Sherlock" I've yet seen and sets an almost impossibly high standard for what may come after this.

Doesn't matter if they don't however, this one was so good it really was the perfect after-Christmas present.

In a Sherlock Holmes mind trip he is taken back to the 1890s. In a setting very much like that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have envisaged, Holmes is a private detective, operating out of 221B Baker Street. Assisting him is Dr Watson. They are presented with a very baffling case. A woman, Emelia Ricoletti, publicly shoots and kills herself, only to appear a few hours later and kill her husband. Within the next few months other murders are committed by woman appearing to be Mrs Ricoletti. Even the police are thinking that paranormal activity is afoot. Then Sir Eustace Carmichael is threatened by such an apparition and his wife calls in Holmes and Watson.

The idea of filming a Sherlock Holmes episode in the original time and setting appealed to me. It gave us a taste of what the series would have been like if it hadn't been contemporised. However, at the back my mind was the nagging suspicion that the writers had run out of ideas and that going back to the 1890s was a gimmick, and the series' jumping the shark moment.

Ultimately it isn't as straightforward as an entire Sherlock episode set in the 1890s, so difficult to judge whether it was meant to be a gimmick or not. It ends up much more complex than that, and, to an extent, unnecessarily so. We have many jumps between the 1890s and the 2010s and it seems like style over substance.

However, it is very entertaining. The 1890s murder story is very intriguing and is woven into the overall plot well. The modern day side is reasonably well done, though the Moriarty scenes seemed a bit self-indulgent and overblown.

Overall, not brilliant but a pretty good episode nevertheless.