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It was good, but I won't it. It's been hit and miss after the second series.
 
I enjoyed it, and this series, whilst having faults, is an improvement on the last series.
Granted, it has as much to do with the original stories as Basil Rathbone fighting the Nazi's, but let us not forget that Conan-Doyle himself said, when asked about a play about Holmes getting married "You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.".
 
"But whatever you do, don't make the story so far up its own arse it's looking out of its own mouth"

Shit on toast, a parade of re-heated ideas from other people who all did it better. When you could replace Holmes with another character and the story is more or less the same, you've kind of missed what made the original stories so good. It's like watching an episode of Columbo where he slides across the bonnet of his Peugeot, leaps behind the wheel before screeching after the murderer, catches him, blows away two bodyguards, says "Just one more thing" and bitch slaps him.

This show hasn't just jumped the shark, it's somersaulted onto it's back, ridden it back to the beach and bought it fecking breakfast.
 
Well, I enjoyed it!

The ending was a slight cop-out, but still good telly. Anyway, I'd rather it wasn't just a rehash of the all the versions that have gone before.
 
"But whatever you do, don't make the story so far up its own arse it's looking out of its own mouth"

Shit on toast, a parade of re-heated ideas from other people who all did it better. When you could replace Holmes with another character and the story is more or less the same, you've kind of missed what made the original stories so good. It's like watching an episode of Columbo where he slides across the bonnet of his Peugeot, leaps behind the wheel before screeching after the murderer, catches him, blows away two bodyguards, says "Just one more thing" and bitch slaps him.

This show hasn't just jumped the shark, it's somersaulted onto it's back, ridden it back to the beach and bought it fecking breakfast.

Quite. Sherlock isn't an action hero. He's an uncommonly good detective. That is and was what made him fascinating.

Anyway, I'd rather it wasn't just a rehash of the all the versions that have gone before.

Sure, but you could have some new stories while still keeping the characters and the basic premise of the show.

Action heroes are ten a penny and all of the elements of last night's show and indeed this whole season - fiendish puzzles leading to death or torture, futuristic secret prisons, black ops assassins - have been done a hundred times before and much better.

Gattiss and Moffatt are tasked with producing three episodes every couple of years. It's one thing if you're churning out 20+ episodes in a season - you can get away with a couple of duff ones. Three? not so much.
 
The ending was a slight cop-out, but still good telly.
The ending, which gave the impression of being hastily contrived and designed for the lowest common denominator, spoilt an interesting premise. Good telly, given the complete bollocks most of the rest is, but I enjoyed Endeavour rather more.
 
I agree with PeteByrdie, the whole concept lost its way after the second series. Too big for its boots, I guess.

I have watched each episode since the second series with a building sense of confusion. I have been unable to tell if Sherlock has become so brilliant that I don't get it, or if there is nothing to get and it really is just boring the arse off me.

For series four, the emotional gut punch of watching John and Mary lose each other was coming more, sadly, from the knowledge that Martin and Amanda had left each other in real life than it was from soulful writing. The rest was just nothing. Too much flirting with Jim Moriarty, too much sub-standard James Bond "action", far too little deduction and way too much reliance on clunky deus ex machina acrobatic writing; "Hustle" held its clever game together till the end in a more convincing manner. Having said all that, I liked the nod to Basil Rathbone at the very end.

Just because I don't get it doesn't mean it's bad, it's just not my thing anymore. I still love Mark Gatiss (beyond what is normal, all things considered), I love the actors (Rupert Graves in particular, there's every chance that my falling out of love with the later Sherlock is related to the lessening of his appearances...), the show presumably rakes it in for the Beeb (helping to fill the Jeremy Clarkson shaped hole in their budget [I'm joking, of course!]) and I like to think that that trickles through and helps finance the insane genius of "Inside No. 9"; I'm more than happy to sit through four or five hours of dull Sherlock for 30 minutes of gaping, swivel-eyed horror courtesy of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, in much the same way as if I were an Edwardian student at Cambridge, listening to hours of dull lectures in order to spend one evening drinking sherry and listening to Monty James frighten the living breath from me.

but I enjoyed Endeavour rather more.
It is physically impossible for me to agree with this any more than I already do! Team Morse!!!!
 
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This line from the BBC website....

"It also featured a cameo appearance by singer Paul Weller."

?
 
Good telly, given the complete bollocks most of the rest is, but I enjoyed Endeavour rather more.
I'm very annoyed to have deliberately switched over after an hour of Endeavour to watch Sherlock. As has been mentioned, it was like a teen-friendly mashup of Saw and the Crystal Maze. Part of me did enjoy it, but the whole tone was so far off what I feel Sherlock should be that I felt quite cheated.

Where was the actual crime-solving, FFS? The Moriarty bit was stupid, Eurus was just plain annoying, and the 4th sibling (although predicted by at least one clever person on here) was explained hardly at all. Always a pleasure to see Wanda Ventham, though...

Overall, from me, 3/10!
 
Fourth sibling?

Oh, and most importantly..... I was right about Sherrinford! YES!
Redbeard wasn't a dog, was he, but another brother who Sherlock played with to the exclusion of Urethrus.

As for Sherrinford (sp?), that's a very odd name for a castle on a rock.
 
Redbeard wasn't a dog, was he, but another brother who Sherlock played with to the exclusion of Urethrus.

I initially thought he was Sherlock's twin ("they always stop after three", "it's never twins" etc.), but wouldn't Mycroft or their parents have mentioned another dead child?

He was Sherlock's best mate, but they didn't say brother (unless I missed it).

I'm guessing that Sherrinford is a codename for the prison (it's actually St Catherine's Rock in Tenby, and I must visit!).
 
Sherrinford was the secret futuristic prison on the rock.

There was an image of a grave for Nemo Holmes so presumably the dead child was his brother, although I also got confused with talk of "best friend" etc.
 
No, Redbeard was his best friend:
Sherlock’s beloved Irish Setter – the childhood pet that represented the happy place he retreated to in times of stress – was not a dog at all, but a little boy, his six year old friend Victor Trevor (a call back to the original Sherlock Holmes stories in which Victor Trevor is revealed to be an old college friend of Holmes’s).

Inspired by his ginger hair, Redbeard was Victor’s nickname when they had played pirates together, with Sherlock known as Yellowbeard.
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017...ry-of-sherlocks-redbeard-is-finally-explained
 
Sherrinford was kinda like Shutter Island. Euros was a cool character but felt too much like she was helicoptered in. Redbeard being not a dog but a best friend (at least that's how I understood it) was a bit cheap/cheaty. The whole episode was a cheap "Shutter Island", with a bit of "Skyfall" chucked in for fun (Musgrave looks like Skyfall?) The tombstones were almost good, but lacked the eerie feeling that came with the tombstones in "the Others". The episode, by itself, fell over too often. It was glamorous in a "The Night Manager" sort of way, but it didn't seem to have a heart. Molly was left devastated, but she was used as no more than a plot device (and a feeble one, at that); previously she was a real and (mostly) respected part of the extended team/family.

Push comes to shove and I'd say the finale was not good, and the last two series have been too contrived to be entirely, if at all, satisfying. If I think back to me running out of the room when "The Hound of Baskerville" was playing, just so I could catch my breath, these last few episodes are so far removed as to be a nearly completely different show.

Sherlock Holmes is the supreme machine; a detective without equal. Watson and Lestrade provide the interpretation and humanity; Sherlock is pure reason. Forcing an emotionally contrived back story onto him feels false*, a weird, bean counter's insistence that the intellectual superior to us all must have a human frailty or centre for simple folk to latch on to. It doesn't sit right with me. Sherlock is damaged, but to me he's always been damaged by his brilliance not by his past. A brain going at the speed his brain is going, will be frustrated to despair by those he's surrounded; turning to Heroin seems logical, in his circumstances. Sherlock's mind weaves through the universe at the speed needed to see fairies, not to hide a lost friend inside a made up Red Setter.

And Mrs. Hudson really shouldn't drive an Aston Martin...! No reason why she shouldn't, she just shouldn't!

*if Conan-Doyle included this back story, with a lost sister etc. I apologise for not knowing. It feels false, nonetheless.
 
Man, this has divided the internet down the middle. It's as if Sherlock was either wearing a white dress or a blue dress. What was wrong with The Crystal Maze, anyway? Great show! Also, Sherlock in the books was a martial arts expert, so man of action too.

Here's the big brains discussing if there will ever be a series 5:
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017...at-reveal-where-sherlock-could-go-in-series-5

Basically, they'd love to (and I'd love to see it), but don't know when.

Personally I can really get behind a TV adventure where the main character can only admit he loves someone on pain of death.
 
I'd like to see them give it another shot, a back to the detecting thing. All hope is not lost on this one, I just shan't revisit series 3 or 4 again, whereas I'll happily re-watch series 1 and 2 whilst waiting for a potential series 5. Perhaps 3 & 4 were all just a dream as Sherlock played dead after the Reichenbach Fall and learned something of himself?
 
Well the beginning jumped the shark with the bleeding pictures, the cliche of a singing child and then a fuckng evil clown. Mycroft is smarter than Holmes and not given to these cliched scare tactics. He's far too rational for that.

Secondly, if you're going to set up a little girl on a plane, you'd better resolve it satisfactorily. I mean, was she doing the plane noises too? It's all very well having Holmes deduce the room but the contrivance of the cockpit door was just unbelievably lame. It goes beyond suspension of belief. Also, there was an element of the sonic screwdriver as Holmes decoded the gravestones. There was no logical resolution, just a mystical Minority Report style waving of arms. Dr Strange conjures a clue.

Mycroft as an old sea salt. And Lady Bracknell indeed..... hmmmmm.

The guys on the boat. As soon as you reveal you're the world famous Sherlock Holmes, The Pirate ( ah...that explains the hat) pointing a gun at them becomes largely redundant. They know they're not going to shoot you.

Sherlock fails to detect glass. Even when prompted in full observation mode.

As others have pointed out, the ability to mindfuck Moriarty in five minutes is an XMen Mutant talent.

The dangling brothers was just a stupid setup.

The gimmicks ran rampage through this episode ruining what Sherlock is all about imo.

Oh... and the young Holmes' would never have a childood friend imo. They're all just so odd. And in all that time, no-one thought to look down the well....

...Where Watson was chained like a starlet on a railway line. Of course he was just majicked out.

It's reached the end but it's kinda killed the franchise. It's gone all Dr. Who. If impossible twists are majicked away (I see Watson got better from being shot last week) it's difficult to generate any real peril. It's the sonic screwdriver all over again.

Anyway... the payscale leads me to think this was the last we'll see of this until a Christmas special a few years from now.
 
I'm with you on all of the above points, jimv1. I think it has suffered from trying to be too clever. It annoys me that Sherlock can be superhuman in his intellect and knowledge one minute and then thick as pig s**t the next.

When a hand grenade flys into the room, he has to ask Mycroft what it is. That's a line for Watson surely?

And the stupid scenario at the beginning with Mycroft running scared, what a load of nonsense.

I thought the premise of one last puzzle was good but rather than having it set in the prison, she could have had Sherlock running around London, solving all sorts of cases or problems that elluded him over the years. It feels like they maybe spent so much on the set that they had to use it a lot.
 
When a hand grenade flys into the room, he has to ask Mycroft what it is. That's a line for Watson surely?

As for the motion detection grenade, what if the dog had been in the room? Or anything else like one of Holmes' experiments that could be moving?
That would have been the end of it right there. Boom. The whole thing blows apart before sister gets to play her games.

The gimmick overcomes reason and that's the main problem for this show.
 
As for the motion detection grenade, what if the dog had been in the room? Or anything else like one of Holmes' experiments that could be moving?
That would have been the end of it right there. Boom. The whole thing blows apart before sister gets to play her games.

The gimmick overcomes reason and that's the main problem for this show.

And another thing...Mycroft and Holmes were talking about minimising casualties from the grenade by waiting for Mrs. Hudson to be at the back of the house and also mentionening that the café was closed.

After the explosion we see that it has blackened the wallpaper and burnt the furniture. Not a whiff of structural damage at all nor even a sprained ankle from throwing themselves out of a second storey window onto the street below.

The idea of this whole series being a dream seems more and more pleasing if it goes some way to explaining the weirdness of these 3 episodes.
 
And another thing...Mycroft and Holmes were talking about minimising casualties from the grenade by waiting for Mrs. Hudson to be at the back of the house and also mentionening that the café was closed.

After the explosion we see that it has blackened the wallpaper and burnt the furniture. Not a whiff of structural damage at all nor even a sprained ankle from throwing themselves out of a second storey window onto the street below.

The idea of this whole series being a dream seems more and more pleasing if it goes some way to explaining the weirdness of these 3 episodes.

Bobby in the shower.
 
I used to joke that Downton Abbey would end with a massive flood filling the house while the cast swam around desperately looking for their hats and then there'd be a massive explosion but they'd all burst out of the top floor windows in slow motion on jet skis.

Sherlock was pretty much that.
 
Sorry, I'm not following you there, Quake. What do you mean?

An infamous 80s Dallas story line where an entire season was explained away as a dream. This was signalled by a previously "dead" character coming out of the shower and waking the dreamer.
 
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