maninahat
Since: Apr, 2009
01/18/2017 00:00:00
I have updated the review to include the rest of the season. Unfortunately the same basic criticisms apply across the rest of the episodes.
Book me today! I also review weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.
jakobitis
Since: Jan, 2015
01/18/2017 00:00:00
I agree with this review. The show does try to genuinely make something new and different about the most famous detective in fiction but it\'s gone so far in doing so that it seems to have forgotten what makes Sherlock Holmes... well, Sherlock Holmes. He\'s not a spy, not a secret agent and most certainly not a sociopath of any kind. He\'s a detective, he solved mysteries that ordinary folk came to him off the street as well as those the police needed help with. This has become rather less apparent with every season.
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."Leave a Comment:
Season 4: Pointless Dithering
[This review was originally of the first episode of season 4, but since seeing the rest of the episodes, this review can be expanded to the entire season.]
Sherlock has always been a frustrating thing to watch. Sherlock is brilliantly well made and tremendously polished but, like a misaligned NASA telescope, it is stuck focusing on entirely the wrong thing.
I enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories because it is about an eccentric detective who is solves mysteries, but the BBC television series would have you believe it is all about an interpersonal drama with the world's biggest asshole. That Holmes has a people problem is hardly a new thing; the books always took some time taken to show Holmes' lack of decorum, warmth, sexuality, and basic general knowledge. But those were just little details used to flesh out a functional murder mystery. Sherlock as a series is so besotted with those little fleshy bits that it often disregards the mystery aspect altogether.
Season 4 is even worse for this than before. In the first episode, the mysteries are now just montages, which Holmes solves without us even getting to see. What’s presented as the episode's big mystery is resolved in a matter of minutes, swapped out for an ongoing personal drama surrounding John Watson's mysterious wife. It isn't satisfying to watch, because Holmes is no longer doing any onscreen detective work, he is playing the overbearing comic relief in an unrelated, secret-agent thriller. It’s boring, it’s outlandish, and it feels its length.
One other thing that has consistently been a problem in this series is how lazy it is in resolving plots. The very first episode of the first season (which annoyingly remains the best episode in the entire series) has Holmes playing a deadly game of “guess the suicide pill”. It is a tense moment, because we don’t know how he is going to win it. We don't know if there even is a way to win it. And then, sadly, the episode surprises you when Watson comes along and shoots Holmes' opponent dead. Since then at least half a dozen other villains have met the same end. Holmes is only as smart a detective as his writers, and It's like they keep running out of smart things for him to do. Rather than show us a problem with a smart solution, it shoots them in their stupid face instead.
Season 4 ends with one character passionately describing Holmes as an detective, but having spent that episode trapped in a Saw like dungeon (and most of the previous episode having psychedelic, film-wanky drug trips) this feels like an informed attribute rather than a description of what he does. The least you can expect in a mystery story is for there to be a mystery and that someone attempts to resolve it. Sherlock does its best to impress, but these days it can't show you either.