Sherlock - Season 4 Review

At this point, a new season of Sherlock feels more like an event than anything. The mystery series delivers so few episodes so rarely, to the point where fans have become ravenous for more. Often, the show delivers on its promises fantastically, with compelling mysteries, interesting character development, and an ever-developing, over-arching plot that's woven into the stand-alone stories of individual episodes very efficiently. Overall, the show started strong, and remained strong, but began to dip a bit as of late in terms of episode quality. Each of the full seasons have ranged from good to great, but The Abominable Bride Christmas special was a big step backward.

For the most part, season 4 also followed the "big step backward" level of quality.

The season didn't get off to a very strong start. The premiere episode had an interesting mystery at the core of it, but it was surrounded by so much filler and slow-moving, pointless plot elements which add nothing to the overall experience. It kind of missed the point of what makes the show work, and ignored a compelling mystery for the sake of a knockoff spy thriller that was light on actual thrills. The show has always been somewhat action-oriented, but having Sherlock Holmes engage in a martial arts fistfight in a pool was just bizarre. The second episode of the season was a bit stronger in terms of a mystery, but it dragged a lot, and all moments of "payoff" before the final twist - which was unrelated to the episode's plot - fell flat. What sense there was of progression, in both the story and characters, felt fairly unnatural. The third episode was just an embarrassment. I have absolutely no idea how the show fell so far to the point where they thought the cringe-worthy plot they executed as the final, ultimate mystery would be anything resembling satisfying. I didn't just feel annoyance or disappointment at this episode, I was flat-out angry. I felt cheated, because of so many plot lines brought to a terrible close, and the disgraceful way that the characters were treated.

It really hurts when a TV show goes bad on you. Especially one that I've become so invested in, and I get so infrequently. But despite my excitement and desperate search for anything enjoyable, I came away from this season of Sherlock enjoying very little. This season picks up where the last one left off, with Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) returning to London to discover how James Moriarty has seemingly returned from the dead, along with help from John Watson (Martin Freeman). The first problem comes from that, because I was very excited to see how Moriarty would factor into the plot, as he's certainly the strongest villain the show has ever had, but it didn't come up until the very end. The season was adequately woven together plot-wise, if not thematically. The individual plots of episodes weren't very interesting, but the story unfolding across all three was woven together in a mostly satisfying way. The characters felt very different, but not in a way that reflects what they've been through before. I'm all for character development, but most of the characters have moved beyond where they used to be, and as a result, the show doesn't work as well as it used to. Whether they were wasting characters or seemingly formulating entire scenarios just to make a certain character do something funny, it all felt so stilted and unnatural.

What felt most disingenuous about the season was the importance and "dramatic weight" placed on everything. It reminded me of Spectre a lot, in that it tied a bunch of stuff together from previous stories even though there was no real reason to. At the same time, it treated everything like THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO EVER HAPPEN OH MY GOD THIS IS SO IMPORTANT HOLY SHIT PAY ATTENTION THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT. For example, Culverton Smith (Toby Jones), the villain in the second episode, was interesting, but having Sherlock describe him as essentially "the worst person he's ever encountered" was a massive hyperbole. Spoiler alert, but he was a serial killer. Just a serial killer, with a somewhat interesting character element, but the show never did anything with it. This used to be a show that I admired for its writing, but the writing actually became the weakest element of the entire experience. The worst part of the season was how it tried to end on a note of sentimentality, as if to wrap the series up and say "this is what it's always been about". The last few moments of the show felt so disingenuous and forced that it almost made me retroactively dislike the entire series.

If there's anything I didn't want to feel when watching this particular season of television, it was disappointment. There's always a large amount of build-up and excitement created around the show as each new season arrives, and the show has always managed to deliver on it. I figured that The Abominable Bride was just an anomaly in quality, and when the show would have a full season, there would be a much more interesting story to tell. But it never reached the same heights as previous seasons managed to, and while a show can't be expected to maintain a consistent level of quality throughout its entire run, this was such a sudden and noticeable plummet. Never before have I felt so disconnected from watching this show, and questioned what was happening on-screen. The show also had a noticeable increase of lines that sounded smart, but didn't actually make any sense. Ironically, much like Sherlock himself, the intelligence that the show once held as its definitive trait has been replaced with empty  sentimentality. There's a difference between a smart, complicated story and a story being so convoluted that it makes the audience think it's smart.

While I did enjoy season 3, the writers did put themselves into somewhat of a corner with the introduction of Mary. The show was, at its core, about Sherlock and John, and while Mary was a fun and interesting character, the dynamic was thrown off balance when she became a part of the main story. What the writers tried to do in season 4, and executed with extreme clumsiness, was bring the show back to that relationship between Sherlock and John. The only problem is, the show had evolved past the point where that needed to be the only central relationship, and there was no real reason for Mary to not be a large part of the story. She technically was, but it was in a very forced way, much like the inclusion of other characters. The episodes did mostly stick with Sherlock and John, but it made the rest of the supporting cast feel like glorified cameos. Because the characters were basically being treated like fanfiction props, I just felt bad for the actors.

I'm worried that Sherlock has simply lost its touch. It happens all the time with TV shows over time, but in this case, what the writers think the fanbase wants to see has seemingly become more important than actually telling a story. So many moments of humour and character interactions felt so forced, and like they were there to make fangirls of the show squeal in delight. If that wasn't the intention, the the writers might just not know how to write these characters anymore. Maybe their love for the characters and the mythology that the world has overtaken actual storytelling, because a lot of this season almost felt like internal fanservice; the writers were doing whatever they wanted at the cost of the story. Fanservice is fine, but it has to be controlled. So much of the season didn't feel like the same show because of it. It felt like Sherlock had been turned over to a bunch of people who really liked the show, but didn't truly understand it. I don't have a lot of experience with Sherlock fanfiction, but many lines, events, reveals, and moments in the season felt designed to appeal to people who are more concerned about the sexuality of fictional characters than anything else.

This whole season felt like it was being directed towards an editing perspective rather than a story perspective. Sherlock has always had an artistically distinct editing style, but it was used sparingly enough to make certain moments stand out more. In season 4, the show went out of it way to have more elaborate sequences with visual effects, lighting tricks, fancy camerawork, but it's not necessary. Everything was so overt and blatant, in style and in terms of how predictable things got. The season delivered a couple of solid twists, but unfortunately ended up ruining most of them by not ding anything substantial after the shock of the moment wears off. It's possible that the show has just become too predictable as well, because many story elements that were set up early in the season were very clearly going to be brought back later. All sense of subtlety or subterfuge with storytelling s pretty much gone. You would think that the writers would have learned from their mistakes in the past, but instead, the show has gone the route that most comedies do; taking the characters from real people and turning them into caricatures of themselves.

If this truly is where the show ends, then I say it's okay, because the writers are clearly running out of ideas. It almost felt like an entirely different show at times, and there surely must have been a better way to resolve everything. If the whole series had to be brought together in a big, revelation-filled ending for these characters, the writers and showrunners picked a very flat way to do it. I'm glad that there were only three episodes, because if I would have had to suffer through any more of this, I would have given up much sooner. Given how the season ends, it's unlikely that we'll see any new Sherlock episodes anytime soon, at least not in any regular format. I think that the writers wanted to make this the final bow, one last hurrah with all of these characters. But there's no sense of closure or resolution, because the story element introduced to deliver the final emotional blow felt so hackneyed and dumb. The last episode is seriously just a rip-off of Saw and Silence of the Lambs, and misses the point of both of those stories. Sherlock season 4 also misses the point of Sherlock, and it never grabbed me the way that it used to. Almost everything that I previously enjoyed about the show was nowhere to be found, and it all felt empty.

And now all we have left is Elementary. Ugh.