Sherlock, 'The Abominable Bride'

[Another review from the archives, of last New Year's Sherlock.]

When I saw the trailer for 'The Abominable Bride', I wondered if this might actually be Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes for once. Of course, that doesn't happen - instead we get the usual much less likeable, much more arrogant and often bullying version that we've seen for three seasons of Sherlock.

Nor do Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss go the whole hog and do an actual Victorian Alternate Universe version of the show - instead, this is all going on in Sherlock's mind, and is therefore of no real consequence. It takes place in the immediate follow-up to the end of Season 3, where Sherlock had committed murder largely because Moffat and Gatiss could find no other way out of the plot corner they had written themselves into, and then used the return of Jim 'Thighs' Moriarty, whom they seem to have turned into a supervillain, as a deus ex machina so that they could continue to make episodes. To be honest, I'd have preferred the AU.

As Dan Hartland observes, in a piece that's well worth reading in full, 'The Abominable Bride' is primarily an exercise in self-referentiality. It's oh-so-clever, down to the final scene that is meant to have you wondering whether it's the 2010s or 1890s Sherlock who is real. This is the same trick that Moffat pulls at the end of the Doctor Who episode 'Last Christmas', where a final tangerine implies that the Doctor and Clara Oswald are still dreaming (which may be a great get-out from the succeeding two years of continuity). The device was frankly old when Buffy the Vampire Slayer did it in 'Normal Again'. These days, I am past caring.

Neither do I care for the overly blokish 'look, we're feminists too' pronouncements with which the episode is littered, about as convincing as David Cameron saying that he really is on the side of the poor (though, as has been pointed out to me, if this is all in Sherlock's head, then the feminism is a priori going to be caricatured). But the biggest problem is that what there is not in this episode is much in the way of story, and what there is is pretty confused.

There are good performances, of course. In particular, Rupert Graves' slightly confused Inspector Lestrade works much more effectively in the Victorian context than in the twenty-first century, where one feels he would be rapidly sidelined from any real work. Martin Freeman as John Watson does well with a set of lines that seem designed to make him look as stupid as possible, the error made by the otherwise admirable Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce versions of Holmes and Watson. If this is what Sherlock actually thinks John Watson is like, and the words are not Watson's but Sherlock's imaginings of Watson's, then it's hard to see how their friendship survives.

But these performances are not enough. In short, 'The Abominable Bride' is a mess. A very pretty and professionally made mess, but, as with recent Doctor Who (though it is better than that), arguably evidence that the showrunners are out of ideas, and continuing to do the show merely out of habit.