Sherlock, 'The Six Thatchers'

(It's impossible to talk about 'The Six Thatchers' without including spoilers. Hence, there are spoilers here, eventually.)

So now we get the other Steven Moffat series that's been off the screens for exactly a year. How did this one fare? Well, it was probably better than Doctor Who; as the first episode of a new season, it is perforce more substantial than the throwaways that Doctor Who Christmas episodes seem to be now. And it was certainly better than the self-indulgent mess that was last year's 'The Abominable Bride'.

Indeed, there are quite a few moments in 'The Six Thatchers' that remind us of why we became fans of Sherlock in the first place. If Mark Gatiss' script tends to assume that the audience likes the characters, rather than giving them reasons for doing so, it nevertheless has a number of good jokes and quite a lot of clever dialogue. Some scenes definitely had me smiling. There's a neat twist on the original 'Adventure of the Six Napoleons', though one might feel Margaret Thatcher is still perhaps too divisive a character to be used in this role - many will relish the smashing up of her image, others will be offended by it.

Benedict Cumberbatch is very much back on form. Other performances, however, with one exception, are a bit muted. There are some other problems - there's an opening scene, largely designed to get the writers out of a hole they shouldn't have got into in the first place, in which Sherlock appears to have been possessed by the spirit of Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor. And, given the reliance of the show on the John Le Carré international espionage aesthetic for a number of sequences, it's unfortunate, if beyond the showrunners' control, that television audiences have in 2016 been exposed to real Le Carré in the form of The Night Manager, which does this sort of thing so much better. (Incidentally, the 2016 edition of Le Carré's novel includes a fascinating afterword on the experience of seeing his book filmed.)

But overall, 'The Six Thatchers' was doing okay. And then it fell at the final hurdle. And here come the spoilers.

The other first rate performance in this episode is, of course, that of Amanda Abbington. Finally, she gets to convince the viewers that Mary Watson really is a superspy and international woman of mystery. But she's only given this leeway because it's her last opportunity.

That Sherlock would eventually fridge Mary was not exactly unexpected, not least because Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his own Mary. I was quite surprised that she made it through Season 3. The moment that the contents of the last Thatcher turns out to be an AGRA data stick rather than the expected pearl, it's clear that she won't be alive by the end of the episode.

But, as with the death of Osgood in the Doctor Who episode 'Death in Heaven', the creators seemed to feel that they had to kill the character off, but couldn't work out how to do it properly. In this case, Mary's death is pretty contrived. I was expecting the villain Norbury instead of shooting Sherlock to shoot the tank in the aquarium, which would have been a surprising, if unrealistic scene - but this was probably beyond the show's budget. More seriously, Mary seems to need some sort of super-speed to actually get in front of the bullet fired at Sherlock, given that she doesn't respond until it's already left the pistol barrel.

The disappointment here is that there was an opportunity here to subvert genre tropes, but instead the creators chose to lazily follow them. They probably take the view that Sherlock is ultimately about the relationship between men, and women get in the way of that (an inherent drawback of a 130-year old franchise, that can be overcome, but only if creators make an effort). And so we will get at least ninety minutes of John Watson's manpain.