REVIEWED: Sherlock - His Last Vow

Beware - Specific spoilers...

Charles Magnussen (Lars Mikkelsen) is the ultimate media mogul - the ethics of a shark mixed with a steely determination to humiliate and control others. Both Sherlock and Mycroft describe him as the most dangerous man in Britain. But no-one seems able to touch him because of the legend - which appears to be true - that Magnussen has an impenetrable library beneath his home with millions of pages of blackmail material and the willingness rto use it against anyone who crosses him. So when you're  a high-ranking politician being blackmailed, just who could you go to to solve the problem? Driver... to Baker Street!

Meanwhile Sherlock has been acting strangely. He's found by Watson in a drug-den and perhaps even more strangely, he looks like he has a woman in his room! As John and Mary stage an intervention, we're soon to find out that everyone has secrets, everyone has agendas and some my be wlling to kill to protect their secrets. How far will Sherlock be wiling to go to bring Magnussen down and protect the secrets of the few people he calls 'friend'? 

Well, then, that was a very twisty-turny ninety minutes in which we saw off Holmes for another season (and who knows exactly how long it will be until the next one, despite assurances of two more possible seasons at some point?).

What initially promised to be a possible return to the much hoped-for deductive investigations (on which the iconic character was built) quickly became more of a puzzle shrouded in a mystery and wrapped in the enigmatic if disposable  fish and chip tabloid paper of modern pop culture. It was a cat and mouse game in which the cat and mouse regularly changed places - and may never have been felines and rodents to begin with -   just as the trajectory of the story veered from left to right and the target of Sherlock's wrath alternated between great and distant  enemies and those possibly closer. To both its credit and chagrin, this was a story in which the audience was thinking 'Where the hell is this story going to go next?' That's something of a double-edged sword when asking an audience to be invested in the characters and equally suspend disbelief only so far. 

The most-effective parts of the story were the brothers bickering and  the 'mind-palace' aspects of Sherlock's shooting and Magnussen's blackmail empire -  the way in which Sherlock's mind tried to deduce the actions to take in the seconds he apparently had to save his life (the show's stylised choreography working very well there)  and the way Magnussen kept his own secrets safe. However it's the latter that must have positively screamed the obvious resolution to the audience in the final minutes. One should have watched enough cop shows to know what happens to those who casually admit they don't have physical proof as an insurance policy. 

Yet again, this seems to be the fault-line of a series that is supposed to be about dissecting a mystery with a surgical scalpel but so often gives in to the urge to sledge-hammer the family china and ask us to admire the beautiful way in which it scatters the debris.  There's still the requisite banter and scenes that scream of the talent on show - this isn't a train-wreck by any standards, there's much to admire in isolation - but the narrative throughline simply doesn't work. Magnussen proves to be a wretched, if formulaic, bad guy we can love to hate but one who takes up little screentime. He's sadistic but really not as clever as the character needs to be to have got this far. The revelations about Mary may shock, though (to be fair) some questions WERE somewhat seeded in the two previous episodes, but they don't answer why an international CIA operative and freelance assassin (really, guys?) would want to settle down for a quiet life with John Watson OR later risk the dangerous spotlight that Holmes' revival from Moriarty's plans might bring. For a show about deduction... there's far too many leaps of faith being asked for in order for the stylistic flourishes to work. Yes, you enjoy the experience as it's happening, but afterwards those logic holes, the threads left hanging and the 'then why didn't they simply..?' moments crowd out some of the more positive aspects. Ultimately it's quite sloppy structure that's asking you to admire it on the extent of the gorgeous paper stock its been inscribed upon. Never mind the mind-palace, so to speak...

Sherlock continues to be the show you want to love more than you do. It's got so many genuinely clever aspects (this was the best of the three 2014 episodes in 'moments' but not so in over-all satisfaction) that you can enjoy in the brief moment and should be applauded, but the spotlight favours the quirks rather than the intricate clockwork and the most interesting aspects have been over-taken by affectations - they've been driven en masse to the edges by style over content. 

And so, in the dying minutes and apparently just to keep fans' teeth gnashing in expectation, an old face impossibly rears his head. Is Sherlock's greatest nemesis still alive, however utterly ridiculous that seems (his ringtone was, after all, 'Staying Alive')? If so, then Moffat would be wise to provide concrete answers to the 'how' factor in Season Four rather than building up another "OMG!" mystery simply to shrug it off as a "OMG! That's SO not important!" later - a pathology that Holmes himself would no doubt feel free to point out is getting quite repetetive and tiresome. (Why does one suspect that Moffat and Gatiss have painted another old master into a corner and will work out the colour-scheme when and if they get around to it?)

In an Q&A after the show, the creative duo would not be drawn on any timeline or cliffhanger resolution. With Cumberbatch and Freeman getting offered more and more Hollywood work, could it be another two years before any questions are answered? Yes, it actually could. That's proven to be a long time to yank a chain that has already had a lot of wear and tear...

 "The game will never be the same again..." the creative team promise.  

Oh, somehow, on the evidence presented thus far, I think it's safe by now to vow that it, like totally,  will.