I'm going to pause here for a second and go back to something rather old at this point. It's no secret I really, really disliked the last couple series of Sherlock. And I came off the fourth series sort of assuming that was the end of it. Like, they seemed to have wrapped it up in a bow, right? But people keep talking about how to fix the show in the next series, and I just keep thinking, Is there going to be one? Is it even worth trying to fix and keep going?
The show's stars are busy with other things now, and Moffat and Gatiss have talked about doing Dracula or Frankenstein or something, haven't they? So I don't really know that there will be more Sherlock. But for the sake of argument, let's say there will be. Someday. And that the show needs to be course corrected. Because, Jesus, that last episode in particular was just so, so awful. But honestly, it's been going downhill for a while, yeah? Starting with the third series? With the making fun of the fans while simultaneously doing random fan service that felt pulled straight from bad fan fiction?
What made Sherlock good in the beginning was the very careful amalgam of plot + character. What made it slowly go bad—like takeaway left out to spoil—was the shifting imbalance of those things. 1. Plot became less important and often less concise, which is the kiss of death when telling mystery stories in particular. 2. Character also became less well defined as the characters began to behave in odd ways that seemed not to fit the way they'd been originally established. So: viewers who had come for the plots were disappointed. And people who'd come for the characters were equally unhappy. It just all went off the rails, really.
When we left the show, where were we? Sherlock had an even smarter sister who . . . was criminally insane? And was upset, I guess, that Sherlock had forgotten her? She's apparently orchestrated his entire life, or at least the last several years of it, by injecting Moriarty (now very definitely dead?) into it. I'm surprised we weren't told she was the one who introduced John to Sherlock in some backward way.
Okay, but the sister is all safe and sound now, and the Holmes family is somehow quite fine with . . . whatever the f*** happened there, and based on the coda to that last episode, John and Sherlock are happily raising a baby together and solving crimes and teaching a baby to solve crimes.
Yeah, that feels like an end to me. I don't see a path forward there short of something really, really awful like: it was a novel John wrote that was so bad it never found a publisher. Or even a series of novels John wrote, and they did get published, but it was all fantasy. So let's reset to . . . when? How far back would we have to go to make Sherlock good again? I think we'd have to start back at series three. I think we'd have to explain how he survived the fall (and we all know that the writers don't know, which is why they didn't answer that question and instead chose to make fun of the fans for asking). I think we'd have to change Mary or remove her entirely. Because, honestly, the whole mercenary thread? It was pretty awful. I think, if we go with the idea John was writing novels, that was John writing a wish fulfillment/attempt at a James Bond thriller. I think if he's got a girlfriend or a wife, she's probably something fairly normal and not half the fun Sherlock is, which is why John wrote her as way more exciting.* Because he missed Sherlock while Sherlock was "dead."
This is a stretch, I realize. This is Dallas' "all a dream" or St. Elsewhere's snow globe to the maximum. But it's the only way back to good that I can see.
Still, it seems far more likely they'll just leave it and move on. Viewers keep hoping for "one more miracle"—that the show will come back from the dead and redeem itself—but I'm not sure it has any left.
* John's actual wife: "But, dear, why did you kill off the wife?"
John: "The readers didn't like her."
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