With the return of Sherlock rendering its fandom speechless as it bought back its titular detective, the question is: "Now what?"
The return of Benedict Cumberbatch was to widespread critical acclaim with an impressive episode documenting the way the detective evaded death, while rekindling a broken friendship with Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman) and stopping a fairly pathetic bad guy's attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
But the question is simply "What's next?"
Well, summoning a police detective from the arrest of his life and further bringing in a horde of police cars and helicopters to help write a best man speech is a hilarious ice-breaker for this episode.
Watson is getting married to Mary Malone (Amanda Abbington), which is a concept that - predictably - eludes Sherlock's logic and sees no sense. Or, to paraphrase,"Two people living together have an expensive party, go on holiday, then carry on living together"
To make things more... odd... Sherlock has been given the gig of being Watson's best man. The story behind the generation of the speech and the awkward delivery of the according speech are played alongside one another. Eventually it ends in the traditional matter with Sherlock talking his awful side up and saying it as a compliment towards Dr. Watson that he asked him to be his best men.
But it has an odd effect of elongating the programme just to kill part of the 90 minutes of time of film. It also leads to an absurdly-long flashback in Sherlock's search for "a funny story", which kinda stretches what most people would call "funny", and would be very pointless at a wedding.
A lot of the episode primarily consists of these flashbacks, more or less as an insight into the worlds the group act within. But it also seems to try and give the hardcore fans a looksie into stuff not covered, such as drunk Sherlock and his attempts to investigate while pissed up.
Predictably, it ends badly, although it does at least provide an amusing sequence of events and answers the question. But it also provides intriguing evidence towards the suggestion argued by some people that Sherlock is resembling a more comic programme than the first two series. Its an odd way to go about it, even if it does at least provide some amusing one-lines.
Somehow, the long-winded narrative arc through flashbacks actually provides an impetus that leads to a solution for the two seemingly-unrelated crimes that Sherlock was trying to solve at the time. But blimey, its takes one hell of a time to reach this moment. A best-man speech lasting around 30-40 minutes would be exhausting.
The first episode played on the relationship between the two main characters and also had sections that felt like they were written by the show's large and manic fanbase on Twitter, Tumblr and the likes.
The erratic nature of this edition of the programme made it, at times, very hard to follow the central concept of the plot, if there was any.
The strongest part, no doubt, is the end, which sees the twin mysteries elegantly deduced and solved, the quite impressive wedding waltz performed by Sherlock on violin, a new mystery that may appear in the next episode (or series?) and the questioning of one thing - can Sherlock find love?
Its an odd construct that has the potential for character development, given that one would possibly question what attracts women to psychopaths like Sherlock... or a "high functioning sociopath with your number" as he put it.
But in terms of the episode, it tailed off alarmingly. The middle half-hour or so killed a lot of the momentum and made for a confusing, hard-to-follow section. It would've been better arranged if these bits were placed before the wedding, with minimal flashbacks allowing for the solution.
This is what nags at the episode. There's plenty to admire - not least the acting, as per usual - but as a whole, this episode was just not what it could have been.
Next week is the series finale and it should at least be better than this. Which shouldn't be too hard if you just follow a plotline and not opt for an overdose on confusion.
3.5/5
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