Sherlock Episode 3 review

It seems odd that the only online review I can find for Sherlock episode three is the Guardian review... and that even then Sam Wollaston wasn't paying attention.  I fear that the revered Caitlin Moran may have written a stunning review of the series behind the chargeable wall of the Times this week.  I shan't be seeing that, then.  I loved the series... if a set of three counts as a series. It wasn't perfect, and as Sam and several of his commentees mention, the biggest mistake in the last episode was the inclusion of a scattering of stars in the alleyways of London - I should think the last time that sort of sky was seen over London was during the blackouts of the Blitz.

There were a lot of loose ends left untied, not least, supposedly, the fate of the protagonists, although that was assured after the popularity of the first episode, I should have thought. Maybe the papers exhausted their stock of superlatives after the universal acclaim for the first episode, which was widely reported, and declared a triumph.  There was a little bit of grumbling about the updating to present day, and the messing around with the plots of the stories, but even the Conan Doyle geeks on the Guardian review comments had to admit that the spirit of Sherlock is something recognisable to anyone who is familiar with the stories.

The least convincing part is still the relationship with the police. While the admirable LeStrade must necessarily struggle with his work in order to allow some room for Sherlock to appear and leave him standing, the CSI approach (with Holmes having better equipment, more time,  and newer technology than the police in the UK would be likely to have or be able to afford), especially in the fast moving world of forensic science, might have been a better way in?  Whether he has some sort of humdrum job he only ocasionally does, in the laboratories of Barts, or simply squats in an unused room at his own convenience and waits to be kicked out, was never explained unless I blinked and missed it.  However, these are minor quibbles.  The plots are meant to be tosh of the highest order and rely on a parallel universe where criminal gangs use grafitti instead of texting and send messages via hapless bomb-laden members of the public rather than the traditional letters cut from newspapers.

It was exciting, and though one might have to disable the critical toshometer in one's brain in much the same way that generations of children have done for Dr Who, rather like Dr Who it had me on the edge of my seat half tempted to flee behind the sofa while the hanging on cliffs was afoot.  I enjoyed it.  I liked the length of the episodes, I liked the pace, I liked the actors, I liked the way in which London was, starry skies excepted, mostly a recognisable place which felt like London (even if, as one viewer claimed, it was mostly Cardiff).

I profoundly hope that more episodes will be written and made, and hope that they manage to do this quickly without sacrificing the hunger that was evident in the first three.  I enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch enormously, and thought Martin Freeman was a perfect Watson to Cumberbatch's Holmes... though he isn't the first actor that would have sprung to mind had I been in charge of the casting, I think it was inspired. He manages to be extraordinary in an ordinary way, and to be the public in a way that has turned previous Watsons into shambling old fools, without succumbing to that at all.  Of course, his presence was a device that Conan Doyle wrote in to enable someone to ask the damn fool questions or feed Holmes a bit of commonsense when cleverness failed to make an obvious connection, and of course to give Holmes someone to show off to, when he had solved some part of the puzzle in hand.

I enjoyed the background characters , the chases, the settings and styling.  Well done, BBC.  More please, as soon as possible.

Sherlock wins

I don't watch much television any more. Who do you think you are? can generally be guaranteed to have me watching, and the odd documentary, but mostly I stick to the radio and the internet.

Thus I didn't watch the first episode of Sherlock on July 25... I left it to cause a furore because it beat Tom Cruise's Top Gear appearance into second place, and then eventually watched it on the BBC iplayer.

I feared the worst really. I am a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, but so much of what makes Holmes, Holmes is stuck in the 19th century - or at least the turn of the century. The familiar "ripper" London of Hansom cabs, dark allies and undeserving poor, the gaslight and of course the poor old plods trailing along behind Holmes, nearly always as much in the dark as the poor reader.

It seemed unlikely that any writers would have been able to translate Conan Doyle's Holmes into a workable 21st-century character, and there are some places where one has to suspend one's disbelief. Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes is an apparent security expert who can't work out how to disguise his identity in text except by borrowing other people's phones, a genius who has subsumed a huge amount of knowledge and yet is someone who takes longer than the viewer to understand the role of the cabbie in the opening episode. That, more than anything, was the flaw in the first episode... Conan Doyle's Sherlock always gets there first.

He has a slightly other-worldly look, which may partly have been the result of pneumonia, where his skin was porcelain white for a proportion of the episode... but then that might have been deliberate, to indicate the hours he spends in laboratories, microwaving eyeballs or flaying dead bodies.

The role of the police, and their relationship with Sherlock Holmes was ambiguous in the books, and is ambiguous here too, although it is a lot less believable nowadays that any policeman worth his salt would allow a member of the public to go tramping over a crime scene, tampering with evidence. Forensic science has come a long way since Holmes's day, and in some cases has replaced the painstaking analysis which was the only option then. It was refreshing to see that the writers met that head on, in the hostility of LeStrade's sidekick.

However, those small quibbles aside, I thought the writers had done a good job in bringing the stories up to date, and directors and actors did a superb one in bringing them to life. Despite his self-diagnosed sociopathy, Holmes was intriguing and clever and it was a pleasure to watch how cleverly the writers had adapted the stories to fit.

I was initially wary about Martin Freeman as Dr Watson...I have always imagined someone much bigger and older in the role, but he won me over almost immediately. I see it now.

I watched the second episode with baited breath, with my daughter, and we were both on the edge of our seats. Of course we know the main protagonists are in no real danger... but you never know when a subsidiary character might be sacrificed to plot, especially in a series which is a paltry three episodes long.

More! More! We enjoyed every minute of it, and long for more of the same. We profoundly hope they manage to make a Christmas special, even if the newspaper reports are right and the next proper series is unlikely to be out before next year.