![]() ![]() Yet to get her brother to be nice to her, she has to create an elaborate deathtrap and murder at least six people along the way (the three brothers, the governor and his wife, and the woman who was supposed to be John’s new therapist). The end-game, though? It simply doesn’t scan.Įurus (Sian Brooke, captivating and largely wasted) can manipulate anyone into doing anything, we’re told. ![]() A plot years in the making designed to punish him? Fine. A lifelong fixation on a long-lost brother? Fine. Look at the final two scenes between the pair, and try to draw a line from those moments to the reappearance of Moriarty at the end of “His Last Vow.” We’re shown that this plan has been in motion for at least five years, since prior to the arrival of Eurus’s Christmas treat (also, as it turns out, a treat for viewers like you). The closest one can come to summarizing this episode in one sentence would probably go something like this: “Sherlock gets tortured by his sister until he realizes all she really wanted was love, and they all live happily ever after.” It’s a strange and reductive ending, but Eurus’s story fails to satisfy for reasons beyond the trite. What matters is why, and what we’re meant to take from it-and that’s a total damn mystery (and not the good kind). It doesn’t matter how Sherlock landed on the roof of that boat, or how he and John made Mycroft’s paintings cry blood. There’s no shortage of logic and reason at play, but this show has always left questions unanswered. It never mattered which pill was poisoned in “A Study in Pink,” and while the show’s gleeful insistence that all would be explained made “The Empty Hearse” just a little bit intolerable, the means by which Sherlock escaped his fall didn’t matter much, either. Sherlock wouldn’t be Sherlock without bizarre left turns and inexplicable acts. We’re too busy being ricocheted from the scary clown to the drone grenade to the boat capture to the costumes and the violin and the dangling brothers and the plane, the plane. Unfortunately, it’s all so mired in twists and turns and torture that neither the friendship nor the mysteries that brought these men together get to play much of a role. It makes the story of Watson and Holmes one in which a friendship saves two men from horrors visited on them in their lives. The revelation that this person who believes himself to be a sociopath was driven to his state of loneliness and cruelty by a severe childhood trauma might be a bit much, but it makes sense. If this is the story of a man who has spent his whole life believing himself incapable or simply above everyday human emotions, then his end as a part of two families feels fitting. It’s a shame, because there’s something to the overall arc that “The Final Problem” gives to Sherlock as a whole (or, at best, as the first long chapter in some longer story). Now we’ve got a new exhibit A, an episode that’s so close to incoherent that it’s easy to overlook the wonderful moments threaded throughout the bullshit. Nearly all its worst moments have come when the series seemed to car more about its own brilliance than these people and the story they inhabit. Many of Sherlock’s finest moments have come when the show either took its characters very seriously or itself much less so. It flies high and is brought low by its own cleverness it treats selflessness and compassion as the most sacred of values while mistreating the compassionate, selfless people who inhabit its world. The strengths and weaknesses of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s series have always been echoed in its titular character. “The Final Problem” is all of those things, but above all else, it’s a mess. Sometimes it was a mess, and that is what it is. Sometimes it was more, and that was great. Sometimes it was just fun, and that was fun. For a better or worse, it’s a mystery series that always at least attempted to put character development first and answers second (something that’s held true from “A Study in Pink”). It’s a great place to turn for hallucinatory visuals and pithy dialogue, for twists and turns and unapologetic theatrics. It was from the beginning, and remains, a terrific showcase for a talented ensemble headed by two world-class performers, each in a role uniquely suited to his abilities. There have been consistent elements, to be sure.
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