Sherlock - The Abominable Bride

"What if we set an episode of our modern setting of a famous Victorian series
in the Victorian era?"

In the foggy streets of Victorian England, a woman commits a very public suicide and then shoots her husband dead. This is a job for the Baker Street detective and his stalwart assistant, but what does it have to do with women's suffrage, John Watson's marriage or the suicide of criminal genius Jim Moriarty in 2012?

'The Abominable Bride' is a massively high concept episode of the BBCs question to which Elementary is the US answer. Now, Sherlock is a series which has suffered from being 'the other project' for practically everyone involved, taking second fiddle to Stephen Moffat's run on Doctor Who, Mark Gatiss being the rogue genius of our age, Benedict Cumberbatch becoming an international sex god and Martin Freeman being down and out in Minnesota and Middle Earth. In this respect 'The Abominable Bride' scores highly over the regular episodes simply because everyone involved seems to be 100% on board for a one off instead of the decidedly more mixed quality of the series episodes.

And I do think this one works. It's a weirdly meta approach with a couple of neat if not unpredictable twists, and leans hard on the strength of the relationship between John and Sherlock, which for reasons can be allowed to be more equal here than in the regular series. The plot is a little more explicitly gruesome than an authentic Holmes story, but not significantly more baroque and decidedly more sympatico with the canon than that Silk Stocking bullshit with Rupert Everett they did a few years back (although that was written by someone who clearly hated Holmes as a character on every conceivable level.)

'The Abominable Bride' was a good outing for an inconsistent show, which is a lot better than a disappointing instance of an otherwise consistently good one.