I am Sherlocked: The Abominable Bride

 

Well. We’re back.

This episode of Sherlock is…. Different. The Abominable Bride. The extra episode, the special that came between season three and four. The Sherlock episode set in the Victorian era.

And… the Sherlock episode which actually has a good message wrapped up in it. I know, right?

I have to say, I’m excited to review this one.

So, we begin by zapping back in time. To John Watson in the middle of the second Afghan war, narrating with the opening lines of the first Sherlock Holmes novel.

You know that this is making me excited, right? This is a fresh idea, a more accurate depiction of the Sherlock characters. The flash, the production value of Sherlock, but with the characters I know and love rather than their Sherlock-ised counterparts.

We see John meeting Stanford, shortly after his return from the war. Again, this encounter is a direct quote from “A Study in Scarlet”.

My goodness, how much I would love to see the cast and team behind Sherlock making a 100% completely faithful, word for word adaptation of the original stories.

I love this.

Oh, and then we cut to Sherlock beating a corpse. So… the whole “follow the original stories” thing… kind of gone out of the window. But you know, a minute or two of something brilliant is still better than… than…

90 minutes of something infuriating and awful.

Anyway. Instead of referencing the original stories, we’re now referencing the first episode of Sherlock.

Yay.

After a brief interaction, Sherlock leaves to attend a hanging… and any hopes that this version of Sherlock might be anything closer to Sherlock Holmes than the modern day version goes out of the window.

Sherlock Holmes might occasionally get some grim satisfaction out of knowing that his conquered foes will hang, but I can’t imagine him ever being so blasé, or suggesting that he might enjoy an execution.

Anyway, we’re not destined to dwell too long on this first meeting. That was just to set the scene for another story, set considerably later in the pair’s relationship.

So, John Watson is in a cab. He asks a paper-seller how the Blue Carbuncle is doing.

“Is there going to be a proper murder next month?” the seller asks.

OK, this is actually funny. Lots of people look on the Blue Carbuncle as a somewhat failed attempt to make a “Christmas Special”- Sherlock Holmes style. It’s considerably more light hearted than most Holmes stories, featuring, as it’s main villain, a goose that swallows a precious stone, which conveniently turns up on Sherlock Holmes’ doorstep. Literally. There’s generous helping of Christmas spirit, the thief gets let off, the goose gets…. Cooked and eaten (well, it is Victorian London at Christmas, what did you expect?) and a hard-working policeman gets a rather generous Christmas bonus.

I actually really like the story, but I think a lot of fans think that it’s too obviously trying to be merry, and that the  plot itself relies too heavily on co-incidence. Which…. They’re not wrong.

Point being, this is a funny little reference, and I approve.

Sherlock and John head to 221b, and Mrs Hudson lets them in. Apparently they’ve been working on the case of… a dismembered country squire?

I’m not sure if this is a reference to an original story… if it is, it’s too vague for me to get it. Sorry to disappoint.

Mrs Hudson criticises John for not including her in any of the stories that he publishes. John, rather, um… well, he says that her only narrative function is to show people upstairs and make breakfast.

I mean, I think this does downplay her role rather. In the originals, she definitely is shown to be very caring of her lodgers, and sometimes gets involved in cases (I’m thinking of “The Empty House”, in which she crawls around in 221b to reposition a wax statue of Holmes every half an hours, so that a sniper will believe that Holmes is inside the flat rather than creeping up behind him).

But sure. She definitely isn’t given much of a speaking role in the original stories.

Then Sherlock starts complaining that he’s hardly in “the dog one”. By which I presume he means “The Hound of the Baskervilles”.

I mean, again, true, the story does involve John doing a lot of the investigating… but when Holmes does appear in the narrative, he gets to swoop in like a hero and reveal the truth in a truly dramatic fashion. Hardly a role to complain about, I’d think.

Actually, the bigger problem here isn’t Sherlock complaining about the stories John writes… it’s Sherlock not complaining about the correct things. Holmes is often disparaging of Watson’s storytelling, thinking of it as too romantic, and not scientific enough. He wants Watson to make an accurate record of the science of deduction, but Watson tells the cases as stories, he draws the reader in and reveals things chronologically. This is what makes Holmes critical of his writing, not any amount of disappointment at the size of the role he’s given.

Also, somewhat ironic that Mrs Hudson complains that she’s more than a plot device.

Because…

In Sherlock, anyway…

Is she?

Anyhoo…

John explains that “the case of the abominable bride” has pushed Sherlock to greater extremes than any other case. It begins with a woman, a client, apparently, turning up at 221b.

Except it isn’t a client at all. It’s Mary Watson. Sherlock “deduces” things about her, then reveals her identity to John. John is angry that she came to 221b, and Mary is angry that she had to come to 221b in order to see her husband.

This… isn’t true to the original stories. Watson, for sure, sometimes struggles a little with his work/life/chronicler of Sherlock Holmes balance, but he always makes it work.  

While the couple squabble, Sherlock plays violin. By this point, Cumberbatch is… adequate at his miming. Adequate. Not good.

Anyway, Sherlock gets bored of listening to them. Apparently, a new case has presented itself. Lestrade appears. He assures everyone that it’s a social call.

He’s lying, obviously. He’s… afraid of something.

Something strange has happened.

We cut to the scene of the crime. A woman in white is shooting up a street. After taking several shots, she turns the gun on herself.

Apparently, the woman in question is Emelia Ricoletti, and the day in question was her wedding anniversary.

There’s only one problem. A few hours after she shot herself in the head, Emelia’s husband was killed by a woman in white. By Emelia, in fact. Then, Emelia vanishes into the mist.

John and Sherlock head off to the morgue. Mary asks what she should do, and John… tells her that she should go and make them dinner.

Hmm.

I mean, so obviously, an element of Victorian sexism going on here. The problem is, I can’t help but feel that “Sherlock” has a bit of a credibility problem when it comes to making statements about feminism. You know, the show that had Sherlock Holmes defeat Irene Adler? And has its main character repeatedly manipulate the women in his life?

But sure.

As they leave, Mary announces that she is part of a campaign for women’s suffrage.

“That’s nice dear” everyone says, and they leave her to start preparing dinner.

I… actually before we get any further, I want to make a point about something.

Sexism and feminism are complicated things, and I am worried that this episode is going to try and make them seem simple. It’s the same thing I noticed with Enola Holmes, actually.

I think that, sometimes, when we look back at this period, we pick up “modern day women”, with modern day ideas about feminism, and drop them into the past. The problem is that women in the past did not view feminism and sexism in the same way that we do now.

Take suffrage. We sometimes forget that a lot of women were opposed to suffrage. It was commonly held that women and men had, and should continue to have, different roles in society. Even among the women for suffrage, this belief was still very strongly held. Women were seen as inferior, less intelligent, more emotional, too easily swayed. These are actually things that we see Holmes stating about women throughout the stories.

The thing is, when we portray women from these eras, we often forget that, no matter how forward thinking they were, they were still raised to believe this. They were conditioned to think that they were emotional beings, rather than logical ones.

Even the suffrage movement didn’t try to challenge the idea that the woman’s place was in the home. That the woman’s task was to raise children. If you look at pamphlets they produced, they instead tend to explain that child-raising and housekeeping are influenced by politics, and therefore women, who perform these tasks, should be allowed to vote.

I’m not saying that there were no women of that period who did not believe that women should be housewives. Just that the norm for women at the time was that they were conditioned to believe that they were only suitable for traditionally womanly roles.

Presenting women in the way that Mary Watson is here, therefore, seems to me to under-represent the immense struggle that had to be overcome by the women involved in fighting for suffrage. They not only had to fight against the world, they also had to fight against their own beliefs over what women could, and should, do. The limits society placed on them were internalised over generations. Presenting history as it is here, and in many other modern stories set in this period, seems to under-value the immensity of the struggle women had to face.

The patriarchy was so ingrained that women had to fight to even be able to think outside it, and I don’t think that that idea is well represented in this episode.

So when Lestrade asks Mary whether she’s for or against votes for women, that is actually a fair question, given the time period. And treating it as if the answer is obvious is a massive over-simplification of history.

Ah well.

Mrs Hudson delivers a letter to Mary. A letter “M”, in fact. With “immediately” written on the back.

Presumably Mycroft, rather than Moriarty?

Anyway, at the mortuary, Anderson has chained up Emelia’s body. Molly Hooper is also there. Dressed as a man. Pretending… to be a man? And apparently Molly hates Sherlock in this version of reality.

Interesting…

 

Anyway, apparently Emelia Ricoletti is definitely dead, was definitely lying on a mortuary slab when her husband was killed, and was definitely identified as herself by her husband just before she shot him.

Well, that makes things simple.

John suggests that Emilia might have a “secret twin”.

Also, apparently, the corpse has a new injury to it’s finger, that wasn’t there when Molly examined the body earlier. There is also a word, “you” written in blood on the wall.

Then, we get our first slip. “A bullet to the head. How could he survive?” Sherlock muses.

But Emilia isn’t a “he”.

So who is Sherlock talking about?

He snaps back to the moment, and he leaves the mortuary. John stays behind for a moment, to tell Molly that he knows that she’s pretending to be a man. Given that this version of John has been shown to be a sexist pig, I’m not entirely sure why he doesn’t act on that information. But… consistency? Why would we need that?

Several months pass, and Sherlock gets nowhere. But apparently there have been five more murders carried out by the woman in white. Sherlock says that they are copycat killings, then goes to visit Mycroft.

Before he does, though, we get the latest edition of the “Sherlock doesn’t realise John isn’t there and he’s been talking to himself” gag.

You know, the one that was never actually funny, and never made any sense at all.

That one.

We cut to John at home, enjoying breakfast. Well, he would be enjoying it, if his servant was more useful. He complains that she has been behind with her activities, and says that he will tell his wife to discipline her.

I don’t know if this is meant to be John being sexist again, or just a bad-tempered employer. I mean, it isn’t sexist to tell someone who hasn’t been doing their job properly that they haven’t been doing their job properly. Though, yes, the expectations put on servants in Victorian times were ridiculous, and the relationship between them and their masters basically abusive by default… I mean, it’s all seriously disturbing, actually.

But John is definitely being unnecessarily rude here, and I don’t know why.

Anyway, Mary has gone out. John snaps at the servant a bit more, she criticises him for never mentioning her in his stories (he does, actually, but seldom in good light), and he receives a telegram from Sherlock telling him to come.

So he comes. They are going to visit Mycroft at the Diogenes club. Where they communicate in sign language! So they make a joke about John being bad at doing it, and making lots of insulting mistakes.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this joke on Top Gear recently. You know, the “I can’t speak your language well and so I will accidentally insult you in a charming way” gag?

Yeah. Top class comedy there.

Never been done before.

So, let’s meet Mycroft. Who… is obese.

I’m sure more novel comedy is forthcoming.

And why… Why? He is literally sat in a room surrounded with food. Eating constantly. Because… that’s his thing now.

Oh Mycroft. Sometimes I forget that you are the character most frequently lost in adaptation.

John gives Mycroft a “you will be dead in 5 years if you don’t lost weight” talk. Mycroft and Sherlock disagree, they think he’ll be dead in 3. In fact, they bet on it.

Ha ha. So funny. So consistent with Mycroft’s character. So… so….

Actually, they do get one thing right with Mycroft in this episode. He manages to solve one of Sherlock’s cases without even leaving the Diogenes club. This is meant to be his thing. He is highly intelligent, but lacks the energy or motivation to actually go and find proof to back up his deductions.

So that’s something.

But then they ruin it by suggesting that Sherlock is jealous of Mycroft, and is humiliated by his very existence.

Sigh. So near, and yet so far.

Actually, thinking about it, not even that near to begin with…

They get on to discussing the actual point. Mycroft warns Sherlock of an omnipresent enemy that threatens their way of life. He tells Sherlock that he needs him to confirm his theories. Sherlock… agrees.

Mycroft also makes it clear that he thinks that, rather than defeat the enemy, they must lose to them. Because they are in the right.

So… Mycroft believes that women should have the vote, but rather than use his political power to ensure that they get it, he would rather view them as an enemy and make at least a passing effort to investigate, and possibly stop them?

I’m confused….

Sherlock takes the case, and we’re left with the image of Mycroft eating more food in grotesque fashion.

Because, ha ha, he’s fat! And that’s funny!

Isn’t… isn’t it?

Or is it actually hugely harmful to perpetrate the idea that we should laugh at, or in fact judge people in any way because of their body shape?

Right. So Lady Carmichael. She has an interesting case to present. Her husband received an envelope containing five orange pips.

I thought Sherlock had already done the “five pips” gag. No?

Anyway, Sir Eustace Carmichael believes that these pips are a sign that he is going to die, but refuses to discuss it further with her. Two days later, her husband saw… the woman in white. The Bride. Then, earlier that morning, he sees her again. He goes outside to try to work out who she is, and his wife follows him. The Bride is there, and warns Sir Eustace that he will die that night.

Nice of her to give a fair warning. Anyway, Eustace faints, the Bride vanishes. Sherlock decides to use Eustace as bait, and follows Lady Carmichael down to her house.

Meanwhile, we see Mycroft ordering Mary to keep an eye on things from afar, without alerting John or Sherlock to the fact that she is working for Mycroft. I don’t really understand this choice, to be honest. I don’t think it actually makes that big of an impact to the plot.

On the train, John and Sherlock discuss whether Emelia Ricoletti, in ghost form, is actually guilty. They decide that, no, that seems unlikely.

At the house, Sir Eustace insists that it’s all a case of sleepwalking. He’s fine, everyone’s fine, it’s all a big fuss over nothing.

Interesting position to hold when a couple of guys are trying to save your life. Sherlock says he will help him anyway, despite the lack of aid Eustace is giving him. Sherlock deduces that Eustace is a guilty man, and that he knows more than he is letting on. Apparently, he fears something more than death.

Sherlock and John spend the evening hiding in a greenhouse, waiting for Sir Eustace to fall asleep. They discuss Lady Carmichael to pass the time. John suggests that Sherlock admires Lady Carmichael. Inevitably, the conversation turns to Irene Adler. John seems to be match-making. He asks Sherlock why he has to be alone.

“All emotion is abhorrent to me” Sherlock says. John asks him whether he’s had any romantic experiences in the past. He also insists that Sherlock must have romantic feelings, and… “impulses”.

This feels gross.

Sherlock feels it too. Mercifully, they spot the ghost. A glowing, shadowy form. Then they hear a scream, Sir Eustace. Sherlock and John break in, and John is left to guard the window the used, now the only exit.

Sherlock finds Lady Carmichael distressed, and close by, her husband’s body. Meanwhile, John completely fails to stop the killer from leaving through the broken window.

Ah. Back to Sir Eustace. Stabbed through the heart with an elaborate blade.

The Bride creeps up on John, startles him, then makes her escape.

The next morning, Lestrade comes to investigate the killing. Sherlock is busy blaming John for letting the ghost get away. John insists that what he saw was a ghost. Sherlock disagrees, and points out that they heard glass smashing before the entered the house.

Meanwhile, Lestrade has noticed that there’s a note on the body.

Sherlock looks at it, then walks away, shocked.

“Miss me?” the note says.

Sherlock seems to be drifting in and out of reality for a moment. He has a conversation with Mycroft, who has the note. “Moriarty is dead” he insists. Sherlock also notices that Mycroft has put on weight. Which doesn’t seem possible, in 24 hours.

“Have you made a list?” Mycroft asks. “You’re in deep”.

Sherlock produces a piece of paper, but insists that he hasn’t finished his work yet.

Mycroft describes Moriarty as “the virus in the data”. Sherlock turns, surprised. A modern phrase.

Sherlock leaves, saying that he will be waiting for Moriarty, if he returns.

We cut back to 221b Baker Street. Sherlock is meditating, using the Victorian version of his mind palace. I love the aesthetic of this, actually. Newspaper cuttings flying in front of him, he snatches them out of the air, sometimes misses…. It’s a beautiful piece of imagery.

And then he reaches for a syringe in a blue velvet case.

Next, we hear Moriarty’s voice. He has come to talk to Sherlock. They have their usual small talk. Moriarty explains that he’s visited 221b before, when Sherlock was absent. There’s something weird about the scene.

“Do you mind if I fire this?” Moriarty says, pointing his gun at Sherlock. “Just to clear this out”

Sherlock aims his gun at Moriarty in return, then both discard their weapons.

“You didn’t expect me to turn up at the scene of the crime, did you?” Moriarty asks. Then he tells Sherlock to stop pretending that he cares about the Bride, about Sir Eustace. The world begins to shake.

Moriarty tells Sherlock that he knows what he actually cares about. The Bride shot herself in the head… and lived. It’s impossible.

And, apparently, it’s what Moriarty did. He shot himself in the head. And yet…

“Does it remind you of another case?” Moriarty asks.

The world keeps on shaking. Moriarty puts his gun into his mouth. He pulls the trigger, but Moriarty is still alive, despite the back of his head being blown off.

“I saw you die. You blew your brains out, how could you survive?” Sherlock asks. Reality continues to twist around him. Sherlock is thrown back into his seat…

No, not his seat.

The seat of an aeroplane.

And just like that, we’re back in the modern day.

OK, so, I’ve criticised a lot of Sherlock twists in the past. But not this one.

This one I am completely, 100% OK with. It’s well done. All through the episode, hints are dropped. Little pieces of language that seem inconsistent. The world twisting just a little too easily to Sherlock’s will. It escalates over the last few scenes, things that aren’t real, that can’t be real coming to life. Sherlock slipping in and out of the way he talks about Moriarty, did he fall, or was he shot in the head? And then, back to the present. Here we are.

Beautifully done.

So, Sherlock’s plane lands. Sherlock seems sleepy. “Not now!” he says. He wanted longer.

“I have to go back” he says to Mycroft and John as they arrive. He wants to dive back into the past, to solve the crime. He explains that he knew about the case of the Abominable Bride, he wants to solve it to see if it will give any answer as to how Moriarty survives. John and Mary marvel over how quickly he has started working on the problem. He explains that he’s been running an experiment, as it were. Trying to work out what he would have done, using his mind palace.

Mycroft shakes his head. “You really think anyone’s believing you?”

Mind palaces don’t work like that, he says. So he asks Sherlock if he made a list. Sherlock tries to deduce things about Mycroft, to prove he’s OK, but Mycroft brushes him off. He asks again for the list of everything that he has taken.

Sherlock hands over a piece of paper.

So the truth is revealed. Not just a memory technique. A hallucination, brought on by drug use. John looks at the list in horror.

Mycroft reveals that, since the day when Sherlock nearly died through an overdose, they have had an agreement that Sherlock will always write a list of everything he takes.

It’s kind of sweet, actually. It hints at a greater care that Mycroft has for Sherlock, a history that we will never actually get to see explored.

Mycroft also reveals that Sherlock was already high when he got onto the plane. Sherlock tries to explain that he’s a user, not an addict.

He’s not fooling anyone.

Meanwhile, Mary is looking up the Emilia Ricoletti murder. She confirms that the facts of the case are as they have been described to us. Sherlock might be high, but he isn’t making the murders up.

Mycroft tells Sherlock that “I was there for you before. I’ll be there for you again.”

Big words for a guy who just sent his brother on a death mission.

“Morphine or cocaine?” John asks.

A first slip back into the past. Sherlock is curled up on the floor beside his syringe. John has found him. He is decidedly cross. This is actually a nice representation of the MANY occasions where this exchange, or variations on it, is documented in the original stories.

We also get one of the best lines in all of Sherlock. In my opinion, anyway.

“I’m an army doctor, I can break every bone in your body while naming them”.

I mean, very much not a John Watson thing to say. Still very, very cool.

A telegram arrives. Sherlock surmises from it that Mary is in danger, and the two head off to find her.

The succeed. She’s in an abandoned church, full of people wearing hooded cloaks and chanting creepily. Mary reveals to John that she works for Mycroft. John is remarkably OK with it, given his previously stated opinions on Mary’s role.

CONSISTENCY.

Anyway, Sherlock walks into the room of chanting people. He silences them, then explains his theory of the Bride’s story.

His theory is that she pointed one gun at the ground, firing it to make it seem that she has shot herself in the head. Meanwhile, blood is sprayed at the curtains behind her.

A substitute corpse (Why is there always a substitute corpse???) is used initially, and delivered to the morgue. Meanwhile, Emelia Ricoletti goes and murders her husband, ensuring plenty of witnesses. Then she gets a friend to shoot her in the head for real, so that if anyone comes to identify her, they will confirm her identity. The substitute corpse is switched for the real one, and a legend is established.

Sherlock explains that Emilia was a sacrifice in a war. A soldier in the invisible army. The women who live in the background, denied a voice, denied a vote.

The hoods are removed. Sherlock is standing in a room full of women. Sherlock completes his speech by explaining to John that this is a war that must be lost.

John fills in one last detail. Emilia Ricoletti was already dying of consumption.

So…. What do I think? Firstly, seriously, what’s with the chanting and the hood wearing???? Why???

Secondly, as I’ve already mentioned, feels like this isn’t giving a rounded view of suffrage. At all.

Also, apparently, Sir Eustace once was involved with Emilia. Then discarded her. Hence his guilt, hence his death.

Oh, and who drops that piece of information? Molly Hooper. No longer dressed as a man.

Other women we have met are there. Janine. Watson’s servant.

…

Sure.

Anyway, the general idea is that any wronged woman can pick up the guise of the Bride, and use the identity to commit murder. A weapon for abused women.

A weapon created by Lady Carmichael.

But as he reveals this final portion, reality quivers again. The face under the veil is not Lady Carmichael. It’s Moriarty.

And… back to the present.

Sherlock is lying on a bed, no longer on the plane. He insists that he be taken to the place where Emilia Ricoletti was buried.

Mary magically finds the grave location in seconds, and they get a lift over from the police. Sherlock insists that his theory of the crime is sound, despite the… unorthodox methods used to create it.

So they go and dig up a grave. Sherlock believes that the substitute corpse must have been buried with Emilia. For some reason. So if there’s two corpses rather than one….

So they dig up the grave. Night falls. For some reason, they’re digging by hand. They find the coffin and… lift it out of the ground… by hand….

Because it’s that easy. Apparently.

And inside… the worm-filled corpse of Emilia Ricoletti. I have to congratulate them for a fairly realistic level of decomposition, although I don’t think the worms would be there, given the soundness of the coffin and the lack of consumable matter inside it.

Anyway, Sherlock isn’t giving up, he continues digging, looking for a second body.

Sherlock hears the whispered song of the Bride, and the body of Emilia Ricoletti starts moving.

He snaps back to the past.

“Still not awake, am I?” he moans, pushing himself to his feet. He’s on a shelf of rock, water moving nearby.

In fact, he’s at the Reichenbach fall. Moriarty stands, looking down at him. “You’re the first man in history to be buried in his own mind palace” he says.

“Moriarty is dead” Sherlock insists. Moriarty tells him that he still exists in Sherlock’s mind, like a computer virus.

The two of them fight. Moriarty is winning. He’s about to push Sherlock into the waterfall…

But John shows up, a gun in his hand. He stops the fight.

John tells Sherlock to wake up. Then John pushes Moriarty over the edge, into the waterfall.

In order to “wake up”, Sherlock follows him, jumping over the edge.

“How will you survive?” John asks.

“Elementary, my dear Watson” Sherlock replies.

And he wakes up on the plane.

So the whole grave digging thing… yeah. Also a fantasy. A sign that Sherlock has, actually, gone way too far.

So Sherlock decides to skip his post OD trip to hospital, and go straight to work. Back to 221b it is.

We get one last shot of Mycroft, picking up the torn up pieces of Sherlock’s list, putting them inside a notebook for safe keeping.

Written on the page is one word. “Redbeard”.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have Mycroft down as a notebook type. But anyway.

John gets Sherlock to explain. Moriarty isn’t alive, but he is “back”. Whatever that means.

Apparently, this whole thing was to prove that there is no way to shoot yourself in the head, “blow your brains out” and survive.

I mean… I could have told you that.

Anyway…

Apparently, Sherlock knows what Moriarty’s next move will be. Which is odd, given that he’s dead.

But we can’t end with that, oh no. We go back to Victorian times once more. John and Sherlock are discussing what the future will look like, how John will record the case… apparently they will describe it as a failure. Sherlock doesn’t want the public to know that he had the chance to prevent future ghostly murders, or… something. If you actually think about that for a moment…

Weird.

Anyway, Sherlock tries to guess the name John will give the story. They finally arrive at “The Abominable Bride”.

Which actually fits quite nicely.

Victorian Sherlock finishes by saying that he has always felt like a man out of his time. And we get a glorious shot, swooping away from the Victorian window, and slowly transitioning to the modern day.

 

So. What do I think?

Firstly, my overall impression is that this episode is fun to watch, from beginning to end. It just… is. There’s a certain amount of comedy that comes from watching Victorian Holmes and Watson interact with each other, and from the references to the present day that are dropped everywhere.

Secondly…. Why did they go for the whole “army of women” thing? Basically, they tried to tackle the suffrage movement. In doing so, they oversimplified, they created a story where women were literally murdering guys (which, to be clear, was not a thing that the suffrage movement did), and they didn’t actually get the history of the suffrage movement correct.

I know it’s an interesting bit of history. I’m sure it must be very tempting. But please, if you’re not going to do your research, if you’re not going to tell the story of woman’s suffrage in a way that doesn’t insult the people who risked and sacrificed so much… maybe… don’t?

Because let’s look at what they actually did here. They told the story of a group of women fighting for the vote, who, along the way, decided to create a murderous figurehead that they could use to enact vengeance on any man that had wronged them. They made this group of women almost cult-like, showing them wearing tall, pointed hoods, meeting in abandoned churches, chanting mysteriously… And then they made Sherlock Holmes basically say that they were right. Right to go around murdering whoever they wanted. They also framed the whole thing as a battle, a war between men and women.

The fight for suffrage was not between men and women. The women who fought for suffrage didn’t commit murders. They didn’t act like a cult. They didn’t do… any of this.

And before you say “but this is fiction!”, yes I know. It is fiction. But when you base your story on a piece of real history, and make it very, very clear that that is your intention… maybe get some of it right.

This whole issue could be fixed if they had decided not to mention suffrage. The story would still have made sense, a group of women working together to take revenge on the men that had wronged them. Everything would make sense.

But instead, the writers linked this story to real, historical events, while failing to demonstrate actual understanding of those events.

Oh, and also, making an episode about feminism and suffrage doesn’t immediately make the sub-par writing of female characters throughout the whole series OK. OK?

As far as they style of this episode goes…. OK, so sometimes the editing is a little over the top. On the whole, though, I love it. Acting? Again, Cumberbatch, Freeman and the rest completely nail it. I particularly love how you can tell whether Victorian Holmes and Watson, or modern day Holmes and Watson are speaking depending on the tone of voice they use.

In short… Good episode. As with most episodes of Sherlock, there are some deep, deep flaws with the messaging, the writing and the characters. But at least the plot in this episode makes sense.

Next time, we move onto…

Oh goodness…

Series four.

Please send help.