It's particularly wise that Gatiss and Sherlock executive producer Steven Moffat don't have John faint upon coming face-to-face with Sherlock, as Watson did in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure in the Empty House," on which the episode is very loosely based.
(Not helping matters: Apparently many, many people indeed knew that Sherlock wasn't dead.) Freeman excels here, exhibiting a slew of conflicting emotions at war behind his placid face that their reunion occurs just as John awkwardly attempts to ask Mary to marry him escalates things considerably. John has settled into a life of gray-colored monotony, from which Mary is his only real respite.Īnd when Sherlock does return to reunite with him, it's played for both comedy and pathos, a sequence that one-ups itself as John struggles to come to terms with the fact that Sherlock is not only alive, but has chosen to keep this truth from him specifically. John Watson (Martin Freeman) - now a mustachioed GP who frets about proposing to his girlfriend, Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington, Freeman's real-life partner) - appears much changed from when we last saw him. While I won't say just how Sherlock ends up back in London, there is a sense of palpable urgency and unexpected physicality to the early scenes that depict him as a man of thought and a man of action. So where has Sherlock been this whole time and why did he need to keep his status among the living a secret? Well, savvy viewers will remember that Moriarty's gang posed a threat against those whom Sherlock held most dear… so whatever Sherlock has been doing these past two years would seem to be an effort to keep them safe and dismantle Moriarty's network, meaning Anderson's conjectures (in the Season 3 prequel "Many Happy Returns") about Sherlock's movements abroad were correct.
However, the episode's writer Mark Gatiss (who once again pulls double duty as Sherlock's glacially cold brother Mycroft) rather smartly withholds the reveal until "The Empty Hearse" is almost concluded, creating an ongoing mystery that continues to swirl around the minds of both the viewers and several characters within Sherlock itself. The taut sequence that reveals how he achieved such a feat is both simple, yet cunningly complex (not to mention quite spectacular), though I won't spoil the outcome for anything on this Earth. This is not to say that viewers are denied a revelatory sequence in which the truth about just how Sherlock faked his own death is laid out. When Sherlock picks up - two years after the action of the 2012 Season 2 finale, "The Reichenbach Fall" - the facts surrounding how the master sleuth pulled off the seemingly impossible are kept firmly under wraps for much of the ingenious 90-minute season opener, "The Empty Hearse" (which airs Jan. Just how did Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) fake his own death?
0 kommentar(er)
