This was the finest hour and a half of nothing much happening that I have ever seen. Cheekily marketed as a one-off, period special from Sherlock co-creators, Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss, The Abominable Bride was apparently (going by trailers and stills, at least) a departure from the usual contemporary setting of previous series and instead taking place in Victorian times - the original milieu of Holmes and Watson, as written by Arthur Conan Doyle in his original stories, himself writing in the 1800-1900's.
During the first half of Bride, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, usually 'Sherlock' and 'John', now refer to each other as 'Holmes' and 'Watson', rocking a respective pipe and 'tache with as much natural élan as their many forbears in the role (e.g. Jeremy Brett and David Burke). The deductive duo are on the case of a spurned bride, Mrs. Emilia Ricoletti (Natasha O'Keefe), apparently returned from the dead after being seen putting a bullet through her own addled brain. This, in much the same fashion as modern Moriarty (Andrew Scott) at the end of series 2's The Reichenbach Fall, only to appear in a video message at the end of last series' closing episode, His Last Vow, chanting 'Did you miss me?'
About an hour in, all of this turns out to be a heroine-induced fantasy inside modern Sherlock's vast Mind Palace of as he lies on the plane we saw him on during Vow's final moments. It's all rather reminiscent of Inception. Later on, Victorian Holmes even echoes that film's main theme. 'Once an idea exists,' he says of the reportedly resurrected bride, 'it cannot be killed.' Christopher Nolan's epic featured the same concept, as well as a main character who spent most of the film asleep on a plane.
There are hints to the twist beforehand - some very dreamlike scenes of Victorian Sherlock approaching his brother's room and their 'where do we pick up these extraordinary expressions?' conversation. 'Virus in the data.' Says Mycroft I liked the fact that, in modern Sherlock's Mind Palace, his envied elder brother is a fat slob, slowly killing himself through his food addiction. At one point, Victorian Sherlock meditates on clues in his flat. So, he's inside his Mind Palace, as his imagined Victorian self, inside his Mind Palace. A dream within a dream.
Moffat and Gatiss no doubt intended to convince viewers that the whole episode would be period-set and decided to throw us a curveball. It does still work, up to a point. Although, they possibly thought fans would want something to connect it to the series proper, beyond just using the same cast (Una Stubbs' Mrs. Hudson, Rupert Graves' Inspector Lestrade and Louise Brealey's Molly Hooper all turn up, too). I liked the connection but by having the best of both worlds it lessened both of them to some extent.
The Victorian element is diminished a little by never actually happening (although it was, according to the 2016 Sherlock, an actual cold case that he imagined himself solving in order to figure out modern Moriarty's alleged resurrection) and all that happened in the modern one was that the Great Detective slept, dreamt a lot, woke up, had a chat, got in a car and was driven off. Still, I did like the feminist element of the period story (it was like suffragette city at one point, with all the scorned 'brides' in one rom) and a revised, more Doylian Reichenbach fall scene, at the actual Reichenbach Falls, with a period Holmes and Moriarty. It was marred slightly in its deviation from canon by having Watson flippantly kill a cowed Moriarty by booting him off a ledge to a watery grave.
The twist that the Victorian shenanigans were really all a drug trip was Bride's greatest strength but also its worst weakness. It blew my mind with its audacity at first but, upon reflection, I think it cheapens the period element by shoehorning it in with the main series' continuity. This is most likely the first and only time Sherlock will do a Victorian-set story and they may as well have gone all out.
Whilst the show's style of showing graphics of text or thoughts moving around the characters in a comic book fashion might have seemed somewhat out of place in a period piece, I'm glad it was included, but not overdone, as it was - almost to the level of spoof - in the last series. A couple of the fancy scene transitions were jarring and unnecessary, though. Flipping a long shot of our heroes in a train carriage to match the exterior of a manor house (1st picture above) was a bit of a show-off and having a bird's eye view of a maze match-dissolve into Sherlock's spindly fingers (2nd picture above) in the next scene was painfully arty. Still, smart-arsery and showing off is what Sherlock is all about, as a character and a show.
The Abominable Bride was still an improvement over the whole of the last series and has me looking forward to series four, due later this year.
All images courtesy of BBC
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