I love all the other Sherlock episodes, some more, some less, but this one is not one I will be watching again. It's silly, strained and trying way too hard. The weird make-up, the forced social message, none of it really worked at all. About the only part I liked about it somewhat was the retro look. The way they tried to explain things at the end was put together in a rather slipshod and really just silly, unsavoury manner. The story did not hold together very well at all. And it certainly did nothing to link it to Moriarty.Alas, it just wasn't at all enjoyable.

In a Sherlock Holmes mind trip he is taken back to the 1890s. In a setting very much like that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have envisaged, Holmes is a private detective, operating out of 221B Baker Street. Assisting him is Dr Watson. They are presented with a very baffling case. A woman, Emelia Ricoletti, publicly shoots and kills herself, only to appear a few hours later and kill her husband. Within the next few months other murders are committed by woman appearing to be Mrs Ricoletti. Even the police are thinking that paranormal activity is afoot. Then Sir Eustace Carmichael is threatened by such an apparition and his wife calls in Holmes and Watson.The idea of filming a Sherlock Holmes episode in the original time and setting appealed to me. It gave us a taste of what the series would have been like if it hadn't been contemporised. However, at the back my mind was the nagging suspicion that the writers had run out of ideas and that going back to the 1890s was a gimmick, and the series' jumping the shark moment.Ultimately it isn't as straightforward as an entire Sherlock episode set in the 1890s, so difficult to judge whether it was meant to be a gimmick or not. It ends up much more complex than that, and, to an extent, unnecessarily so. We have many jumps between the 1890s and the 2010s and it seems like style over substance.However, it is very entertaining. The 1890s murder story is very intriguing and is woven into the overall plot well. The modern day side is reasonably well done, though the Moriarty scenes seemed a bit self-indulgent and overblown.Overall, not brilliant but a pretty good episode nevertheless.

Can't say enough good things about this. Let's start with what it is not. It is not rewarding long form filmmaking. It is TeeVee, and despite the rush of talent into TeeVee series, and their ability to engage, this will never be the sort of thing that we go to for lucid dream walking. The techniques I will be lauding here have been used for decades in films that matter, let's say for example by Ruiz. But never in the mainstream like this.But this thrills me because it makes explicit folding the default for popular entertainment. Oh, it is masked by energy and OCD. And too much is 'explained' by way of drugs, mind palaces and so on. But this is mainstream, big time popular stuff and its primary structure is that of folding.We have a Victorian character set in modern times who is transported back to the referenced context. This is done by drugs, by an unrelated inner space of visualized 'working out.' We have the reality, two realities in fact conflated with the stories written in each reality, sometimes shifting control. We have the fold that Conan Doyle put in, the one about Mycroft and Holmes directing each other.And then there is the staging where reality and the account of reality are merged.And we get it. We like it. Ten years ago, we were still in Mary Tyler Moore territory. A mass audience wouldn't follow these shifts in abstraction, these skips among parallel realities and creating spaces. I wish it were not served as a device to keep the attention of dopes that can't pay attention. But it is sophisticated abstract reasoning nonetheless, and we didn't have that, even remotely when I was a kid.

This really was another fantastic addition to one of my favourite series. The actors played their parts perfectly, and they transition between timelines flawlessly (I don't really think that's a spoiler, but I gave warning nonetheless).Like any of the episodes, you have to pay attention in order to follow it properly. They go all over the place, but not in a way that makes it a mess, like so many other writers/directors have done.As for the "feminist propaganda" that is mentioned in the threads so often...seriously, people need to get over themselves. I'll probably get a number of "dislikes" to this review simply by saying that, but honestly, it didn't feel like propaganda in any way...it was simply good story telling with a theme that fit the story.Anyways, most likely every fan of the series is already going to watch this, so I don't have to tell anyone to. If you haven't seen the seasons prior, however, go watch them first...things won't make complete sense otherwise.