Season 2, Episode 1
“And you believe in a higher power. In this
case, it’s yourself.”
About 2/3 of Sherlock’s
first season was good. The first episode had a strong emphasis on getting
Sherlock and Watson together, and generally introducing this version of the
Holmes world. The third episode has Sherlock going up again Moriarty, in a
brilliant plotted game of cat-and-mouse that was just as much about the dueling
personalities as it was about the mystery at the center of it all. The second
episode meanwhile, was a boring and borderline racist affair, a straightforward
case that failed to do anything beyond tell a mystery tale, which it told quite
poorly. I would hate to lay down such a blanket generalization as “serialization
trumps standalone”, because that doesn’t always have to be the case, but it
does appear as if this is going to be the case for Sherlock. Take witness tonight’s episode, which put the case itself
behind everything else, and was all the better for it.
