Sherlock - Series 2

Series 2 brought more of the Sherlock I loved the first time around.  No great changes to what made the first series great, just overall more of it.  These three episodes were as dense as the finale of last series, with this finale getting even denser.  The amount of plot at work in 90 minutes is astounding.  Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and company are churning out movie-length scripts that are more entertaining than most movies out there, including the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies.

Rachel McAdams, eat your heart out.  Lara Pulver was amazing in "A Scandal in Belgravia" as this version of Irene Adler.  Smart, sexy, dangerous, and enough of a force to stand up to Sherlock.  Every scene she was in gave the show an entirely different energy than it had had in the past.  This was someone who might not be Sherlock's equal intellectually like Moriarty, but was close enough that she could use her attraction to bring him down to her.  Sherlock's confusion about her was wonderfully played by Cumberbatch.  He has no use for emotion, but still feels them.  He feels a bond with John, Mrs. Hudson, and Mycroft, even with their antagonistic relationship, but this is something entirely different that he can't quite get a handle on.  It only helps to make things more interesting that she's not a good guy, but not exactly a bad guy either.  A sort of Batman-Catwoman approach.

It was a while ago that I first watched this episode, so I'm finding it hard to remember the exact circumstances of the case.  It's not a knock on it, it's just the Adler stuff was so good and the cases are so complicated that the details can be easily forgotten.  I haven't tried it, but I think that would make it well suited for rewatching and seeing everything pieced together even though you know the outcome.  I know it started out with Adler's phone containing sensitive pictures of a royal, and ended with Moriarty uses other information on the phone to foil a counter-terrorism fake bombing of a cross Atlantic flight (to Baltimore!).  The purpose of the fake bombing to make it seem to the terrorists that they had succeeded so as to not compromise the inside source. That's what I mean when I say "more,"  the way the plot spiral into craziness without ever becoming too much to understand.

As with the first series, the middle episode is the downturn.  Not bad, of course, but never up to the genius of the first and last.  "The Hound of Baskerville" was much better than the previous middle episode, probably because they were adapting one of the most famous Holmes stories.  I'm not familiar with the original story, but I did enjoy the way they worked around having a demon hound in the realistic setting they've portrayed.  They set you up to think it may be some sort of genetic mutation done in the labs of Baskerville, but when Sherlock himself sees the hound, glowing eyes and all, we know it can't be a simple escaped large dog.  The aerosol drug being vented into the hollow was a nice touch, but also having it vented in a room inside the Baskerville facility I didn't understand.  The only reason it was there was to have John get infected.  The scenes with the "hound" were decidedly creepy, though, and you can't not like an episode that ends with the bad guy blowing himself up.  Overall, it just didn't gel in the same one the other episodes do.

Now onto "The Reichenbach Fall."  I'm going to start with the ending because that rooftop scene was incredibly well acted and so very tense.  Anyone who knows a little bit about the Holmes stories knows that Moriarty and Holmes fell to their deaths fighting at Reichenbach Falls only to have Conan Doyle later resurrect Holmes due to popular demand.  I knew Sherlock was going to jump off that roof and I knew that it was going to end up being that he faked his death, but I was still extremely tense during that scene.  I will miss Moriarty, his two main episode were amazing.  Unless it turns out that he faked his death, too, though I don't know how you can fake a suicide by eating a gun.

Sherlock's reasons for jumping off that roof are even more intriguing.  He needs to save his friends.  The Sherlock we met six episodes ago had no want nor need of friends.  He was only fixated on the case and whatever way he could stimulate his mind.  The small steps of growth this character has taken from completely uncaring to faking his death to save his friends has been one of the best parts of the show.  He even goes to Molly, the person he ignores the most, to help him.  The rest of the case was masterfully played out.  Moriarty getting himself caught, getting acquitted, building doubt about Sherlock, posing as an actor hired to play Moriarty, and in the end revealing that it was all just a sham to destroy Sherlock.  Just wow, all around.

Can't wait for Martin Freeman to finish work on The Hobbit so they can get back to making more of these.