#SEAOSON 4 REVIEW SHERLOCK HOW TO#
#SEAOSON 4 REVIEW SHERLOCK TV#

Over an eternity of screen time, this twisted sister manipulates Sherlock, Watson, and Mycroft with games designed to pit them against each other. Those who abhor the artificial “moral dilemmas” of closed-door psychological horror films - the kind where an all-powerful puppet master forces basically decent people into making horrible choices - will not enjoy Eurus’s idea of a Holmes problem.

Instead, once we’ve learned the truth of her existence, the three men ship off to Sherrinford for a little family reunion straight out of Saw, and it turns out Eurus’s big plan was the same one it was decades ago: to torture her favorite brother. In other words, she’s the perfect match for Sherlock, Watson, and Mycroft were they to encounter each other in the open, as Moriarty did once upon a time. Deep inside her maximum-security chamber, Eurus has all the makings of the perfect supervillain: She has no understanding of genuine human emotion, she only needs five minutes of conversation to bend anyone to her will, and she seems to be able to control every facet of her environment despite severe physical limitations. But the cat (or dog?) is finally out of the bag: Eurus, played by a truly terrifying Sian Brooke, has successfully toyed with both Sherlock and Watson under disguise, while plotting a truly devious scheme involving posthumous video messages from Moriarty.Įurus has no Arthur Conan Doyle equivalent, though Sherrinford, the island facility where she’s being kept, was fittingly floated by Doyle as a possible name for Sherlock.

Eurus, it should surprise nobody, is also a genius, but hers is of the more “psychotic” than “crime-solving” variety she was such a demon as a child, torturing her family and setting fire to their home, that Mycroft locked her away in a top-secret Alcatraz-like prison for the criminally insane - and he implanted false memories in Sherlock to keep him from recalling her existence. So Sherlock and Mycroft have a sister, Eurus, a name that explicitly references the fatal “east wind” everyone keeps going on about. The fourth season finale, “The Final Problem,” is trying to accomplish the both-sides bit, building a glass wall only to walk through it while swearing it was never there in the first place. They entered too many emotional inputs into the equation, weighing us down with death and guilt and consequence, before pulling back for yet another big curtain reveal just as we’re trying to figure out if we’re still in the mood for this game. Where Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have erred this season is in their approach to that central problem. Its formula depends on a story that’s light, energetic, and fundamentally harmless - even as it invites us to plumb some truly horrifying psychology. But what we’re willing to accept from Sherlock is a direct function of how the show presents itself to us.

#SEAOSON 4 REVIEW SHERLOCK TV#

A defining childhood memory turns out to be false, a dead character magically returns in the flesh, chillingly realistic scenarios are revealed to have been staged: On any other TV show, even another mystery program, such a ludicrous sequence of events would quickly fall apart.

#SEAOSON 4 REVIEW SHERLOCK HOW TO#

Sherlock is the rare show that knows how to goose its audience.

Photo: Robert Viglasky/Hartswood Films/Masterpiece

Seaoson 4 review sherlock