Sherlock: Season 2 Finale

I’ve always had a problem with adaptations for the lone reason that the subject matter can cause the writer to find himself in a hole he cannot get out of. Case in point: Valkyrie. Bryan Singer’s cross between a war film and a heist movie about the plot to kill Hitler is certainly an entertaining piece of cinema, but throughout the film there is always that nagging sensation in the back of your head. Hitler is not going to die, they are going to fail, and the failure to address this in the film leads to all the momentum draining from its final half hour. This is not just true of adapting events from history, but of adapting fiction too.

For Sherlock show creators Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, “The Reichenbach Fall” could not have arrived at a worse time. The work that writer Steve Thompson has adapted from “The Final Problem” has recently found its way onto the big screen in the Robert Downey Jr. film sequel, complete with its shock grand finale that delivers an unexplainable sucker punch to the viewer. The writing team know that any momentum gained by showing this ending is now gone, and his only course of action is to do one thing: make it seem even more implausible. Using visual imagery that leaves nothing to the imagination, Moffat, Gatiss, and Thompson reinvigorate a used storyline as well as giving themselves a particularly giant hole to write their way out of for the third season. If nothing else, the episode has certainly stuck in the minds of its viewers.

Even without the big finale it was a pretty sharp episode of Sherlock. The show is at its best when Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) seem to be ten steps behind the villain, with a ticking clock in the background counting down to somebody’s demise, and this time it is Sherlock himself. The A plot revolves around Moriarty (Andrew Scott), who upon his release proceeds to get himself arrested again and then released again, at first seemingly for his own amusement. After his triple-heist and jury-rigging duties are over he winds up at Sherlock’s house to deliver a few cryptic comments before vanishing off the earth. What follows is a slow and thorough character assassination of Sherlock, undermining his credibility and turning his allies against him. There are many references to British tabloid papers, so this story line might also serve as a little bit of wry satire.

While this plot serves to keep things moving quickly as Holmes’ walls close in on him, a more patient B plot unfolds content to keep as much information as possible from the viewer. Bizarrely, a group of assassins of different nationalities have all camped out on Holmes’ street. Even more bizarrely they seem uninterested in killing him, instead preferring to aim their sights on each other. With the A plot’s pretty straightforward narrative more about action and physical threat, the B plot’s sheer oddness gives it a bit of mystery during the middle parts of the piece. Later the B plot serves to ramp up the tension during the big cliff hanger, complete with its own ingeniously planned twist.

What I like a lot about Sherlock is its OCD-like tendency to ensure that almost everything you see on screen contains some sort of importance. Even the appearance of a pretty routine extra can have significant impact on the plot, as one choice visitor to Baker Street makes his presence felt in the climax. These little inconsequential details are the most satisfying twists, because you noticed them and yet were unable to spot how important they were going to be. In “The Reichenbach Fall” the show outdoes itself by making a detail so inconsequential that we completely miss it.

Moffat revealed recently that season two’s implausible ending can be explained with a vital clue in the episode that “everybody missed”, which is a pretty big boast considering the amount of internet buzz and theories that pull the episode apart. Moffat can boast for taking a used storyline and turning it into a fresh one, but a far bigger challenge awaits him: finding an ingenious solution to an unsolvable problem.