In an ordinary episode, Sherlock’s flashy post-production effects are there to jazz up what are essentially scenes of someone sitting down and thinking. It was all handled with a minimum of visual tricks. It went like the clappers, held its breath, went like the clappers again, held its breath some more until you thought you might pass out with the dizziness (oh, Molly!), then crescendoed into a screaming climax where nothing much made sense but by which point there hadn’t been a dull minute. Director Benjamin Caron previously worked on several Derren Brown shows – fitting when you think about it. Fun and ultra-tense with a terrific, whooshing sense of momentum. (If she was so worried about Sherlock putting that gun to his head, why explode 221B Baker Street with him inside? Would a family really never mention a dead child? Just how good were the transport links to and from this island that she could skip about flirting on buses, giving therapy sessions and eating chips without Mycroft hearing of it, no matter how many people she’d brainwashed? We could go on.)Īnd this was fun to watch. Up until Eurus’ 360, the episode’s liberties taken with logic were easier to ignore. He should have tried it on Moriarty and saved everyone a lot of bother. As soon as Sherlock solved her cry-for-help riddle and bounded up those stairs her malevolence powered down so completely that she could be trusted back in the same cell she’d effortlessly broken free of in the same prison-asylum she’d turned into her own personal human experimentation lab. The speed of her transformation from evil genius to vulnerable child though, was this episode’s toughest sell. Her comic-book name? Intellecto perhaps, or Professor E. Trapped in her Mind Palace, she simply wanted her brother’s love, but, typical woman, instead of asking him outright, dropped hints, wrote him a coded song, flew a grenade drone into his flat, trapped him in the Crystal Maze of doom, invented a metaphorical plane, killed a bunch of non-metaphorical people and almost drowned his best friend.Īppearing to have the resources of a Bond baddie and the mutant powers of all the X-Men combined (we never saw her sprout wings or grow blue fur, but I’m sure she could have if she’d wanted to) Eurus made a fair supervillain. Da da-da da-da.Īll Eurus needed was love too. And having failed to solve the puzzle Eurus promised would lead him to Redbeard, he’s solved every other puzzle he can lay his hands on since.Īnd so The Final Problem reveals what we’ve really been watching these past six years: Sherlock’s gradual journey back to humanity. So changed.” Suffering, he repressed his feelings, chose rationality over sentiment and didn’t make another friend until Mike Stamford introduced him to a certain ex-army doctor looking for digs. As a kid, she drowned ‘Redbeard’-not a dog but Sherlock’s childhood friend-and in so doing cauterised her brother’s emotions. Born with a fearsome intellect outstripping that of her brothers, Eurus’ curiosity was unrestrained by conscience or empathy. Little Mischa Lecter may have been a sweet thing (you’d have to ask those Nazis), but little Eurus Holmes was a monster. Or rather, the man he was before A Study In Pink and John Watson’s friendship thawed his icy heart. Like Hannibal the cannibal, childhood family trauma made Sherlock the man he is today. The latest wheeze of writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss is that Sherlock Holmes didn’t just happen, something happened to him. Once you know the answer, what’s left to wonder about? Fans of detective fiction know that the pleasure comes from trying to solve the mystery, not having it all explained for us. A-to-B diagrams explaining the precise genesis of heroes and villains are likely to disappoint. But about as elegant and invincible as a National Enquirer headline. Twenty-five years later, Harris scrapped all that to explain in Hannibal Rising that Lecter is what he is because Nazis ate his sister. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.” It’s an elegant, invincible line, one that waves away the tricks of their trades as psychiatrist and FBI agent, and paints Lecter as pure evil. In Thomas Harris’ The Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice Starling “Nothing happened to me I happened.
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