assignment 17 - zachary langdon

I, quite embarrassingly, was unable to create a rotten tomatoes account, thus I shall post my reviews natively. 

Sherlock season 4

The first two episodes of the latest in the long-winded, long-awaited BBC series have felt, in hindsight, a bit off. The path of this season, as I write this before the finally, is understandable in its ununderstandability. The series begins as the last left off, with Moriarty back. Somehow. This is promptly dealt with, as Sherlock says he must wait for the next act, effectively ignoring the event, never yet visited again. Sherlock then goes on solving entertaining crimes with some spliced in John and Mary and baby mini-scenes. The first episode deals with Mary’s past coming back to her, Sherlock solving it (ish), and then hubrisly "killing" her. The next episode logically follows this in what would be a predictable "must save john from grief because there’s still another episode after this" except that it's so disjointed that it's rather hard to comprehend, especially the first half. There are great twists, gags, and revelations, which I thoroughly enjoyed. My issue is the complete ignorance of the end of the last season. Sherlock has always put the series plot second, and has done so successfully for 3 fantastic seasons. But it worked then because it focused on great cases and built from nothing to madness over the season. here it started with madness and then ignored it, making the smaller episode stories seem more trivial. I can’t make any conclusions without the finale, and it promises to be a great one, but episode two felt great in pieces, but awkward as a whole. It followed a series of events, rather than an escalating arc or nice isolated cases. It is marred by Mary’s death, distracting from the supposed arc of Moriarty, which kicks off a logical chain of events that are entertaining, but feel random in a season that was defined in the end of season 3 and the in-between homage-ish movie. Here’s to hoping it’s madness for a cause (looking at you Lost).