Yes. From what I could tell, no one who wasn't already a fan of this new Sherlock Holmes series, was going to watch it anyway.
To the rest of us, the best night of publicly-funded television happened in what I can only call, the most immersive and engaging Sherlock experience since Jeremy Brett's Granada produced version of Sherlock Holmes.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hjPxUfV32Q[/embed]
The cult scene... and no spoilers here, is one of the best sequences of any scene on film that exposes the restraint and craft of the the best writers in the business.
Because really, we should be far past the point of thinking that any effort behind the writing of this series is amateurish; that Benedict Cumberbatch -- already a huge name thanks to films like Start Trek: Into Darkness -- portrays the character regularly and is a big sell, anyone who hasn't already been watching would be tea-party nuts to deny ridiculous to deny his relevance now!
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0-Ay31Bc2A[/embed]
Who would ever think that anyone could take any modern version of Sherlock Holmes we see today could ever take it back to the original source of a nineteenth century London?
By the way, I need to thank a friend of mine for turning me on -- in more ways than one -- to the Jeremy Brett's version of Sherlock Holmes, which I was familiar with but too scared to watch growing up, to compare.
At the beginning of the show, the creators flip through scenes from the modern BBC television Sherlock series before they get into this #SherlockSpecial and, right from the beginning, go straight into the moment of re-portraying their own version of the first episode from their own program -- in the Doyalist vision where Holmes is beating a corpse, which is easily familiar -- before we realize, we have to stay on our toes.
No spoilers!
Now, for those fringe-purists who still smoke? There's been some discussion about the fact that this new Sherlock doesn't have a pipe to pack and so when he does, me knowing that, it's the center of focus.
But never mind any of that because almost a full hour passes before we realize that the fat man in the room, is systemically focused on making Sherlock's prediction of his own demise as accurate as he's been confronted with, to either spite him, to satisfy his own morbid curiosity.
At this point, I'm already sold into the plot before it thickens, and boy does it!
To prevent myself from revealing anything past this point, allow me the distraction of pointing out that 'Darling' of Blackadder Goes Forth is in this, who I recognized immediately...
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVTx_02rCW4[/embed]
At some point I couldn't come to a better revelation that to admit that we were at the mercy of writers who think outside the box, to be able to bring us to a nineteenth century London, resulting in even more questions and depending on which one you're willing to answer, clears up a lot if for a little bit.
Overall a very compelling episode which was loaded with messages but not not over-driven; a very important contribution to the Sherlock Holmes collection of mysteries out there today.
Sherlock Holmes' The Abominable Bride Wasn't As 'Elementary' As I Had Thought by Zoe Dune is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
.[Featured image by Douglas Neiner via Flickr is under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License]
4:54 PM - CST: Changed title from Sherlock Holmes' The Abominable Bride' Wasn't As Elementary As I Had Thought to Sherlock Holmes' 'The Abominable Bride' Wasn't As Elementary As I Was Expecting. (UPDATED)