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Audiences and critics alike were deeply frustrated with the fourth and possibly final season of Sherlock, which ended with a madcap but anticlimactic finale. The Guardian called it “an annoying parody of itself,” IndieWire called it “problematic,” and British media did roundups of “the most furiously outraged reviews.” Vox had mixed, mostly negative, reactions to each of its precious three episodes.
This is not a new development for the show, which premiered in 2010. Since then, Sherlock’s showrunners and writers, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, have spent years promising grand things for the series, which at least had the lofty ideas — along with the stellar acting, rapier wit, and gorgeous production values — to be smug. But again and again the show floundered, indulging in cockamamie leaps of logic and inexplicable fantasies, with barely any character development to back them up.
Many of Sherlock’s problems boil down to two factors. First, given the rise to mega-stardom of its two leads, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, the show never knew whether its current season would be its last — and it still doesn’t. Each season was only a few episodes long, and each episode centered on retelling a different Arthur Conan Doyle detective story. That didn’t give the show much room to develop the larger ideas bouncing around in its head.
The second overarching problem: The show fell hard in unearned love with itself and never looked back. Much has been written about how Moffat, who is also the departing longtime showrunner of Doctor Who, is a huge fan of the “reset button” — sometimes literally. What this meant for Sherlock is that plots never had enduring consequences, and characters’ actions never had any logical impact on their lives. But the show always presented these frustrating resets gleefully, as if they were just part of Sherlock’s much-touted, endless “game” instead of the huge narrative shortcomings they actually were.
Taken together, these two larger issues resulted in myriad problems for the series, which have only become more pronounced over time. Here are the five biggest recurring narrative problems Sherlock has developed over four seasons — problems it has to fix if it wants to satisfy fans in any future seasons.
1) Sherlock never learns from his mistakes
Throughout the seasons, Sherlock (Cumberbatch) behaved in the same destructive, unlikable ways again and again. He repeatedly insulted and used everyone he loved (and a lot of people he didn’t) whenever it was convenient for him. He repeatedly, and sometimes violently, used John (Freeman) as a kind of lab rat for his experiments. And he repeatedly fell into dangerous spirals of drug addiction, ostensibly in order to help him solve cases. Through all of this, Sherlock proceeded with the assumption that he was always right — and he was always, always proven correct.
Sherlock’s violent actions have never had consequences. His repeated drug trips never led to any major health complications. The act of drugging his best friend — a war veteran — and sending him into a PTSD-triggering hallucinogenic fight zone in season two should have had major repercussions, but it was handwaved away; Sherlock then went on to once again drug John and his wife and Sherlock’s own family in season three, again with no consequences. Sherlock’s hubris led to him murdering a man in cold blood, but not even this choice resulted in punishment — his friends simply brushed off the idea that Sherlock should have to pay for his crime, just as they accept everything else about him. As a result, the same hubris that led to Sherlock killing Charles Magnussen in season three ends up getting Mary (Amanda Abbington) killed in season four.
Then there’s Sherlock’s use of John in an elaborate (and never explained) plot to fake his death for two years. This should have been framed as a huge betrayal leading to serious trust issues at the least — but instead they just fought for an episode and got drunk enough to reestablish their bond, and the rest of season three revolved around the question of whether John should trust his own wife instead.
The end of season four’s second episode feints toward acknowledging this problem, when Sherlock asks Mrs. Hudson to use a code word — a word representing the moment when his hubris got Mary killed — to tell him if he gets too self-satisfied or starts acting with too much hubris. It’s the most remorse and self-awareness he’s shown the entire series; but it leads nowhere and comes far too late.
2) The show prioritizes grandiose plot twists over logical development and satisfying conclusions
It could be argued that Sherlock was a weird show about a pair of megalomaniacs — Moffat and Gatiss. The pair constructed every episode of Sherlock around one far-fetched unrealistic plot after another, but left their audience hanging time and again when it came to actual resolutions. And every time, the show presented the dangling plot as a clever innovation rather than a frustrating loose end.
For example, after Sherlock faked his death at the end of season two, the show took great glee in opening season three, two years later, by presenting the many fan theories about how Sherlock was able to survive the fall in the previous episode. Instead of giving viewers an actual resolution, it gave us several possible resolutions — and then never actually explained what really happened.
This was typical of Sherlock: Whenever it came close to presenting real drama with meaty narrative consequences, it consistently halted mid-act and just walked away from the entire plot point as though it didn’t matter. The result was that Sherlock, Moriarty, and Mycroft each became larger-than-life mythical figures who could miraculously rewrite fate again and again.
Again and again, fans challenged Moffat and Gatiss to explain how Sherlock could get away with so much, and again and again Moffat and Gatiss eschewed the need for any explanation at all. “I think people have come to think a plot hole is something which isn’t explained on screen,” Moffat said in response to complaints about season three. “A plot hole is actually something that can’t be explained.” At the end of season four, Gatiss told people to “go and read a children’s book” instead if they didn’t want to be “challenged” by Sherlock’s convoluted plot contrivances.
In other words, Sherlock’s lack of plot resolution was a study in storyteller ego, rather than plausibility. And it left Sherlock feeling like a jittery, endless loop of high drama that ultimately went nowhere.
3) Female characters are consistently hollow props for Sherlock
Here’s how you transform Sherlock from a deeply flawed junkie whose selfishness drives away everyone around him into a mythical superhero whose cleverness ultimately keeps everyone by his side and in his thrall: Make sure that every action every other character takes winds up being about Sherlock himself.
This tendency is most noticeable in the writing of the women around Sherlock. Because characters like Molly, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, and Mary are so thinly written to begin with, it’s hard not to notice that they all turn out to be, again and again, props for Sherlock’s ego and/or schemes. They ultimately have no agency of their own outside of whatever Sherlock needs them to be.
When Sherlock needs a convenient shill in the morgue, there’s Molly, conveniently putting aside her own unrequited love for him to help him. When Sherlock needs to confront his humanity through red-blooded sexual attraction to a woman (since Moffat had scoffed repeatedly at the idea of him being either queer or asexual), there’s Irene Adler, a self-described lesbian, inexplicably and immediately falling in love with Sherlock anyway. When John needs a therapist to help him address his grief over Mary’s death — surprise! Turns out she’s only spending weeks with John in order to get to Sherlock.
And then there’s Mary, the one independent character who could have removed John from Sherlock’s orbit completely. But she ultimately gets so wrapped up in Sherlock’s orbit herself that she not only sacrifices her own life for him, but goes so far as to pre-record a series of encouraging messages for both her husband and Sherlock, urging them to go on solving crimes together because they belong together, or something.
The reason for this recurring pattern in Sherlock’s female characters is clear and frustrating: Moffat has stated before that he thinks women’s primary reason for watching Sherlock is one of sexual attraction, saying “our female fan base all believe that they'll be the one to melt that glacier.” He couldn’t be more wrong about women, and it shows in his writing.
4) Mycroft is overused as deus ex machina
In order to believe that Sherlock could fake his own death for years and return with no one being the wiser; murder someone and get away clean; and never know about the existence of a sister who occasionally broke out of a high-security prison in order to send him reaction GIFs of Moriarty, we have to believe that Sherlock’s older, allegedly smarter brother Mycroft is basically the god of Great Britain.
And apparently he is. Sherlock describes Mycroft thusly: “He is the British government.” This seems to be all the explanation needed for why Mycroft is able to be everywhere, know everything, and keep his brother out of trouble to a logic-defying degree. In terms of accountability he seems to be answerable to no one, which means Mycroft can pull whatever strings are necessary to keep Sherlock from going to jail, or even facing trial after killing someone.
What makes this continued reliance on Mycroft especially mind-boggling is that he often makes terrible decisions that have no fallout. He tries to work with Moriarty, even though Moriarty is a sociopath who’s caused mass chaos and has it out for Sherlock; he tries to work with his own sister, even though she literally brainwashes anyone who talks to her.
Given all this, the way in which he seems to orchestrate acts of God again and again in order to compensate for his brother’s antics has started to seem less quirky and endearing, and more like a convenient way for the show to avoid any kind of continuity.
5) Moriarty is a constant distraction
To be sure, Andrew Scott’s Moriarty was a gift to the show, but once he was dead, he should have stayed dead. But since he was so popular, the narrative constantly brought him back as a specter, implying that Moriarty had planned dark and impenetrable plots to keep Sherlock busy long after his death.
In reality — probably since the show never knew whether it was going to continue from one season to the next — all that teasing never paid off. We learned in the season four finale that Moriarty had used Sherlock’s sister to distribute a few taunting messages to Sherlock after his death, but that’s … it. How disappointing.
And then there’s the fact that the threat of Moriarty’s return was the reason Sherlock never had to pay for killing Magnussen. Now that it’s established that Moriarty was never back at all, shouldn’t Sherlock face the punishment he evaded?
It almost certainly won’t happen, though. Instead, Moriarty will go down as Sherlock’s biggest distraction, and not a very good one, from the series’ most consistent issue: It couldn’t maintain any narrative cohesion or direction.
However, Moriarty does function as a fitting metaphor for the problems that plagued Sherlock since his first appearance in season one: Much like Moriarty himself, the series has proven to be full of a lot of ego and showmanship, but ultimately not much else.
