TV Review Sherlock The Six Thatchers

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Spoiler alerts A very mixed reaction to this disjointed cluster of stories, threads, and tragedy. The opening conveniently draws a disappointing line and magic reset button over Holmes killing the villain at the close of the second to last adventure back, with brother Mycroft in high places just rewriting history. The Death following his prey to another city story is an old one, possibly from The 1001 Nights – Boris Karloff relates it in the under-rated movie Targets. It is here used both to relate to Mary’s efforts to evade Holmes, with a highly trained MI5 agent failing to consider that she might be being tracked, and of course, not being able to cheat Death, except Holmes does in that Mary sacrifices herself to save him, even starting her leap in front of him after the bullet has been fired. There is little real deduction going on – Holmes uses trackers, (electronic and sniffing dogs) rather than his mind, and once we know it is a leak in MI5 there are only two suspects left, one proves she is innocent to Mycroft just by saying, no I didn’t, honest, and the other is practically confessing to Holmes before he even accuses her of it. I was half expecting someone to get eaten by a shark. The scene was reminiscent of scenes in the same aquarium in MI5 intrigue film The Quiller Memorandum with Alec Guinness. The baby has barely time to be born and Christened before becoming a minor aside, and even brought along for part of one pursuit, absurdly involving following a dog to the meat market. The opening case with a young man dying in a car in suburbia while supposedly in Tibet seemed to belong in a Jonathon Creek story rather than a Holmes one. There is actually a cinema ad showing a magician using a similar camouflage suit to surprise car passengers when he suddenly jumps out at them or drives the car while invisible. Then there’s the first Thatcher bust being at the same as the car-tragedy – a Hell of a coincidence there, on top of the car burning a week after the victim died in it from unlikely natural causes. The real mystery was who Watson was flirting with on the bus and by text, so soon after having a baby. I expect that will unfold in episodes to come. Arthur Chappell