(Warning: This review contains spoilers.)

Fans of BBC’s Sherlock have been waiting an awfully long time for a new episode. In fact, with the cast and crew in such high demand, new installments of Sherlock are a rare commodity. This show has not always responded well to the pressure of success, and the difficulty in scheduling production has made this pressure higher than ever. Fortunately, the result is a clever and complex episode that almost succeeds at re-capturing the sense of fun and adventure missing from the most recent series, without getting lost in its own twists and turns.

I’ll admit, the idea of re-imagining the modern adaptation of Sherlock Holmes to be set in Victorian London (would this qualify as re-re-imagining, or un-re-imagining?) struck me immediately as something of a self-indulgent stunt designed to stall for time as the show continued to figure out how to get unstuck from the mire of tangled arc story in which it’s been entrenching itself since the end of series two. However, upon viewing, the strengths of this approach were obvious, surprising, and thoroughly entertaining.

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