I am really disappointed in this show. Let me start by saying that I’ve been a fan of Sherlock since 2011 when I accidentally stumbled upon one of the first season’s episodes airing on PBS (a year after its BBC release) and I was instantly hooked. The show also kickstarted an obsession with Benedict Cumberbatch and his beautiful voice and his tight buttoned shirts that I share with apparently most of Tumblr and which has persisted to the present day. It’s one of the few shows for which I actively anticipate a season premiere rather than just saying to myself “oh I’ll catch up on it sometime”.

The fourth season of Sherlock was absolutely terrible. I really don’t recognize this show anymore as it’s become a very strange and - quite frankly - ugly mixture of James Bond and Saw and innumerable bad psychological “thrillers” that air late at night on Cinemax (but without the sex). Remember those complaints people had about Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes being remarkably adept at hand to hand combat in Guy Ritchie’s laughable attempts at adaptations? Well, Cumberbatch as Holmes does pretty similar shit in this season, and it’s also left mysterious as to how he acquired this particular set of skills. A major character from season 3 gets their character arc expanded to a ridiculous extent and then leaves the show almost equally quickly and pointlessly.

Toby Jones, whose appearance as the villainous Culverton Smith (and who appears to be a rather thinly veiled Jimmy Savile surrogate, albeit done quite well by the always-awesome Jones), was hyped to no end before the season started basically shows up in the second episode to deliver like four or five Bond villain monologues and then get really unceremoniously taken out by Sherlock. It’s almost insulting, or at least I would have found it insulting if I could figure out what the hell was going on in that episode because the plot involved a whole lot of hallucination and mind control for a show that used to pride itself on its realism.

And speaking of mind control - please, for the love of God, STOP THE HALF-ASSED ATTEMPTS AT MINDFUCKS. I beg you Moftiss. This entire season felt like it was a vehicle running solely on the fumes of shock value because twists that even M Night Shyamalan would find pretty hard to explain away neatly were crammed into episodes like women stuffing $5 panties into their shopping carts at a Victoria’s Secret clearance sale. (Trust me on that metaphor.) I like a good eleventh-hour twist as much as the next man but they have to be properly set up, and we have to be invested in the stakes. Ocean’s Eleven doesn’t fucking work if you find out that George Clooney et al stole the money by posing as the SWAT team before you learn about his relationship with Julia Roberts or what a dick Andy Garcia is and whtanot. I hate that the writers tried to cover up completely lazy writing by tossing in plot twists as if all the fans would be awestruck by the mindfucks and disregard how random and retroactively demeaning they were.

I probably have more thoughts on this season but I don’t want to spoil too much and quite frankly it just makes me angry that this show is now a ridiculous clusterfuck of cliches and terrible writing. It’s not what fans expected after three years, and I sure as hell hope this is not what we receive after another three years.