Sherlock, The Empty Hearse

I never thought I would miss Moriarty (or to be more precise, the rather annoying actor who played him) but that’s exactly how I felt after watching 'The Empty Hearse,' the first episode in Season 3 of Sherlock. The competition between the great detective and his nemesis gave the earlier episodes a focus and without that, I felt that this episode was entirely too pleased with itself. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock has always had a high opinion of himself, of course, but in this episode he was positively smug and I couldn’t help but feel that the show itself succumbed to the same smugness, so pleased with its own success that it couldn’t be bothered to come up with a decent plot (a subway car filled with explosives under the Houses of Parliament on Guy Fawkes night? Really?) or to develop the character of Lord Moran AT ALL. Moreover, although on the whole I like the changes that this show makes to the original source material, there’s no getting away from the fact that it gets the relationship between Holmes and Watson all wrong. Anyone who’s read ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ knows that Watson is delighted when Holmes returns. The hissy fit that Sherlock’s Watson throws may be understandable in some ways but it takes too much attention away from the story (what there is of it) and places too much emphasis on the friendship between Sherlock and John. Please, please, please do not let this show become a bromance!