Sherlock: The Final Problem - Spoiler Review
- Adam Tye
- Jan 25, 2017
- 6 min read
Sherlock makes my first review for this blog difficult with an episode that I say I like, but then moan about for about a thousand words or so.
First, cards on the table. I originally started this review wanting to write something that felt somewhat concrete, where I’d point out things I liked or didn’t like with some degree of confidence. Instead it’s been a few hours since I’ve seen The Final Problem and it’s becoming apparent that this will probably be the hardest episode of Sherlock for me to coherently articulate how I actually feel about it. Still I push on to actually finish this article out of A: The desire to put this frustration into words and B: wanting to actually put something on this blog. So I’m flagging this now before I properly begin as a not-particularly-self-assured review of this (potentially last?) episode of Sherlock. Is this a cop out? I hope not. Maybe. Look, shush you – this episode was pretty trying.
Also I won’t be recapping the episode’s plot in full and I’m assuming whoever’s reading has already watched the episode. So, just to reiterate; there will be SPOILERS.

Back when Sherlock returned with The Six Thatchers, I liked to describe the episode to others as ‘awkward’. For this final episode, I was lead by several people to believe the word I would use for The Final Problem would be ‘shit’. Having finally seen the episode roughly a week late (curse you iPlayer and your insatiable need for a TV license) I think a better word for it would be ‘frustrating’. This is the closest to ‘jumping the shark’ the show has come since The Sign of Three, with elaborate psychological torture traps replacing traditional case-of-the-week business and even though I’ve argued to some that Sherlock never really has a default setting, I’d still probably put The Final Problem forward as the least ‘Sherlock-y’ episode the show has done. But whilst The Sign of Three had an impeccable sense of structure to compensate for it’s perhaps unearned sense of ‘twee’, The Final Problem is far more scattershot and so we have to take it largely at face value. The result is an episode that makes a lot of confounding and infuriating choices, but is laced with some great ones that, for me, stop the episode from completely flat-lining.
I want to get to those great parts, I really do. But even someone as reasonably warm to this episode as I am (lukewarm, really, but that seems to be warmer than others) can’t ignore a feeling of disconnect with this episode – by which I mean an almost total disconnect from past Sherlock episodes. I was dancing around the issue until someone snapped it into focus for me; there is a disconcerting lack of connective narrative tissue that links back to the previous episodes in the series. Yes, obviously Euros is our big link but she’s not a particularly organic one. The reveal of Euros as Sherlock’s absent sister is treated as an enormous missing piece in the puzzle but the only reason for the audience to be invested is the hints dropped by Mycroft, which until last episode weren’t even directed to our two main characters. Euros becomes more a case of “oh that’s what he was talking about” than a natural part of the narrative – a twist for the sake of a twist. Sian Brooke does a pretty great job as Euros and her actual character is written effectively enough but it’s obviously not enough to overcome the bigger problems here.
This point of disconnect is not particularly helped by restricting the action to fairly non-descript rooms on a remote island facility. A limited supporting cast doesn’t help either and so whilst Lestrade and Molly do appear in the episode (more on Molly later) it can’t help but feel like the world of Sherlock shrinks a bit in this episode when, for a finale, it probably could have stood to be at its fullest. I understand the reasoning behind this and the island works wonderfully as a representation of the cold, isolated and warped mind of Euros, but it’s possibly a direction best suited for a penultimate episode than a grand finale (even if they do more, its hard to say that TFP doesn’t feel like the end to a particular story – especially given that coda with Mary).
As for the cast, everyone gives great performances yadda yadda yadda as we’ve basically come to expect from Sherlock at this point. It’s a shame that Watson’s role is heavily reduced for most of the episode seeing as Moffat/Gatiss have apparently decided his arc was largely finished after The Lying Detective, which in fairness it probably is and the episode is already stuffed to bursting anyway – certainly a far cry from the wheel-spinning of The Six Thatchers. Still, this feels odd in retrospect. Certainly the ‘finale’ feel of the episode tends to intensify a lot of its more peculiar choices and issues.

And then of course there’s the case, or rather lack thereof. I will happily defend Sherlock on the grounds that it doesn’t need a strict case to make an episode work but TFP is more difficult to grasp on this front. If we were to find a case/objective, I would argue it’s saving the girl on the plane rather than finding out more about Euros (they both turn out to be the same in the end anyway so hey ho). But it mostly hangs in the background, whilst in the foreground is a series of psychological/moral torture puzzles. It’s all a fairly obvious way of highlighting Sherlock’s arc throughout the show and it is so at odds from the rest of the show it’s hard not to protest against it. To be fair, I found it fairly effective and certainly was tense and fraught as the episode went on but it’s all verging on some sort of tonal/narrative dissonance in comparison with the rest of the show. This is easily the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. On the one hand I admire a story that doesn’t just cater to what people think the show is supposed to be but instead will diverge when appropriate. My best argument as to why this doesn’t apply here is that the show doesn’t feel like it earns this change in direction. As I said earlier, Euros can feel less like a necessary continuation of the story and more like a shocking twist for the sake of a shocking twist, so it’s hard to feel like the episode was in fact appropriate.
I mentioned earlier that there are things I like in this episode, right? I think now is a good time to mention more of those.
By far the biggest advantage for the episode is the conclusion of Sherlock’s arc. Yes, I think Euros and her challenges can be a fairly ‘obvious’ way of illustrating Sherlock’s character development, but there are moments in TFP that really shine despite or in spite of this. The development of Sherlock’s empathy has been quite impressively maneuvered and those little steps forward that are present in past episodes (the wedding speech, the vow, even as far back as Sherlock’s phone call to John before his rooftop jump or his ‘I don’t have friends’ scene from ‘Baskervilles’) are brought starkly into contrast here. If Euros seems a bit ‘shunted in’, then it’s almost made up for with how effectively they use her to focus in on Sherlock’s humanity. All of it was enough to tie the episode together and keep me invested, even managing to find meaning in twists that could have just been meaningless without Sherlock’s arc to support them. Okay, Sherlock’s demolition of the coffin is a bit silly when viewed in isolation, but I didn’t really notice at the time given the power of the scene we’re just coming out of.
Which I guess is as good a time as any to talk about the ‘Molly’ scene. You know the one. For me it’s the best scene in the entire episode: utterly tense and horrific. What’s less great is the narrative consequences, or rather, the lack thereof. The scene stings in the moment, which is why it’s especially galling that the next time we see Molly, both her and Sherlock seems largely unaffected. Some people have pointed to John not dying after the previous cliffhanger as a pretty egregious lack of narrative consequence, but for me, it’s the Sherlock/Molly aspect that’s the bigger problem.
What’s that? I was talking about things I liked?
Look, TFP is a much easier episode to hate than it is to love – that much is apparent. In fact I fully expect to find this episode circling near the bottom of people’s episode rankings list as time goes on. At it’s best it reaches higher than the Six Thatchers, whilst at it’s worst it arguably plumbs lower than Sherlock has gone before. Everything in the middle is muddled and frustrating and ultimately makes you wish they’d taken a different route (though I don’t want to do the whole ‘what I would have done’ bit as it’s usually pretty unhelpful). Still, I have a lot of goodwill towards these characters to go off here and it’s this good will, plus Sherlock’s arc, that got me through the episode even when it was at its worst. Actually, that still sounds fairly negative. Let’s maybe chalk TFP up as a misfire.
In short: I enjoyed it, despite itself. Sort of.
A good start to the blog methinks. GAH.
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