Why Sherlock is the most brilliant show ever

 (by thelonelybrilliance)

I’ve never known a show that developed like this over four seasons and far more years than that. It leaves me awed. It leaves me in love.

Sherlock Season 1 was fresh. It was new. It was everything we loved about Baker Street but with a myriad twists. Who was Sherlock? He was idiosyncratic, brilliant, cold. Fascinated with puzzles, puzzles none of us could solve. The episodes were complex but close to home. Everything revolved around Baker Street, this unlikely friendship.

But there was a whisper. The classic arch villian. These are simple, but age-old, dramatic stakes. Not so much man vs. man but mind vs. mind.

This is Sherlock Holmes come of age, with mystery behind and before him.

It ends with the grand entrance of his twisted mirror, mind vs. mind.

Season 2 raises the stakes. It look into Sherlock’s heart, his loyalties, his fears. It delves into the deepest and richest of Holmes canon–the Woman, the Hound, the Fall. Season 2 leaves us gasping for air. This is Sherlock in the Golden Age, this is Sherlock that has us whirling, trying to keep up with twists and turns, with how much we now care about Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, Molly, Mycroft–the side characters who now are part of a universe.

A threatened universe. This is Sherlock and John’s friendship at its tested peak, this is a Sherlock who might just be more than cold exterior, this is Sherlock with problems and people he might not be able to solve. This is the greatest face-off between protagonist and antagonist we’ve ever known, perhaps because they’re so like and yet unlike.

This is the end of an era, and a fall we still don’t quite understand.

Season 3 changes the game. It reels us back from grief. It has its lighthearted moments, even while John struggles to believe in a world again he’d thought lost. Season 3 gives us Mary, a story in herself. Season 3 takes John away from Baker Street, Molly away from Sherlock, everything we’ve known away from itself. How can such grand and beautiful caricatures feel so close to our own life? The alienation and the joy combined that we’ve always felt at a friend’s wedding.

Threats we expect coming from people we never dreamed would be the ones pulling the trigger.

This is Sherlock the savior. This is Sherlock the sacrifice.

This is death cheated in different ways.

Season 4. What is Season 4? Season 4 is everything times ten. The drama, the complexity, amped to 100mph. Why are there complaints it’s too clever? Or that it’s somehow buckling under its own weight, when this Sherlock come full circle. This isn’t close to home, complexities around a simple nucleus–this is close to heart, all the truths we’ve always known, Mary dies in canon, Molly loves Sherlock, There’s another Holmes–and yet it is ALL turned on its head.

This was a brilliant masterstroke. I pray it’s not the last. My soul begs for Season 5. But this was a beautiful finale, if so it must be. This was John destroyed and a friendship forged all the stronger in the end. This is where we realize that Sherlock really is Sherlock Holmes, the legend we’ve all known. A man, as Moftiss said, with a heart you never doubt. This is Sherlock the human.

And suddenly we understand all the questions we didn’t know we had. A high-functioning sociopath isn’t that way because of some paltry quirk. He’s shut down. He’s closed off. This is Sherlock Holmes finally opening the lockbox of himself, stepping outside the mind palace into something far, far greater.

And this is when we learn that the “freak” has “always been the grownup”. He’s the one who forgives. The one who saves them all. The one who cannot kill the brother he loves, does not leave the sister only he does not fear, the one who opens his heart up to the possibility of breaking because he has only three minutes to save Molly Hooper.

This is an East Wind. Mary, gone. Rosamund, still beloved by many. Eurus Holmes, remembered.

And 221B Baker Street changed, yet also just as we’ve always known.

Raise a glass.