We’ve been hearing that the series will be darker than ever. In what way will it be darker? 

It is darker for obvious reasons, and it gets darker still, although still we joke, so don’t worry about that. It is a dramatically chewy feeling because Mary’s death has enormous consequences for Sherlock and John. But it is not a decision we made lightly. Although it is a 120-year-old spoiler that she dies, it has a massive impact. It is definitely a darker season, which is why episode one starts off very lightly, with lots of fun little cases and deductions and them just having a good time together before it all goes south.

Was it a difficult decision to make, killing off a character who’s popular? 

It was, yes. And that’s the point. Mary Morstan in the original stories, she’s really only there in one story. She has a couple of appearances but essentially her role is to let John go out and play, and even in The Sign of Four she’s a very typical Victorian woman character. She is rather ineffective and sidelined and everyone sort of sends her off when there is danger. So, we wanted to make Mary a much more proactive character and a woman with a history, which eventually comes back to bite her. So having such a strong character and such a brilliant performance from Amanda [Abbington], it wasn’t an easy decision. And we didn’t just decide it, we spoke to everyone in turn, especially Amanda, about where we want to be going with it that it will have proper impact, you know we don’t pick up episode two with John Watson leaving her a victim and getting on with life. It has enormous consequences as it does in real life. 

So it wasn’t an easy decision but at the same time the show is Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and when we brought in the character of Mary, it was to make season three have a different feel to it. It was like Sherlock is apparently dead and Doctor Watson is about to get married, it was just the worst time Sherlock could come back and therefore it has massive consequences for that feed. So, no, we haven’t taken it lightly at all but it wasn’t a surprise to anyone in terms of stories. 

Talking about dark, when you come up with ideas for villains, do you worry about how they would measure up to Jim Moriarty?

It is always difficult because Moriarty, as it turns out in the book, kind of invented the notion of an evil baddie… and therefore everything is in the shadow of that. And what Andrew (Scott) did with our Moriarty was kind of take that somewhere else again. So we have to make sure that each villain is a different kind of person. Charles Magnussen, last season, was a Rupert Murdoch kind of figure, a media mogul. He doesn’t see himself as evil, as if the evil people do, although I have my doubts about the Donald Trump administration. I think they quite relish being evil. You have to make sure that they have a different take on it and Toby Jones this year is again a very different kind of baddie. You want to avoid finding yourself in a situation where you could think ‘Oh this could just be Moriarty’. Their attitude to Sherlock and Doctor Watson has to be a very different take from the ones you have seen, or otherwise you would feel that it is just a dilution of Andrew. 

But Sherlock seems almost as worked up about Toby Jones’s villain as he was about Moriarty… 

Yes he is, he is, but for different reasons. Moriarty is a kind of intellectual equal or even superior, he has a sort of Olympian detachment. He is so clever, he kind of looks upon people like ants, whereas Toby’s character is… well, I can’t say too much without you seeing it, but he has a different attitude towards life and crime. 

But why is Sherlock still obsessed with Moriarty, even after his death?

Well, in practical terms, the way we ended the last scene and especially that he got a message to all the TV screens in the country, which means something’s going on. He is not quite sure what it is. Moriarty is dead but he made this message which is broadcast after his demise, and that means he is up to something from beyond the grave, and that’s why Sherlock is obsessed with him.

 

How has Sherlock evolved over the four seasons? 

He got older (laughs). We’ve all got older. Well, I feel very strongly about this. You know we got criticised last time for making him a bit too human, but I don’t think that’s the case. The fact is, if you read the stories, Sherlock Holmes by the end of the stories is not the same man that he was at the beginning. He has to develop, he has to change, otherwise you won’t have any respect for him. He is so clever, he has a colossal intellect and anyone who didn’t actually learn from their mistakes would be an idiot. 

What we’ve tried to do is give them proper character development, and Sherlock particularly has to learn from what Doctor Watson has taught him. He is better at dealing with people. But it doesn’t mean that he’s ever gonna be like us because he isn’t, and wouldn’t be very interesting if he was. If he just transformed into an ordinary person, you wouldn’t be interested in him. But he is better at it, or maybe he is better at faking it, but he is better. 

But he does care about Molly, he does care about John, and he definitely cares about Mrs Hudson. He has friends and he is able to say it. But at the beginning he was so isolated and detached that Sergeant Donovan has said that ‘one day we’ll find a body and Sherlock Holmes will have put it there’. He was in danger of drifting away from all humanity and the reason we join the story where we did was that Doctor Watson’s entry in his life is a key moment, that’s when he becomes a better person. John Watson in turn becomes a better person from knowing Sherlock.

Will Mycroft be evolving as well then? 

Yes, of course. This was not our intention right at the beginning, but what we’ve actually done in the end is probably sketch out the backstory of how Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson became the characters we sort of know. We started with the first meeting which is very, very dramatised, both being much younger men than they are usually portrayed. And I think what we’ve ended up doing is showing how they became the two men by the fireside that we traditionally know, usually in Victorian clothing. So, the much more antagonistic relationship between Mycroft and Sherlock is evolving. It is becoming fonder. By the time we meet Mycroft in the original stories, they get on really well. 

John and Mary’s baby, how is Sherlock handling that?

Well, as you’ve seen, he sort of treats the baby as a case. I think he is puzzled by it but at the same time he is probably thinking ‘how can I be the best babysitter in the world’, like the way he thought ‘how can I be the best best man for the wedding’. He actually treats it like a puzzle. But babies don’t really adhere to logic in the same way. So I think he is going to find it a bit baffling, really.

It must be difficult to get actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman together. Is this going to make it difficult to continue with the series? There are rumours that this is the last one.

Yes, it is difficult. We wanted the season to be on last year and it was impossible to get everyone’s diaries to align, so it is increasingly difficult. But there is also a genuine feeling that we wouldn’t want to push it further than necessary. We know it and sometimes there is an argument for keeping something bespoke and we want to keep being excited about it. 
There is another problem with telling stories of this scale, we basically make three films every season. That’s an awful lot of story. You have to put the characters through an awful lot. To continue to be able to do that is not easy. But at the same time we are all incredibly blessed by it. It is a once in a lifetime experience. Something like Sherlock doesn’t come along twice in your life, really. It is a worldwide phenomenon. We wouldn’t want to wave goodbye to that, but at the same time we don’t want to follow it to death. So we seriously don’t know. But while we called the last episode of the series The Final Problem, I don’t know. 

That is one of the reasons why people probably believe that this is the last story…

Well, you remember what happened when Doyle wrote The Final Problem? Sherlock Holmes came back (laughs). 

 

 

It wasn’t an easy decision but at the same time the show is Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and when we brought in the character of Mary, it was to make season three have a different feel to it. It was like Sherlock is apparently dead and Doctor Watson is about to get married, it was just the worst time Sherlock could come back and therefore it has massive consequences for that. So, no we haven’t taken [Mary’s Death] lightly at all but it wasn’t a surprise to anyone in terms of stories — Gatiss on Mary Watson’s death

 

Did you know?

• Mark Gatiss has written multiple episodes in Doctor Who, including the excellent The Doctor’s Wife. He has also starred in the episode called The Lazarus Experiment.
• Gatiss also plays Tycho Nestoris, the head of the Iron Bank on Braavos, in Game of Thrones, and though not seen for a while is still alive. 
• His childhood hobbies included watching Doctor Who and Hammer Horror films on television, reading Sherlock Holmes and H.G. Wells, and collecting fossils.
• Apart from writing for films and TV, he has also written a historical spy novel series on Lucifer Box.

 

SPOILER ALERT: SHERLOCK ON A HIGH IN EPISODE 2 SERIES FOUR

 

REPEAT: SPOILER ALERT!

Finally a Sherlock episode that has an actual case, a chilling villain, and a big bang reveal! The second episode of series four, The Lying Detective, is a major improvement from the series opener. Its break-neck speed is exhilarating and it also packs a solid emotional punch. That is not to say that it doesn’t fall into its usual ruts, but more on that later.

Based on The Adventure of the Dying Detective, the episode, written by Steven Moffat, takes quite a bit from the original where Sherlock Holmes pushes himself almost to the point of dying to get Culverton Smith, who is also the villain in the Sherlock episode, to confess. 

John is visiting a new therapist even though he is far from admitting that he is hallucinating about Mary. Sherlock on the other hand has locked himself up in his home and has given in to his drug addiction. And for most of the fast-paced first half hour you are not sure whether what is happening is just a figment of Sherlock’s drug-addled brain or reality. 

We are introduced to the big baddie of the episode — Culverton Smith, played with chilling aplomb by Toby Jones, as a well-loved rich philanthropist who has a secret to hide, a secret that Sherlock goes to the extent of almost getting himself killed to get a confession about. The secret? Smith is a serial killer. And the glee with which Toby Jones’s character tells Sherlock that he likes “turning people into things”, and that it makes him happy, is stuff of nightmares.

Sherlock is drawn into the case when Smith’s daughter Faith pays him a visit and asks for help. Benedict Cumberbatch has a ball with the “high as a kite” act, where Sherlock himself is at least a few steps behind his brain. And even when he was being a “c**k”, you could see through to the guilt that was doing a far better job of breaking him than the cocktail of drugs he was taking.

It is quite the twist when we find out that the whole Culverton Smith case and his drug addiction was a big ruse to get John back, something that was suggested by Mary. There are two things that bother me about it. One, it just takes away from the case as it once again takes second place to the rest of the drama. And two, it treats drug abuse with frivolity as Sherlock gets on and off the wagon as and when he wants to.

Martin Freeman turns in a brilliant performance as a man who is trying to get back to normalcy but is slowly cracking under the strain. That scene in the mortuary with John pummelling Sherlock, letting out the rage about Mary’s death, is fantastic. Una Stubbs as Mrs Hudson gets her moment in the spotlight putting Sherlock at gun point, driving a snazzy sports car, cutting down John and Mycroft to size (her “get out of my house you reptile” to Mycroft is pure gold). She is definitely not the housekeeper.

The other brilliant bit from the show is the big reveal at the end. Yes, we meet the other Holmes sibling, and guess what? She is the sister! Not the brother we were expecting. Meet Eurus, the East Wind that Sherlock refers to at the end of series three. The only surprising thing is how did Sherlock not recognise his sibling when she posed as Smith’s daughter, and why did John not realise that she was the same lady he had been cheating on Mary with when she was posing as his therapist?

Are they stupider than we are? Because we noticed. Or is one woman so interchangeable with another that no one notices?

Is Eurus Sherlock’s twin? Who is Sherrinford then? What is her connection with Moriarty? Those are conjectures for another time.

 

Episode 2 Sherlock Season 4 will air on AXN India on January 14 at 8pm 
What will you miss about Sherlock if this is the last series? Tell t2@abp.in