Sherlock interacting with the Watson baby promises to be some light relief from what is shaping up to be a more serious and somber fourth season, one that has an “epic scale.” Cumberbatch has called it, approvingly, “myopically dark.”Įven Sherlock, the self-described high-functioning sociopath, continues to develop and evolve from episode to episode. Culverton Smith is different again-you’ll have to wait and see!-but very much a man of these strange, rootless, dark times. “Thus our other villains are very different: Magnussen was a businessman in the Murdoch vein-not evil as far he’s concerned. “The danger with anyone other than Moriarty is you run the risk of them appearing as a diluted version,” he says.
What’s certain is that the series will feature a new villain in Culverton Smith (played by Toby Jones), whom Gatiss has described as “purest evil.” The last episode lifts its title from the original story in which the Sherlock Holmes character was killed off, plummeting off the Reichenbach Falls the earliest promotional image for the season was of a violin with one of its strings broken. Spoilers aside, there’ll be the usual astonishments in store in Sherlock Season 4, whose three 90-minute episodes-“The Six Thatchers,” “The Lying Detective,” and “The Final Problem”-will air weekly in the U.S. (“Moriarty is dead,” Gatiss insists, adding, “More importantly, Sherlock knows exactly what he’s going to do next.”) ”), and the nature of the posthumous return of Sherlock’s arch-nemesis. It’s marvelous to keep your secrets.”Īmong the mysteries fans are currently salivating over is the hinted existence of a third Holmes sibling, possibly named Sherrinford (Gatiss: “Well.
It’s so wonderful if you can maintain it.
But, genuinely, if you gave it to them, they’d be disappointed. Gatiss, who also stars on the show as Sherlock’s brainier brother Mycroft, is determined not only to outwit the Sherlock sleuths, but to also confound the expectations of those who know the old stories. A certain amount of cunning comes with the territory: perhaps inevitably for a show awhirl with ingenious riddles and mysteries, Sherlock has inspired a following of would-be detectives obsessed with picking up clues and unraveling the show’s secrets. It helps that Gatiss has the sincere-seeming “soft, precise fashion of speech” originally ascribed to the criminal mastermind Moriarty.