bobcobb301 Time jumping, craziness, mind trickery, this special had it all.It wasn't exactly written in the best way and I hate how Sherlock just figures everything out with 20 minutes left out of the blue, but it was surely an entertaining and unique episode of the show.

winobliss-09728 This was most clever and entertaining episode. I absolutely love this interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. I also enjoyed they way the writers managed to go back and fourth in time. The excellent acting of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in these roles makes this one of the best programs to watch.The writing is terrific with a plot that had more ups and downs than a mountain range, more ins and outs than a maze and more twists and turns than a dozen corkscrews, in short it was a triumph. Starting with a Victorian-era impossible murder with an even more impossible murderer, guest appearances by all the previous supporting cast including a massively-bloated Mycroft, surely a homage to Sydney Greenstreet and the return of the master-criminal we've all missed, a premonition of another husband-slaying in a big old house after dark, a recreation of the real Reichenbach Fall climax of yore, an ingenious denouement anticipating female suffrage years later but perhaps the best thing of all was the promise of a new series to come. BRAVO!!!

grantss In a Sherlock Holmes mind trip he is taken back to the 1890s. In a setting very much like that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have envisaged, Holmes is a private detective, operating out of 221B Baker Street. Assisting him is Dr Watson. They are presented with a very baffling case. A woman, Emelia Ricoletti, publicly shoots and kills herself, only to appear a few hours later and kill her husband. Within the next few months other murders are committed by woman appearing to be Mrs Ricoletti. Even the police are thinking that paranormal activity is afoot. Then Sir Eustace Carmichael is threatened by such an apparition and his wife calls in Holmes and Watson.The idea of filming a Sherlock Holmes episode in the original time and setting appealed to me. It gave us a taste of what the series would have been like if it hadn't been contemporised. However, at the back my mind was the nagging suspicion that the writers had run out of ideas and that going back to the 1890s was a gimmick, and the series' jumping the shark moment.Ultimately it isn't as straightforward as an entire Sherlock episode set in the 1890s, so difficult to judge whether it was meant to be a gimmick or not. It ends up much more complex than that, and, to an extent, unnecessarily so. We have many jumps between the 1890s and the 2010s and it seems like style over substance.However, it is very entertaining. The 1890s murder story is very intriguing and is woven into the overall plot well. The modern day side is reasonably well done, though the Moriarty scenes seemed a bit self-indulgent and overblown.Overall, not brilliant but a pretty good episode nevertheless.

mvossie Nice try to set the atmosphere in victorian London, but overall this episodes lacks it all.....a good plot a solid story They just made a mess of it .. nice try but please forget this episode quickly ...its a shame as the standards of all the previous episodes were pretty high ( 9 out of ten i rated that...this one is a 5 and mainly for the effort and the victorian settings) Spoileralert; The fact that sherlock is in a high and actually relives the story set in victorian London doesn't it buy it for the viewer...it is just confusing and unsatisfactory In my opinion it would have been better to stick in the current time line as to go back in Victorian time and use sherlocks addiction to drugs to have him hallucinate the story of sherlock holmes in the victorian age( maybe his former life?sorry but many people doesn't believe in reincarnation)