At
the end of the first season of Masterpiece’s
Sherlock Holmes reboot, the consulting detective came face-to-face with his
arch-nemesis, consulting criminal Jim Moriarty.
Now it is time to introduce the femme fatale. After getting a reprieve from the cliffhanger
ending season one, Holmes meets the incomparable Irene Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia, the first of
three new episodes making up Sherlock season
two, which premieres this Sunday on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery (promo
here).
Rest
assured, Moriarty is not done with Holmes.
For the time being though, Holmes is free to solve some very high
profile cases, including the recovery of a painting stolen from the American
ambassador, titled the Reichenbach Falls.
This will be significant later in season two. For now, it raises Holmes stature to such a
point, the British government requests the detective’s help recovering some
sensitive photos of a Royal from the cell phone of dominatrix Adler. As Homes fans know, this is no ordinary
scandalous woman. Holmes himself has no
idea what to make of her, partly because she receives the sleuth in the nude,
thereby robbing his keen powers of observation of any details to form
deductions from.
Right,
where were we? Something about Public Broadcasting? While always shot from discrete angles, Belgravia is pretty HBO for PBS. Each previous episode has modernized the
Doyle stories in clever ways, but the season two opener takes it to a new level. As Adler, Lara Pulver is the guest star to
beat all guest stars. Her chemistry with
the new Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, is appropriately weird but hot. Frankly, the re-conception of The Hound of the Baskervilles (as The Hounds of Baskerville), which many
fans have probably been eagerly anticipating, is something of a let-down by
comparison.
In
S2E2, there indeed appears to be a hound haunting the moors, but it seems to
involve a shadowy government research lab.
Compounding the disappointing clichés, the CIA factors somewhat vaguely in
the skullduggery. On the plus side, a
vegan restaurant also seems to be up to no good. Mostly importantly, it gives Rupert Graves a
bit of an opportunity to develop his Inspector Lestrade. Not a bumbling plodder in the Dennis Hoey-Eddie
Marsan tradition, he is a reasonably smart and charismatic fellow. In fact, Holmes might actually sort of-kind
of like the Scotland Yard man, at least as much as he can like anyone who is
not Watson or Adler.
As
it began, season two ends with one of the series’ best episodes overall. Making good on his promises, Moriarty returns
to wreck havoc on Holmes. Not content to
simply kill his rival, the super-villain sets in motion an elaborate plan to
thoroughly discredit the detective first.
The resulting affair takes Holmes to some very dark places—like Luther levels of psychological angst.
