Apologies to all you Yanks if this hasn't aired for you yet! You have been warned.

In trying to get away from my obsession on here I decided to watch Sherlock with my dad last night. I absolutely loved the show when I was younger, one of the most clever murder mystery shows and adaptations on the character I'd seen for a long time. Both Blobbydong Cucumbersnatch and Martin Freeman were on form and likeable, the Mind Palace was a brilliant concept to show us mere mortals what a real high functioning sociopath's thought processes were like (most reds are wannabe sociopaths) and SPOILER

Moriarty was chilling of course. I'm tempted to say it's better than RDJ and Jude Law's film adaptations (man I wish they'd had more of them...)

Well it turns out that gender roles and women fighting against le patriarchal norms is actually a key plot point in the Christmas special! So much for no redpill shit tonight, the feminist imperative is everywhere! bangs head on table

SPOILERS

  • The maid jokingly complains to Watson "why do you never talk about me?" [In his accounts of his adventures with Holmes, an obvious nod to the classic books.] "Well, according to you, all I do is show people up the stairs and serve you breakfast"

IMDB quotes

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3845232/quotes?ref_=m_tt_trv_qu

Sherlock Holmes: [shouting to Mrs. Hudson who is downstairs] Good Lord. Mrs Hudson, there is a woman in my sitting room. Is it intentional?

Mrs. Hudson: [replying from downstairs] She's a client, said you were out, insisted on waiting.

Dr. John Watson: Would you, uh... care to sit down?

Sherlock Holmes: Didn't you ask her what she wanted?

Mrs. Hudson: You ask her!

Sherlock Holmes: Why didn't you ask her?

Mrs. Hudson: How could I, with me not talking and everything?

Sherlock Holmes: Oh.

[to Dr. Watson]

Sherlock Holmes: For god's sake, give her some lines, she's perfectly capable of starving us.

  • Early scene involves Watson's wife ranting at him for being involved in the second Anglo-Afghan War *1878-80. Then says she feels under-appreciated by the men in her life. When an inspector from Scotland Yard comes in with the case details of the main mystery, she tells him as he's leaving, "by the way, I'm part of a club you know. Votes for women." He says, "I see-and you, for or against?" to which she of course coldly stares and says "Get out." I mean, I get it, suffragists on the rise and that…

  • The episode is called 'The Abominable Bride'. Main mystery is of a bride jilted at the altar who goes crazy with grief and heartbreak, causes a scene with twin pistols then shoots herself in the mouth. Her 'ghost' comes back from the dead and kills her fiancée who abandoned her as revenge, then disappears. Proceeds to go around killing specific men. They try and figure out who the ghost is.

  • In the morgue of the bride and groom, the morgue attendant is clearly being played by Sherlock's contemporary forensic scientist with a nice little bowler hat and big 'tache for comic effect. She fell in love with him in the present, but being a logic-lover and all, and in love with The Woman (Irene Adler) he had to walk away. Her character has a heated exchange with Watson at one point about Watson just being Sherlock's pathetic side-kick, where Watson says "well, I'm sure you'd know all about that wouldn't you-being the little guy in a man's world."

  • Another scene where Watson calls in a maid while he has lunch or dinner. Watson proves himself as this stiff-upper-lip conservative gentleman of days past (being a veteran of course), but part of being conservative is apparently talking down to women. He frequently tells her words to the effect of stop being cheeky, know your place and such. Plot twist: he has to say "If you persist then I will have a word with my wife who will have a word with you!" So, obvious Watson is a whipped Yesdear to his wife joke 1!

  • Another scene where Mycroft (who is now apparently morbidly obese and eating himself to an early grave for shits and giggles) says that Holmes and Watson are fighting "An enemy you should not want to defeat." Cue Watson listing, "Socialists? The French? Suffragists?"

  • One of the victims of the bride's wives also proves herself to be more socially savvy and resistant to the bride's nightmare fuel than her hubby, despite him being patronising to her earlier on.

IMDB:

Sherlock Holmes: Your wife can see worlds where no-one else can see anything of value whatsoever.

Sir Carmichael: Can she really? And how do you "deduce" that, Mr. Holmes?

Sherlock Holmes: She married you. I assume she was capable of finding a reason.

  • Events occur which means that old-school Sherlock gets snapped back to 2014-6 Sherlock on the plane. In the present day, Watson's wife (being spoilers ex-CIA) is yet AGAIN proven to be badass. We see her casually by-passing MI5 security to figure out the whereabouts of the bride's corpse. More IMDB quotes:

Mycroft Holmes: I have access to the top level of the MI5 archive.

Mary Morstan: [already looking at that archive via her phone] Yep, that's where I'm looking.

Mycroft Holmes: What do you think of MI5 security?

Mary Morstan: I think it would be a good idea.

Later, Watson says to Sherlock "right, I'm taking Mary [his wife]" home. Mary says, "I'm sorry?" He say, "Mary's taking me home." She says "better" and they walk off with her leading. Obvious John is whipped gag2 , obligatory women can lead too you know reference in the bag!

  • Back in 1880s land, Mary's period counterpart leads ; a cult! Sherlock, Watson and Mary follow the cult and...guess who it is...the suffragists. The whole bride fiasco was the suffragists.

Sherlock Holmes: Every great cause has martyrs. Every war has suicide missions and make no mistake, this is war. One half of the human race at war with the other. The invisible army hovering at our elbow, tending to our homes, raising our children. Ignored, patronised, disregarded. Not allowed so much as a vote. But an army nonetheless, ready to rise up in the best of causes. To put right an injustice as old as humanity itself. So you see, Watson, Mycroft was right. This is a war we must lose.

  • In what I'm not sure whether it's a clever turn of events or a total cop-out, the show goes really meta. It turns out that Sherlock is on the plane with Watson, Mycroft et. al. where we left him at the end of series 3, in his Mind Palace, trying to solve The Abominable Bride case so that he can figure out how to defeat Moriarty in the present (who it was implied in the series 3 cliff-hanger had returned from the dead). Then in a final twist, the actual whole story was basically 1880s Sherlock getting high and imagining the future plus his future counterpart...and then yet again messing with us, as he looks out of the window into a present-day London. Dafuq?

I thought this was good fun, but clumsy compared to the average standard of all 9 other Sherlock episodes, which were each and every one, frankly outstanding. I'm seriously not sure whether they were told by the BBC controllers that being on New Year's Day, they had to tame the content down for the spin-off and give kids a history lesson on late Victorian England society while we're at it. As for the 'Grrlpower!' message, well it's practically superliminal by this point guys. Idk, I support gender equality in principle contrary to what my flair states, but I’m getting tired of these messages being shoe-horned in to all my favourite pop-cultural past-times (because this isn’t the first-the new Star Wars and the MCU would be other examples I can think of off the top of my head.) I'm beginning to think [we should really follow the wisdom of Morgan Freeman in relation to -isms; stop talking about them so much!] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMGfhXCpN2k)

Finishing on a positive note for my rant, this episode did contain 2 of my favourite quotes of 2016! :)

Dr. John Watson: [being furious with Sherlock] I'm an army doctor, which means I could break every bone in your body while naming them.

DI Lestrade: Mrs. Hudson didnt't seem to be talking. Sherlock Holmes: I fear she has branched into literary criticism by mean of satire. It is a distressing trend in the modern landlady.

What were your thoughts on the episode if you watched it, did it work? More broadly speaking, is the media trying too hard to push the message of 'women are men's equals'? Is it becoming so self-referential to SJW-ism that it's becoming a parody of itself? Was this their intention? (If so, that's quite ingenious PR.)