 Tagline: A new sleuth for the 21st Century Disc 1: A Scandal in Belgravia (89 minutes [1:29]) Disc 1: The Hounds of Baskerville (88 minutes [1:28]) Disc 2: The Reichenbach Fall (88 minutes [1:28]) In A Scandal In Belgravia, Sherlock gets embroiled in the complex plans of the dangerous and desirable Irene Adler and finds himself employing every one of his remarkable skills to survive as the unlikely duo square off in a battle of wits. . .and perhaps emotions. The Hounds Of Baskerville whisks the increasingly popular detective and John to the wilds of Dartmoor, and face to face with the supernatural lurking in the eerie landscape. Meanwhile, Moriarty is still out there in the shadows, and is determined to bring Sherlock down - at whatever the cost - in The Reichenbach Fall. Storyline: In this modernized version of the Conan Doyle characters, using his detective plots, Sherlock Holmes lives in early 21st century London and acts more cocky towards Scotland Yard's detective inspector Lestrade because he's actually less confident. Doctor Watson is now a fairly young veteran of the Afghan war, less adoring and more active. Written by KGF Vissers 2.01 A Scandal in Belgravia - Following a bizarre stand-off with master criminal Moriarty, ended when the villain responds to a phone call, Sherlock interrupts his investigation of a rural slaying when summoned to Buckingham Palace. Dominatrix Shelock's brother, Mycroft Holmes, tells them that dominatrix Irene Adler has incriminating photos of a royal princess which Sherlock is engaged to retrieve. However, having engineered a meeting with Irene, Sherlock realizes that she has far more dangerous evidence in her possession, sought by rogue CIA agents, and which cause her to fake her death and pass the facts, encrypted in her camera phone, to Sherlock. Having deciphered the explosive result and discovered a government plot, Sherlock has to consider if Irene can be trusted and indeed if she is in league with Moriarty. --- Mycroft hires Holmes and Watson to retrieve compromising photos of a minor royal, which are held on Irene Adler's (Lara Pulver) camera phone, a ruthless and brilliant dominatrix who also trades in classified information extracted from her rich and powerful clients. Holmes obtains Adler's phone, but discovers it is booby-trapped and requires a code to disarm it. When Adler discovers that the CIA are on her trail, she disappears and is then apparently killed, only to reappear months later when the coast is clear. Adler manipulates Holmes into deciphering a coded message on her phone which she obtained from another well-connected client. She sends the message to Moriarty, who in turn uses it to foil a British counter-terror operation, before going underground again. The episode concludes as Mycroft tells Watson that she has been killed by a terrorist group in Pakistan. This is another lie: Sherlock helped her escape when she was on the brink of death. (Based on the short story A Scandal in Bohemia.) 2.02 The Hounds of Baskerville - A bored Sherlock decides to take on the case of Henry Knight, who claims to have seen the footprint of a gigantic hound in the woods. He also claims that 20 years before he had seen his father mauled to death by the creature. Holmes assumes that the source of the creature is the nearly Baskerville military research facility. Using his brother Mycroft's identity card, he and Watson gain access to the facility though his ruse is quickly found out. His faith in his abilities is shaken to the core when he too sees the creature, something that genuinely frightens him. He soon realizes that they've all described the beast in the same way. He learns of old experiments to develop drugs to make people more susceptible to suggestion but it leaves him far from a solution to the case. He decides to experiment with an unwitting Watson who also sees the beast and is terrified. --- Sherlock and Watson are contacted by Henry Knight, a man traumatized by the death of his father by a monstrous hound on Dartmoor years before. Investigating Dewer's Hollow, a local spot where the beast was allegedly seen, as well as the nearby Ministry of Defence testing site Baskerville, Holmes and Watson uncover a conspiracy wherein one of the Baskerville scientists, Dr. Frankland, is continuing the work of H.O.U.N.D., an aborted project to create a hallucinogenic gas for military use. Holmes and Watson discover that the legendary hound is an ordinary dog used for publicity that the hallucinogenic gas makes appear as a demonic monster. The "hound" that killed Henry's father was actually Frankland wearing a redlensed gas mask and a Tshirt bearing the logo of the H.O.U.N.D. group. Confronting both the dog and Frankland at Dewer's Hollow, Watson and Lestrade shoot the dog. Frankland attempts to flee, but dies when he runs into a minefield. In the final scene, Mycroft releases a confined Jim Moriarty. (Based on the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.) 2.03 The Reichenbach Fall - Moriarty comes close to stealing the Crown Jewels to prove it might be done but allows himself to be caught. Sherlock gives evidence at the trial where Moriarty has scared the jury into acquitting him and later visits Sherlock,camply taunting him with his superior computer skills,seemingly capable of any crime. Sherlock rescues two children abducted by his enemy but his brilliantly accurate deductions lead the police to believe that he may have been an accomplice in the kidnapping and he is arrested,going on the run with John. After a further encounter with Moriarty,who has persuaded a journalist to publish that he is an innocent actor paid by Sherlock to masquerade as his enemy for Sherlock's own glory,the two meet atop a very high building and Holmes decides that there is only one course of action left open to him. --- After a series of high-profile cases lead Sherlock to fame, Moriarty launches a simultaneous heist on the Tower of London, Bank of England and Pentonville Prison, for which he allows himself to be captured and put on trial. He secures a not-guilty verdict through blackmailing the jury and visits Holmes, explaining he still intends to "burn" him, taunting him with a "final problem" for him to solve. Soon afterwards, Moriarty arranges for the kidnapping of the children of an American ambassador, who are terrified of Holmes once he has them rescued. This, in conjunction with the ease with which Sherlock solves the case, leads to Holmes becoming a suspect. Holmes escapes arrest, and soon learns Moriarty is under the alias of an actor hired by Holmes, and has seeded the press with a story of Holmes being a fraud. The two meet on the roof of a hospital, where Moriarty explains that assassins will kill Watson, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade if Sherlock Holmes does not commit suicide; he wants Holmes to do this to cement his story. After a tense conversation, in which Moriarty realizes the two are enough alike that Sherlock could extract the code to call off the assassins from him, Moriarty shoots himself instead. Sherlock calls Watson and "confesses" to being a fraud (which Watson refuses to believe). Watson pleads for him to come down. Sherlock states his final "Goodbye" and then steps off the roof, leading to his vilification by the press. Watson and Mrs. Hudson meet alone at Sherlock's grave to say their goodbyes; the final seconds show Sherlock watching from afar, having faked his death. Moffat and Gatiss have stated that it was shown on screen how he survived, but that no one has yet figured it out. (Inspired by the short story The Final Problem. The title alludes to the Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock and Moriarty supposedly fall to their deaths in the original story.) Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Kenneth Brown on May 23, 2012 -- Unraveling Sherlock is as much fun as unraveling the titular detective's latest case. But God help you if you blink or walk out of the room without pressing pause. Current Doctor Who overmind and fan-favorite scribe Steven Moffat infuses every inch of he and co-creator Mark Gatiss' positively electric BBC series with endless wit and wile, making for a dizzying, at-times exhausting but ever-spellbinding trio of seemingly uncrackable cases that are every bit as good as the duo's first three episodes. As devious and delicious as Moffat and Gatiss' adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories and characters are, though, it's Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman that put Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in brilliant business, not just on screen, but in the 21st century, as if the world's greatest detective and his loyal companion were destined to traipse around modern day London from the very start. The soon-to-be-household names (who some of you will come to know as Bilbo Baggins and the Necromancer this December, and Bilbo and Smaug the next) don't flinch for a second either and stride headlong into the fray, outpacing and out-manuevering Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law at every turn. In "A Scandal in Belgravia," Sherlock gets embroiled in the complex plans of the dangerous and desirable Irene Adler and finds himself employing every one of his remarkable skills to survive as the unlikely duo square off in a battle of wits... and perhaps emotions. "The Hounds of Baskerville" whisks the increasingly popular detective and John to the wilds of Darkmoor, and face to face with the supernatural lurking in the eerie landscape. Meanwhile, Moriarty is still out there in the shadows, and is determined to bring Sherlock down, at whatever the cost, in "The Reichenbach Fall." It would be a mistake to dismiss Sherlock as a timely cash-in, or a series riding the wave of Guy Ritchie's splashy, dashy Sherlock Holmes feature films. It's neither, as the quality of its scripts and performances continue to attest. For the show's second season (or series if you prefer), Moffat and Gatiss tackle three of Doyle's more famous stories: "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Final Problem." But don't assume you have anything figured out, even if you're familiar with Doyle's works. Each episode is a loose adaptation, sure, but it's the manner in which Moffat and Gatiss twist and wriggle from daunting clue to daunting clue, dazzling deduction to dazzling deduction, that conceals whatever lies in wait around the next corner. It's difficult to predict a single Holmes reaction, much less the outcome and particulars of a case, and trying to do so is often a futile endeavor. It all comes together nicely, though -- plot holes and contrivances are few and far between -- and, whip-smart and demanding as the series tends to be, you needn't worry about getting lost. Aha! moments and grand revelations are satisfying and carefully dispersed, and the show's happy marriage of style and substance should keep both casual viewers and amateur detectives up to speed. After a bizarre, expectation-defying entrance at the end of the first season, Jim Moriarty (scene-stealer Andrew Scott), Holmes' nemesis, earns plenty of screentime, plucking Sherlock's feathers and toying with the detective to demented, altogether sinister ends. Not that stepping off camera amounts to an absence. Moriarty's presence permeates the air and knocks Sherlock off balance with startling regularity. If anything in the series could be labeled predictable, it's that Scott's wild-eyed madman will stick his twitchy fingers in any pie that could poison Holmes or harm those closest to him. But Moffat and Gatiss use that predictably -- that one known variable -- to introduce real tension and danger into the mix. It isn't as if they're going to ever kill off their title character, no matter what Watson suggests at the outset of "The Reichenbach Fall." But they can make poor Sherlock doubt himself, and they can make him suffer. Oh, how they make him doubt and suffer. Other would-be villains emerge too, first among them a wry dominatrix (Lara Pulver) with a knack for throwing Sherlock off his game, and there's never a sense that Holmes' is capable of staying one step ahead of everyone on the planet, much as he would like to believe. Not that Holmes and Watson take a back seat to the colorful supporting players, new or old. With origins and introductions out of the way, far more attention is devoted to Sherlock and John's relationship, as well as Holmes' relationships with his slimy bureaucrat of a brother Mycroft (Gatiss), morgue attendant Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), inspector Greg Lestrade (Rupert Graves) and the boys' landlady, the delightful Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs). With just three episodes, though, "The Hounds of Baskerville" wanders off into the woods on a wild goose chase and never comes back around. It's a solid mystery and the Holmes/Watson bickering and bantering is as amusing as ever, but too many sharp lefts make the ending convoluted and, like Season One's second episode, "The Blind Banker," it feels like a bit of a diversion. Especially when dropped in the middle of "A Scandal in Belgravia" and "The Reichenbach Fall," two blistering duels of the minds. In a normal ten or twelve-episode season, it would be a welcome diversion. But here, it wastes precious time and spins its wheels, bringing little to the table and even less to Holmes oft-strained friendship with Watson. If there's any consolation prize to be had it's that Moffat and Gatiss are still at the helm, and having a good deal of fun with a classic Sherlock Holmes tale. That said, the second season still delivers, leaving me with just one bit of unfinished business. The most frustrating part of penning a review of a BBC series, even one as outstanding as Sherlock, is knowing how many people will shrug off the recommendation and never give the show a chance, regardless of how enthusiastic said review might be. And it's a shame. The internet places almost everything at our fingertips, and yet voices are drowned out, high praise is lost in the crowd, and people brush past a release like Sherlock: Season Two without a passing thought. Word of mouth on the series is rapidly spreading, though. Glowing reviews continue to roll in. Buzz is swirling. International audiences are clamoring for more. And Cumberbatch and Freeman are poised to become A-list stars as The Hobbit and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek sequel materialize. Maybe Moffat and Gatiss' little-adaptation-that-could will round up even more fans than it already has. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see bigger, grander Sherlock seasons in the future. A third season/series is already in the works and, after that? Only time will tell what Moffat, Gatiss, Cumberbatch and Freeman have in store for Holmes and Watson in the great detective's addicting small-screen revival. Is Sherlock's second season better than its first? It's just as good, but better? Almost. "A Scandal in Belgravia" and "The Reichenbach Fall" set a new series bar, as do Cumberbatch, Freeman and the wickedly wild Andrew Scott, but "The Hounds of Baskerville" feels like a side story best reserved for another time. Even so, nothing -- and I mean nothing -- should prevent you from investing some serious time into Moffat and Gatiss' acclaimed Holmes adaptation. BBC Video's 2-disc set only helps. Even though its Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track isn't the lossless beastie fans were hoping for, it's more than serviceable, and its video presentation is excellent. An extra commentary and another production documentary or two would have been most welcome, but it hardly matters. If you've never seen an episode of Sherlock, there's no time like the present. If you have, well, I'm guessing this one is on your wish list, in your cart, or already resting comfortably in your collection. [CSW] -5.0- I say the rented DVD version on 09/14/2012. They finally got everything right so I purchased the Blu-ray version. Trivia:
Cast Notes: Robert Downey Jr. (Sherlock Holmes), Jude Law (Dr. John Watson), Rachel McAdams (Irene Adler), Mark Strong (Lord Blackwood), Eddie Marsan (Inspector Lestrade), Robert Maillet (Dredger), Geraldine James (Mrs. Hudson), Kelly Reilly (Mary Morstan), William Houston (Constable Clark), Hans Matheson (Lord Coward), James Fox (Sir Thomas Rotheram), William Hope (Ambassador Standish), Clive Russell (Captain Tanner), Oran Gurel (Luke Reordan), David Garrick (McMurdo). IMDb Rating (12/04/16): 9.2/10 from 527,046 users
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