Our First Look at the Sherlock Throwback Episode is Weirdly Meta

When the people behind the massively popular Sherlock TV series first announced they were doing an episode set in the original time period of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, I lamented at two things: first, one of the major appeals of the show was its modernization of the character, played to perfection by Benedict Cumberbatch. Second, this isn’t a fourth season, it’s a stalling tactic. Nevertheless, I and many others knew we were going to watch it without condition. Any Sherlock is good Sherlock, we presumed.

Here’s our first look straight out of Comic-Con.

The British are outsmarting themselves. I’m adding a third caveat to the list: self-awareness is not cute anymore. Let’s take a look at just some of the lines thrown out there in this one 90 second clip:

• Watson to ancillary character: “Well within the narrative, that is, broadly speaking, your function.”
• Ancillary character: “I’m your landlady, not a plot device.”
• Watson again: “Oh don’t blame the animator, he’s out of control. I’ve had to grow this mustache just so people would recognize me.”
• Sherlock: “I’m hardly in the dog one,” referring to Watson’s write-up of the case in The Hounds of Baskerville, a previous episode in the series, which featured an abnormal amount of screen time for Watson himself.

The hope is this clip is a deliberate appeal to the Comic-Con crowd and not completely indicative of the entire episode’s purpose. Nevertheless, let’s take it a step further and assume, for a moment, that it is.

The show has dabbled in meta-commentary before with Sherlock and Watson both deriding or being derided about, in their own ways, the public image of their character. Sherlock hated the hat and Watson tried out a mustache. Neither worked, on purpose. Now we’re getting an episode comprised, potentially, of an entire hour of trying to make that stuff work while also making fun of it. Where does the entertainment start and the commentary begin? Sherlock might be too popular for its own good. This is a bit like Downton Abbey adopting the script of a Spanish soap opera for an episode, because so few people would be able to tell the difference.

Though the tag at the end of the clip says the episode is coming soonish, the rumors and assumptions point to a holiday 2015 debut on the BBC. It should come to PBS and Netflix after that, as history would tell us.