Sherlock Episode 2 Season 4 : "THE LYING DETECTIVE" Recap and Unsolved Mysteries

Before I speak anything about the episode, I just want to thank Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat for this wonderful adaptation of the world's most famous detective. Now coming back to the episode, great pacing, beautifully shot and so many twists and turns, it felt like roller-coaster ride. A lot of credit for this also goes to the direction.

So careful for spoilers, if you haven't seen the episode yet.

This was proper Sherlock- a dark story drawing real-life parallels and of course, Mrs Hudson is speeding in a sports car. As i said before the episode was amazingly shot specially the scenes where John Watson is hallucinating his dead wife, Mary. The episode had a perfect dark villain, a beloved public figure- Culverton Smith, a business man and philanthropist who uses his power and fame to commit monstrous crimes. He is very well described by Sherlock,"the most dangerous and despicable human being I have ever encountered". Smith regularly confesses to his crimes, deriving pleasure from doing so, but after he divulges his sins he wipes the memories of his confidants, administering them with a drug that causes some sort of amnesia. This was the only part of the episode that felt hammy to me, a bit of sci-fi trickery that doesn’t make sense if you think about it too much. 

 At the start of the episode, we see Smith’s daughter try to scrawl what she can remember of the confession before her father takes the paper from her hands.

Somehow, she retrieves it and brings it to Sherlock, who, following Mary’s death, is in the midst of a bout of extreme drug abuse, his powers of observation partly blinkered. Perhaps because he is feeling analytically rusty, Sherlock suddenly seems able to feel pity. He takes Faith, who he believes to be suicidal, out for chips and agrees to tackle her case (although he also has a bit of fun telling Mycroft, who is tracking him via drone, to “fuck off”, by spelling out the letters in the walking route they take).

Mycroft doesn’t have too much else to do here, except get hit on by Lady Smallwood and make more references to Sherrinford, his no-longer-very-secret sibling.

Meanwhile, a grief-stricken John is receiving therapy and being visited by Mary. John spends an awful lot of time grief-stricken, doesn’t he? Remember the hissy fit he pulled when he thought Sherlock had died? Well this time, he is refusing to talk to Sherlock and has closed himself off emotionally, unable even to look after his daughter. It’s down to Mrs Hudson to kidnap Sherlock in the boot of her sports car, bring him to John’s therapist’s house, and force the game to become afoot. Sherlock shows John that he predicted everything about his own kidnapping two weeks earlier as a means of demonstrating his sound mind and the urgency with which they need to deal with Smith, who Sherlock has since worked out is one of the most grotesque serial killers ever to walk this earth.

There’s a lot of back and forth over what are Sherlock’s genius deductions and what is heroin-addled nonsense. When Faith turns up, he realizes she is an entirely different woman from the one who turned up at Baker Street and doubts are cast over his theory. But eventually Sherlock, beaten by his own addiction, ends up in a bed at Smith’s hospital. It turns out that Smith had the ward built especially so he can creep into patients’ rooms and murder them. Sherlock knew that was his fate, and tells Smith he doesn’t want to die but knows he must let himself be killed. There are particularly sinister scenes while Smith is drugging and strangling Sherlock, demanding that Sherlock keep looking him in the eye as he dies.

Back at Baker Street, John has discovered Mary’s message to Sherlock from last week’s episode. Seen for the first time in full, we learn that Mary demanded Sherlock to “go to hell”, to allow himself to be in such danger that John would be forced to save him (hence the heroin addiction and willingness to be murdered by Smith). With this, Watson races to the hospital, of course saving Sherlock in the nick of time.

‘Oh he’s making a funny face, I think I’ll put a hole in it'

But the fun barely stops there. In a lengthy epilogue, we learn Irene Adler is still alive and still sexting with Sherlock, especially on his birthday. John admits his infidelity to his hallucination of Mary, something his imagined version of his wife immediately forgives him for (what are the chances). Then, in the final twist, it seems John’s therapist knows slightly more than she should about Sherlock’s secret sibling. John calls her out on it, and the reveal begins: she is Sherlock’s secret sister Euros and, in various disguises, was also the woman John met on the bus, and the “Faith” that first met Sherlock, providing him with the note that began the whole case. She says that she was given Faith’s original note, which Smith stole as soon as it was written, “by a mutual friend”. So does that mean Smith was involved in the plot from the start, or just that they are in some kind of criminal mastermind club? And could that mutual friend be Moriarty?

Also, are we to assume that Sherrinford is somehow Euros? “Didn’t it ever occur to you that Sherlock’s secret brother could be a secret sister?” as she puts it. 

I personally loved this episode because not only it was stand out 90-minutes movie itself but it also sets up the final episode of this season with stakes so high. Assuming that Euros is as smart as her brothers, this will be war of wits that you don't want to miss.

Mysteries unsolved

• 1. When Sherlock first meets “Smith’s daughter”, he makes deductions that she has been in a very small kitchen with no visitors, hiding the paper in a book to avoid it being discovered by her lover. Perhaps the small room was actually a cell, and the lover some kind of prison guard.

• 2. Euros explains to John her name means “the east wind”. We know from His Last Vow that Mycroft used to tell Sherlock a story about “the east wind coming to get him”. It used to terrify him. But perhaps Mycroft used the story to make Sherlock forget about the real east wind, and what she did to him.

• 3. There’s something odd going on with Lady Smallwood. Previously she’s been “Elizabeth Smallwood” but on the card she left for Mycroft she was “Alicia Smallwood”.

• 4. I’ve often thought there was more to Miss Me, Moriarty’s oft-repeated posthumous coda. Perhaps now realizing it’s an acrostic: Mycroft, Irene (Adler), Sherlock, Sherrinford, Moriarty, Euros.

5. Mycroft has been keeping in regular contact with Sherrinford, so either Sherrinford is a code name, or they are in cahoots, working together to do Moriarty’s bidding. Or is there actually a fourth Holmes still to be discovered? As Sherlock says here, people always give up looking after three.

Comment below what you think of this episode.