“I’m the great Sherlock Holmes, I work alone ’cause no one can compete with my massive intellect!” – John Watson
A Chinese woman at a museum shows a small crowd how a tea ceremony keeps the teapots properly seasoned, and while she’s packing them up, another employee tries to ask her out. She turns him down, then goes into the back, where things get spooky. There’s something tall with a sheet over it, and she pulls the sheet and looks horrified, but we don’t see what it is. The game is afoot!
Sherlock is thinking and John is shopping, and then Sherlock is flighting a man with a sword and John is not shopping very successfully, and when he gets home, Sherlock is back to thinking and John decides that he needs to get a job because the bills are piling up. He tires to bring up the subject of borrowing some money, but Sherlock isn’t listening; he’s up and out, and they’re off on a new adventure.
A Sherlock’s bank — the biggest and most high-tech one in London — they talk to Sebastian, who went to school with Sherlock and is an insufferable jerk, but he tells them that someone broke into their former chairman’s office, graffitied the portrait and the wall, and did it in under 60 seconds without opening any of the doors. Sebastian offers them a huge fee to take the case, Sherlock ignores the check and takes it anyway, and John takes the check, since he needs it and he’s basically Sherlock’s interface with the rest of the world. They check out the crime scene and Sherlock discovers that because of the way the office is set up, only a very few people could have seen the mess, so it must be a message to someone who could, and he finds the one desk where it would have been clear: Edward Van Coon. They go to his apartment, trick their way in, and find champagne in the fridge and books on the shelf, and him dead on his bed of an apparent suicide, but the gun is in his non-dominant hand, and Sherlock is convinced that it was posed, but again, all the doors and windows seem to be intact. Sherlock says the wall graffiti was for him, and he took it as the threat it was and was waiting for the hit to come down, but they got him anyway.
This is all in the first ten or so minutes of the show.
A reporter locks himself in his room, but turns to see something horrible that we don’t see. The other museum employee, Andy, comes looking for the Chinese girl, Soo Lin, and finds out that she’s left unexpectedly. John applies for a job as part time help at a surgery, and he’s terribly overqualified, but they need the help and he wants the job, so Sarah hires him anyway.
They go to the (now dead) reporter’s house and find the same graffiti, open windows, and a book checked out the same day he died. At the library, they find where the book goes, and the marks are there, too. Sherlock figures it’s not just random marks, it’s a code of some sort, and they have to find out how the men were connected and who could scale not just the reporter’s apartment, but the high-rise bank. John goes to check out the reporter’s personal things and finds a diary and Sherlock goes over the man’s receipts and pieces together a trip with a big object and then a ride home on the tube without it, and both men wind up at the Lucky Cat Emporium. The marks are there on some of the objects– it’s an ancient counting system. Both men must have been smuggling something and one of them stole something, but the killer didn’t know which one. They find Soo Lin’s apartment and Sherlock breaks in, but is almost choked to death by the ninja-like killer as John waits for him to open the door. They head to the museum and look for Soo Lin but find Andy. More marks on her things. A graffiti artist they know leads them to a train station with more marks, and that leads them to a wall covered in them, which must be the cypher that makes the code make sense, but they only have the picture on John’s cell because the wall is entirely painted over when they get back only moments later.
They realize they need Soo Lin to crack the code, and Sherlock sees that the teapots are shinier than they were the day before, so they wait and catch her sneaking in to finish her work while she hides from the killer. She says she used to be one of them, but she’d left it behind until they came looking for her to find the smuggler. The killer is her brother, who still works for them. She starts to decipher the picture, tells them it’s based on a book, but he killer gets her, and they find her dead. They go back and look through all the books the two men had and try to find ones in common to see what the code means. By morning, they still haven’t done more than narrow it down, and John has to go to work, but sleeps through most of his shift, which is okay because Sarah likes him. She asks him out. Sherlock gives them tickets to a Chinese circus that’s in town, but he bought one for himself, too, and tags along, turning their date into part of the investigation. They’re attacked, but Sherlock finds paint matching the marks and confirms the gang connection. They go back to try and break the code, and while Sherlock is trying to get a cab to Soo Lin’s, john tries to get some food and gets captured; Sherlock comes back to find his whole apartment covered in graffiti, but he’s cracked the code and knows where to go.
The matron of the gang thinks John is Sherlock because he has the tickets, the check and Sherlock’s debit card on him, and won’t listen that he isn’t. She sets up a death trap like at the circus to get him to talk. Sherlock arrives just as they’re letting the timer go, and they have a big showdown where Sherlock and John free Sarah, the crossbow of the trap kills the murderer, and the Matron gets away. Sherlock is displeased that she did, but she’s next seen texting her benefactor “M” and promising that she won’t give him away — which she can’t, because she’s shot by a sniper.
This show is nonstop — from the beginning to the end, there’s always something going on, and it makes it hard to gloss for a quick recap, but amazingly interesting to watch. Steven Moffat’s cleverness comes through even when someone else is writing the episode, and the actors have their own, clear and brilliant, ideas of what and who the characters are. Watson is mostly in over his head, nowhere near as brilliant as Sherlock, but Sherlock can’t function in normal society and is sort of broken and therefore needs him. They connect in an odd way that’s part a perfect partnership, part the beginnings of a co-dependency, and part Sherlock needing someone to talk to so he can make sense of things– it’s like the entirely non-sci-fi version of the Doctor Who-Companion dynamic, and maybe that’s why Moffat can handle it so well.
This second episode is not as good as the first or the last, but it’s nevertheless wonderful to watch. Exciting, clever, confusing in a good way, and it makes perfect sense in the end, which is the best part of every version of Sherlock Holmes that has ever been made: the man is leaps and bounds beyond everyone else’s mental processes, but in the end, he makes it all make sense, and the killers are accounted for, if not exactly caught. It’s amazing to watch, amazing to experience. The show is addictive. Even on TV, where even PBS has to make room for a few commercials, the show is paced in such a way that you barrel through 80-odd minutes without it ever feeling like it’s too long. It could easily go longer and I’d keep watching it. And I can’t wait until next week, when they show the next episode.
Or next year, when the new season airs.
More thoughts on Masterpiece Mystery, “Sherlock: The Blind Banker”:
* Watson: “I’m not Sherlock Holmes!” Shan: “I don’t believe you.” Sherlock: “You should, you know. Sherlock Holmes is nothing at all like him. How would you describe me, John? Resourceful? Dynamic? Enigmatic?” Watson: “Late?”
* Sherlock is this brilliant mix of genius, arrogant, self-involved, easily confused by normal things, semi-savant-like in his dealings with the normal world, and somehow broken– he’s basically a sociopath, but one who uses his abilities to help people, even if it’s not really out of any need to ease someone’s suffering. He doesn’t know what to do with emotions other than annoyance and anger. He fakes whatever else is needed to get what he wants for his case, and it’s creepy as hell. And wonderful to watch.
* The filming is clean and artful, and it makes it more like a movie than a dinky old BBC show– and yet at the same time, it has that charming closeness that BBC always has and American shows somehow lack: it’s really a show about two people tring to do what makes them happy, and there’s a lot of the classic BBC standing-in-a-room-and-delivering-lines — which is, arguably, why it’s so dramatic, because when nothing else is going on, the acting has to be top-notch. This show never once falls into the funk of too much nothing happening, though. Silence and stillness are used to punctuate the action, to make the shocking parts so much more shocking. It’s like a gift to those of us who love well-made shows. Everything is thoughtful, as befits a show about Sherlock Holmes.
* And it’s genuinely funny in a lot of parts. The interplay between Holmes and Watson is literally sparkling. It dazzles. It makes you like them, even when Sherlock is not a very nice person and John is kind of lost most of the time. Casting was perfect for these two.
* If you close your eyes, sometimes Benedict Cumberbatch / Sherlock sounds like Alan Rickman — and that’s awesome, because there needs to be more voices like that around.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.