“Take this as a friendly warning, my dear. Back off. Although, I have loved this, this little game of ours.”
- James Moriarty
We’ve reached the finale of series 1. I know it seems like three episode isn’t enough. Don’t worry; you’ll be getting recaps of series 2 courtesy of Jen very soon. We begin our final episode in Belarus in a prison. Sherlock is listening to a man explain what he did to end up there. He killed his girlfriend after he flirted with a waitress and she nagged him about. Sherlock isn’t interested. I have to say when he first spoke in this episode, he sounded exactly like Alan Rickman as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films. Next we see him, he’s in his bathrobe utterly bored and shooting at the wall in Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson won’t like that. John’s not overly fond of it either, nor of the severed head he’s just discovered in the fridge. But good news for his therapy, he’s written his first blog entry about the cabbie from episode 1. Sherlock didn’t like it though. They get into a somewhat heated argument over the fact that Sherlock doesn’t know the Earth revolves around the sun and John storms off, ending up at Sarah’s place for the night. Just after Mrs. Hudson chastises Sherlock about the wall, an explosion rocks the neighborhood and blows out the windows in the flat. John sees it the next morning on the news and races off. He finds Sherlock quite calmly sitting in the flat, plucking his violin and ignoring Mycroft. Apparently, Mycroft needs Sherlock’s help on a case of national security.
A man was murdered on the train tracks and Mycroft thinks he had a flash drive with sensitive data on it. Sherlock’s not interested. He gets distracted by Lestrad calling about a package found after the explosion. It was actually a bomb, not a gas leak like the news reports said. Inside the package is what he is supposed to believe is the phone from the first case but it’s not. It has a voice message with 5 beeps and a photo of a room. Sherlock immediately recognizes it as the downstairs flat at Baker Street, where they find a pair of sneakers. The pink phone rings just as Sherlock bends down to inspect them and a woman tells him that it’s a puzzle and Sherlock only has 12 hours to solve it or the woman dies. So Sherlock takes the shoes back to the lab at the hospital and is running analysis of the soles of the shoes when Molly shows up with her new boyfriend, Jim from IT. Jim seems rather taken with Sherlock and with a bit of sleight of hand leaves his number under a tray. Sherlock profiles him as gay and Molly storms off all upset. Sherlock tells John to examine the shoes and tell him what he sees. John gets a lot of information from just looking at the shoes, such as they were worn by a child and they were well loved. Sherlock adds in that the boy came to London from somewhere else and that something bad probably happened because he wouldn’t leave the shoes behind.
In the car on the way back to the flat, Sherlock has a breakthrough. The shoes belonged to a boy named Carl Powers who drowned in 1989. Sherlock remembered being intrigued by the case because the shoes weren’t found in the boy’s locker with the rest of his belongings. As Sherlock focuses in on the case, he sends John off to deal with Mycroft and the national security case. The big question there is how the victim got from his home to the train tracks without using thee train or other transportation. When John gets home, Sherlock’s cracked it. Carl was poisoned through his eczema medication. He posts the findings on his website and gets another call from the hostage, saying he’d solved it and gave the address of where she was. There isn’t much time to celebrate though because Sherlock gets another message and another photo. And another phone call giving him 8 hours to solve the new mystery. A business man’s gone missing. His wife provides a few helpful clues. He was depressed and since he hadn’t renewed the tax on their car, he had to hire one to get around. Sherlock and John are off to the car rental agency. Sherlock does a bit of deducing and discovers the rental agent is lying. He’s in the middle of examining the blood found in the car when the bomber calls him to give him a clue. With it, he solves the case. The businessman wanted out of financial trouble and so went to the car company who helped him get out of the country. The wife was in on it and collected the insurance money.
John and Sherlock manage to grab a quick bite to eat for breakfast when the next case comes in. A TV personality was found dead two days ago. Sherlock goes to the morgue to examine the body. Autopsy revealed that she died of tetanus but the cut on her hand (which the gardener said was the cause of the infection) is clean. Sherlock notes a couple of scratches on her arm and some injection points in her forehead. At least point, I think the infection came from either the scratches or her Botox injections. John goes to meet her brother and is accosted by the cat (hello cause of the scratch marks). Back at Baker Street, Sherlock is going over photos and checking out videos of the victim. The bomber calls again to tell him he has three hours. John calls with news. He thinks he’s figured it out and needs Sherlock to come be a distraction. John thinks it was the cat that infected her. Sherlock says it was the Botox injections. Apparently, the victim was going to disinherit her brother (the house boy’s employer) and so the house boy took her out. Unfortunately, when the bomber’s latest hostage calls back to get rescued, she makes the mistake of starting to describe the bomber’s voice. Another explosion happens and kills twelve people.
Sherlock is getting a little antsy that the bomber hasn’t called back with a new puzzle until finally he gets a picture of the river. He and John are off to investigate and after some deductions and some fact checking on his phone, Sherlock explains the victim was a gallery attendant and was killed by a Czech assassin. He thinks it’s related to a painting that was supposedly lost but then recently found. Sherlock deduces the painting is a fake and he and John grab a cab. Sherlock makes a stop to give a homeless woman some money and note and then he’s off to the gallery. He sends John to investigate the gallery attendant. John finds out that the attendant was an amateur astronomer and had gotten a message from a Professor Cannes the night he died. He also gets a text from Mycroft about the national security case. So John pops off to talk to the dead guy’s fiancée. She says that her fiancé was a good guy and wouldn’t betray his country to pay off debts. As John is leaving, he runs into her brother who is not happy with the level of police investigation. There’s something fishy about him.
Sherlock impersonate an attendant at the gallery and tells the curator that the paining is fake before disappearing. He and John later meet up and apparently he asked the homeless woman where to find the Czech assassin. They get to the tunnel where he’s hiding but don’t catch him. John has an idea of where the assassin is going. They can’t save the professor and they don’t stop the assassin from getting away. But the visit to the planetarium does hold the key to proving the painting is a fraud. Sherlock solves it with only a second left but the bomber’s latest hostage, a child, is safe. And Sherlock and John manage to solve the national security case, too. Sherlock’s been following John on it since the start. It was the brother. He got deep into dealing drugs and thought stealing the flash drive would fetch him some cash to pay off some debts. He didn’t mean to kill his future brother-in-law. Back at Baker Street, Sherlock is watching crap reality shows and John heads off for a night with Sarah. Sherlock is clearly growing antsy. He’s not had any contact from the bomber. So he sends a message. He wants to meet to exchange the flash drive (he’s already given the real one back to Mycroft) at a pool at midnight. He gets there and waiting for the bomber to reveal himself when John walks in wearing a big parka. I have to admit, the very first time I watched this episode, I couldn’t believe John was the bomber. Luckily, my first instinct was incorrect. In short order, Moriarty materializes and it’s Jim from IT. He’s quite pleased with himself for luring Sherlock out. But after some witty genius banter that probably passing for some type of flirting for him is over, he promises to burn Sherlock one day (foreshadowing much?) and leaves. Sherlock has enough time to rip the parka (and the bomb) off John before Moriarty reappears and says he was kidding. He’s going to kill Sherlock and John now. Sherlock has other plans. He spins around and points his gun at the bomb on the ground and then we cut to black. What a way to leave the first series. I hope they knew they’d be back for series 2 at that point.
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