Despite a Few Too Many Twists, “The Lying Detective” Gets Sherlock Back on Track
(Episode 4.02)
Courtesy of Ollie Upton/Hartswood Films & MASTERPIECE
Each season of Sherlock tends to follow a pattern. If the first episode reorients the stakes of the series—the pilot, of course, introduced Sherlock, Season Two’s “A Scandal in Belgravia” threw Irene Adler into the mix, and the third season saw the “resurrection” of Sherlock—then the second usually puts Sherlock in a potentially unwinnable situation. Be it facing down a seemingly supernatural foe in “The Hounds of Baskerville” (recall Sherlock’s agitated, rapid-fire deductions at the pub while unwittingly under the influence of a fear-inducing drug), or taking on the Herculean task of giving the best man speech at John’s wedding (“The Sign of Three”), second episodes carry the potential to defeat Sherlock. For Season Four, Sherlock’s episode two foe looks, at first, to be a serial killer, the enemy du jour of the contemporary crime drama. But Sherlock’s true, nearly insurmountable mission turns out to be reuniting with a shaken John.
Mary is gone, but she’s still very much on John’s mind—she appears to him as an apparition only he can see. Though he fails to mention Phantom Mary to his new therapist, it’s the least of his problems at the moment, as someone (presumably Sherlock, but more on that in a moment) crashes his session. Literally, that is: a red sports car pursued by police cars and helicopters.
Flashback to three weeks prior: Sherlock is also reeling from Mary’s death, and the added loss of John from his life. He’s back on heroin, this time on much higher doses than we’ve ever seen him take before. The tables in his apartment are riddled with syringes, he’s got some kind of meth lab running out of his kitchen, he hasn’t showered or shaved in days and, most distressing of all, Sherlock’s mind has gone a little nutty. As illustrated by his behavior with new client Faith Smith, there’s a lag between his observations and his ability to deduce helpful information from it.
Faith comes to Sherlock with an intriguing mystery: a hastily scrawled note from three years ago, upon which she copied down the vague details of a murder confession given by her father, entrepreneur and philanthropist Culverton Smith (a suitably creepy Toby Jones), before her memory was forcibly wiped by an experimental anaesthetic used in the hospital funded by her father. Yes, it’s convoluted, but the density of the mystery doesn’t end there. Sherlock muddles through the clues, coming to suspect Culverton of being a serial killer. The constant stream of heroin in his veins ups his paranoia, and by the time he reaches out to John three weeks later, he’s fully obsessed with exposing Culverton to the world, his apartment wallpapered with every news story and photograph of the suspected killer—an unsettling shrine to a murderer. The entire episode is edited to mirror Sherlock’s manic state, with snippets of Culverton’s various media appearances flashing by throughout the runtime.