Sherlock 2.02 - The Hounds of Baskerville

Going to try for spoiler-free on this one. Overall -- that's more like it! I'm relieved it was solid. I'm really relieved it was solid. This was the ep of S2 I really hoped was going to be good, considering it was The Hound of the Baskervilles, and all in all it was a pretty decent adaptation of the theme of that story to a modern-day context; I guess it's turning out that I prefer the Gatiss episodes to the other writers, considering "The Great Game" was my last-season favorite. The pacing was just plain better than most Sherlock episodes and it unfolded something like a regular mystery rather than a Moffat Plot Twist Carnival, and didn't keep introducing new elements willy-nilly, which was good.

The character writing for Sherlock was considerably better than "Scandal" and gave BC an opportunity to give him a pretty wide variety of reactions and mannerisms -- it added to his watchability on whole. That said, uh, I realize a lot of people are jumping on Sherlock's actions this ep for being inappropriate, and it's not like they aren't, but I can't be the only one who thought John was rolled-a-natural-1-on-Diplomacy levels of mean?

Overall I agree with relia that the ep could've done better being a 120-minute movie than a 88-minute episode, so it reached about 70% of its potential as it is, but it's better than 30% or 10%. Sherlock really is the uneven series that can't decide whether it's written like a long-running show or a miniseries.