Disclaimer: DO NOT proceed reading this article if you have not watched all four seasons of Sherlock. This article contains SPOILERS, and might therefore ruin your viewing experience.

The fourth season of BBC's popular crime drama Sherlock was completed January 15th, 2017. Although it has been almost two months, I think that this remarkable season deserves some more attention.

Firstly, let's take a brief look at the show as a whole. BBC's Sherlock is based on the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes in the late 1800s. BBC's version, which is set in modern time, first aired July 2010. The show is written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (who also stars in the show as Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes!).

The show's lead characters, Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Doctor John Watson, are portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Throughout a total of 13 episodes, we've seen this iconic duo solve a number of challenging and often life-threatening crimes.

Now, on to the topic of discussion - season four. I'll start by summarizing the main events of each of the three episodes through a bullet point list.

Episode 1: The Six Thatchers

• Mary and John's baby, Rosamund Mary, is born.
• Sherlock solves a case involving the unexpected death of the son of a Conservative cabinet minister.
• A former member of A.G.R.A, Ajay, is looking to kill Mary.
• Ajay was, in fact, looking for Lady Smallwood, but had mistaken Mary to be his target.
• Vivian Norbury kills Mary.
• Sherlock finds a DVD with a posthumous message from Mary, where she urges him to save John.

Episode 2: The Lying Detective

• Sherlock and John remain distant after Mary's death.
• John is seeing a new therapist and hides the fact that he sees hallucinations of Mary.
• A prominent entrepreneur and philanthropist, Culverton Smith, confesses to a group of close colleagues - including his own daughter - that he is going to kill someone. He then forces the group to subject to a medical serum that causes them to forget his confession.
• The daughter, Faith, reaches out to Sherlock for help. She is able to remember fragments of the event that she wrote down shortly after being drugged.
• Sherlock becomes obsessed with Smith, who is giving subtle hints of being a serial killer.
• Sherlock puts his own life in danger as a part of an elaborate plan to expose Smith. This also compels John to rescue him, thereby "saving" himself like Mary asked, and mending their friendship.
• In John's next therapy session, it is revealed that his therapist and Faith are the same person - none other than Sherlock's and Mycroft's secret sibling, Eurus Holmes.

Episode 3: The Final Problem

• A young girl wakes up on an airplane, due to a phone ringing. She picks up and hears Moriarty announce "Welcome to the Final Problem."
• Mycroft reveals that Eurus was sent away to a mental institution, Sherrinford, after she burned their family home.
• Sherlock, Mycroft, and John travel to Sherrinford.
• Mycroft reveals that five years ago, Eurus was granted five minutes of unsupervised conversation with Moriarty as a Christmas present.
• Eurus forces Sherlock, Mycroft and John into a series of tormenting psychological games, resulting in the death of several people - in order to save the girl on the plane.
• Sherlock wakes up near his old home and helps the girl safely land the plane.
• Sherlock realizes that Redbeard was not a dog, but his friend Victor Trevor, who Eurus murdered as a child because she felt left out of Sherlock's attention.
• The girl on the plane was a mental metaphor Eurus used as a cry for help.
• Sherlock succeeds in sending Eurus back to Sherrinford, where he now visits her regularly to play violin together.

As the summary proves, the fourth season of Sherlock is no less action-packed what we've seen from this spectacular show before. Also, it sparked quite an emotional response to once again witness John experience the loss of a loved one (and for real this time!). Personally, I found the result of Eurus' and Moriarty's five-minute conversation quite terrifying - and the showdown between the Holmes' siblings (with John in the middle of it all) was nerve-wracking to watch.

Yet, season four was not all perfect. With Sherlock being a genius of deduction, it simply doesn't add up that he didn't recognize John's therapist and Faith to be the same person - considering the fact that Eurus used quite a simple disguise. The ending of The Final Problem was also somewhat ... anti-climactic? Although Eurus' mental metaphor was clever writing, I feel like the episode might have deserved a more spectacular ending. But that might just be me.

Altogether, I think Gatiss and Moffat created another masterpiece. A fifth season is confirmed to have been plotted by the writer duo, but they have not yet decided whether or not to produce it. If not, I can gladly accept season four as a worthy finale to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson.

Would you like Gatiss and Moffat to produce the fifth season of the show?

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