Season 2 of Stephen Moffat’s Sherlock is done and over with. And, while it didn’t end on a cliffhanger, it is still a bit of a mystery that needs to be revealed. The stories that were adapted for this set were A Scandal in Bohemia, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Final Problem. As with the first season, the first and third were the strongest with a disappointing second episode and the final episode is focused on Moriarty. So let’s discuss what went right and what went wrong with Season 2 after the jump.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was a problematic episode for me because Sherlock doesn’t seem to work well with high-tech thriller and he really was a giant dick to Watson when Watson was running around the lab scared. It just never clicked and seemed like a decent idea with the wrong cast in place. I wasn’t thrilled with some of the plot mechanisms either. It seemed like Sherlock and Watson would have had a much harder time getting into the base (rather than just by flashing Mycroft’s ID around) and probably would have been in jail for quite a while for doing so.

The first episode was wonderful and the fact that Sherlock had an opponent who has just as smart as him, only with a different set of…talents. Lara Pulver was amazing as the dominatrix who had information that everyone wanted. And I thought she handled the situation much, much better than Sherlock did. It was kind of fun to see Sherlock flustered and confused as opposed to his usual know-it-all attitude.

The last episode was a bit of a mess. I love Andrew Scott as Moriarty and he was wonderful when he played the not-Moriarty actor. He changed his entire set of mannerisms and pulled it off successfully. Having said that his suicide was silly and the whole plan was fairly inconceivable. This isn’t the 1900s any more, it is extremely difficult to create a brand new person and fake events (newspaper articles, dated money transfers, etc.). Almost every banking system keeps logs upon logs of what happened and when it happened. I’m not saying it would be impossible to make it look like Sherlock was paying someone to be Moriarty, but it wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny. In addition, there were numerous articles created as to Moriarty’s “real name”. Any archive of newspapers in a library or similar storage would quickly and easily dismantle the story. But once you get past the implausibility of the main plot, I enjoyed the story.

I’m looking forward to the further adventures with Moffat telling many more stories.