SHERLOCKED

"I don't care how you faked it," screams out John Watson following Sherlock's return from the dead. Viewers who've just watched the first episode might as well share John's irritation, specially given that we still don't know how he did it! At least, not exactly! Two years we've waited. Countless theories and countless brain-scratching hours later, we still don't have a finite answer to how Sherlock managed to defy death after jumping off the roof of St Bart's Hospital.
The Empty Hearse, the first episode of Sherlock's third season after two long years came as a special New Year's gift for fans, and 9.2 million people in UK has watched it. The episode presents not one, not two, but thirteen ways in which the genius detective with an unimaginable eye for detail might have faked his own death (and kept Watson from finding out about it). But in the course of the episode, three of those ways are revealed to be impossible.
Viewers were made to wait until the very end of The Empty Hearse for the third solution, courtesy of Sherlock himself. From the inflatable crash mat hidden by a low building, to the cyclist who deliberately knocked John to the ground, buying time for Molly and members of Sherlock's "homeless network" to bloody up his “dead” body, this was indeed the version many fans had been expecting (albeit with a surplus corpse thrown in for good measure). But it's not the explanation that matters; it's how well Benedict Cumberbatch presented it.
More importantly, an amused Sherlock, when faced with a brushfire of questions, does not try to convince people if this was the real way he cheated death. And when John later asked him for the explanation he remained enigmatic, teasing "You know my methods". So was that last solution the correct one? "That's presuming, of course, that Sherlock Holmes would bother to tell the truth,” said Moffat. “We might still not know." Maybe the ambiguity is just part and parcel of the ultimately unknowable enigma that is Sherlock.
Fortunately for everyone, this wasn't the entire meat of the first episode as Holmes and Watson were reconciled to combat an underground terrorism network. From then on, it was all torches in dark tunnels, upturned collars and lots and lots of nifty editing as Holmes homed in on quite a bit of a bomb, and Watson continued to prove his peerless acting stripes, equal parts confusion, good intention, and deep indignation when said bomb turned out to have an off-switch.
Because of all of Watson's understandable, brooding resentment for much of the 90 minutes, a lot of the real pleasure in this episode in fact came from the jollier exchanges between the Holmes brothers, with both siblings proving that absence makes the heart grow more competitive... who can deduce more accurately? Who can say more words in one minute? Who can enunciate more c-c-r-r-i-sply? Wonderful stuff from both Cumberbatch and Gatiss. A challenge to keep up with, a joy to watch - there's a reason this kind of television takes two years to make. But oh, how we've missed it, and oh, how it was worth the wait!