The fatal flaw in "Abominable Bride."

Massive Sherlock Christmas Special spoiler ahead.

Having slept on last night's episode of Sherlock, letting the brain digest the whole thing, I awoke with the conviction that there was only one flaw with "The Abominable Bride."

Just one.

I mean, sure, it was a bit of a lark. But we had a bit of a lark or two last season, which was met with mixed fan reaction. And the promos had prepared us for a Sherlock and John set in Victorian times. An alternate universe version. We were totally ready for that. AUs are common these days.

But here's the big problem I found with the way it was handled: I think what we saw last night was a writer too used to doing Doctor Who, a fantasy series where you can get away with any outlandishness, trying to bring a fantastic mechanic to what was, at least to some degree, a more "real world" series.

Truly, the episode might have as well been the "never going to do it" Dr. Who crossover.

Sherlock's "mind palace" gimmick got pushed to what I thought was it's furthest limit in "His Last Vow" in season three. Boy, was I wrong. Using it as the "it was all a dream" way for a modern Sherlock to solve a Victorian Sherlock case . . . too far. Too damned far.

And to even pretend that some magical drug concoction helped make that dream possible?

While I've never been a fan of the "Sherlock Holmes, drug addict detective" route, when it is done, drug addiction is a topic to be taken seriously, not used as a part of a fantasy lark episode. And for those magic drugs to make this magic-mind-palace Sherlock come up with Watson publishing short stories in The Strand Magazine at a time when serialized novels were the thing was pretty much the equivalent of Victorian Sherlock dreaming up an accurate replica of a Lear jet (or whatever brand that private plane was -- sorry, out of my price range).

Had they left out all the modern-day attempts to tie the episode in to the current storyline, I think I would have been completely satisfied with "The Abominable Bride." I was enjoying the Victorian romp for what it was, until the attempt to "it was all a dream" shoehorn it into the series continuity happened.

If only the creators had followed the gist of Holmes's "It is never twins!" comment. It should never be "all just a dream" either.

Must we be so many, all at once?

Today has been an interesting day. Corned beef and cabbage with my favorite aunt. A game of words with the accusation that only two of us were really playing each other. And then, the intrusive awareness that everyone else in the world was watching a certain television show.

Where gleeful anticipation should have been, there was the cautious avoidance of social media once the scheduled time across the Atlantic had come. There were the many reminders, when such caution was ignored for a moment or two, that one could have all of the company one wanted while watching said show. And then, even as the broadcast was taking place, the imagined version of what was happening on Twitter as the play unfolded.

"All that I have to say has already crossed your mind."

"Then possibly my answer has crossed yours."

I may not be Sherlock, and you may not be Moriarty, but both of us have a pretty good idea what references will be cited, what fan service will get a gush, once we've been in this realm long enough.

Even now that BBC Sherlock's "The Abominable Bride" has played, and anyone who could possibly see it has seen it, it doesn't even seem necessary to review it. So many reviews are being typed, have been typed, or shall be verbalized on podcasts. And so many are more politician than legitimate critic any more . . . "If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all" is the new eleventh commandment, the twenty-eighth amendment to the American constitution (unless you're one of those comment trolls -- comment sections are the new lawless Wild West, of course). And who wants to do all the spoiler warnings called for these days, anyway.

Tonight, it felt not just like the makers of BBC Sherlock had set their sites on jumping an impossible shark with the Christmas special, but that fandom was perhaps making the jump as well. The success of any fiction lives or dies on its ability to completely pull one in to its reality, however fantastic, and make one forget that there is a fourth wall, even when a character breaks it. One has to leave the world as we know it behind and dive deep into the world presented. There's a reason we shut off cell phones in theaters -- so the real world can't wake us from the dream. Feeling the presence of the rest of the Sherlockian world watching alongside me tonight could be looked at as some weakness in the narrative . . . or possibly the state of fannish global warming.

It will be interesting to see how the theater experience stacks up Thursday night. But all in all, I'm thinking I found the pressure-free experience of the annual Dr. Who Christmas special much more relaxing this year.

The room wasn't quite so crowded for that one.

Old man Watson.

Things may have changed a little bit in the latest generation of Holmes/Watson pairings, but if you look back through the past century, you'll notice an ongoing theme: John H. Watson as an old man.

Sure, Sherlock Holmes isn't all that young himself. TV and movies of the past seems to be all aged white guys. But Watson, good old Watson, always seems a little older. (And in one or two notable cases, practically suffering from dementia.) And there's a certain sense to that, when you think about it.

Part of John H. Watson's role is to stand next to Sherlock Holmes and admire his genius and energy.

Put two early-twenties males side-by-side and you're going to get a testosterone battle, even between friends. They're chemically charged for competition. For one friend to just accept that the other is a superior specimen is not that easy a go.

Put Holmes at 30 and Watson at 50, and the balance quickly changes. Their primal natures aren't subconsciously competing to impress the female of the species any more, and the elder of the pair can actually look at the younger with a pride at what the younger accomplished. There is a naturalness to having an older Watson that makes his job easier. Just look at the amount of conflict between Downey and Law playing younger, more vital Holmes and Watson. It isn't just because Holmes is so "eccentric." It's in part because they are peers, seeing each other with an eye that says "why can't you be more like me?"

One might argue that the Watson who meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet was not an old man, but remember such lines as this: "My health forbade me from venturing out unless the weather was exceptionally genial." John H. Watson may have not been old in years, but he war wound and subsequent illness, to say nothing of battle experience itself, had aged him much in spirit.

Is it a mere coincidence that many a classic Sherlockian of old seemed to blossom more fully in Holmes fandom at a later age? At a time when it might be more natural to admire the energy of a younger Sherlock Holmes with the pride of an older kinsman who recognizes something of himself in the next generation? The love of a younger Watson didn't really start to play into Sherlockian fandom nearly so heavily until the massive female Sherlockian spike that came with BBC Sherlock. The feminine view of an ideal Watson is quite a different thing than that of the male. Of course, he's younger!

Yet our heritage of old man Watsons lives on in our past, if maybe not so much in our futures. But he'll be back, as we head into a day when Watsons, like Sherlocks, come in all genders, ages, shapes, and sizes.

"The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up," as a very wise man once said.

Don't take Sherlock's job, Americans!

Here's a disturbing headline: "7 out of 10 Americans want Sherlock Holmes's job."

Look, I love my countrymen as much as the next guy, but come on, America. Seventy percent of you are not capable of doing Sherlock Holmes's job. I'd also wager that seventy percent of you couldn't actually give a fair assessment of what Sherlock's job actually is/was. Sure, it looks like a lot of laying around the couch all day, but there's some serious brainwork going on there. Necessary brainwork.

As a human being in the potential client pool for a modern day Sherlock, I'm sticking with the guy who trained himself in observation, deduction, criminal history, tobacco ash, perfumes, disguise, code-breaking, boxing, inner role-play, the city of London, chemistry, anatomy, brain storage, stimulants, etc., etc., etc., and NOT hiring an American from the 70%. The rest of you 30% who surely include much of my canny readership, well, we shall discussion qualifications. But I warn you . . . I do know what the real deal is when I see it, and I really want to hire Sherlock Holmes.

The fact that these same people polled would want to have been taught by Charles Xavier or Albus Dumbledore also makes a certain statement: They have a death wish. Both of those fictional schoolmasters have an unreasonably high death rate among their student bodies.

So do we want a bunch of suicidal Americans who have probably watched more Elementary than they have read Conan Doyle charging into the consulting detective business? Hell, no!

That 70% also picked Sherlock's job over Richard Castle from TV's Castle, most likely due to pure name recognition, but perhaps they even realized that Castle was a best-selling author as well as a mystery-solver . . . which means they'd have to spend time writing things, in addition to solving things. Extra work!

Which gets me to the real point in all this: Apparently Sherlock Holmes has made detective work look very easy over the last 123 years. People seem to look at it as an exciting, high-pay, high-respect, low-effort career choice. I suspect the first time they smelled that room full of flies that contained Black Peter's harpooned corpse, they might change their mind. Or if they had to put in the time, focus, and study to achieve Holmes's skill set, even if they were born with a Holmes-level I.Q.

To magically be Sherlock Holmes, with all the skills and insights, is one thing. Just to take on his job?

Don't do it, America. If you think I was a tad insulting about that prospect in this blog, you really don't want to see the one I write when you do take Holmes's job.

A possible element from one Sherlockian's primordial ooze identified?

Let's face it: Not all of us cut our detective baby teeth on Sherlock Holmes. Most eight-year-olds are just not yet possessing the mental wiring to fully comprehend or appreciate the greatest detective the world has ever known, nor should they be. And even as adults some of us still need a more ele . . . but I digress.

Thanks to some rights issues that were finally settled a year or so ago, I finally got around to re-acquainting myself with my first favorite detective this past week, a character so absolutely silly that it's almost impossible to place him next to Sherlock Holmes in anyone's detection Hall of Fame. And yet, there he was, so prominent in my past, the detective whose fandom I was a full-fledged member of back in 1966, a full decade before I dove headfirst into the great sea of Holmes.

Was "1966" enough of a clue?

Yes, before I was a Sherlockian, I was a Batfan. Not a fan the grim, dark, gutteral-voiced guy we know today -- no, a fan of the Adam West incarnation of Batman, who called his teen-aged Watson "old chum" and who had the best announcer voice of the 1960s narrating his every cliff-hanging adventure.

The most remembered parts of 1966 ABC Batman may be the "BIFF! POW!" fight scenes, but at the core of each story was Batman's detective work. The very beginning of the series has a Sherlock Holmes-like start, as the heads of the Gotham City Police Department all stare at a clue from the Riddler, and Commissioner Gordon is asking each of his men, one by one, if they can solve it. None of them can. So Gordon goes to call in the city's highest authority in detection: the man at the other end of the light-up red phone, the Batman.

Sixties TV Batman is more consulting detective than vigilante justice warrior. He goes to crime scenes in broad daylight to look up clues. He listens to recordings at police headquarters to recognize background sounds. He tests evidence in his personal crime lab. With his brightly colored surroundings and clearly-lettered signs identifying each device or switch, Sixties Batman feels a lot like a "Playskool" version of a consulting detective, but a consulting detective he most certainly is.

Going back and watching those old episodes after decades away was like finding a missing puzzle piece for me. Whether or not it would have come about anyway, my later love of Sherlock Holmes was surely set up to some degree by this cartoonish detective version of Batman. "What, you say his headquarters is Batcaver Street? I'm on board!" (Okay, maybe that's pushing it. But the beats of both sets of tales are close enough to make one wonder.)

One last odd little coincidence to think about: Sixties TV Batman has 120 episodes in it's Canon . . . 120 episodes that tended to be two-parters, as I remember it, making it very close to a 60 episode Canon. Not a bad number at all.

We never know the exact mental formula that turns us into Sherlockians. And not that many of us have the ABC Batman series figuring in our formative years (though now that it's available on DVD, we can start running experiments on available children, right?), the fact that it seems to owe more to Sherlock Holmes than Zorro, despite the costume, is a very curious thing.

Meow-lementary, my dear Watson.

There was a teensy bit of Sherlockian cat conversation on Twitter today, which eventually came to a comment from Lyndsay Faye that read, "God, we all do have cats, don't we."

And my mind went straight to a certain fellow's "cat-like love of cleanliness."

Because we all have cats. Even John H. Watson.

Yes, yes, Watson tried to be a dog guy. Gets along great with Toby, kept a bull pup . . . though probably keeping it for someone else, which, thankfully, gets it out of Baker Street alive. But in the end, John Watson had a cat.

Yes, just google "Sherlock Holmes was a cat" and you get pictures of cats in deerstalkers, cat Sherlock fan fic, as well as Conan Doyle's "The Story of the Brazilian Cat," which made me wonder for a moment if it might have contained a were-panther Holmes a la the movie Cat People, but the cat's name was "Tommy." And all of this reminded me of The Serpentine Muse's Annual Birthday Challenge (open only to Muse subscribers, but you may subscribe now to enter) to write an under-300 word story to go with a Laurie Manifold illustration of Baker Street populated by cat-characters.

Of course, Sherlock as a Cat People were-panther has me going down a road that doesn't really fit the cutie kitties of the Muse art. In fact, it just meandered me off an entire blog-post that was supposed to be about comparing Sherlock Holmes to a cat.

Well, you know, Sherlock Holmes was kind of a cat. He did cat stuff. There.

Sigh. This is why I'm a blogger and not saving any of these golden words for marketing somewhere. "I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather -- that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times," as Holmes said of himself.

Kind of like a cat. See?

The Sherlockian feline of the house.

Since the storm was had awakened us both this early Monday morn, the world's most Sherlockian cat and I had to dig through his toy basket to find something different to play with. And there we came upon a memory.

Now, I know there are a lot of Sherlockians out there with cats. Cats named "Moriarty" or "Violet" who play with homemade Sherlock cat toys and drink from Sherlock water bowls, so one might think my claim to owning "the world's most Sherlockian cat" might be a bit exaggerated. And it probably is. But indulge me.

Mister Tinker, as we call him, when he's in trouble and needs a full name, was not named after either Canonical tinker reference, but he has moments when he might fit "a tinker's curse" from "Illustrious Client" . . . such as this morning, when the storm outside has him frustratedly unable to go outside and he's feeling bite-y from boredom. (A Sherlock-ish trait, I'm sure.) The reason I call him such a Sherlockian cat, however, has nothing to do with his name or personality.

Mister Tinker is a Sherlockian cat because he's only here because I am a Sherlockian.

Here he is playing with his oldest toy this morning, a Sherlock silhouette key ring tied to a frayed old cord. The toy came with him from his previous owner a good three years ago this January. Mr. Tinker is a Sherlockian legacy cat, you see.

While I prefer cats, with their self-cleaning, no-attention-required bathroom habits, and ability to leave one alone most of the time, to dogs, I am not exactly a cat person. Or a pet person, really. And yet here he is, this easily-bored, fiesty tooth-and-claw predator now taking a nap on the floor not far from me, because he wandered on to the patio and into the life of my Sherlockian neighbor Bob Burr. And when Bob passed away, he had to go somewhere.

There's a whole story there about Mr. Tinker that is reserved for telling over drinks, but are there any other cats out there who have been owned by two Baker Street Irregulars? Given the Sherlockian world's friendships, I would be pretty sure there must be felines whose path has taken them through multiple Sherlockian households.

But for this morning, I'm giving old Tink the title of "world's most Sherlockian cat."