Was this really Sherlock’s swansong? Let’s hope so

Sherlock – The Final Problem BBC One, Sunday

or six years now, Sherlock Holmes’s catchphrase in the rebooted, modernised

has been “The game is on!” With hindsight, I wonder if the writers now regret focusing on that particular line from Conan Doyle because, four series in, it’s become divisive: some viewers want more games, others want fewer.

Although it has still not been confirmed that this week’s finale was the last ever episode, it certainly felt valedictory. It culminated in a freeze-frame of Holmes and Watson heading out at full pelt on another madcap lark. The game, we were to understand, was most definitely still on – and will continue to be so ad infinitum. That end shot was accompanied by a voice-over from the frankly not-that-much-missed Mary (Amanda Abbington), a message from beyond the grave in which she summarised our sleuthing pair’s enduring appeal: “It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures,” she told them. “Who you really are doesn’t really matter…”

Yet this came an hour-and-ahalf into an episode occupied entirely by the question of who this Sherlock Holmes really is. It was “The Final Problem” of the title. And it’s become the overarching problem of the whole series – do we want Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s Holmes and Watson to be believable people with coherent psychologies? Or do we want them to ping forever from case to case like playful Labradors?

Writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss would say their series can be both – a consequential romp – yet their final effort suggested otherwise. The story was of Sherlock’s previously unknown little sister Eurus (Siân Brooke),

Fwho, we were told, had an even bigger brain than Sherlock but had chosen from a very early age to use it to do bad things. When a six-year-old Eurus set fire to the Holmes family mansion, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft had her secretly put away for life in a Bond-villain style island fortress, Sherrinford.

The theme, therefore, was family, and the degree to which, we are shaped by our childhood. Eurus had been a pretty messed up child and now she was dead set on messing up her brothers, too. She lured them to Sherrinford to put them through a series of deadly mind-games for her sport.

When her games were indeed on – fatal versions of triage, lifeboat ethics and balloon debates – everything was pleasingly frenetic and, as always with this show, directed with vim and wit. It was the sententious stuff that grated. Having spent three series establishing Sherlock as an intellectual for whom brute reason always trumped emotion, suddenly the writers showed that his mind was fallible – he’d forgotten he had a sister. And he wasn’t even the best violinist in the family.

Sherlock was suckered into a ticking clock scenario that featured a young girl on a plummeting plane, yet the girl was a voice on a phone throughout. Surely the Sherlock who never misses a trick might have asked if there actually was a girl on a plane at all (there wasn’t). This film was about his emotions, not his intellect, even though Sherlock is supposed to thrive on the latter and not be distracted by the former.

I suspect this confusion between the need for characters to evolve and our desire for them to remain exactly how we liked in the first place, is the same paradox that explains why few successful TV shows make it beyond three decent series. You could call it “the final problem”, and it’s one that even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve.

If you’re a fan of the slam-dunk pseudoscience debunk, this week’s was manna from heaven. Dr Giles Yeo ruthlessly, methodically, marched his way through the whole Clean Food fad, rejecting alkaline eating, claims of using food to cure cancer and every other type of tosh.

Yeo married scientific understanding with journalistic rigour. Scientists like him who have spent years studying nutrition and are well-versed in the medical consensus must find the snake-oil salesmen and the quacks beneath contempt. Yet Yeo took care to interview each of the men and women whose ideas he then dismantled, or at least those of them who would see him. And he asked the right questions; his words starkly confrontational, his manner anything but.

With the science so clear – according to Yeo, science has so far discovered nothing to disprove current NHS guidelines on diet – Yeo was left looking for other targets, and here the film meandered.

Social media was a bugbear, yet Yeo admitted at the outset that he didn’t understand social media. Still, with so many “clean” cookery books and TV programmes springing up, we need more Giles Yeos as a buttress for common sense (and the occasional fry-up). He’s the right man for the job and,

Sherlock’s little sister, we were told, had an even bigger brain than he did