Sherlock Special (2019)

And the point of this being...?

Can I have the time I wasted on this back? Why was this compilation made? It is about 80% recycled material from the series and the rest is useless new event (a shady journalist investigating SH with the help of the naive JW in love). Only to tell us that Shishio is alive and well, three years later fascinatingly annoying like before.

There must have been a point to this special: I guess to remind people of the events in the series just before the movie is released. And reminding we did need since the drama was boring and easily forgettable! I had just finished watching it yesterday and I could not remember half of the cases - That's how invested I was in it!). So I hoped for a better ending with this episode

The guest actors reprised their roles perfectly. But the character of Wakamiya reached the new levels of cringe: crying like an abandoned lover, pretending to be SH and failing pitifully. While he did have some character and a backbone at the beginning of the series, SH managed so well to train him that he became a willing cult follower without his own will, he had become SH's shadow, useless and there!

Fortunately, SH was only heard of but not much seen except for the violin playing montage. I guess he knows how to play only one piece of music.

This was a disappointment. They did follow the original books: SH and Moriarty fall down the Reichenbach Falls and disappear only to show up out of nowhere as if nothing happened some time later. Arthur Conan Doyle tried to get rid of the character who was ruining his life with his popularity but could not and had to bring him back. So he did but it was lazily done. Here it is unacceptable!I wanted to find out more about Moriya, their disappearance, what did he do and why. Nothing! Ep 10 they fall into the bay and vanish and then he shows up at the crime scene three years later. Easy! The magic of Sherlock Holmes?Yeah, right! No thanks!

I'll be watching the movie next, hoping it is better but not really believing it!

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This special wraps up the drama and sets up the upcoming movie, The Hound of the Baskervilles, that should air at some point next year.

In the special, we find out what happened after Shishio and Moriya's henchman fell off the pier and disappeared, how Wakamiya - with the help of a female journalist - tried to find Shishio by digging up his old cases, so it's pretty much a clip show, true, but the added bits, esp. the scenes where Wakamiya meets up with all the people he and Shishio helped... those really tugged at my heart.

Mostly because Iwata Takanori is an amazing actor and here, he's just... Usually, Watson is portrayed as a good-natured, well, fool - a bit, let's face it - a round-bellied everyman's man. But Wakamiya is, uhm. He's kind, that's true, but he also has anger issues and unlike in other adaptations, he's the much less grounded one of the two. And I truly have to applaud the costume department here because they kept sticking Wakamiya in oversized sweaters with sweater paws which made him look even slighter - I noticed that Iwata Takanori looked very thin in this drama, especially next to Fujioka Dean's Shishio which, strangely, fit the dynamics of this Holmes and this Watson pair perfectly.

Also, the fact that this drama did not in any way or shape or form debunk that Wakamiya had feelings for Shishio? That was *chef's kiss* As in, after Shishio's "death", in his blog, Wakamiya wrote about the loss of a "loved one" and when their landlady went all, "Oh, I knew you were in that kind of a relationship!" Wakamiya didn't go all, "You got it wrong" or whatever, he just started talking about something else, so... You know.

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