If you haven’t watched any of the Benedict Cumberpatch/Martin Freeman Sherlock movies, you’ve missed out on something truly special and should check them out.

Go ahead, I’m waiting.

Seriously, with perhaps a single exception, Sherlock could well be one of the greatest things to make their way to television in these past couple of years.  The idea behind the series is to make adaptations of Sir Conan Arthur Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories but set them in modern times.

Benedict Cumberpatch rocketed to superstardom as Sherlock Holmes but equally effective is Martin Freeman as the sardonic Dr. Watson.  The two play off each other magnificently and the movies presented are alternatively hilarious, incredibly clever, and eminently watchable.

(I mentioned above that there was one exception.  That would be the adaptation of perhaps the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Sadly, of all the Sherlock episodes made, this proved to be the most confusing one, to me)

On New Year’s Day, the BBC released The Abonimable Bride, a special “one-off” Sherlock film that had our intrepid characters going back in time to the era Sherlock Holmes is most associated, the late 1800’s.

I’m so tempted to get into details regarding the episode but all that would do is spoil things so I won’t.  I will say this, however: This might well be one of the absolute best of the Sherlock episodes/movies ever made.  It is clever, engaging, hilarious (some of the dialogue!  I would kill to write such clever dialogue!), and incredibly surprising.

When it was over I was absolutely blown away by what I had just seen.

The story, in short: In late 19th Century London, a woman in a wedding dress appears to go crazy on the balcony of her apartment and fires at people down below.  Ultimately, she puts the barrel of one of her revolvers in her mouth and blows her brains out.

She’s dead, it would appear, yet her husband, who is about to head out to identify her corpse, is confronted by his wife in her wedding dress.  He sees her and positively identifies her before witnesses…before she kills him with a shotgun.  She then vanishes but her corpse is still in the morgue!

How could a dead woman kill her husband?

Holmes is tasked to solve the mystery but is unable to.  A year later, he is presented with a new mystery…and the ghostly bride appears to have returned from the grave to seek out another victim.

Great, great stuff.

I’m once again tempted to go into SPOILERS but I won’t.

Suffice to say, this “old fashioned setting” episode plays an intricate role in the Sherlock series though, on the surface, it would appear not to.

For those who haven’t seen the series, you simply must try to catch it.  For those who have, The Abominable Bride might well be one of the very best episodes of the series ever created.

I’m not kidding here: Sherlock, and The Abominable Bride in particular, is television at its very best.