Spoiler alert: this review contains spoilers to the Sherlock episode The Six Thatchers, which aired on 1 January 2017.
It may have been discussed in advance for featuring the destruction of one strong Englishwoman – the plot involves the smashing of six statues of Margaret Thatcher – but the New Year’s Day episode of Sherlock will make headlines after transmission for the annihilation of another.
Mary Watson, the wife of Holmes’s sidekick, shockingly became – following Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey and Nigel Pargetter in The Archers – the latest fictional character sacrificed over the festive period.
Sherlock co-creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss also work on Doctor Who, which was awarded the other prime seasonal slot on the BBC on Christmas Day. But although the franchises have to some extent overlapped, both tending towards tragicomic love stories, viewers knew that as Amanda Abbington lay slain on the floor she would not shimmeringly regenerate into another actor.
The Arthur Conan Doyle story on which Gatiss based his script has busts of Napoleon being smashed by an intruder. Here, the French emperor’s replacement with the former British prime minister has led to some muttering about the BBC’s supposed leftwing bias. But the point, as Sherlock immediately realises, is that the vandal has no political motivation: he’s looking for something hidden inside a head.
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