The BBC is billing this as a “Christmas special”, pinning its United Kingdom broadcast to December.
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The Christmas special will be taking the show back to how Arthur Conan Doyle first envisaged it in the Victorian era, complete with the pipe and deer stalker hat.
The teaser featured Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) and John Watson (Martin Freeman) in 19th century England.
As the clip makes a rather sinister turn, Watson turns to Sherlock and says: ‘What made you like this?
He also said that the special is not connected to the hotly-anticipated fourth season, or even the previous seasons. So it is incredibly exciting that despite their enormous fame, Cumberbatch and Freeman will be returning for not just a new series of Sherlock episodes coming up, but also for a Sherlock Christmas special. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘You’re Sherlock Holmes.
“The stage is set, the curtain rises, we are ready to begin”, Holmes begins. “It’s kind of in its own little bubble”. Thus far, the three series of the show have aired first in the United Kingdom on BBC and then in the U.S. on PBS as part of “Masterpiece”.
“It’s like we checked the books and discovered we’d set it in the wrong time period by mistake and it’s like we’re correcting it for 90 minutes”, Steven Moffat, executive producer and co-creator, previously told BBC News.
Noticeably missing is any sign of Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (played by Mark Gatiss) or arch-nemesis Moriarty (Andrew Scott), although Amanda Abbington returns as Watson’s wife Mary Morstan.
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Of course, we know that faking a death isn’t that hard to do for a master criminal, and the fact that Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) did it himself in series 2 left us nearly certain that we would be seeing Moriarty again when the show returned. And do we really think that Sherlock Holmes lived through a Dalek invasion?
