The game is back on at Christmas. Well...Christmas 2015 at least.
After the end of "His Last Vow" in January, fans of the BBC television series Sherlock have been eagerly awaiting word of when Series Four will arrive. Well, according to The Telegraph, a new episode is reportedly on the way, just not until Christmas 2015.
They spoke with Martin Freeman, who plays Sherlock Holmes' recently-married best friend Dr. John Watson, who said that a period of filming "looks pretty likely" in early 2015. "If that’s going to be a special -- I’m speaking off-message here; if this was New Labour I’d get fired -- I think that might be for next Christmas. A Christmas special. That’s what I understand."
Meanwhile, Freeman was asked if his real-life partner Amanda Abbington is going to return as John's new wife Mary Watson. "Certainly, yes, for the foreseeable future," he said, adding a spoiler from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Holmes stories. "While we play fast and loose with the original stories, we generally follow the trajectory of what Conan Doyle did. So he [Watson] gets married, and then Mary dies -- so at some point, presumably she’ll die."
The problem with making new episodes of Sherlock hasn't been due to lack of interest from Freeman, co-star Benedict Cumberbatch and executive producers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, but finding an opening in everyone's busy schedules. Freeman stars in Richard III at London's Trafalgar Studios next month and has recently finished filming the Hobbit trilogy and the first season of the FX series Fargo. Cumberbatch has recently voiced the role of the dragon Smaug for the Hobbit trilogy and is currently filming Black Mass, then will also take on Richard III for a BBC production to be broadcast next year. As for Moffat and Gatiss, they've been working on Series Eight of Doctor Who and Gatiss recently appeared as Tycho Nestoris in Season 4 of HBO's Game of Thrones.