SHERLOCK at Comic-Con: Live-Blog

SHERLOCK co-creator Steven Moffat, executive producer Sue Vertue and actor Rupert Graves (DI Greg Lestrade) appeared at this year’s Comic-Con panel to tease the coming holiday special and series 4.

When we last saw Holmes and Watson, Holmes had been banished from England following the murder of Charles Augustus Magnussen. But when James Moriarty broadcasted a message across the country asking “Did you miss me?”, Holmes’ plane turned around to return home and he will be pitted against his arch-nemesis once again.

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3:50 PM: The panel opened with a video featuring Andrew Scott (Jim Moriarty), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes) and Mark Gatiss (Mycroft Holmes) apologizing to fans for missing the panel. Scott ended with “miss me?”

3:52 PM: “It’s going to be a long time before you see SHERLOCK again, but we are going to give you a tiny little bit of it right now,” Moffat said, before a scene from the Victorian-era special played on the screen. The young boy who made an appearance in the wedding episode in series 3 and was interested in the macabre will be making another guest appearance. Moffat says that when this special airs on TV, it will also air in certain cinemas around the world so that it can be shown on the big screen (details to be announced).

3:55 PM: Moffat said the press used to ask “how can Sherlock survive in a world with an iPhone?”. Now that they’ve done this special, people are asking “how can Sherlock survive without his iPhone?” The point was to take the original style of Arthur Conan Doyle’s books and transplant it onto the screen. “It’s SHERLOCK as you know it, but in the correct era”. Moffat claimed that the special is one of the best episodes they’ve ever made. “It’s definitely our show,” Vertue said.

3:58 PM: We’ve heard the clue “ghosts” in relation to the special, so what does that mean? Moffat remained mum. He did say “it has to be a standalone special, we have to make it [stand] on its own.”

4:00 PM: Moffat said that, for the most part, a big problem is that the women in the original Sherlock Holmes stories don’t have many lines. Take Mrs. Hudson, for example, she doesn’t really do that much in the stories. They asked themselves what they were going to do about that, because they had to be honest to the era (which was sexist). So how could they bring their female characters — who have backstories and important arcs — into that era in a way that made sense? That becomes central to the special.

4:03 PM: They know very clearly what stories they’re going to do and the emotionally-shattering cliffhangers, but they haven’t started writing series 4 yet. Be warned, they’re going to “sucker punch [SHERLOCK fans] into emotional devastation,” Moffat said.

4:15 PM: Do the panelists have a favorite gut-punch moment? Graves said “Mary with a gun”. Virtue said “it’s where Sherlock shoots Magnussen” because the music is stunning and you see Mycroft’s love for his brother as well. Moffat said “one of the rare moments where I felt ‘that’s not bad’ was ‘I am Sherlocked’ [from ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’].”

4:17 PM: When they run out of source material, will they continue the show? Moffat laughed that they’ve done ten episodes and there are sixty original stories. There’s a huge amount of source material, but something will close the show before they run out of material (like “old age or death”). They often take some source material stories and then make it their own. For example, the first 20 minutes of “Scandal in Belgravia” is almost identical to the original story, but then it goes off in its own direction. Also, could we see Irene Adler again? Moffat admitted “I don’t know”. He said that episode is “close to our hearts” but they don’t know what happened during that night when he saved her life (although he did write a continuation of that scene and has thought of other possible scenarios). He said he doesn’t think Holmes and Adler saw each other again, but that they smile once a day when they think about each other.

4:21 PM: Moffat said that a big cornerstone of the series continues to be the friendship between Holmes and Watson. These are two men who really shouldn’t be friends, but are.

4:22 PM: Will we ever see the third Holmes brother? “What third Holmes brother?” Moffat deadpanned before a fan in the audience reminded him that Mycroft said “you know what happened to the other one”. Moffat declined to answer the question.

4:27 PM: Have they ever seen any fan speculation or rumors that affect the way they write the scripts? “Not really,” Moffat said. Although, he did admit one of his friends came up with the theory that Sherlock found a body that looked like himself based on the way the child screamed at him in “The Reichenbach Fall”. Moffat actually “stole” that idea to help explain how Sherlock faked his death.

4:30 PM: Moffat said that after season 2, what they liked best was finding those bits in the original stories that people don’t really know about — moments of humor, moments of insight and moments of brilliance.

4:33 PM: Moffat admitted that when Graves came in the for the audition, he gave them a version of Lestrade that they weren’t expecting: “The really good copper”. They ended up incorporating that more into the story.

4:37 PM: Vertue said that they are always trying to get the U.K. and U.S. airdates for new episodes closer and closer.

4:45 PM: The panel came to a close with an amusing discussion of the handsomeness of Cumberbatch versus Graves.