Sherlock: 10 Most Hated Episodes

It's only fitting that the worst episode of the series is also the beginning of its worst season. Many fans thought Season 3 was a decline in quality, but even then none of us were prepared for Season 4, the ultimate jumping the shark moment for the series. The Six Thatchers is an absolute disaster — especially since it revolves around Mary, a pointless character who continues to be pointless, and yet the writers seem to think is absolutely necessary to devote an entire episode to.

The Six Thatchers is pretty much everything that made Sherlock go from great to terrible, starting from its beginning. It feels like forever for this episode's plot to get moving, with many unnecessary and irrelevant scenes that, big surprise, are really only there to add more padding and forced comedy. The entire thing is a mess, which seems to be the best word to describe pretty much every Sherlock episode that came after The Reichenbach Fall. The narrative is chaotic and jarringly jumps around from scene to scene and the characters act strangely out of character, especially John Watson.

It really is just an uninteresting and unengaging season premiere, one that's so convoluted and overly complex it often feels plain silly. This doesn't even feel like Sherlock, this feels like a generic thriller you'd watch if you had two hours to kill and there was nothing else to watch. Really, given how awful the second half of Sherlock is, the biggest mystery now is if a fifth season could possibly bring it back to its former glory or if Sherlock is better left done instead of continuing it and letting it get worse.