Sherlock 

The Great Game Season 1, Episode 3, Written by Mark Gatiss

                This episode is the season finale to the first season.  Sherlock receives phone calls from an anonymous source, giving him time limits for solving his current cases, threatening that if he doesn’t, in each instance, someone will die. In the first call, Sherlock is told that, in the next twelve hours, he must solve the murder of a boy that occurred years earlier, or an old woman will die. Sherlock discovers the boy was poisoned through eczema medication; the old woman is released. The next puzzle is solving how a man disappeared from his car, and Sherlock only has eight hours to do so. He solves this one fairly quickly, finding out that the missing man’s insurance agent was recently on vacation, which leads Sherlock to conclude he helped the missing man disappear.  Again, the victim is released. The third call tells Sherlock to find out, in the next ten hours, how a local celebrity was killed. Sherlock and John Watson visit the celebrity’s housekeeper, who does not seem that broken over his boss’s death. Sherlock notices that the celebrity has had many Botox injections, and pins the death on the housekeeper for Botox poisoning.  However, even though Sherlock successfully solved the crime, the identified victim died because he started describing the caller to Sherlock. In the fourth and final call Sherlock is instructed to find out how it was obvious that a certain painting is a fake.   Sherlock has only ten seconds to analyze every detail and find the mistake, or a child will die. At the very last second, Sherlock notices the mistake -- there is a star there that should not be. Sherlock then meets the anonymous caller to gloat -- which never ends well -- and finds John with a bomb strapped to him. He has to give up a flash drive to the anonymous caller to save John. The caller is revealed to be James Moriarty, who has his gunmen ready to shoot, but, out of nowhere, Sherlock pulls out his gun and points it at the bomb, that is strapped to John. 

My comments

- I like the fact that this is all from John's perspective, which is more of a compliment to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than the show, because like in the books we get to see how Sherlock deducing things  out of thin air.

- It amazes me that a man, fictional or real, could do what Sherlock does. He can just look at a person, for example, in the second case he just looked at the man and could read the history of this man.

- In this episode, Sherlock actually did meet Moriarty earlier, but it was so unimportant to Sherlock it did not really fit in the summary.I love Moriarty because he is almost exactly like Sherlock-- he's a super genius, he easily gets bored with everyone, and he commits crimes because he is bored; the only thing dividing them is that they are separated by good and evil.