The specific status of The Abominable Bride is akin to this status, although as we shall see it is more connected to the previous episodes noticeably through the continuous topic of Moriarty's fate as a link between the various instalments. Thus it is placed very much in the position of the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in the canon, a novel which was published after the fictional death of Holmes with Moriarty but which was supposed to relate an investigation that had happened previous to that death-hence it was a part of but not a continuation of the series. What actually happens at the beginning of the episode is a digest of the previous seasons and adventures of the 21 st C Sherlock, and then we have the presentation of the 19 th C " original " -but what is striking is that this presentation of the 19 th C Sherlock repeats part of what we have just seen at the beginning of the episode, especially concerning the initial meeting between Sherlock and Watson, which is thus told twice, first from a modern day and then from a contemporary, 1887 1 It is actually a single episode due to the busy timetable of most actors on the show who could not commit themselves to a whole season for 2016. " Alternatively " -1887, anachrony and time travel What the episode initially claims to establish is a particular vision of time travel that is akin to the exploration of alternative dimensions of reality-and not simply the " going backwards " in time that the narrative pitch seems to rely on. This paper will examine the complex relationship between past and present understood as rooted into the specific treatment of seriality by the series. Moreover, the spectators actually learn approximately one hour into the episode that this 19 th C investigation was merely a mental reconstruction by the 21 st C Sherlock of a past case that may help him in the present, so that the past diegetic frame is eventually seen from a distance, from the present-day Sherlock. As such, it plays out its exceptional status as a temporary travel into the " alternative ", 19 th C vision of the detective, but it does not purport to establish a long-term relation with that vision.
Moreover, this episode is pointedly presented as a " one shot " installment, an isolated story within the series that is set apart from the general outlook of the BBC series conceived as a modern rereading of Victorian fiction 1.
It poses as a " traditional " adaptation of the Holmes Canon, and cannot thus claim to repeat this introduction of 21 st C technology used to " update " the texts. What the latest instalment brings is a total reversal of that strategy since the episode is set in the 19 th C, at the time of the original publication of the texts.
Yet these connections rely very much on a clear separation between the 19 th C model and the 21 st C adaptation-we are supposed to recognize Doyle's creation in abstentia, in a new diegetic universe that consistently differs from the original and that never refers to it except through the (often subversive) quotes from the " Canon " (i.e.
To put it in a nutshell, the 21 st C Sherlock uses profiling very much the same way the 19 th C original used phrenology and the Lombroso theory. It has now become common knowledge how the BBC series made the most of a new take on the Victorian sub-text by moving the 19 th C Sherlock Holmes into the digital, hyper-technological universe of the 21 st and by pointing the surprising connections between the two worlds in terms of ideology, mythmaking and investigation methods.
The Abominable Bride is a very exceptional instalment in a TV series that is itself very original in the way it approaches the adaptation of a classical 19 th C corpus. The Abominable Bride (Douglas Mackinnon, 2016): Sherlock and seriality Nothing made me.