Remedy your Sherlock blues (another series over!) by reliving the explosive series 3 finale “His Last Vow”, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, with our full recap! This post contains spoilers.

We begin with new villain Charles Augustus Magnussen being interrogated by Elizabeth Smallwood about potential links with the British Prime Minister. The newspaper owner makes some deductions of his own via some very interesting hi-tech spectacles. After insisting he has “excellent memory”, the show’s latest villain returns to his creepy theatre to look further into his interrogator, discovering her husband wrote letters to an under-age girl in the eighties. He tells her about the letters, claiming “ownership” over her. Backed into a corner, the minister turns her car to Baker Street….

John (still plagued by flashbacks to his life in the forces) and Mary are disturbed by a family-friend looking for her addict son. When John reaches the drug den, he finds a high Sherlock, who claims he is undercover. After rounding up the druggies, the crack team (pun intended) take Sherlock to St. Bart’s to be tested – he’s clean (or at least that’s what Molly says, but her multiple slaps suggest otherwise). After revealing his pleasure at his drug addiction hitting the headlines, he heads back to his apartment.

Back in the flat, Mycroft warns Sherlock not to go after Magnussen, which Sherlock does not take kindly to (pinning his older brother to the wall and telling him to leave). Sherlock goes to the bathroom, and tells John not to go in through the bedroom door, which Janine (the bridesmaid of the wedding from “The Sign of Three”) comes out of straight away. Sherlock explains the malice behind Magnussen – comparing him to a shark – and admits that no one can turn his stomach like the villain. The mogul uses “his power and influence to get information” giving him more of the former two, explains the super sleuth. He tells John about Charles’s house, and how it is protected to ensure no one has any freedom. There’s a saying that goes “Speak of the devil and he shall he appear”, and this is certainly the case when Sherlock’s latest adversary comes around and scans Sherlock’s many weaknesses. He expresses an interest in the bathroom, but instead relieves himself in the fireplace. After telling the Baker Street Boys he’s keeping the letters because “they’re funny”, he departs. Sherlock notices how Magnussen showed them the letters and hatches a plan to steal them.

John meets Sherlock at Magnussen’s office, where the socio-path uses a stolen key card to hack the villain’s security system. Scanned by a computer camera, he convinces Charles’s PA (Janine) to let him in by pretending to propose to her. When they reach the office, the crime-solving duo find Janine and a security guard knocked out, and Holmes deduces it’s Lady Smallwood, until Mary turns around – and shoots him! Molly, Anderson, Mycroft (as well as a young Sherlock, played by writer Steven Moffat’s son) assist him in working out to fall on his back, then preventing him from going into shock by exploring the mystery of Redbeard the dog (first mentioned in “The Sign of Three”).

Moriarty makes a return via the mind palace (a mental asylum), while John gets him to hospital. Moriarty tries to convince his foil to stay in the land of the dead, before eventually reminding him of “His Last Vow” to protect John. This brings him back to the land of the living, where Janine reveals how she sold her story to the papers to get her revenge for their phoney relationship. Morphined up and back in his mind palace, Sherlock tries to work out who Mary really is. John and Lestrade go to visit him, but he has escaped. The duo try to track him down, while he tracks down Mary (or the other way round) to Leinster Gardens. Sherlock exposes her as a fraud (the real Mary Morstan was stillborn), eventually revealing that John heard her whole confession (his disguise as a dummy is a fun nod and nice introversion of a similar tactic the detective uses in Doyle story “The Empty House”).

We cut to Christmas at the Holmes household, where John comes to “Mary” – before we again cut back to Baker Street, where Sherlock delves into John’s history, and lists his addiction to danger as an explanation for why he ended up with Mary. Eventually, John allows his wife to assume the role of a client, and she reveals her identity is A.G.R.A., a former assassin who tried to kill Magnussen to stop her identity from being revealed. Sherlock insists that Mary is trustworthy, having saved his life with her ‘precise’ gun shot.

Back at Christmas, John has decided not to read the contents of AGRA’s USB (containing her original identity) and tells her that he still loves her. Mycroft asks Sherlock to refuse a job offer from MI6, before admitting that he would be heart broken at the loss of his younger brother. Back in the house, Mary, Mycroft and the Holmes parents have passed out because Sherlock has spiked them so he can sneak off to meet with Magnussen. Taking Mycroft’s security information, he goes to Appledoor to negotiate terms on releasing his information on Mary.

Sherlock thinks he has the villain framed, but Magnussen insists he’s made a mistake. He reveals his vault – nothing more than his own mind palace – in which he stores all of the information he has (foreshadowed just moments before when it was revealed that Charles’s glasses were not hi-tech at all, and that he was calculating people’s pressure points himself). Since there are no files, there is no evidence, and Magnussen says Sherlock and John will be arrested for trying to sell a newspaper state secrets. In a particularly disturbing sequence, Charles flicks John’s face, intimidating him – before Mycroft and a squad of soldiers arrive to arrest them. As they close in, Sherlock kills Magnussen to protect Mary’s previous identity and ensure he keeps his last vow. As he’s arrested, the screen fades to black.

Next we see Mycroft insisting the world needs Sherlock Holmes, trying to get Lady Smallwood’s approval for a top secret plan. Mysterious plan approved, Mary and John come to say goodbye to Sherlock, but the great detective insists “the game is always on.” He reveals he will be doing the undercover work offered to him earlier in the episode, giving him an apparent lifespan of six months. As we fade to black, we’re disrupted by some static, and Lestrade’s football viewing is disrupted by some mysterious white noise. After just four minutes of exile, Sherlock’s plane has to turn around and protect Britain, because – MORIARTY IS BACK!

“Did you miss me?” he asks on repeat, projected on every television channel and digital screen around the country. And just as the great detective cheated death on the rooftop of St. Bartholemew’s, it seems that his mortal enemy escaped the reaper as well. The game is back on!

What did you think of ‘His Last Vow’?

When will Sherlock series 4 premiere? As early as Christmas 2014!