Remember how obsessed we were for Sherlock Season 3? The wait was endless – Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes seemed to jump off a building and die, only to be resurrected in shadows at his own gravesite. We had to wait years to for season 3, and then when it arrived, it was just sort of… eh. For my money, the first two seasons of Sherlock are still impeccable, which makes it even more noticeable that the third and fourth seasons were poorly written hogwash. I mean, the “Sherlock has a secret sister who killed his dog, only the dog was really a small child” storyline still makes me really angry. Anyway, Martin “Dr. Watson” Freeman told the Telegraph that there are no big plans to return to do a fifth season. Good.

Hopes of a fifth season of the beloved BBC show are fading by the day, especially as both of its stars now have Marvel contracts to uphold (Cumberbatch will be reprising his Doctor Strange for Avengers: Infinity War, and Freeman’s Agent Everett Ross from Black Panther may well return in a future film). According to Freeman, part of the long post-Season 4 delay was due to viewers’ expectations running wild.

“Um . . . I think after Series 4 [it] felt like a pause. I think we felt we’d done it for a bit now,” Freeman explained in a new interview with The Telegraph. “And part of it, speaking for myself, is [due to] the reception of it.”

Sherlock’s fourth season was far from its most beloved, but Freeman’s issue wasn’t with the critics’ more negative response, but with the fans themselves, who, in their devotion to the show and its stars, at times caused more stress than anything else. “Being in that show, it is a mini Beatles thing,” Freeman said. “People’s expectations, some of it’s not fun anymore. It’s not a thing to be enjoyed, it’s a thing of: ‘You better f—— do this, otherwise you’re a c—.’ That’s not fun anymore.”

Above all, Freeman said, it was about going too big too fast. The popularity of Sherlock’s first season spanned an entire ocean at lightning speed, and keeping that kind of quality up while also keeping fans entertained and happy while also doing it in three 90-minute episodes that only arrived every few years was an impossible task. “Whereas even with The Office [Freeman’s big break] it was a slow burn,” he admitted. “But Sherlock was frankly notably high-quality from the outset. And when you start [that high] it’s pretty hard to maintain that.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I understand his complaints about the fan obsession and the weirdness around the cult of Sherlock. That being said, the answer was NOT to deliver two awful, tepid, poorly written seasons to counter that. It was almost as if – and hear me out – Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat were TRYING to alienate viewers while also giving them really f–ked up “fan service.” Instead of Moffat and Gatiss just keeping their heads down and delivering the same quality from the first two seasons, they were just throwing sh-t at the wall and reading too many Sherlock-Watson ship-blogs.

Here are photos of Martin at the Empire Awards over the weekend:

Photos courtesy of WENN.