There was never a doubt that Benedict Cumberbatch would return to the role of Sherlock Holmes, the modernized incarnation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective he plays on the hit BBC series “Sherlock.” Despite a second-season finale in 2012 that seemed to show Holmes falling to his death, Mr. Cumberbatch’s star has risen considerably since then (in films like “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”), and besides, the BBC had already committed to a third season of “Sherlock.” (The series is shown in the United States on PBS’s “Masterpiece.”)
Audiences got an early taste of a resurrected Holmes in an online short that made its debut this week. The seven-minute episode, written by the “Sherlock” producers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and titled “Many Happen Returns,” is set two years after Holmes’s apparent death and tracks the cross-continental journey of a mystery figure who delights in solving crimes much as Holmes did. “I’m going to be with you again very soon,” Holmes says to Watson (Martin Freeman) in a video message at the end of the online short.
But just how the presumably deceased detective intends to rise from his apparent demise is hardly elementary.