The deerstalker returns

Usually, the Fall is associated with the gaining of knowledge and the loss of innocence, but with Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes, the audience is still not the wiser as to how he survived his plummet.  Sherlock is back in riveting form - wasn't it always - and one of the best aspects of this new episode is the in-joke regarding all the real-life theorising as to how Holmes survived transposed into a geek club (The Empty Hearse) run by a former policeman foe of the great detective.  Three speculations were aired (two of which were preposterous as we saw Holmes fall without any rope attached to his back) and one cul-de-sac explored, but really all three could be bunkum.  I disagree that we don't need to know how he survived because that he just did is enough (just as how he could commandeer a motorcycle and two helmets - lucky the generous motorcyclist had a passenger and one of equal magnanimity - so effortlessly which is never explained).  Steven Moffat said after the last series concluded with Holmes looking on at Watson grieving at the former's grave that he knew how it was done, so Mark Gatiss must divulge the explanation over the course of the next two episodes (if Holmes' proposed one in The Empty Hearse - a play on The Empty House, like all the other episodes' slight alteration - is fake).
Cumberbatch's turn as a supercilious French waiter (not unlike John Cleese in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life) is hilarious and offsets the teeth-grindingly embarrassing scene where John Watson attempt to propose to his girlfriend (Martin Freeman's actual romantic associate/partner, as with Holmes' parents being Cumberbatch's père and mère).  The plot is very reminiscent of V for Vendetta with the bomb on the Tube Train under the Houses of Parliament and it was a bit silly that the Underground worker said there was no way a whole 'car (not 'carriage' apparently) to disappear between St James Park and Westminster before remembering late in the day that there was a sealed-off Tube station.  Also silly was the timer on the bomb - if you're detonating it remotely, why does one need a timer?  These things grated but the acting and the whole set-up brought it through as enjoyable.  Not a top-notch affair compared to the previous excellence of prior series but I expect standards to rise for the remaining two episodes.