Sherlock season 4 will be afoot on January 1, 2017

By Sam Barsanti | October 26, 2016 | 10:16pm

Aux Features TV

Earlier this month, Benedict Cumberbatch suggested that the upcoming fourth season of Sherlock might be the end of the show—in a real way, not in a phony “Reichenbach Fall” way where the show comes back and never explains what actually happened. We still don’t know if that’s truly the case, but at least we now know when the fourth season will premiere. According to Deadline, the debut will happen day-and-date in the United States and United Kingdom on January 1, 2017, which is a nice change of pace from the old days when people in the U.S. had to illegally download or patiently wait for new episodes of Sherlock. Now they can catch it on PBS, just as their English friends catch it on the Beeb.

The Deadline story also confirms that the first episode of the season—or “series” if you want to be fancy and British—will be titled “The Six Thatchers,” which is a name we first heard back in September. Presumably a play on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons,” that title is pretty much all we know about the episode. If we had to guess, though, we’d predict that “The Six Thatchers” will spend an inordinate amount of time in Sherlock’s “Mind Palace,” that it will feature some unexpected shake-up to the status quo, and that Sherlock will make at least one reference to a game being afoot.