Sherlock fans rejoice! Steven Moffat just spilled all kinds of great things re: future of the show

If you’re a die-hard BBC Sherlock fan, then you have patience in such great quantities, being patient is basically your superpower at this point. We Sherlockians have to wait EONS in between seasons, and when we finally get a new installment of the series, it’s, you know, three episodes. And those episodes are delicious and we eat them right up and then we have to wait another eon and change for a new season.

Showrunner Steven Moffat has taken pity on his poor fans and, as the Washington Post reports, at the Television Critics Summer Press Tour, he gave us some scoop to tide us over until we get our hands on new Sherlocks (we get a one-off this Christmas, then they start shooting the next season in spring of 2016 , so that superhuman patience is going to come in handy as we all settle in for that long wait).

Here’s what Moffat told us:

He’s down to keep making Sherlock, like, forever

“I don’t think it will be us that switch it off. I imagine it’ll be down to Benedict (Cumberbatch) and Martin (Freeman.),” Moffat explained. “Obviously we can’t do the show without them, and they’ve always said they’re happy to carry on so long as it’s good.”

He would love to see Sherlock and Watson grow old together

“I’d like to see them age, not because I’m a sadist. Just because it would be interesting to see them become the more traditional age of those characters, which is in their fifties. They’re much younger than the normal version.”

He had ALL the scoop on the Christmas-special-that-might-not-actually-be-a-Christmas-special

You know that one-off Sherlock we’re going to get this Christmas set in the Victorian England of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman play the old-timey versions of Sherlock and Watson? Well it might be released on Christmas, but it’s not necessarily going to be a Christmas special.

“It’s probably Christmas-ish,” Moffat explained. “We don’t actually know. We’re not making this up.”

Also, it sounds like Cumberbatch had an easier time hanging in the 1890’s than Freeman.

“By the end, Martin was ready to go back to the more acerbic version, but I think Benedict really enjoyed being Victorian Holmes. He was saying halfway through, “Let’s always do this. I quite like it,’” Moffat told the crowd.

And are we going to get an explanation re: why Cumberbatch and Freeman are all of a sudden all old-timey?

“We never bothered explaining what they were doing in modern London,” Moffat pointed out, “so why bother explaining what they’re doing in Victorian London, when that’s where they’re supposed to be?”

Okay, we’ll have to be patient until we get our hands on that special and we’ll have to be SUPER patient while we wait for the new season. We’re strong, we can do this.

Related:

Finally the BBC gives us a tiny taste of what’s coming up on Sherlock

Looks like we’ll have to wait even longer for Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘Sherlock’ return

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