Steven Moffat confirms the setting of the Sherlock Christmas special

Earlier in the year we saw the release of several shots taken during the filming of the upcoming Sherlock Christmas special. They featured both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman wearing some rather antiquated garb while walking down an old-timey Victorian street. Was this a hallucination? A dream? Some Doctor Who related shenanigans?

Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat spoke to Entertainment Weekly today and confirmed what many fans had suspected; that the entirety of the episode will take place in Victorian-era London.

“The special is its own thing, we wouldn’t have done the story we’re doing, and the way we’re doing it, if we didn’t have this special. It’s not part of the run of three episodes. So we had this to do it – as we could hardly conceal – it’s Victorian. [Co-creator Mark Gatiss] and me, we wanted to do this, but it had to be a special, it had to be separate entity on its own. It’s kind of in its own little bubble.”

Moffat added the the special was nearly done and that he's very pleased with the result. As if he'd tell us otherwise but I have no reason to doubt him, I've always considered the quality of the series to be quite high. A self-contained Sherlock Holmes story with no connections to the previously laid canon could be just the thing to keep us busy while we wait for the fourth season to debut. I'd actually be quite thrilled if this became a new Sherlock tradition; every other year we'd get a separate episode to act as a bit of a breather between seasons.

The Christmas special has no official air-date at the moment but we can obviously expect it to air sometime in December. The long awaited fourth season will follow in 2016 and I think we can expect our own Alex Maidy to bring you his reviews.

What are your thoughts on the special? Are you excited or just wishing they'd get to resolving last years cliffhanger?