Fans are in for a treat a year earlier than "Sherlock" season 4's expected release date in 2017.
According to previous reports, executive producers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have decided to quench die-hard followers' thirst for more Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman with a Christmas special later this year.
As a standalone episode, this special will be set in the era it was originally intended for and it would be a totally new experience for fans of the modern Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. There won't be iPhones and Twitter this time, and even the genius detective would be "a lot less brattish" and "a lot more polished" in the Victorian era.
So when can fans expect this Christmas episode on their screens? According to Moffat, it ironically won't be on Christmas. However, fans can still expect it way before the rumored "Sherlock" season 4 release date.
"It is a Christmas-ish special," he recently told Collider in an interview. "It will be around that time of year. I'm not being vague because I'm evil. I just don't know."
However, he confirmed that it "won't be Christmas day 'cause that's too crowded now" but he did promise to air it sometime during the Yuletide season.
"So, it's a sort of Christmas special," he continued. "We keep calling it the Christmas special, and there's a Christmas-y element in it, but it's not really. You could put it in the middle of summer and it would be fine."
In another interview, Moffat promised a "spooky" story for the special episode.
"Ghost stories work better in a Victorian setting," he teased Entertainment Weekly about the mysterious one-off.
The said special episode won't be connected to any of the previous or upcoming episodes of the BBC show plot-wise. In fact, the showrunners still haven't started putting their ideas for the fourth season on paper yet.
Moffat told Collider that the will be working on that after completing the "Dr. Who" Christmas special. Hopefully, their filming schedule ("April-ish") would still give the production enough time to premiere it on the rumored "Sherlock" season 4 release date in January 2017.
Watch "Sherlock" Christmas episode trailer here!
