I was one of the few people who remained a fan of Moffat throughout his tenure on Doctor Who. His episodes certainly weren’t perfect, and often ranged dramatically in quality, but I was mostly on board with what he was doing with the storyline – even if his grasp on writing the companions’ character arcs was always weak. I also really enjoyed the first two seasons of Sherlock – even two of those first six episodes weren’t particularly good. While Moffat’s run on Doctor Who was mostly consistent, his and Gatiss’ work on Sherlock took a noticeable dip in quality during the third and fourth seasons, completely blowing any goodwill they’d accumulated from the fanbase by the end of the fourth season’s finale. And it’s this trend of inconsistent quality that brings us to Dracula. There is something appealing about the writers who revived Sherlock Holmes for a new generation tackling another literary legend like Dracula. In that sense, I was very excited to see what they’d do, hoping it would skew closer to the first two seasons of Sherlock in terms of quality. Unfortunately, it skewed heavily toward the last two seasons of Sherlock, giving us a mess of a show that tries to be more clever than it is and eschews telling any kind of coherent story in favor of distracting plot twists that don’t work half as well as Moffat and Gatiss think they do. (Spoilers for all three episodes of Dracula.)

Dracula (written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat)
For over 120 years, Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula, has inspired generations of filmmakers. Now the creators of Sherlock give the legend fresh blood! It’s 1897 and St Mary’s Convent in Budapest plays host to a desiccated husk of a human being, Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), an English lawyer with a strange and unsettling story to tell. Listening in is the kind and inquisitive Sister Agatha (Dolly Wells), a nun with an unusual interest in the creatures of the night.

Invited to Transylvania to meet the reclusive Count Dracula (Claes Bang), Harker finds himself trapped in an ancient, terrifying castle, a maze of mouldering corridors and vaults: a prison without locks. It soon becomes clear that he and his client are the only things living in the echoing halls of the moulding pile, and that the Count himself isn’t living at all. In fact, Dracula is a 400-year-old vampire who has grown weary of his own exhausted country and has set his sights on the new world. As the shadows lengthen and Harker’s account unfolds, it becomes clear that the remorseless vampire may have unfinished business with his erstwhile guest.

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