Sherlock , Season 3, episode 2, "The Sign of Three" is set to air Sunday night on PBS, with the entire third season having already aired in the UK. IGN had the opportunity to sit down with series co-creator Steven Moffat recently to talk about his intentions for, and the audience response to, the long-awaited third season, as well as what lies ahead for Sherlock and Watson. We'll be rolling out segments as the series progresses. Here, Moffat addresses the seemingly meta tone that Sherlock adopted in the Season 3 debut, the continued speculation about his "death", and the balance between character-driven and mystery-driven stories.

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The debut episode of series 3, "The Empty Hearse" had elements that some Sherlock fans interpreted as reflective of Moffat and co-creator Mark Gatiss' understanding of their viewership. The fandemonium surrounding Sherlock and speculation about his death in the show seemed to reflect rampant real-world audience conjecture about how the fictional detective may have faked his own death at the conclusion of Season 2. The writers also seemed to be doing a bit of a tip of the hat to the fervor that has emerged around star Benedict Cumberbatch,"They're seeing themselves in the show," Moffat said when asked if the Sherlock team was engaging in a conversation with their fanbase to some degree. "We don't look. We can't look. I'm running two shows that have got very large and very vocal fandoms. I wouldn't admit it to myself if I had to look at it. No, the meta feel comes from the original Sherlock Holmes, the original stories. In the stories, when they were published in The Strand Magazine, it wasof the fiction that these were being published in The Strand Magazine. Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson, 'I cast an eye over your last account of my case. I congratulate you on the results.' It was very exaggerated. So that's the first thing. I can't think of any other set of stories in history where the main character reviews them -- and he doesn't like them. He doesn't like them very much. He's constantly saying 'your hideously distorted accounts.' [Laughs] He's constantly making suggestions. So the meta thing comes from the original. It's not from us being in dialogue with anybody."Moffat also feels that Sherlock's fake death was a rather obvious bit of trickery, stressing that what you see - in the form of Sherlock's final explanation of how he did it - is what you get. As to the theories that were presented online, Moffat says he is aware of them, but that for the most part, the audiences explanations are far more complex than what the show ultimately needed. When it comes to Sherlock's manufactured demise, viewer's would have done well to keep Occam's razor in mind - the simplest answer is usually the correct one."When it started to erupt, we saw a couple of them," Moffat said of the fan fiction that emerged to explain Sherlock's fake death. "We saw some YouTube things that were quite funny. Most of the ones I saw were jokes. There was one Mark [Gatiss] saw that was incredibly elaborate -- much cleverer than ours -- but the fact was, it would have taken most of the episode to explain it. As we keep saying to people, I do think there was -- I can now say this -- a measure of nonsense going on. He's falling off a building. He has one objective -- that is, not to hit the sidewalk. That's it. That's the only thing he can do. Didn't anybody notice that there's a whole building between John and the point of impact? So obviously something got in the way. That's it. It wasn't going to be anything else. The TARDIS wasn't going to fly in. That wasn't going to happen."Moffat jokingly added that the audience would have been "a bit cross" if the TARDISsuddenly appeared to sweep Sherlock up from his fall. "Besides, we've already done that with River."As far as a true potential crossover between the two series, something which is a consistent source of speculation among fans, Moffat has said that there are no hard and fast rules saying that an actor could not appear on both series. Though, that would not mean that the characters of The Doctor and Sherlock themselves would meet.In speaking with press at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch said he would be "very averse" to a crossover between the two series, "for all sorts of reason's beginning with taste.""No," Cumberbatch concluded. "Absolutely not."It seems unlikely that we would ever see Cumberbatch as The Master as many fans have petitioned for.One other topic of conversation that fans engaged in following the series premiere of Sherlock was the seeming shift to more character-focused stories."It's interesting, when were we that mystery-driven?" Moffat said when asked if he felt that the series had changed its direction this season. "The only totally mystery-driven story I can think of is "The Blind Banker." I mean, "A Scandal in Belgravia," which is outrageous from that point of view, has a crime story going for about, what, 25 minutes? Then it's about a boy and a girl missing each other. That's it for now. Then the plot, more or less, wakens up towards the end. I think we've always favored the characters, because that's the vivid thing in Sherlock Holmes stories. At the beginning of every Sherlock Holmes story, there are two or three pages of just Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson having a chat by the fireside. That's what people fell in love with. So we've always favored that. As we keep proclaiming to anyone who's not completely bored of it by now, it's not a detective show; it's a show about a detective. That's why it's a hit. That's why it's exciting."Stay tuned for more from our chat with Moffat in the coming weeks on Sherlock's evolving relationship with Mycroft, this season's villain, the sexualization of The Doctor and Sherlock, and more.

Sherlock Season 3 airs in the US on Sundays, January 19 – February 2 at 10PM on PBS.Roth Cornet is an Entertainment Editor for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @RothCornet and IGN at Roth-IGN