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Sherlock returned with a bang on BBC One last night, pulling in nearly 10 million viewers on New Year's Day.

The Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman drama has had fans on tenterhooks for two years and series three's opening episode 'The Empty Hearse' appeared to go down well on Twitter and on the Digital Spy forums. Keep reading for the best of the web's responses.

On Twitter.

If Moffat and Gatiss couldn't explain the fall, Twitter came to its own conclusions.

Loved how #Sherlock survived the fall by arranging for Geoff Capes to catch him

— Michael Hogan (@michaelhogan) January 1, 2014

The Tumblr fandom quickly forgot about the fall and replaced it with that hat.

Sherlock In That Hat Though. Sherlock In That Hat. pic.twitter.com/bBvvT0xbYz

— Sherlock Day! (@PondsAreCool) January 2, 2014

The Daily Mail brought their usual class to proceedings.

Good effort! The Daily Mail reviews #Sherlock and Nearly gets Both...

So far away and yet so near. The problem with depicting the future on TV is that, 99.99999% of the time, it never turns out that way. Take the short-lived Space: 1999, the mid-1970s ITV rival to Doctor Who. 1999 itself was far less dramatic – the moon was never catapulted across space in the wake of a nuclear disaster. And come to think of it, no one walked around in drab, grey jumpsuits with big, bouffant hair. So many of the sci-fi classics made the mistake of thinking that the future is overpowered by the jumpsuit and the bouffant hairdo – a terrifying combination.

And let's not forget computers – great big clunky pieces of metal that would require the combined mights of Geoff Capes, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks to ferry from one place to another. TV programmes also assumed that computers could talk to people in the form of a giant holographic face.

There are a few things that make a man a man, most of these come through at puberty and are harrowing and traumatic affairs, one however was something I looked forward to greatly; Growing facial hair. To me having a beard was a true sign of manhood, it made me think of rockstars, bikers, lumberjacks and Brian Blessed, all things that as a young teenager you aspire to be.

As I reached the ability to grow facial hair I unfortunately could only manage a mustache and a couple of random hairs on my chin. Over a decade later I’m sat typing this with a beard that hides half my face and hasn’t even been trimmed in 4 months. In games you don’t see the day to day annoyances of owning a beard, mild itching, food and drink sitting proud on the hair based nest and people’s assumption...