Sherlock notices that Soo Lin's flat is empty and snoops around, where he finds an intruder; a brief fight ensues, but the attacker flees.

Back at the museum, Holmes surprises Soo Lin in hiding, who explains the code is linked to the criminal ring "Black Lotus Tong", of which she was once a member.

However, Shan, the Black Lotus Tong's leader, escapes and contacts a person via online "chat" identified only by the initial "M" who had helped the gang to get a foothold in London.

Sam Wollaston of The Guardian thought that "The Blind Banker" was better than the series opener, calling the plot "more satisfying ... clearer and more self-contained".

[7] Radio Times reviewer David Butcher wrote that the episode "didn't have the scripting pizzazz of the others, but it did have one big advantage: Zoe Telford.

She played a love interest for Martin Freeman's Dr Watson and briefly threatened to bring a strong female character into the mix — only to be wasted on damsel-in-distress duties.

[8] IGN's Chris Tilly rated the episode 7 out of 10, describing it as "a lacklustre effort that fails to do justice to that smart and sophisticated start".

He praised Lyn's directing and the character developments, especially of Watson, but Lestrade did not appear and the plot "fails to fully engage, the story feeling like 60-minutes of material dragged out over 90".

[16] Laurie Penny, writing for The New Statesman, stated she was "tired of stories about clever white men", and characterised the plot as "booga-wooga yellow peril exotic chinky slaughter emporium".

[17] Kayti Burt, writing for Collider, rated the episode an eighth-best middle of the pack for the series, but noted its "seriously lazy Orientalism.

"[18] Jaine Chemmachery, a lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at Sorbonne University, wrote in a 2020 paper that: "The tropes of unassimilable otherness and unfathomable mystery are repackaged into a London Chinatown which is explicitly Orientalist," referring to both the series as a whole and this episode directly.