It’s the news every fan of TV’s most famed super-sleuth had been dreading. Almost.

Benedict Cumberbatch might not have much more left in him.

Speaking to , the actor — whose portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street-dwelling detective helped catapult him into Hollywood’s A-list — laid some fairly heavy clues about the future of the hit show.

“It might be the end of an era,” he said of season four, which recently wrapped filming. “It feels like the end of an era, to be honest. It goes to a place where it will be pretty hard to follow on immediately.”

But before the world’s devotees begin crying into their deerstalkers,

Cumberbatch suggested it might not be all over just yet. 

“We never say never on the show. I’d love to revisit it, I’d love to keep revisiting it, I stand by that, but in the immediate future we all have things that we want to crack on with and we’ve made something very complete as it is, so I think we’ll just wait and see,” he said. “The idea of never playing him again is really galling.”

The increasingly busy schedules of Cumberbatch— soon to be seen as Marvel’s — and co-star Martin Freeman has kept an intermittent presence on TV screens. The Emmy-winning one-off special, which aired on both the BBC and PBS on Jan.

1, was the first new in almost two years.

Season four of is not expected to be broadcast until 2017.

But will it be the end? The BBC told it wouldn’t comment.