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2.0 Baker Street, or How Sherlock Holmes Came To Be Alive & Well, and Living in 21st Century London

Just a few minutes into A Study in Pink, the first episode of the new BBC TV series, Sherlock, a throwaway reference that will elude non-Holmesians makes clear that the creative forces behind the latest — and by far —most successful chronological reboot of the world’s most famous detective, take their Canon very seriously. After introducing a modern wounded and recuperating ex-military doctor named John Watson, haunted by memories of his service in the current Afghan War and at loose ends upon his return to London, the writer Steven Moffat, draws viewers further into a remarkable and convincing alternate universe, with staccato depictions of a terrifying series of suicides carried out by victims with no apparent reason to take their own lives.

Following the death of an affluent man, seen arriving at the airport, and then swallowing a capsule before collapsing on an empty floor of an office building, we are shown two teenagers caught in a heavy downpour. One of them tells his mate that he needs to go back to fetch his umbrella … before he, too, is shown downing a capsule, and turning up dead.

At the subsequent Scotland Yard press conference led by Detective Inspector Lestrade, that second victim is identified as James Phillimore, a name shared with the subject of one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous unresolved cases, alluded to in the tantalizing opening section of The Problem of Thor Bridge. There, Watson (that is, the 19th-century injured Afghan War veteran) refers to the puzzle “of Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.” Moffat’s present-day Phillimore was also “never more seen in this world” after his fateful decision to retrieve his umbrella — save, perhaps, by the person who somehow managed to convince him to end his life.

Not one viewer in a hundred will find this choice of name noteworthy, but it’s clearly a shout-out to those watchers who read Doyle’s original tales devotedly. Moffat’s and cocreator Mark Gatiss’s love for their source material is evident in every scene of the three episodes that comprised the first of what deserves to be many seasons. By seriously and intelligently dissecting what made Doyle’s stories — and their leads — so enduring, and almost-universally appealing, Moffat and Gatiss have already staked a claim at being among the most faithful and creative interpreters of the iconic figures of Holmes and Watson.

It’s not that they are the first, not by a long chalk, to place the detective and the doctor in a time period later than that of the original sixty stories. (As Holmes himself quoted from Ecclesiastes in A Study in Scarlet, “there is nothing new under the sun.”) Almost from the beginning of the depiction of those characters on film, writers and producers transported them from Victorian England to times contemporaneous with the movie’s filming. In 1932’s Sherlock Holmes, based on the Gillette play, screenwriter Bertram Millhauser had Clive Brook’s sleuth tooling about in London of the 1930s. Even the well-respected Arthur Wontner series of the same vintage set its adaptations of The Valley of Fear and The Final Problem, among others, decades after they occurred in the originals. Most famously, when Universal took over the film series that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce had begun at 20th Century Fox with two period pieces, they unapologetically set their plots in the 1940s. In the first, 1942’s Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror followed the opening credits with this explanation for the shift: “The character of Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible, and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the present day, he remains, as ever, the supreme master of deductive reasoning.”

The shift, by the way, was done with the explicit approval of Rathbone himself. But while the Universal films occupy a warm place in the hearts of many, with few exceptions (such as The Scarlet Claw), they are not viewed as being in the spirit of the originals. They actually feature relatively little by way of deductive reasoning, and their continuation of the Fox films’s reduction of Watson to a buffoon still raises hackles.

Starting in the 1970s, versions of Holmes on screen began appearing in modern-day America. In They Might Be Giants, George C. Scott portrayed a character who deluded himself into believing that he was Holmes himself. A 1976 TV movie, The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, featured Larry Hagman, of all people, as a policeman who comes to think that he’s really Holmes after being struck on the head. In 1987, Michael Pennington (who was a brilliant Moriarty in the BBC radio Canon starring Clive Merrison and Michael Williams) was a Holmes revived from a cryogenic chamber into the modern world in the TV movie, The Return of Sherlock Holmes. A very similar plotline was at the heart of the 1993 TV film Sherlock Holmes Returns with another one-time Napoleon of Crime, Anthony Higgins, as the reanimated Great Detective. These efforts, along with the early graphic novel Son of Holmes: The Woman In Red (1977), the 1999-2001 cartoon series, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (in which Watson has become a robot!), and Barry Grant’s modern-day pastiches, The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter, have not left much of an impression either on Holmesians or the public at large.

Given these failures, and the seemingly-obvious notion that to faithfully present Holmes, one must start by keeping him in his own time, skepticism that BBC’s Sherlock, planting the character in 2010 England, would have any redeeming value was certainly rational. But with Gatiss and Moffat’s passion for the characters, stemming from a life-long fascination with them (and an affection for the dozen much-derided Universal films manifested in the person of one villain modeled after a creepy killer from The Pearl of Death), and intelligent tweaking of characteristics of their leads and plot elements from Doyle’s sixty tales, they have managed to produce not only television films that are remarkably true to the spirit of the original (in countless ways that the 2009 Guy Ritchie film was not), but ones with broad appeal beyond would-be Baker Street Irregulars everywhere.

In a blog entry on the BBC website, Gatiss has written about the origin of Sherlock, which, fittingly, came about during rail journeys he and Moffat shared during their work on Dr. Who, when they both discussed their feelings about Doyle’s creations.

“It didn’t take long, though, for us both to shyly admit that our favourite versions of the oft-told tales were the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films of the 1930s and 1940s. Particularly the ones where they brought them up to date. This may sound like heresy but really it isn’t. Although Steven and I are second to none in loving the flaring gas-lit atmosphere of a lovely old London, it felt as though Sherlock Holmes had become all about the trappings and not the characters.

Also, the original stories are models of their kind. Incredibly modern, dialogue-driven, fast paced and short! What better way to get back to the roots of these fantastic creations than to make Holmes and Watson living, breathing, modern men just as they had been originally?”

The creators of Sherlock’s central conceit is that Doyle never invented the fictional characters of Holmes and Watson, and their rich supporting cast. Instead, when, in A Study in Pink, their Watson meets his old medical colleague Stamford by chance, and is introduced to an eccentric searching for a flat-mate, the name Sherlock Holmes is new to him. Their meeting parallels the opening of A Study In Scarlet closely; Holmes effortlessly displays his brilliance by rattling off a series of accurate deductions about Watson. Instead of the immortal first words Doyle penned — “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” their Holmes asks their Watson, “Afghanistan or Iraq?,” before disclosing, in a segment that combines the verbal explanations for the deductions with tight camera shots of the telling clues, how he knew that the good doctor had recently been in combat. Moffat and Gatiss also borrow freely from The Sign of the Four in this episode, but instead of having Holmes announcing remarkably-accurate details about Watson’s brother from his examination of a pocket-watch, they have him work his intellectual wizardry on the cell-phone Watson carries. Doyle’s Holmes magazine essay. “The Book of Life,” which Watson famously dismisses as “ineffable twaddle,” is replaced by Sherlock’s website, The Science of Deduction.

In keeping with the multi-media approach to booming TV series these days, you can actually visit that website, complete with a forum, hidden messages for visitors to decode, and a list of archived case files that play upon Doyle’s habit of having Watson refer to cases he has written up but not published, for one reason or another. Those archived cases include ones derived from the original Watson’s untold tales, such as that of the Abernetty Family, and titles (“The Killer Cats of Greenwich,” “The Man With Four Legs,”) that pay homage to the long-running radio series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that began with Rathbone and Bruce reprising their roles. All three episodes are replete with clever twists on the originals that often undercut the expectations of viewers who remember what certain clues meant when Doyle used them. In today’s smoke-free environment, Sherlock dubs a case a three-nicotine patch problem, rather than a three-pipe one. Pointing out more would vitiate the pleasure for those who have not yet seen the series; suffice to say that none of the updates or inversions strike a false chord.

But a well-constructed framework is not in itself enough to explain the success and popularity of the series. The cleverness of the writing extends to character and plot as well. A Study in Pink, and the third episode, The Great Game, both do a laudable job of playing fair with the viewer, and repeat viewings will reveal how crucial evidence was placed before the viewer early on. Bits and pieces of a number of canonical stories are artfully employed. While A Study in Pink primarily derives from A Study in Scarlet, the other two episodes, especially The Great Game, borrow from a number of original cases, including The Dancing Men, and The Bruce-Partington Plans (with a missile substituted for the naval submarine of the original). The Great Game has Holmes racing deadlines set by a homicidal madman to solve seemingly-unrelated crimes in order to save a hostage’s life, and The Blind Banker, the least-strong episode of the three, has the detective trying to find out why strange symbols have been painted on the interior wall of a bank. Again, saying more about the plots for those who have not had the pleasure of experiencing them would do a disservice to the careful work of the writers Moffat, Gatiss and Stephen Thompson, but any reader interested in discussing them is welcome to email me at the address at the end of my bio line below.

For many, the convolutions of the puzzles will take a back seat to the dynamic portrayals of Holmes and Watson by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Both are instantly convincing in their parts. Cumberbatch combines arrogance, brilliance, and quirkiness, without making the concept of a modern-day genius serving as a consulting detective anything less than fully plausible. As in the originals, the humanity of the shows is brought out by Watson, here personified by Freeman as a capable professional in his own right, who needs only a focus for his morality, loyalty and intellect that he finds as Holmes’s assistant. Their rapport develops quickly, and the development of their bond of friendship is much more convincing than in other portrayals, such as those that diminish Watson’s own strengths to the point of caricature.

When the 2009 Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law movie brought Holmes back to the big screen for the first time in almost thirty years, many hoped that the robust box office sales would translate into a renewed appreciation for the original stories and characters. Surprisingly, that hope is more likely to be realized by Sherlock, which just a month or so after appearing on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre has become a surprising big seller on DVD. My efforts, in the fall of 2010 to buy a copy in New York City, at one of a dozen branches of megagiant Barnes & Noble over the course of several weeks were unsuccessful; every store in the metropolitan area was sold out, and the demand for the not-inexpensive 2-disk set was so great that Barnes & Noble’s warehouses were also out of stock, meaning that shoppers would need to wait about a month to get a copy. In an experience of buying Sherlockian DVDs that extends over two decades and two continents, I have never encountered such a phenomenon. I look forward to the countless scholarly analyses of the programs that I expect will be forthcoming on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the promise of the second season, which may include an episode that is somehow inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles. Devotees of the detective and the doctor owe Moffat and Gatiss a debt of gratitude for reinvigorating them, and keeping their memories green.

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Lenny Picker, a freelance writer living in 21st-century New York, has not (yet) been called a high-functioning sociopath. He can be reached at chthompson@jtsa.edu.