Swarmed as we are by television detectives cast from the mold of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation — or, to be as rigidly precise as Holmes himself, cast from the mold established by Edgar Allen Poe in Murders in the Rue Morgue — a new Sherlock Holmes series set in modern times comes with a luggage room full of assumptions, expectations, opportunities and pitfalls. The happy news is that Sherlock, produced and co-written by Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat along with fellow Whovian Mark Gatiss, is as good a contemporary presentation of the classic detective as one could expect, if not hope for. The production is handsome, the writing good, and in Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman one finds the strongly reactive chemistry that gives the series its sparkle. Cumberbatch is nicely tuned to a 21st century expression of the arrogant, analytic and socially careless savant we know. But Freeman outdoes him as the everyman Watson who serves as both audience surrogate and foil to Holmes. Result: Holmes, self-described as a high-functioning sociopath, is kept within sight of humanity by Watson’s empathy and friendly inclinations. The sociopath angle is rather interesting. In one respect it’s little more than a rhetorical contrivance that makes for an exciting business card — SHERLOCK HOLMES — High-Functioning Sociopath and Consulting Detective. Yet the exaggeration also points the character in a definite direction: Holmes’ dedication to solving rather than committing crimes indicates a moral sense. And the foundation is there, as we know from Doyle’s work, for a relationship between Holmes and Watson that flourishes by teasing out that subsurface moral sense.
Pity poor Watson, however, who is written so inconsistently as to be spongy rather than steely. In one episode, he’s the listless war veteran missing the action and capable of wielding a handgun with deadly aim. In later episodes, he is brave but floppy, not at all like the hardened (or haunted) veteran of a counterinsurgency war. Even his medical skills seem to be left aside, making Watson little better than a Baker Street irregular insofar as helping Holmes solve cases is concerned. It’s a problem of context; in a Victorian setting Dr. Watson could hardly be expected to be a forensic pathologist or a terminator. But surely the Army doctor of today — and an Afghan war veteran, no less — has more to contribute.
Moffat, who is usually at home in the intricate, and Gatiss succumb to other more unseemly glitches. The decision to present Moriarity with the demeanour of a college student rather than the heft of a seasoned force of nature, for example. Or Holmes asking about what sort of person could pass invisibly through society while staring at a taxi cab. You would think the driver would come immediately to mind, as it did to this decidedly non-genius mind, and you would be wrong; it’s the passenger who — wrongfully, it turns out — gets the attention. The adventure elements also stick on occasion, such as when Holmes and Watson pay a visit to a woman at risk of being murdered and inexplicably leave her alone while pursuing an apparently wilier assassin. Once again we ask, isn’t Watson supposed to be a veteran from a war defined by counterinsurgency and the constant need for vigilance against surprise attacks? Worst of all, however, is the cliffhanger ending of the third film, The Great Game, which strongly suggests that Moffat and company succumbed too much to adventure tropes at the expense of the difficult, baffling problems that truly provide Holmes, and viewers, with intellectual gratification.
Yet is it possible to just go along for the breathless thrill of the ride? Of course. The series deserves accolades for its hip, smart efforts even if, it must be said, Jeremy Brett and Edward Burke remain the definitive Holmes and Watson, and the Granada series that housed them remains the definitive screen adaptation of Doyle’s work. In all the comparisons, the question as to how significant this modern vision is of Sherlock Holmes remains to be settled. The difference between the new Holmes and, to pick one example of countless, a program like CSI, is that where it requires a small army of Crime Scene Investigators to gather the minutiae of physical evidence from a crime scene with a Grissom to integrate it all, Holmes works like a one-man forensic lab. Context, again: When everything that Holmes observes about a body or crime scene could just as easily have been gathered by capable forensic technicians, his feats of deduction lose their relative power. One might even suspect that the police are kept artificially stunted to make Holmes, by comparison, seem to occupy a higher plane of reasoning. We are left with the notion that while Holmes may be a brilliant and marvelously entertaining detective in modern times, he is something far greater in his original Victorian setting when forensic science is largely unknown. There, the Great Detective is revolutionary.
Sherlock. Created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.Written by Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Stephen Thompson. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Una Stubbs, Zoe Telford and Rupert Graves. At the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t4pgh
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