Clearing the Victorian Fog: Doyle's Holmes vs Sherlock 

While I am in the Sherlock mode, let me jabber a little more about the series. I was just reading John Watson’s blog. Yes, the blog of John H. Watson actually exists and is replete with spin-offs from the original stories. My favourite is The Speckled Blonde! You guessed it right – it’s a cheeky twist on The Speckled Band. In 2012, the evil stepfather is not an ex-colonial officer but a cosmetics tycoon. The snake is a red herring, owned by the dead woman’s fiancé and the fatal weapon is a bubble bath. 

This nugget of a case encapsulates Sherlock's fascinating twists on the original stories. The sci-fi thriller version of The Hound of the Baskervilles is the best. Doyle's novel portrayed a world teetering dangerously between superstition and science. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (the writers of Sherlock) launch us into the terrifying milieu of chemical and biological weapons. The hound is no longer a fiendish beast covered in phosphorous but a nightmarish image created by the victims' own horrified psyche. Instead of a vengeful aristocrat we have a sinister scientist suffusing the 'moor' with noxious fumes that generate paralyzing nightmares. Exploiting contemporary paranoia about biological terrorism, the writers clear off the Victorian fog, distilling the essence of Doyle's novel. 

And they do the same for the super sleuth. Holmes is stripped off all the Victorian trappings except for his scintillating deductive powers. Sherlock fans will of course delight in the brilliant update of famous deduction scenes.Instead of a watch, Holmes spews Watson's life-history from an i phone with an impish touch at the end. Holmes is spot on about everything regarding Harry Watson - his drinking, his divorce, his tenuous relationship with John. He just misses one small detail - Harry is short for Hariette - Harry is Watson's sister and not his brother!

The creators do an equally brilliant job with the new stories. The Great Game gets my vote. An unknown criminal mastermind compels Sherlock to solve 'little puzzles' within strict time limits. If Sherlock fails, a random hostage will blow up. The fascinating aspect of this episode is to see Sherlock being kept on razor's edge by a sadistic adversary. The books provide an implicit assurance of Holmes's infallibility. But as the detective's analytic prowess is strained to its ultimate limit in The Great Game, the audience worries about his potential failure. Particularly tense is the scene where Sherlock declares a painting to be fake, but the villain refuses to release the hostage until Sherlock proves why it is fake. As the clock ticks on the screen, the audience waits in feverish anticipation, wondering if the detective can actually score over his antagonist. 

The anticipation is justified when we know that the antagonist is none other than James Moriarty - "the Napoleon of crime" as Doyle's detective had labelled him. Sir Arthur never fleshed out the schemes of Holmes's "intellectual equal". The series fills up this void with elan. In The Great Game, Moriarty makes Holmes dance to his tune by exploiting the detective's obsession with crime solving. The Reichenbach Fall depicts his diabolical intelligence as Moriarty nearly convinces everyone that Holmes is a fake.

Serial Killer; A Study in Pink (top); 
James Moriarty The Reichenbach Fall (bottom)

Unfortunately, Andrew Scott's performance shatters the menacing charm built up by the plot. His deliberately guttural voice and melodramatic dialogue delivery reduces Moriarty into a clownish, comic-book villain. In fact Phil Davis, who played the serial killer in A Study in Pink, would have made the perfect Moriarty. His calm but chilling ruthlessness, his arrogance, his razor-sharp mind, constitute the perfect ingredients for Holmes's arch enemy. 

Much like Moriarty's performance, the climax of The Reichenbach Fall is a downer. The fact that Moriarty bribes the staff instead of using a computer key code to unlock the Pentonville prison, the Bank of England and the Crown Jewels; undermines the power of this evil genius. Similarly, the plot of A Scandal in Belgravia is riddled with holes. It's utterly unconvincing that Sherlock would fail to detect that the dead woman with a disfigured face is not Irene Adler - especially since she had bared it all; walking in on Sherlock stark naked with red lipstick and red heels. In her dominatrix avatar, Holmes's THE WOMAN appears cheesy rather than seductively smart.

I hope that the writers fix these faux pas in the next series, for, episodes like A Study in Pink, The Hounds of Baskerville and The Great Game establish their smartness.  Meanwhile I will satisfy my Holmes mania with Sherlock's and John's blog. And of course with the good old memoirs of Dr. John H.Watson!  

P.S. Fellow Holmesians can access John's blog  here: <http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/>
      
  And for a real humbling experience browse through 
"The Science of Deduction": <http://www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk/>

‘Cumberbitten’ but not ‘Sherlocked’

The ‘Cumber’ flu has taken over half the world now. Look no further than the Olympic opening ceremony and you will hear Benedict Cumberbatch’s deep voice declare: “Let the games commence”!  Commemorating the actor’s birthday on the 19^th of July a leading daily devoted an entire page analysing why so many girls have been ‘cumberbitten’. The BBC series Sherlock of course formed the highlight of the piece. As an i-phone toting, tech savvy, twenty-first century Holmes in a chic overcoat and scarf, Cumberbatch has supposedly transformed this ice-cold detective into the ‘sexiest’ thing on television. Frankly, I was rather amused to hear this.

Cumberbatch as Holmes (left); Sidney's Paget's illustration in the original stories (right)

I find Cumberbatch’s Sherlock quite melodramatic but definitely not sexy. His striking good looks are rather distracting – not quite Holmesian. In my mind’s eye, Holmes’s tall, thin form with piercing eyes and hawk-like nose, never quite spells ‘handsome’. And then there is Benedict’s breathless dialogue delivery. The actor and the writers tell you that it captures the lightening speed of Holmes’s deduction and his brilliant but utterly impatient mind.

However, the stories always paint a different picture of the detective for me. Yes, Holmes is edgy and debilitatingly rude at times. He cuts off Watson’s florid description of a lichen-covered wall with “cut the poetry, Watson. I note that it was a high wall”. But when it comes to retracing his deductive trail for mere mortals like Watson or Lestrade, he does it with a slow, deliberate relish. The series could have retained that aspect.  After all, the director brilliantly portrays Holmes’s supersonic deductive speed through the texts that flare up on screen, while Sherlock’s single glance culls a person’s minutest details.

Cumberbatch’s Sherlockian mannerisms too are over-the-top. Holmes has a touch of the dramatic. In the book he gleefully springs up from his chair after inventing a chemical test for detecting old bloodstains.And Watson tells us that he “bowed as if to some appalauding crowd conjured by his imagination”. But this twenty first-century Sherlock carries such eccentric flashes to the extreme. A Sherlock, who jumps up and down on the couch or sniffs up a client’s smoke rings, because Watson has confiscated his cigarettes; looks clownish; not delightfully eccentric.

I don’t want to carp. The series has many merits and not least of them is the Sherlock-Watson relationship. Martin Freeman is not the overawed, subservient sidekick of the black and white Sherlock Holmes movies. This new-age army doctor is more of an equal player with an assertive persona and a cheeky sense of humour. My  favourite is the scene where Holmes asks a puzzled Watson to punch him in the face.

Holmes snaps:  “PUNCH ME-IN THE FACE - didn’t you hear me?"

Watson retorts: “I always hear ‘PUNCH ME IN THE FACE’ when you speak. But that's USUALLY  SUBTEXT” 

The creatives transcribe Holmes and Watson's underlying affection with commendable subtlety. Particularly memorable is the scene where Holmes rushes to tear apart the explosives Moriarty had strapped on Watson. The  detective, who had proclaimed to Moriarty that he does not have a heart, morphs into a heartwarming friend the moment Moriarty leaves. As Sherlock awkwardly acknowledges John's bravery, one is reminded of  the scene in Doyle's The Three Garridebs when Watson is shot by a criminal and Holmes exclaims: "You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" Moved by this rare display of emotion, Watson remarks: "It was worth a wound - it was worth many wounds - to know the depth of loyalty and love that lay behind that cold mask"  
And it is this "depth of loyalty and love" that is revealed in the  final phone conversation between Holmes and Watson in the series. As Holmes prepares for his fatal leap in the last episode of Sherlock Season 2, Cumberbatch’s quavering voice and slight facial twitch, expose a carefully repressed human side of this consulting detective.Ironically, much like Holmes's sentimental side, Cumberbatch's acting prowess finds only a fleeting display in Sherlock. 

During his decade long career prior to Sherlock, Cumberbatch essayed characters that showcased his talent way better than this BBC series. In the series The Last Enemy he played Stephen Ezard - an obsessive, socially awkward, mathematician who is sucked into a political maelstrom. Shorn of exaggerated gestures, forming the  hallmark of "Sherlock", Benedict made Ezard's bewilderment and vulnerability terrifyingly palpable.And in Hawking, Benedict portrayed the scientist’s grit and agony with heartrending realism. Ironically, the performance that has made him a household name, lacks these very qualities.  

Finally, much has been made of the actor’s baritone. His deep, sexy voice hooks ‘cumberbitches’ even to  fifteen-minute-long car commercials. I plead guilty to the ‘sin’ as well. His incredible voice modulation can transport you to the World War I battlefield or to the verudous realm of Keats’s Nightingale, with equal ease. But his off-screen persona is no less impressive. His smartness and erudition stand out when he talks about his roles. Just listen to him speaking about the shattering of chivalric ideal during World War I, in one of his interviews on War Horse, and you would know what I mean. And of course one can’t help adoring someone who can respond to abuses like ‘horse-faced and arse-named’ with “that’s what I have been born and blessed with”. So at the risk of crafting the cheesiest sign-off, I admit that I am ‘cumberbitten’ but not quite ‘Sherlocked’!