The Changing Faces of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Season 3 just ended. A new season of Elementary is on. Time for the first post of 2014.

So, who do I prefer as Sherlock Holmes – Benedict Cumberbatch or Johnny Lee Miller? The answer is always the latter. Sharing the rudeness and arrogance of his BBC counterpart, Johnny Lee Miller’s Holmes is darker, grittier and more vulnerable. Miller is not given to eccentric flourishes like Cumberbatch. You will not find Miller leaping over the table in the middle of his best man’s speech. He won’t slap himself as he struggles to identify a potential murder victim at Watson’s wedding.  

Robert Doherty’s take on Conan Doyle’s sleuth facilitates Miller’s realistic portrayal. In the original stories Watson mentions that Holmes’s cocaine addiction nearly ended the detective’s career. Elementary takes this cue. In this series Holmes is undone by the two biggest threats to his deductive powers – drug addiction and love. He can’t resist the charms of the brilliant Irene Adler. Unable to solve her brutal murder, Holmes spirals into the drug world and ends up in rehab. Then comes the ultimate shocker.  Irene Adler was never murdered because she never existed. Irene Adler was Moriarty – the “Napoleon of crime”.

Defining love as a crack in his powerful magnifying glass, Doyle’s Holmes avoids it forever. But Doherty makes his Holmes suffer the consequences of this crack. In spite of the betrayal, Holmes writes to the imprisoned Irene/Moriarty. He admits to Watson that he hoped for Irene/Moriarty’s redemption. After all, planning crimes is her remedy for boredom just as solving them is Holmes’s. Cocaine, for Holmes, is an inferior alternative to the highs of deduction. If Holmes can recover from addiction, can’t Irene mend her criminal ways?

But Holmes makes a fundamental error in this assumption. In spite of breaking laws to solve cases, Holmes is essentially a moral person. And despite his anti-social attitudes Holmes serves people by upholding justice. Moriarty is the true psychopath and will never give up crime. Allowing this erring judgement, Doherty moves his Holmes significantly away from the original, but also makes him poignantly fallible and human.

Unlike Doherty’s Holmes, BBC’s Sherlock will never allow love to crack his powerful magnifying glass. His humanity shines elsewhere. As John’s best man Holmes declares: “I will solve your crime. But you need John Watson to save your life . . . Ask me . . . He has saved mine many times and in many ways”. Notwithstanding his constant proclamations, we know that John has cured Sherlock’s sociopathy. A sense of loneliness creeps into Sherlock as he watches John and Mary disappear among the dancing, wedding guests. His early departure from the wedding or his  blank stare at John’s empty chair, register as much. And in the final episode he embraces imprisonment – even exile – to protect a friend. No wonder Mycroft calls Sherlock a “dragon-slayer”. And as a heartless businessman who turns human beings into assets for his empire, Charles Augustus Magnessun is the worst dragon of the twenty-first century.

Both the BBC adaptation and Elementary depart significantly from Doyle’s original stories. Of course they can’t celebrate Queen and Country as unconditionally as Doyle did. In this world of global terrorism, even an MP can hatch a terrorist plot. Figures like Assange and Snowden raise terrifying questions about the legitimacy of governments’ actions. Thus in Moffat and Gatiss’s hands Mycroft Holmes is transformed. The man, who practically runs the British government, is no longer the brilliant but lazy and harmless brother of the detective. In 2014, he is a cold, power-hungry Secret Service officer, who preserves a despicable criminal like CAM because he does not harm the powerful. Mycroft Holmes can threaten to plant sinister materials in the computers of Scotland Yard’s officers if they reveal hearing Magnessun’s name at Sherlock’s residence.

This is not a chivalrous world. And Doherty’s damaged genius is a better fit for it. But in preserving Sherlock’s old-school heroism, Gatiss and Moffat provide a haven from this anarchihc world – a haven, Doyle called Baker Street. So, in the end, my head is intrigued by Doherty’s fallible detective. But my heart still lies with the dragon-slayer.