Lance Mannion: The trouble with dismembered county squires

Thursday. July 9, 2015.

I’d like to see them do one serious period piece with every new season of Sherlock. This doesn’t appear to be quite what I have in mind though.

I was thinking of a more straight-forward adaptation of one of Conan Doyle’s original stories, like The Sign of the Four or “the dog one.”

Still, I can’t wait.

It looks as though Cumberbatch is playing a more gentlemanly, more mature, more self-contained, more good-humored, more Rathbonian Holmes. Freeman’s Watson appears to still be Freeman’s Watson, a very good thing, since one of the virtues of Sherlock is that Freeman’s Watson is very much Conan Doyle’s Watson. It makes sense that Holmes would be shaped by his times to some degree and that an eccentric polymath who likes to keep his emotions in check and his feelings to himself would be more of a misfit here in the early 21st Century and more at home and at ease the late 19th. But Watson would be doggedly Watson, no matter when and where he lived. That’s his great strength. It’s what makes him so dependable, and it’s his dependability that makes him indispensable to Holmes.He can be shaken but not shaken out of himself. He's always himself and always true to himself. However much danger they're in, however many pipes a problem is, Holmes knows he can look over and find Watson there being Watson. As series co-creator Stephen Moffat has said, Sherlock Holmes doesn't need a second brain. He needs Watson.

Be interesting to see what the Victorian Mycroft and Moriarty are like.

I like the visual and musical tribute to Jeremy Brett’s Holmes right there in the opening shot.