Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson on "Sherlock." (PBS)
Robert Lloyd considers the elementary appeal of ”Sherlock”…
Sherlock Holmes — you all know that guy. (And if you don’t, I would very much like to speak with you; your strange case interests me.) Like Santa Claus or Peter Pan or Hamlet, he is among those — spoiler alert! — fictional characters who stand for a whole class of behavior and purpose and who shape the very way we think about thinking. We greet his periodic returns to the screen with excitement, but also with trepidation: As a man out of copyright, he is subject to all sorts of remaking and remodeling and speculation upon his closeted character. (I don’t mean sexually closeted, but there’s speculation on that account too.) He has been used, and he has been abused.
Holmes is the Hero as Pathology, and even before Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss contrived to revive him as a 21st-century man in “Sherlock” — a series of three feature-length adventures beginning Sunday on KOCE and Thursday on KCET — we got used to seeing him shaped weekly into Gregory House, M.D. The extensive parallels matter little now on “House,” but the fact is that there is always room in our hearts, and on our televisions, for a brilliant, dashing, antisocial deductive reasoner.
Moffat is the show runner on “Doctor Who,” and his Holmes is cut from the same cloth as his Doctor — not quite of this Earth, mad to all appearances, full of random facts, given to sudden quick movements, with a horror of boredom and a love of risk. (It also reminds us, conversely, that “Doctor Who” is structured as a mystery, and that the Doctor’s own archenemy, the Master, is very much a Moriarty.) Star Benedict Cumberbatch is tall and narrow in the familiar mode, with a haughty intensity but also something of a sense of fun. It takes all of 30 seconds, watching him, to go from “Hmmm,” to “Oh, yes.” As the kids say, he owns this.
Watson is played by Martin Freeman, a sensitive, solid Everyman sort best known here as Tim in the British version of “The Office” and as Arthur Dent in the film “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and who was just tapped to play the lead in Peter Jackson’s film of “The Hobbit…”
THERE’S MORE, READ THE REST.
– Robert Lloyd
RECENT AND RELATED
“Doctor Who” will hit home video with a special extra
David Tennant says “Who” role was “impossibly fortunate”
David Tennant, running out of time on “Doctor Who”
VIDEO: Exit interview — Tennant and Davies together
Robert Lloyd: My surreal ride with “Doctor Who”
Will there be a “Doctor Who” film?
“Doctor Who,” fighting the past and looking to the future
Comments
Print
Read Later
Our legion of super contributors is led by Hero Complex editor Gina McIntyre and 
Saw it and was moderately entertained. What gets tiring and is transparent is the writers attempts at inserting as many Black women into positions of power as they can, therapist, police lieutenant, etc.
Then of course there's the naughty lesbian stuff….ok, we're impressed, you wouldn't see that with Basil Rathbone, but is it necessary?
The actual plot is engrossing and credible with the usual tecno details to back it all up.
One unsolved thing…no spoiler here, how does the killer get them to do it???
This is what a remember: The murderer pulls a gun if the subject decides that they'd don't have to chose (a conclusion that Sherlock comes to very quickly) and then 'says' it's either a 100% chance of death by a shot to the head or at least a 50/50 chance with the pill game <— that's the 'talk' that gets them to go for the pill. Sherlock notices the gun's a cigarette lighter and starts to leave; presumably the other victims weren't so astute about firearms.
Benedict Cumberbatch. His name alone is entertaining.
Haven't seen this, but as a die-hard fan of the A. Conan Doyle stories, I can tell you the the books have always been more engrossing and entertaining than the film and television adaptations (with the possible exception of the Jeremy Brett, who comes the closest to the Holmes of the books, in my opinion).