Sherlock Holmes - TV Series

Hello everyone,

I started watching the Sherlock Holmes TV series.

As you may well know, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At the time the stories were published many people thought that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were real people and there were even quite many women who wanted to work for them as housekeepers.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself was at one point fed up with writing stories about Sherlock Holmes, but he went on doing it as this character earned him money. He even killed Sherlock Holmes, which was a huge disappointment for his fans, but then his first wife came up with an idea on how to resurrect the character.

But enough about the author and his love-hate relationship with his character, I will focus on the first episode now. Its name is “A Story in Pink”.
I thought that the action would take place in beginning-of-20th-century London, but I was mistaken. The scene opens with a battlefield where the weapons used are rather contemporary. Then it moves to Dr. Watson’s bedroom where he wakes up from the nightmare. He is a veteran who is being taken care of by The Royal Army Medical Corps – a specialist corps which provides medical care to the army personnel (their cap badge is imprinted on his coffee cup). So this a person for whom forgetting the war is a rather agonizing process.

Luckily Sherlock Holmes is there to bring him back to life (I hope this phrase has a figurative meaning as well). We learn that they both are wretches and no one would want any of them for a roommate and therefore they would be the perfect roommates. The moment they meet is the moment we are fascinated for the first time by Sherlock’s extreme observation skills: he describes Dr. Watson’s current situation only by looking at him and his phone (after having used it). They rent an apartment together and the adventures begin.

There are a couple of suicides in the city of London which are quite similar, therefore the police starts to have doubts if these are indeed suicides. After the fourth seeming suicide the police is at a dead-end and asks Sherlock Holmes for help. Once at the crime scene, we are again astonished by his observation skills – he gives too many details of the lady in pink’s life after having observed her corps for just a couple of minutes. Now he is absolutely sure that these are not suicides, but murders.

What I particularly didn’t like is that the police officers call Sherlock Holmes a freak quite a lot of times. I suppose the idea is to create some tension between the Police and the detective, however, I think it was too much… as is Dr. Watson’s astonishment after each of Sherlock Holmes’ revelations.  

Great series and the English is quite difficult.

At the end of the first episode Dr. Watson shot the taxi driver who almost managed to trick Sherlock into taking a pill that was possibly poisonous. This was the moment when their friendship was born. The spectator is now reassured that if Sherlock is about to do anything stupid, Dr. Watson would be there to save him.

The second episode is called “The Blind Banker”. In it, an old acquaintance of Sherlock asks him for help after someone managed to break into his office and there is no sign whatsoever of how it happened. That’s an easy one for Sherlock – he quickly realizes that the person who broke into the office went in through the window although the office is on a very high floor. The question now is who did it and what does the message they left in the office mean.

Like in the first episode, several seem-to-be suicides take place, the common between them being that there is no sign of intrusion whatsoever. A woman who works at an antiquities museum disappears. Little by little Sherlock Holmes finds out that everything that happened is related to Chinese antiquities that are smuggled into the USA. The criminal gang that organizes the smuggling is looking for an antiquity, but Sherlock does not know what antiquity it is yet.

At the beginning of the episode there is a scene in Sherlock’s apartment in which Sherlock fights with a person whose whole body is covered by clothes. The spectator learns that Sherlock has quite enviable fighting skills. I didn’t really get the meaning of that scene since the intruder’s identity is not revealed… Possibly its purpose was to prepare us for Sherlock’s fight with a member of the Chinese organization.

The last scene is really amusing. Sherlock knows that what he is about to say to the secretary in the office will shock her, so he takes his time to enjoy the moment. Her reaction is his prize for resolving the case. He is not interested in money, so luckily Dr. Watson takes care of that by accepting the checks that the banker offers to Sherlock.

The first scene of the third episode “The Great Game” shows Sherlock Holmes who is so bored that he is shooting at a wall in his apartment. Dr. Watson is astonished to find a human head in the fridge – the level of boredom is so high that Sherlock is measuring the coagulation of saliva after death.

There is a massive explosion in the building opposite Sherlock and Watson’s apartment. Luckily for Sherlock there is a new case… but he is the primary target of it. It turns out that the gas explosion in the building across the street is not an accident. The only thing that survived is a box which contains a letter addressed to Sherlock. And inside it there is a pink phone which is meant to give instructions for a series of puzzles.

The puzzles are created by a bomber who is apparently obsessed with Sherlock’s abilities to resolve puzzles. To be honest, I didn’t like the fact that the bomber creates puzzles just to see if Sherlock can resolve them. I would have liked the episode much more if the puzzles were not created especially for Sherlock. Of course, Sherlock couldn’t have foreseen that there would be a murderer who would be playing with people’s lives just to see if Sherlock can resolve his puzzles.

Unfortunately, an old lady dies because she starts describing the bomber to Sherlock. I did not like that, because if Sherlock hadn’t been so popular, the lady would not have been killed.

Towards the end of the third episode we see Dr. Watson trying to resolve the case that Mycroft asked Sherlock to resolve (at the beginning of the episode Mycroft asks Sherlock to investigate the death of a civil servant who was found on the tracks of a station with his head smashed. According to Mycroft, the servant must have taken a memory stick which contains the plans for a top secret missile defense system. He asks Sherlock to bring back the memory stick.

At first, Sherlock pretends that he is not interested in the case, but he has been observing Dr. Watson’s work since the beginning. I hope that in the next series Dr. Watson will participate more in the resolutions of the murders, meaning that he will have some in-sights just like Sherlock does.

Sherlock has apparently found out that the brother-in-law of the servant lives close to train tracks. He and Dr. Watson visit him and they take back the memory stick. Sherlock realizes that the bomber created puzzles to distract him from looking for the memory stick.

I am surprised that Sherlock does not tell this to Dr. Watson and waits for him to go out before contacting the bomber. Normally Sherlock tells Dr. Watson everything, but in that case the screenwriters decided that Sherlock should act differently so that Dr. Watson would be caught by the bomber (who turns out to be Moriarty – a name that was already mentioned several times in the episodes). They should have not done that – it is so obvious that it was on purpose so that Dr. Watson would be the fifth person to wear an explosive vest.

The first episode of the second season starts with the denouement of the meeting between Morairty, Sherlock and Dr. Watson. Moriarty receives a phone call and is apparently told to leave Sherlock and Dr. Watson alone. Apparently there is another mysterious person who actually pulls the strings.

Sherlock and Dr. Watson are becoming more and more popular as a result of Dr. Watson’s publications in his blog. If I were the screenwriter, I wouldn’t have written anything like that. Dr. Watson should be helping Sherlock to resolve the cases instead of writing about each case in some blog. After all, he is a doctor, so it would have been a good idea if there were some dead bodies that needed more analysis on the part of Dr. Watson. Or maybe I have not seen enough episodes of “Body of evidence” and now I want to see some similar investigations in “Sherlock Holmes”.

Sherlock’s brother asks him again for a favor – this time a member of the British royal family is captured in compromising photos and Sherlock’s mission now is to find the photos. He meets the person who is behind his misfortunes, but he doesn’t know it yet. Only the spectators see this, because her red manicure is shown several times in the episode. Sherlock has found out a competitor of his rank in the face of a woman. What’s more, she is the first person to outwit him.  

I finally started to like these series. Sherlock has an opponent in the face of Irene Adler. She managed to trick the trickster! I thought that no one would be able to outwit Sherlock, but she gave him a code to decipher and he did it in just a couple of seconds. It turned out that this was a code stolen from a member of the Ministry of Defense – it included seat numbers and its purpose was to fool terrorists by bombing a plane full of corpses.

Luckily, Sherlock outwitted Irene – he managed to break the code of her phone, thus providing all the secret information she had to his brother Mycroft and making up for the secret he involuntarily disclosed. I started laughing when it turned out that the password was “SHER” – I start to think that the stuff I did not like so far in the series was some sort of humor that I didn’t understand, but I start to get it, I think The funniest part was when Sherlock almighty saved Irene from the terrorists...

In the beginning of the next episode named “The Hounds of Baskerville” Sherlock is again nervous because there is no puzzle to solve. Since there is no case, he has a desperate need to smoke, however, he had paid everyone within a radius of 2 kilometers not to sell him cigarettes. Boring!

Luckily for Sherlock, a young man comes to his home to tell him about the death of his father that he witnessed when he was little: they were walking in the forest of Dewer’s Hollow (an ancient name for the devil) when a creature that looked like the devil got his father and tore him apart.

Finally there’s some humor that I liked: when Sherlock starts to explain to the young man how he guessed what he had done since the day before, Watson tells him to stop showing off, Sherlock says “Of course, I am showing off, that’s what we do!” and then he tells the young man everything he noticed so fast that I had to press the pause button several times.  

When the young man tells Sherlock that he saw footprints of a gigantic hound he decides to take the case, so Watson and himself head off to Baskerville.