Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor

Doctor Who. If you get around in the pop-culture part of the Internet at all, you're bound to cross paths with the Doctor sooner or later. I knew a fair bit about Doctor Who before I actually started watching it this summer - and I only started watching it because of insistent family members.

I'm glad they insisted.

So I've been watching the "revival" series, the seasons from 2005 through to the present, and I'm currently getting close to the end of David Tennant's last season. I've been loving it - therefore, I've been throwing myself into it (yes, unfortunately, Doctor Who probably is tied in with the lack of a Mortality chapter for a full month). In fact, when we got to the last episode for the Ninth Doctor, I wrote first a fanfic (also on Whofic now) then a deviantART journal entry to try to cope with my overwhelming sense of loss.

Much as I adore David Tennant's Doctor, Christopher Eccleston's resonated with me in a powerful way. Yes, the Ninth Doctor is indeed my Doctor. I felt for him in a way that I previously only felt for Sherlock Holmes - yes, that's how big it is. And being the hopeless Sherlockian that I am, my mind caught similarities between the two. Not Holmes in general, but Holmes in a specific period of his life - Holmes during the Great Hiatus. If you get strictly canonical with the Great Detective on his Great Hiatus, you get a Holmes who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nine. There are still differences, of course, but the resemblance is there. In fact, watch any of Nine's interactions with the Daleks (especially the Emperor), and then go watch Holmes's interaction with Colonel Moran in Granada's EMPT (Jeremy Brett's performance of an outright angry Holmes is brilliant, but is seldom mentioned, let alone praised). Or recall the scenes in your mind.

...are you a bit chilled yet?

But the similarities between Holmes and the Doctor don't end when Christopher Eccleston regenerates into David Tennant. Whenever you see David Tennant's Doctor being thrilled about a monster, or saying brilliant things that nobody else understands... That's Holmes, right there. It gets particularly blatant in the Mark Gatiss-written episode "The Idiot's Lantern". You have a Detective Inspector (whose name the Doctor got from his shirt collar) from Scotland Yard, for starters. A DI who says he's been on the force for... oh, twenty years and he's never seen anything like this before?

Yes, Mr. Gatiss, I see what you did there.

For the benefit of anyone who's not up on their A Study in Scarlet, Inspector Lestrade greets Holmes and Watson at Lauriston Gardens with: "This case will make a stir, sir. It beats anything I have seen, and I am no chicken." A few chapters later, he also says, "[W]hen I saw something that made me feel sickish, in spite of my twenty years' experience."

Oh yes, the DI's line is very much for the benefit of Gatiss's fellow Sherlockians.

The DI goes on to accept the help of a civilian in this baffling case. Sound familiar? It gets worse. When one of the victims is brought into the DI's office, he tells the Doctor to "deduce" what he can from the victim.

That's where the Sherlock Holmes references finally stop. The boy helping the Doctor might be inspired by the Baker Street Irregulars, but that's a bit of a stretch and purely conjectural.

But there's more that's similar between Doctor Who and an insanely popular adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. David Tennant can rattle off a string of deductions or technobabble for at least half a minute without having to stop for breath. ...so can Benedict Cumberbatch.

The June 10, 2012 edition of the South Bend Tribune had an article entitled "Elementary Acting," and it was about a production of William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes. The actor reading Holmes's lines for that production, Matthew Bell, contrasted Gillette's portrayal of the character with the BBC's modern reboot:

"I think it's always interesting that [Sherlock is] written by people who worked on Doctor Who and they've taken Holmes in the direction of a non-human being to a Time Lord. They have emphasized his sociopathic tendencies, whereas Gillette emphasizes his human tendencies."

Truth be told, that sociopathic emphasis is one of the elements of Sherlock that's always bothered me. Mr. Bell was also right when he said, a bit earlier in that article, that "the fascination in the stories is when a warm, sympathetic human bursts out." The Doctor himself can be more human, sometimes, than the Sherlock Holmes of 21st century London. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a magnificent Sherlock Holmes - he also plays quite a cold one. I was relieved to find Sherlock thawing bit by bit throughout Season 2, particularly The Reichenbach Fall... in that episode, he finally felt to me like the canonical and truly emotive Sherlock Holmes.

And then, of course, there's the Master. The Master who was actually called the "Professor Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes" in one edition of the Doctor Who Magazine. The Master who, in his initial appearance in the '70s, was quite the gentleman villain and treated the Doctor as his (almost) intellectual equal... yes, that does sound familiar. Of course, it gets worse. It gets worse, not because of John Simm's Master, but because of Andrew Scott's Moriarty. The Moriarty of Sherlock is practically Simm's Master in human form, with the name and the occupation thrown in. I can't tell you how disturbed I was to realize that as I watched "The Sound of the Drums" for the first time.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are good writers, don't get me wrong. I'm not disputing that. I'm not disputing the excellence of Sherlock, because I still love it and I always will. I just wish that they'd been a little less Whovian in their approach to a 21st century reboot.

So, all this rambling, and I haven't even talked about Wholock yet. Well, what is there to say, except that it's an incredibly rampant crossover fandom. Lots of Ten and Eleven meeting either canonical!Sherlock Holmes or Cumberbatch!Sherlock. I'll be really happy when I can finally find a good Nine-meets-either-version (preferably the former, though). Until then, I'll have to satisfy myself with my own fledgling crossovers that still need a lot of thought and plotting applied to them.

There is, however, this gem of a Thirteenth Doctor fic... which actually has Martin Freeman's John Watson as the protagonist. I even made a TV Trope article for the story - that's how excellent it is! Be warned: it does heavily involve the Weeping Angels. You might not want to read it late at night...

Now you must excuse me while I return to my poor, neglected Mortality. (Yes, I'm very much aware of how amusing that sentence sounds.) I promise to be back here next Wednesday, with a belated review of a fantastic Sherlock Holmes play! Stay tuned!

Laptops, Sherlock, and Granada, oh my!

MY LAPTOP IS FIXED!!!  I AM IN HEAVEN!!!  ...Readers of A Study in Stardom may recall that my laptop crashed back in late January.  'Tis fixed now, and ALL MY FILES ARE SAAAFE!!!  (Including this one future scene from A Time to Heal that will probably never make it into the story—but it was fantastic to read it again.  I had typed it out that day and not put it on my flashdrive... so when the computer went down, the file went with it.)  All my screenies of Jeremy are there, toooo~!  Hallelujah!

No longer need I work on a desktop that freezes on me completely at random, or that won't let me watch .mp4s or DVDs!  And now I have my lovely laptop keyboard back, with its short, musical keys and spacebar that doesn't get stuck!  (Good thing, though, that I haven't lost my skill with a mousepad, 'cause my regular mouse ain't workin'—which is really not very good at all.)  Just to celebrate, I popped in my Sherlock DVD last night and watched a few minutes—specifically, the Mycroft warehouse scene.  I haven't watched Sherlock in three months because I didn't have the means.  It was great!

And at last, I am getting the Granada series in full!  It may be a little bit before I actually have it, but I will!  *dances for joy*

...I'll try tomorrow to bring y'all up to speed on AMM.  All the stories have been written, but I'm now in post-production.  =D

Granada & GREE: Deeper Waters in the Climax

WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Granada episode.

Months afterwards a curious newspaper cutting reached us from Buda-Pesth. It told how two Englishmen who had been traveling with a woman had met with a tragic end. They had each been stabbed, it seems, and the Hungarian police were of opinion that they had quarreled and had inflicted mortal injuries upon each other. Holmes, however, is, I fancy, of a different way of thinking, and holds to this day that, if one could find the Grecian girl, one might learn how the wrongs of herself and her brother came to be avenged.

—“The Greek Interpreter,” The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Granada takes this ending to GREE and turns it completely on its head.  It was one of the biggest liberties of the Adventures run (seasons 1 & 2)—the only other story changes comparable are the masterminding of Moriarty in REDH and the absence of Mary Watson.  In fact, the ending is really so dark on top of being non-canonical that it’s more in the style of the Memoirs run.

Personally, I always hated it that they turned Sophy Kratides into this coldhearted character who really doesn’t care that her brother has just been murdered by her fiancée.  I like the canon version much better.  Go sisterly justice!

But I was watching the last ten-ish minutes of the episode the other day (because I do love the Brothers Holmes in the climax), and I later realized something.

The climax is all about siblings.  Paul and Sophy Kratides, Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.

Granada took a Sherlock Holmes adventure and turned it into a story about siblings.

There’s a sharp contrast drawn between the Kratides and the Holmes siblings.  On one hand, you have the brave, steadfast Paul who dies trying to protect his sister; and the sister herself, who says that she’d (in essence) be Harold Latimer’s slave, even though he murdered Paul.  On the other hand, you have the deliciously devious Mycroft, who acts as backup for Little Brother and Little Brother’s BFF, saving them from a potentially sticky situation; and Sherlock, who lets Big Brother (supposedly) sleep, safely away from the impending crossfire.  (In fact, it’s even entirely possible that the ever-perceptive Sherlock actually knows Mycroft is faking sleep and might go do a little legwork—not too much, of course—of his own.)

One set has a loving brother and an ungrateful sister; the other set is a team that banters/bickers a little but works quite well together.

It always pays to watch Holmes’s face.  Though Watson/Doyle often describes Holmes as cold and inscrutable, Jeremy Brett gives us a lovely glimpse into the mind of the Master via his facial expressions.  (This makes him gold for the avatar-makers, yours truly included.)  And Jeremy’s/Holmes’s face as Sophy claims she would have gone with Latimer despite his murdering her brother says it all.  Up until that point, he’s all cautious reserve, watching her, feeling her out.  But once he hears that damning statement, he literally draws himself up, his eyes flutter closed for a moment, and he settles once more into the man who will stop at nothing to see that justice is done.

Watson’s expression is clear shock at Sophy’s confessions, but it’s Holmes’s in the background that you really need to watch.

As she speaks, Sherlock is probably even thinking about his own brother, and contrasting his own family with this messed-up Grecian one.  No doubt he’s grateful that his own brother would never betray him as Sophy has done Paul, and thinking of how he in turn would never betray Mycroft.

Of course, the squee moment for Mycroft fans (myself included) comes when Mycroft shows up behind Kemp, holding him captive with the villain’s own gun that he nicked in a clever moment of purposely-lost balance.  (Though in a horrible blooper moment, Mycroft calls the little two-shot a revolver rather than a derringer.)  The Brothers Holmes and Watson share smiles with each other—you creeps ain’t got nothin’ on this trio.

Back at a train station, Sherlock makes a jesting remark about his lazy big brother going down a path of crime with him—probably just baiting him for a reaction.  Mycroft huffs that the only path he’s taking is the door to the Diogenes Club, and he’s shutting it behind him.  With that, he moves off—typical Holmes.

Sherlock and Watson are left behind, Watson wondering what will happen to Sophy.  Sherlock’s answer is very bitter: she will be released, since she has committed no crime.  He adds bitingly that there’s not a drop of compassion in her cold heart—ironically, Watson says things to roughly the same degree about Holmes himself throughout the Canon, though the “great heart” line in 3GAR might be seen as a ret-con to that.  But Sherlock’s answer might be seen as very revealing, that he detests cold-heartedness and family betrayal.  Here, he is valuing compassion and familial love as being virtues, indeed.

A few more thoughts before I wrap this up.  First of all, the rescue of Paul and Mr. Melas: in the canon, Paul dies shortly after the cavalry shows up; in the episode, he has been dead for four hours (and via sulfur poisoning rather than the canonical smoke inhalation).  Perhaps this change is a bit more sympathetic to Sherlock, who takes the failure hard—but even if he hadn’t been delayed by Gregson, he would still have gotten there too late.  Small comfort, but this time, there really wasn’t anything Sherlock could do.

Secondly, the action that precipitates the climax: Sherlock, Mycroft, and Watson getting aboard that train at all!  In the Canon, all we know is that the bad guys cleared off before the police could arrive—but in Granada’s take, Sherlock, characteristically, doesn’t settle for being beaten and gives chase.  Ironically, Granada’s version in that sense is probably a bit more faithful to Sherlock Holmes than his own author was!

Third, Sherlock has some really great moments in the train sequence, beginning with his urging Mycroft to hurry up (at which Mycroft retorts, “I’m not built for running, Sherlock!”  Lol, we could deduce that, Big Brother.).  Then there’s Sherlock smoking in the compartment when there’s a no-smoking sign on the window.  Ha-ha, I'm even anti-smoking, and I find that bit funny!  It’s just Sherlock ignoring the rules again as per usual—you have to pity his mom.  (Or envy her—I might actually envy her: life must have been pretty neat, raising Mycroft and Sherlock.)

Next, he throws open the B21 compartment door, and speaks to Sophy in her own language!  Obviously, he’s asking her if he take a seat, but…  Sherlock Holmes actually speaks Greek.  How awesome is that?  He shoots VR into the wall, tells you your life-story from infancy, wears an awesome (if, admittedly, monochromatic) wardrobe, beats up perverts, rides horses, plays a Strad, assumes whatever identity he wants to and does it flawlessly, bounds effortlessly over couches, unbends iron pokers, has perfect diction, possesses a delightfully sardonic wit, is absolutely gorgeous… and he speaks Greek.  (And it took me several minutes to finish that list—Sherlock Holmes: HIS AWESOMENESS—lol.)  Remind me WHY this guy is still single?

…Oh, right.  No woman will put up with him.  Can I volunteer?  I grant you I’m a little young, but I’m certainly legally old enough…

Ahem, anyway, last item, and this is (for me) his Crowning Moment of Awesome.  He draws his revolver and cocks the hammer.  He’s deadly serious, and if push comes to shove, he won’t hesitate to shoot Latimer.  Of course, he doesn’t really have to, turns out, as Latimer, in a stupid move, tries to jump off the train and ends up getting literally ripped off by another passing train.  Pretty dark.  What is perhaps darker still is that Sherlock holds back first Sophy, then Watson, from helping Latimer—though you can see something akin to regret in Sherlock’s eyes after the grisly deed is done.  Could it be that Sherlock didn’t want to risk Latimer getting past them and away after being pulled back into the train?  Or worse, actually wounding or killing one of them in a struggle?  It’s possible.

And at any rate, despite the definite gruesomeness of Latimer’s death, he did deserve it for what he had done to Paul.

So, there you have it, folks: Granada’s “Greek Interpreter.”  A tale of intrigue, cruelty, betrayal, and ultimately, family.  All in all, it’s a good adaptation.  Next time I do a Granada review, I promise it’ll be SCAN—maybe Monday.