Sherlock: "The Blind Banker" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 20) I left on KPBS after the news shows and watched the second episode of the BBC-TV series Sherlock, a modern-day version of the Sherlock Holmes world with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John H. Watson. The episode was called “The Blind Banker” even though, while there are several bankers in the dramatis personae, none of them are blind – at least not in the literal sense of not being able to see. Written by Steve Thompson and directed by Euros Lyn (one wonders what his name was before the adoption of the Euro currency; actually he was born in Wales in 1971, so he isn’t from a country that uses the euro and I guess “Pounds Lyn” would be too cumbersome a name), “The Blind Banker” is one of those maddening Tony Gilroy-esque stories that has so many reversals that after a while they become the story. It begins as a sort of locked-room mystery when Eddie Van Coon (Daniel Percival) gives Sherlock Holmes a large retainer to investigate the mystery of a stolen Chinese object, or something – only then Van Coon is found dead in his locked apartment. Needless to say, the official police – represented by Detective Inspector Dimmock (Paul Chequer), who resents Sherlock Holmes even more than Inspector Lestrade (played by Rupert Graves in the first episode, “A Study in Pink”) ever did – are convinced he committed suicide. Holmes is equally convinced he was murdered, and meanwhile there are a few scenes taking place in the British Museum of Antiquities involving a young Chinese woman, Soo Lin Yao (Gemma Chan), and Andy Galbraith (Al Weaver), a young British twink who has a boyish crush on her. Soo Lin is introduced doing a Chinese tea ceremony with the tea service in the museum’s collection, explaining that if they’re not used regularly the teapot and cups will disintegrate into their original clay dust. (C’mon, Steve Thompson, hadn’t the ancient Chinese heard of firing clay to waterproof it?) Later a second victim, journalist Brian Lukis (Howard Coggins), is also found dead, and Soo Lin is kidnapped and held hostage inside the museum. It turns out all this is connected with a sinister organization called “The Black Lotus” whose purpose is to steal ancient Chinese artifacts, smuggle them into Britain and then sell them at private auctions for scads of money. It also turns out that a Chinese circus that’s touring Britain is the above-board front for the Black Lotus, and one of their members is Soo Lin’s brother, who blackmailed or otherwise intimidated her into working for them.

The bad guys communicate with each other through leaving clues in public that are actually pairs of numbers written in the old Hangchow Chinese script, and in the one part of the story that actually comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (from the novel The Valley of Fear), Holmes deduces that the pairs of numbers are actually references to a commonly available book – in this case a tourists’ guide called London A to Z. Holmes rips off a copy from a flummoxed German tourist and starts looking up the code after he’d requisitioned all the books from Van Coon’s and Lukis’s apartments and tried all of them, without success. There’s also an intriguing scene in which Watson comes on an entire wall covered with graffiti that are actually pairs of numbers in the Hangchow script, only when Holmes shows up to see them the wall is black and Holmes briefly wonders whether Watson had a delusion. Then it turns out Watson has the inscription after all because he photographed it with his cell phone before the baddies painted it over (though since all this happens within a few minutes one would think Holmes and Watson could tell from the freshness of the paint that it had been covered up recently). At least that’s one advantage Steve Thompson had from having his version of Sherlock Holmes take place in the 21st century! Unfortunately, Thompson was one of those writers who literally doesn’t know when to stop: among the complications he threw into the story are a woman who hires Watson as a doctor for her clinic, goes out on a date with him and then Holmes bursts onto the scene to insist that they go to the Chinese circus that’s the above-ground cover for the Black Lotus. Watson and the woman show up and use Holmes’s name to get in, whereupon the dragon-lady villainess running the Black Lotus (or at least this particular wing of it) spends the next 10 minutes or so insisting that Watson is Holmes (particularly since Watson has Holmes’s debit card on him).

There are also various performers in the circus who are really part of the Black Lotus, including one tightrope walker who used his skills to break into the victims’ apartments to make it look like nobody had got in, and a knife-throwing device that’s hooked up to a Wizard of Oz-style hourglass (actually a sandbag) so whoever’s trapped in front of it and held in bondage has only a limited amount of time to free him- or herself before the automaton hurls a knife into them and kills them. This device is first shown in its normal function as part of the circus, then the baddies use it to try to eliminate first Watson’s girlfriend and then Watson himself. (One gets the impression that if Watson ever asks this woman for a second date, she’s going to turn him down.) It also turns out that the MacGuffin is a jade hairpin that for some bizarre reason Steve Thompson never bothers to explain is worth 900,000 British pounds (most of the larger artifacts the Black Lotus has stolen drew auction prices in the 40,00 to 50,000 pound range) and which Eddie Van Coon stole on his own account, not knowing how valuable it was (or how pissed off the Black Lotus would be at losing it), just because he wanted it as a present for Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), the secretary with whom he was having an intra-office affair. “The Blind Banker” is pretty typical of the Sherlock series, and though this role made Benedict Cumberbatch a star he’s really not that good a Sherlock Holmes – but then again, as I’ve often said in paraphrase of the opening of the Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes. (Indeed, I remember that when Cumberbatch turned up as a villain in the Star Trek movies there were people who questioned casting the actor who’d played Sherlock Holmes as a bad guy – either forgetting or never having known that Basil Rathbone, too, played villains when he wasn’t playing Holmes.)