Sherlock: "The Great Game" (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 27) my husband Charles and I, both longtime Sherlock Holmes buffs, watched the third rerun episode of the British TV series Sherlock (2010-2017), “The Great Game,” which updated the character to the 21st century and cast Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John H. Watson, his roommate and associate. Like the two previous episodes, “A Study in Pink” and “The Blind Banker,” “The Great Game” (written by series co-creator Mark Gatiss, who also played Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft – though he’s considerably slimmer here than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described him) was a confusing mash-up of plot devices found in Conan Doyle’s stories (one of the main intrigues here is a fairly accurate adaptation of “The Bruce-Partington Plans” and there’s also a reference to “The Five Orange Pips,” though befitting the 21st century setting the “orange pips” are actually digital noises emitted from a smartphone) and gimmicks found either in other literary sources or in real life. Holmes is being run ragged by a series of phone calls from ordinary people whom a mysterious super-criminal has outfitted with bombs that will blow up not only themselves but a large area surrounding them. The people making the calls are being held hostage by a malevolent meanie who makes them call Holmes and read exactly, word for word, a text message he has composed for Holmes. If they don’t do it, a sniper will fire at them and set off the bombs. There’s also a bomb attack on Holmes’s and Watson’s home at the iconic 221B Baker Street that blows out much of the front wall, though their landlady Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs) doesn’t seem to mind much. And in order to research a clue, Holmes goes to a computer lab and is helped by a woman staff member who introduces him to Jim (Andrew Scott), a young, hunky guy who works in the lab’s IT department. Jim and the woman are dating, but Holmes warns her off him because he’s Gay – he points out a number of aspects about his grooming, including the fact that he’s wearing his pants low enough you can see what brand of underwear he has on from behind. Naturally she’s upset and Watson upbraids Holmes about his cruelty to her, while Holmes says it’s better that she find out now rather than wait, get “serious” about him and then find out he’s not interested in women. In the end, to no particular surprise, “Jim” turns out to be Moriarty, the mastermind behind the bomb plot (though he’s not officially a professor yet and it’s possible he won’t be at all).

The extent to which Holmes gets so worked up about the bomb threats he’s receiving through relayed texts he resists his brother Mycroft’s entreaties that he work on the stolen military plans reminded me of the plot screenwriters Edwin Blum and William Absalom Drake concocted for the 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – the second, and my favorite, of the 14 Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce – in which Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) concocts an elaborate scheme to feed Holmes clues about a bizarre mystery involving a woman, a drawing of an albatross, a mysterious killer who throws a bolo and wears a shoe to make himself look club-footed when he isn’t, all to distract Holmes from catching on that Moriarty’s real objective is to break into the Tower of London and steal the Crown Jewels. The climax of this episode takes place at a swimming pool where a promising young swimmer was murdered years before by spiking his anti-eczema medication with botulinum toxin, and Moriarty outfits Dr. Watson with the bomb vest as his latest hostage while Holmes threatens to shoot him, even though a red laser light appears on his face whenever he is about to pull the trigger, indicating that Moriarty has a sniper henchman in the building ready to kill Holmes if he tries to shoot Moriarty. I like Sherlock but it’s not that great a contribution to the corpus of Sherlock Holmes stories on screen. Benedict Cumberbatch has the authority and power for the role but not to the extent that the two greatest filmed Holmeses, Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, did. Martin Freeman blessedly plays Watson as a normally intelligent human being instead of the foofy comic doofus Nigel Bruce supplied. But the plots are way too complicated and go off in too many directions. In one of the Conan Doyle Holmes stories Holmes unravels the villain’s plot to frame an innocent man for a crime because he notices a new piece of damning evidence that wasn’t there the last time he visited the crime scene, and later he explains to Watson that the villain “lacked the supreme facility of the artist, the gift of knowing when to stop.” Gatiss and his fellow Sherlock writers also didn’t know when to stop!