by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that KPBS
showed the latest episode of Sherlock, “The Six Thatchers,” whose title indicates that it was suggested by
the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Six
Napoleons” but which was really a wretched exercise in overwrought melodrama
whose writers, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt, made the hideous mistake of
plunging their modernized Sherlock Holmes into a web of international intrigue
that basically turned Holmes into a Jason Bourne-like character considerably
less interesting than Conan Doyle’s original. I recently pointed out that
Benedict Cumberbatch, who became an international star from his performance as
Holmes in this BBC-TV miniseries and has gone on to major movies like Star
Trek: Into Darkness, has been following in
the footsteps of Basil Rathbone, playing both Sherlock Holmes and Richard III
as well as doing villainous roles opposite iconic characters. Alas, Cumberbatch
doesn’t have Rathbone’s incredible balance of surface reserve and seething
emotion underneath — not that Gatiss and Moffatt help him much. It begins with
Holmes’ legendary nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, (presumably) dead but
Holmes obsessed with the idea that Moriarty set in mind some horrible criminal
scheme his surviving associates will implement, so he goes back over all his
old cases looking for clues as to what Moriarty’s scheme might be.
Instead he
stumbles upon a super-secret British espionage program in which Her Majesty’s
Secret Service, like the CIA in the Bourne novels, has assembled a team of
hired assassins to go around the world and kill anyone their employers want to
get rid of without any bothersome nonsense about due process or trials. We’re
also expected to believe that Mary (Amanda Abbington), wife of Dr. Watson and
mother of his newborn daughter, was one of the four assassins in this program
and that, when their cover was blown while they were in Tiblisi, one of them
hid a flash drive inside one of a number of plaster busts of Margaret Thatcher
being made there. (The idea that there are so many upper-class Brits today who
so venerate the Iron Lady that they have shrines to her in their homes is a bit
hard to take — but then, given that the issue that finally toppled Thatcher
from her prime ministership after a record 11 years in the position was her opposition
to the European Union, in a way the “Brexit” vote was Thatcher’s political
revenge from beyond the grave.) Sherlock started out as an interesting program that offered some clever “spins”
on the Holmes canon, and in which each episode was blessedly complete in itself
and also benefited from the excellent chemistry between Cumberbatch’s Holmes
and Martin Freeman’s Watson — but now it’s yet another program that has been
sacrificed on the altar of the Great God Serial
and it’s particularly infuriating that the last episode, to which this was a
sequel, aired exactly one year earlier. Even with the “Previously, on … ” recap
(though as I’ve mentioned in these pages before I get a cold chill every time I
hear a TV show begin with the words, “Previously, on … ”), lots of luck
remembering all the important details from the previous show that are crucial
to understanding, or even making sense of, the new one! Coincidentally, the
updated 1942-1946 Sherlock Holmes film series from Universal featuring Basil
Rathbone and Nigel Bruce also did
a rehash of “The Six Napoleons,” The Pearl of Death, and while it added extra characters and intrigues
(Universal was using it to launch a new horror character, “The Hoxton Creeper,”
played by real-life acromegaly victim Rondo Hatton), it was closer to the
spirit of the original story than “The Six Thatchers” and also had a plot that
actually made sense.
