Sherlock: "The Hounds of Baskerville" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 10) I watched the fifth of 15 episodes of the BBC-TV series Sherlock, which ran from 2010 to 2014 and updated the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson and the other creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination to modern times. It also made a star of Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Holmes as a high-functioning autistic (sort of like Elon Musk, but without the craziness and the desire to use humanity’s largest private fortune ever to bring about a worldwide fascist takeover) and was able to parlay it into major screen roles, mostly as villains in science-fiction franchises like Star Trek. This episode was called “The Hounds of Baskerville” and I liked it better than most of the ones I’ve seen, perhaps because Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles was a full-length novel instead of a short story and therefore writer Mark Gatiss (who also co-created the series and played the part of Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft) didn’t have to pad it as much as he and the series’ other writers had to with their own shorter Conan Doyle originals. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The Hounds of Baskerville” takes place largely (in fact, almost totally) in Dartmoor, but in this version “Baskerville” is not an ancestral manor house and estate but a secret research facility run by the British military. The action kicks off with a prologue showing a boy named Henry Knight (Sam Jones) out on the moors with his father when they’re both seemingly attacked by a large dog. Dad dies and his body disappears, and Henry carries the trauma into adulthood, when he’s played by Russell Tovey. The grown-up Henry comes to Sherlock Holmes with the problem, and Holmes is at first too bored with the case to take it but his face lights up when Henry says the magic words we Holmes buffs remember from the original story: asked if the footprints on the site were a man’s or a woman’s, Henry says, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Holmes and Watson set off for Dartmoor – in the Conan Doyle novel Holmes sends Watson off alone; in this version he thinks of doing so but then decides at the last minute to come with him – armed with a pass from Holmes’s brother Mycroft to admit him to all but the fifth and last level of the Baskerville labs – so they can investigate together. At one point Holmes experiences the vision of a super-large dog with flaming red eyes coming at him; later inside the lab Watson sees the same thing, too,

Dr. Mortimer (Sasha Behar), the outsider who first brings the case to Holmes’s attention in the novel, becomes Henry Knight’s therapist. Gatiss’s script does a good job of incorporating Conan Doyle’s character names but often changing them radically. At least one other besides Mortimer goes through gender reassignment; Dr. Stapleton (Amelia Bullmore), the principal villain in the original, becomes a sympathetic lab staffer. In the TV show, Barrymore (Simon Paisley Day) gets a major promotion from the Baskerville family’s butler to a commander at the Baskerville base, which is researching chemical and biological weapons. It turns out that the “gigantic hounds” are actually hallucinations from a drug being tested at the Baskerville labs, and the principal villain is Dr. Franklin, who relocated to Britain from the U.S. on assignment by the CIA. Dr. Franklin was involved in a chemical weapons and bioweapons program at Liberty, Indiana called H.O.U.N.D. – after the names of the five people running it (his original last name was something else but he took the alias “Franklin” for his work at the Baskerville labs in Britain). He developed a drug that could be spread through the air and would be triggered when you stepped on a landmine hooked up to a dose of it, and Holmes caught on to him when he referred to the pocket telephone he carried as a “cell phone” instead of the usual British term, a “mobile.” (It fascinates me that even in the 21st century there are still these weird divergences between American English and English English.) Alas for Dr. Franklin, when he tries to escape he steps on a landmine – not one of the ones he wired up to administer his drug, but a more conventional sort with an explosive inside – thereby providing him an exit logically updated from Stapleton’s at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles (in which he tries to flee in the dark and misses the guiding posts he’d previously planted to indicate his safe path through Grimpen Mire, so he gets soaked under and buried in mud). “The Hounds of Baskerville” worked better for me than the previous episodes because it provided a logical updating of a Conan Doyle Holmes tale and was cleverly written to give us reasonable modern-day equivalents to the original story’s key elements – though I still missed the character of Beryl Stapleton, wife of the novel’s villain, who’s forced to pose as his sister and attempt to seduce the innocent young Sir Henry Baskerville so Stapleton, a distant relative who’s hoping to inherit the Baskerville fortune once he knocks off all the other claimants, can get rid of him at a fateful dinner party which Holmes and Watson also attend.