Sherlock: "The Lying Detective" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2017)

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

Last night (Friday, February 21) I watched the next-to-last episode of Sherlock, the quite strange recension of the Sherlock Holmes mythos concocted in the early 2010’s by British TV writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. It not only moved the Sherlock Holmes stories to the present day, it took the whole concept into directions its creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would never have dreamed of even in his wildest flights of fancy. The main thing this show did that ensured its enduring importance was it made an international star of Benedict Cumberbatch, whom Moffat and Gatiss cast as their version of Sherlock Holmes. Their Holmes is out-and-out autistic and even farther removed from normal humanity than Conan Doyle’s version. They also made Dr. John H. Watson (Martin Freeman) a depressingly normal fellow, neither as bright as Conan Doyle’s Watson nor as endearingly doofus as the one Nigel Bruce played in the 1939-1946 series of Holmes films with Basil Rathbone (who was so totally right for the part, with the tall stature, the aquiline nose, the ringing voice and the overall air of imperturbability that, to paraphrase the opening of the Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes). For some reason PBS decided to re-run these episodes in sequence in their 9 p.m. Fridays time slot, though since I’d already posted moviemagg comments on the later ones in the series (after my husband Charles and I, both longtime Sherlock Holmes devotées, started watching them as well as the U.S. Holmes reboot, Elementary, which we both found a lot more entertaining) I’d skipped over them this time around and watched last night’s episode, “The Lying Detective,” because I didn’t have a previous moviemagg post on it.

The episode was based on a later (1913) Sherlock Holmes story by Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” in which Sherlock Holmes feigns having been stricken with a rare tropical fever by a man named Culverton Smith, whom Holmes suspects of killing his nephew by deliberately infecting him with the same disease. In “The Lying Detective,” Culverton Smith (Toby Jones) becomes an internationally famous businessman and philanthropist who advertises one of his company’s products, a breakfast cereal, by appearing on the commercials himself and boasting that he’s a “cereal killer.” (There’s a nice scene in which we see Smith take a bite of the cereal on camera and then spit it out again off camera because it tastes so terrible.) Holmes is convinced that Smith is a serial killer; among his charities is a major new hospital in London, and as part of his donation Smith was given keys to the hospital so he could let himself into any part of it whenever he chose. In order to satisfy his lust to kill, Smith set up a special room in which he could let himself in and murder whoever was being treated in that room, and his or her death would be attributed to the illness that had put them in the hospital in the first place. Of course, given that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss worship at the Shrine of the Obscure, it takes a lot of running time to get us to that simple plotline. Among the red herrings we get are Sherlock Holmes’s sudden addiction to crystal methamphetamine (a drug that didn’t yet exist when Conan Doyle wrote the Holmes canon), which is making him even more paranoid and more difficult to live with than usual.

Holmes is put on to the trail of Culverton Smith by his daughter Faith (Gina Bramhill), and we also get a woman therapist, Lady Smallwood (Lindsay Duncan), who’s supposedly Watson’s grief counselor after his late wife Mary Morstan Watson (Amanda Abbington) was apparently killed in a previous episode while saving the life of Sherlock Holmes. Only Mary is still hanging around in Watson’s consciousness and nagging him even though she keeps telling both him and us that she’s dead (sort of like Superman’s father Jor-El in the Superman movies from the early 2000’s, in which he was played via leftover video clips by Marlon Brando two years after he died). What’s more, in a last-minute revelation I really could have lived without, “Lady Smallwood” is revealed at the end to be Sherlock Holmes’s sister. It seems that both Holmes and Watson are investigating reports of a previously missing third Holmes brother, Sherrinford (a name Moffat and Gatiss took from Conan Doyle’s preliminary plan to name his detective character “Sherringford Holmes” until he decided at virtually the last minute on “Sherlock” instead), only both Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft (played by Mark Gatiss himself) learn that the fictitious “Holmes brother” is actually Holmes’s sister. If little or none of this seems to make sense, it’s because it doesn’t; Moffat and Gatiss were much bigger on creating vivid images than building plot consistency.

In Conan Doyle’s “The Dying Detective” Holmes gets Culverton Smith to confess to murdering his nephew, Smith insists that it’s his word against Holmes’s, and Holmes then produces Watson, who was hiding behind a curtain in the room and heard the whole thing. In “The Lying Detective” Holmes tells Smith to kill him in the hospital room and extracts the whole story from him, then announces that the whole confession has been recorded. Smith says that it hasn’t been because he already found Holmes’s three recorders and disabled them all, but Holmes makes a comment about the mystical power humans attribute to the number three and then makes the announcement that he’d concealed a fourth recorder in the handle of Watson’s cane (supposedly left in the room by accident) and he had the whole thing on audio. Later Holmes admits that Smith’s confession will be inadmissible in court, but Smith has been arrested and is talking his head off to Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves) while boasting that his legally admissible confessions to the police will make him more famous than ever. Under America’s current political circumstances it’s hard not to read Culverton Smith as a combination Donald Trump and Elon Musk – the super-rich man who boasts of his own infallibility and ability to get away with literally anything – though in the role Toby Jones looks more like the older, bloated, corpulent version of Truman Capote than either Trump or Musk. More than any other episode I’ve seen (and I believe I’ve caught all, or nearly all, of them), this Sherlock program achieved remarkable levels of dramatic incomprehensibility and incompetence, and the few good and quite charming bits in the script didn’t help save it.