He lacks some of the original Watson's capacity for amusement, but he isn't a post-traumatic wreck. But in Sherlock, Freeman imbues those features with a real grimness. "You're a war hero who can't find a place to live," Holmes says in one of their early conversations, underscoring Watson's alienation from his remaining relative, his alcoholic lesbian sister.įreeman's turned-down mouth and turned-up nose have often served to cast him as a sweetie, as he was in the original version of The Office, or a naif, as he was as Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He's isolated by his service rather than ennobled by it: there are no other veterans in his life, and his therapist misdiagnoses him and doesn't help him get out into the world. But he still has a handy service weapon and a wholly inadequate military pension. Rather than a lingering fever, he has an unhelpful therapist who encourages him to blog. Perhaps fittingly, given that depressing repetition of history, Martin Freeman's Watson is a wiser and sadder than his literary predecessor. This time around, Watson's sustained his injury in Afghanistan again, but as part of British forces supporting the post-9/11 American invasion. After a long convalescence from fever and a period of dissolute life in a Strand hotel, he finds himself a highly amusing flatmate in the person of Sherlock Holmes. The literary Watson was injured during his service in the Battle of Maiwand in the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
#FANSPIRATIONS REVIEW SHERLOCK UPDATE#
The BBC has made three 90-minute movies created by Doctor Who veterans Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt and plans to make more episodes of the same length.Īmong the analogues that are obvious in retrospect is the update of the events that first unite Watson and Holmes.
#FANSPIRATIONS REVIEW SHERLOCK MOVIE#
But even in the new movie franchise starring Robert Downey, Jr., Holmes wears tweed, travels by hackney, and chews his pipe: Holmes and his era are not soon parted.īut as Sherlock-a brilliant BBC One modernization that will begin airing on PBS Sunday at 9 pm-demonstrates, bringing Holmes and Watson into the 21st century ought to have been, well, elementary. We have an anti-social but brilliant doctor working in contemporary New Jersey in House and anti-social but brilliant detective working in New York in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. It says a great deal about the enduring power of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes that modern adaptations of the character basically confine themselves to homage.
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