What do you mean that because the 10 th Doctor didn’t light the torch at the London Olympics time is unraveling and now I’m just a character in an incredibly fabulous adaptation of a series of Sherlock Holmes stories written a century ago? And I’m not existing again until 2013!
Hey, we all want to live in that alternate universe where you are real. Trust me on this Sherlock.
In the meantime take comfort in this incredible and highly entertaining critique of BBC Sherlock. It explains why BBC Sherlock is the most faithful rendition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters, particularly the much maligned Watson. Here’s a sample quote:
But perhaps most significantly, this version of the text – unlike so many before – has finally presented Watson as more than some witless lackey, stumbling around artlessly befuddled, waiting for Holmes to clue him in. Here – as he was in the original tales – he is an essential counterpoint to his companion, a crucial balance to his experience, one that Holmes finds he genuinely needs to prosper.
Holmes (played masterfully by Benedict Cumberbatch), is an asexual emotional vampire, lost in a maelstrom of arrogance and intellectual detachment; but in Watson, a selfless, compassionate soldier who is stirred by human empathy, he finds a partner, someone who can compliment and strengthen the aspects of his personality he knows to be lacking. Meanwhile Watson, driven by an urge to help others both medically and heroically, but shattered by his experience at war, lacks the strength to re-enter the world on his own until he finds the ingenious but socially maladjusted Holmes. They are more than room and work mates, they are two halves of the same broken soul. Thus, they present the perfect bromance, opposites attracting in a non-sexual way (a joke that the show itself plays up with Watson’s repeated assertion to everyone they meet that they are just roommates), the rational and emotional working in cohesion at last. Together, the one guides the other, providing purpose, perspective and drive.
