Sherlock

I have been introduced to a new audio-visual obsession by my friend Louisa: the frustratingly brief Season One of the BBC’s new take on the world’s most famous consulting detective.

Starring the (British) Office’s Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson, and as the title character, a limber-limbed and dark-locked man with the exquisitely improbable [birth!] name of Benedict Cumberbatch (with such a Shakespearian Victory Garden moniker, A Much Ado about Melon Raising handle, is it any wonder that this AD 2011 BC chose acting as his profession?) this Sherlock owes as much to Dexter as to Doyle.

Like the main man of the American Showtime crime serial, the 21st century BBC-1 reincarnation of the Victorian sleuth is a “high-functioning sociopath,” unnaturally fascinated by extra-legal puzzles, most involving blood, and naturally incapable of responding appropriately to verbal and physical cues that the rest of us ordinary, non-criminally-minded folk take for granted. As my sister would say, he’s unequivocally “on the spectrum,” brilliant and quick with observation as he is with technology, able to gauge in milliseconds what most might not grasp in hours, delighted with horror as he ferrets out who perpetrated the problem that so fascinates him, and quick to offend those around him who are not operating at his speed of logic.

Dexter’s transatlantic influence is likewise evidenced by the fact that the laboratory and the morgue, the cell phone and the search engine are as familiar territory to this Sherlock as were the hansom cabs and deerstalkers of his nineteenth century predecessor. And even some of the musical scoring for this series incorporates precisely the synthetic harpsichord which so thrills the bloodthirsty fans of Miami’s favorite mass murderer.

And still, as with all good “reboots”, the creators have not lost their reverence for the beloved literary original, from referencing the “five pips” to the “three-pipe problem” [a “three patch problem” in these nonsmoking times]. The relationship between Afghan veteran doctor John Watson—who now blogs about his unusual roommate—and the impractical yet impossibly smart Sherlock Holmes is exactly—one might even say truthfully—rendered. The steady, yet ready Watson keeps his frenetic friend from stepping on too many toes and makes sure their refrigerator is regularly re-stocked, while Holmes’ adventures offer the necessary excitement his war-wounded comrade fails to find in much of civilian life.

And me, I am simply fascinated.

As of now, however, they’ve only made three episodes. THREE! And the last ends with a cliff-hanger (not at Richenbach Falls, but next to an equally-remote municipal indoor pool) confrontation with a metrosexual Moriarty. They say Season Two is forthcoming, but not until this autumn. How very maddening.