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to Holmes. A key clue in the previous episode is a photograph of the guilty officers taken in Afghanistan, with a shadowy physics professor nearly cropped out. A great deal of time is spent trying to get a full version of the photo as Holmes begins to perceive a single hand behind most of the evil in London. It is personal for the detective in that Irene, who keeps showing up briefly to overturn his composure, is ensnared in the coils of Moriarty. This episode has a magnificently gruesome opening as a wedding photographer is murdered when his flash powder is replaced with TNT, spattering the bride (Natalya Turkina) with gore. The story then revolves around farcical diplomatic business about a fake affair between the American ambassador’s naïve wife and a French diplomat which might foment a war between France and America. In a splendid bit of new Holmesianism, the bride is too shocked to describe Moriarty, whom she has seen, and the detective seizes on her profession (fishmonger) to cajole her to think in piscine terms and liken the villain to a pike (long face), crab (eyestalk-like blue spectacles) and an octopus (tentacular arms). This Holmes is anything but immune to emotion—he slaps Watson for calling Irene a whore, and rolls around on the floor in agony when betrayed yet again.

      Lyubovnitsy Lord Maulbreya (The Mistress of Lord Maulbrey), a case made from whole cloth, features an apparent serial murderer who is eliminating the women who might be mentioned in the will of a wealthy, just-dead aristocrat. It offers a solid, formidable villain in Gilbert Roy (Leonid Timtsunik), who is shockingly violent and ingenious (he favours a poison-dart-firing airgun disguised as a rolled newspaper), and an intriguing femme fatale in scheming innocent Ellen (Aleksandra Ursulyak), a gifted artist who presents Holmes with a sketch of the Professor he is looking for. We also learn that Moriarty (Aleksandr Adabashyan), aka Bernard Buckley, smokes distinctive Royal Caribbean cigars. Though Doyle set many stories in London and in rural areas, he oddly neglected to have Holmes work in any of the UK’s other cities … here, the case takes him and Lestrade (Mikhail Boyarskiy) to Bristol, where there’s an impressive shoot-out in a hotel and on the street.

      It’s back to Doyle for the bones of a story in Obrad Doma Meysgreyvov (The Musgrave Ritual), a detour into the gothic which offers a snowbound Scots castle, a Baskerville-like naïve American Musgrave heir (Aleksandr Golubev), a dour bastard brother (Sergey Yushkevich) who insists even Holmes and Watson wear kilts in freezing weather, a centuries-old family feud, a black-robed ghostly monk (who might evoke Chekhov or Edgar Wallace), the sword of Charles I, Watson delirious with flu and the arrival of the horseless carriage. The most traditional, standalone episode of the series, it might make a useful sampler for folks who just want to give the show a try—getting away from London for a spell means that Holmes and Watson are also away from their ongoing storylines. Suggesting that the makers have a familiarity with previous film and TV takes on the canon, the heir has the character name Reginald Owen, after one of the few actors to have played both Holmes and Watson.

      By the time of Galifaks (Halifax), Watson is a published author—and his work puts him on the outs with an offended Holmes and Mrs Hudson, while the resentful Lestrade is envious of how much the doctor is paid for his stories. With Holmes made famous, Baker Street is thronged with curiosity-seekers and Holmes worries he’ll no longer be able to work anonymously. When a corrupt official is glimpsed in a deerstalker and checked cape, smoking a curved pipe, Holmes asks Watson to describe him as looking like that, to get back his ability to work undercover. This begins with a reasonably straight version of ‘The Red-Headed League’, but the tunnel-to-the-bank business is just Act One of an insanely complex Moriarty plot to heist a printing press from the Royal Mint. The ruthlessness of all parties is stressed—Moriarty poisons the stooges he sends into the bank so they all die during a chase and policemen gun down suspects Wild West fashion. As in Kamen, Nozhnitsy, Bumaga, there’s a theme about the pride of men in uniform. Lestrade (here, fully named as Fitzpatrick Lestrade) is coldly furious at the members of the police fraternity who have let down the side. Knowing that the constables who have muddy trousers have sold out to Moriarty, he lines his whole force up for inspection and walks past, calmly shooting the traitors. The eponymous Halifax (Andrey Merzlikin), a forger forced to work with the Moriarty gang, specialises in trompe l’oeuil tricks—painting a convincing escape tunnel entrance in a cell to alarm a warden—and seems to be making a philosophical point about how trapped and doomed everyone is.

      Poslednee delo Kholmsa (Holmes’ Last Case) opens with Irene in blackface singing ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’ at a Christmas entertainment at Brasher Castle, which is part of a jewel heist. The script takes a while to get to ‘The Final Problem’, as it fills in the backstory of Holmes’ relationship with Irene in a full-on Paris flashback which involves a meet cute at the base of the unfinished Eiffel Tower, a trip to the Moulin Rouge, absinthe-fuelled sex, impressionist art and a mime. In the present, Watson and Martha Hudson finally stop bickering and he proposes; later, it seems they’ve become a couple, but not actually got married. The plot goes into full-on bizarre mode with an embassy robbery that exposes a mad science plan involving electrified steel needles which can turn ordinary men into zombie super-soldiers. The face-off in Switzerland features a frozen Reichenbach, much cheating as Moriarty brings a gun and a knife to a (brutal) martial arts fight, Holmes being canny enough to wear spiked shoes while his opponent slides around on the ice and a noise-triggered avalanche which seems to do for both men—prompting Watson to write up a supposed last adventure even though there’s one episode to go.

      The finale is titled Sobaka Baskervil (Baskerville Hound), a canny piece of misdirection since the dog only turns up (in a new context) in the final scene, which features a visit to Baker Street by Queen Victoria (Svetlana Kryuchkova). It’s three years since Watson wrote of Holmes’ death, Professor Challenger is in London lecturing about evolution and young war office clerk Arthur Cadogan West turns up dead in a fish tank in a market (with secret papers on his person) after falling from a train. On the assumption that he knows Holmes’ methods, Watson is called in to investigate the crime (derived from ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’) in partnership with a nattily-dressed, bearded Mycroft, who turns out to be Sherlock’s twin … with the not-dead detective at some point stepping in to impersonate his stuffier sibling to get back in the game. Panin enjoys the chance to play several takes on Sherlock and Mycroft, and the inevitable you’re-not-dead shock reunions with the rest of the cast. Moriarty also survived the Reichenbach and—in a development rather like Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows—a key player is cruelly sacrificed to remind us how evil he is. The mcguffin is an ingenious murder contraption wired to the clock of Big Ben (which is either great location work or very good CGI, for a finale reminiscent of the climax of the 1978 version of The Thirty Nine Steps). In a Scenes We’d Like to See moment, Holmes launches a furious tirade at the ingenious craftsman who’s made the thing for the Professor without caring what he uses it for—remember Doyle’s Holmes admiring the workmanship of Colonel Moran’s airgun, which has been used in attempts to murder him.

      Briefly, in this episode, Holmes puts on a deerstalker and a cape—only to complain that it’s uncomfortable. But, by now, he’s reconciled to being eclipsed by Watson’s version of himself and touched at the title Watson chooses for his book of reminiscences, My Friend Sherlock Holmes. So, at the end, after all the reimagining, we come back to what is for this version—as for almost all other versions—the heart of the story, the comradeship of two admirable, difficult men in a world of crime, betrayal, love, honour, diabolic cunning and basic decency.

      d

      Kim Newman is a prolific, award-winning English writer and editor, who also acts, is a film critic, and a London broadcaster. Of his many novels and stories, one of the most famous is Anno Dracula.

      BETTER THAN HOLMES?

      by Terry Teachout

      This talk was presented to The Wolfe Pack in New York City.

      Until now, the only person to whom I’ve ever had occasion to say the word “werowance” out loud is my wife, so … thank you, Werowance! And thanks to all of you as well. I’ve been racking my brain in an attempt to come up with a suitable noun of assembly for a gathering of friends of Nero Wolfe—something as good, and as appropriate, as “a murder of crows.” It finally came to me just the other day. The Wolfe

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