Baker Street Beat

Is it just me, or was the ending of Sherlock the other night remarkably similar to that of the most recent series of Doctor Who? Genius hero forced to fake own death to get hordes of enemies off back and enable them to go back 'undercover' after becoming too high profile. That just about sums both endings up. Of course, some similarities were inevitable. Quite apart from the fact that key creative personnel - Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss - were involved with both series, Holmes himself is clearly one of many characters from British fantastic fiction, (I use that term in the widest possible sense), that inspired The Doctor. Indeed, The Doctor even has his own Moriarty equivalent in The Master, a character who, like the Professor, is his polar opposite. Not that I'm criticising Sherlock for these similarities in plot details - it is just an observation.

There was much to enjoy in the episode for committed Baker Street geeks like me, from the brief cameo by Douglas Wilmer, (who had played Holmes for the BBC back in 1964-65 and in the Gene Wilder movie The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother in the seventies), as the old gent Watson encounters at the Diogenes Club, to the oblique references to Nicholas Meyer's Seven Per Cent Solution. (In the latter the real Moriarty is revealed to be Sherlock's former maths tutor, only becoming an evil genius in Holmes' cocaine-induced paranoid fantasies; in Sherlock Moriarty convinces a newspaper reporter that he's really an actor hired by Holmes to play an evil criminal genius). The real genius of the series is that, through its skilled use of contemporary settings and references and witty reinterpretation of the Conan Doyle originals, it also appeals to a far wider audience than just us Holmes fans. The 'in jokes' and references I've noted are an added bonus for the likes of me but aren't essential for non-hardcore fans to understand in order to enjoy the series. Great stuff.