Season 35 - Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2005-2006)
When I first watched Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking it felt like a fresh take on Holmes and Rupert Everett seemed well cast. The problem is in the proceeding twenty years Sherlock Holmes kind of went boom then bust, with Robert Downey Junior playing him on the big screen in Guy Ritchie's films, to Jonny Lee Miller on Elementary, to Benedict Cumberbatch on Sherlock. Now people are wanting their Sherlock with a twist, look to Millie Bobby Brown as Enola Holmes and Blu Hunt as Sherlock's daughter Amelia Rojas. We as the audience demand more of our stories and watching Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, we see the flaws. What will strike you most is that they didn't even bother to film this TV movie on a decent film stock. It lends that faux reality to it, wherein it almost feels like you're watching the news. This is actually a problem I have with all high-definition film conversion, which this is obviously not. But there's a weird surreality making them hyper real. If you doubt my theory watch Jaws in high-def, it's like watching a documentary about the seventies. But here they coupled their bad film stock with a bad transfer, wherein the PAL to NTSC transfer is jittery, making it look even shittier. Though the worst decision of all was they stuck to the when in doubt use a fog machine for atmosphere school of Victorian filmmaking. There is so much fog you can barely make out any of the action in outdoor scenes, yet incongruously there wasn't enough fog to hide the modern metal structures near the cemetery! The lack of production quality seeped over into the historical details. They very obviously had no historic adviser. Instead they had a slouching Duchess smoking filtered cigarettes almost thirty years before they existed. I mean seriously, she wouldn't have shown exasperation and insolence to a police officer, she would have shown hauteur! And that doesn't even cover the telephones and the improper titles for the King and Queen! They seemed to want to update Holmes, but instead of going all out like Elementary or Sherlock, they added incongruities that exasperate the audience versus adding to the story. But oddly enough what annoyed me the most was the lackadaisical floorplan for 221B Baker Street, which in an odd error is actually once referred to as 222B Baker Street. Of all locations in books and films, I don't think there's any one more regulated than 221B Baker Street. But then again, watching it all these years later, I seem to have nothing but problems with this production. I even question the casting of Rupert Everett as Holmes. He brought nothing to the role other than the required hawk-like profile. Holmes is fun for his excitability, his dark humor, his mood swings, yet Everett plays him almost atonally. But Holmes is supposed to be balanced by Watson. And Ian Hart was miscast abysmally as a lecturing antagonistic parental figure for Holmes, with a very rat like face. With their ongoing bickering one wonders why they are even colleagues at all, because with this behavior they are certainly not friends! Yet all these flaws could be overlooked if the conclusion and the revelation of the killer hadn't been so absurd. And in what is an even weirder turn of events, it isn't Holmes who expounds on how he figured it all out and when and why, but it's the killer explaining himself FOR NO REASON to his latest victim that we get his lame reasoning for killing. He's not a Bond villain for crying out loud! I actually applaud the production of a Sherlock Holmes story wherein Holmes is a nonentity. Not what I or anyone else would have done, but it's at least novel.
The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets by Nancy Springer
