Elementary, 1x02 "While You Were Sleeping"

At the beginning of Elementary's second episode Joan Watson has dragged Sherlock Holmes to a session of a drug abuse support group but instead of listening to his 'comrades' Sherlock repeats a mantra over and over inside of his head. He does so in order to avoid feeding his brain with unnecessary information since the human mind is an attic one has to take care of and keep tidy to maintain splendid mental achievements. Filling the brain with useless knowledge, its finiteness is stodged to that extent that it cannot absorb any new and probably more important information unless one decides to delete any prior memories. At least that is how Sherlock's brain works. Shortly, he is called by Gregson to assist in a case that does not seem to be that difficult to solve at first glimpse but turns out to set a series of murder with peculiar circumstances rolling, committed by a apparently comatose woman. After finding out about the woman's twin sister, Sherlock reaches an impasse as the sisters prove to not be monozygotic twins, however, the motive for murder is connected to an inheritance dispute that arose after the twins' wealthy and well-known father had died and children who were begotten in several love affairs are now to benefit from the dead father's heritage. A hint that is spotted by the detective in a second support group session serves the correct solution of the case and proves that it can be useful to Sherlock to occasionally listen to others and make room for seemingly unnecessary information in his brain attic. As in the previous episode, Sherlock shows off his skills in deduction and raises suspicion in Gregson's assisting officer Bell who is convinced by the detective's abilities in the end and shakes hands with him as a sign of a well-functioning collaboration in the future.

Neil McCaw: "Sherlock Holmes and a Politics of Adaptation"

From the day Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th century and first published in 1887, came into the world, there have been numerous and diverse adaptations of the original canon which underlied two major determinants, namely the conditions within the film and TV industry as well as the predominant cultural and social climate. In general, Holmes adaptations are palimpsestuous (scraped off and rediscribed) that means the original story or former adaptations are altered and interpreted partly new. The interaction with socio-cultural contexts often appears in multiple layers as well and is thus multi-textured.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was the "Thatcherite" political rhetoric and ideology, named after the only female Prime Minister the United Kingdom has ever had, Margaret Thatcher, also called the "Iron Lady", which had a great influence to adaptive works made during her term of office. Thatcher's ideology supported themes such as "authority, law and order, patriotism, national unity, [and] the family". In particular, it celebrated the supposed moral as well as the political and economic order of the Victorian era (1837-1901) as a historical model which was also embodied in Holmes adaptations at that time. The 19th century was to be imitated, an "idealised paradigm of harmonious, commerce-focused, respectful social interaction amidst a mythologising quasi-hagiography of the Victorians themselves". Those points formed the basis that ought to evoke a regeneration of a contemporary British consciousness and Englishness since the UK suffered from a decline in national self-esteem caused by statewide exhaustion after World War II and years of turbulence in the 1970s. The "Thatcherite" ideology was often accompanied by the so-called Tory vision that implies the UK in which the present conditions are underpinned by tradition, consequently, a return to a national essence. Holmes adaptations were meant to be a "pleasurable fantasy", an escape for everyone from everyday-life. Those adaptive works were a romanticised, throuroughly ordered and detectable Victorian portrayal of what it used to be, hence, the audience is comforted by "the restoration of the law". The adaptations draw on Doyle's stories in great detail and trace back to Holmes's origins by faithfully recreating the Victorian surroundings and its milieu, simply a seemingly secure haven of order the audience of troubled times longs for. However, the familiar detective narratives were more "ritual acts of expiation which isolate and project cultural guilt upon some scapegoat rather than offer any social analysis or critique", be it critique to contemporary or bygone times and circumstances. Hence, viewers regarded those works as "amazingly faithful adaptations of the original stories", showing literary quality in exactly applying original features to a cinematic genre and fitting to the existing Holmesian canon, which Granada's adaptations (1984-1994) embodied. The fidelity to the canon was regarded as cultural value one has to loyally transfer in order to fulfill a duty towards the original. The whole setting and screenplay in films and TV series ought to be authentic and represent the 'original' Victorian style, at least what was believed to be original back then. Nonetheless, the image of Victorian times that was shown in the Granada incarnations of Sherlock Holmes is an idealised one and does not necessarily depict the true circumstances Victorian people lived in. It is more, as previously mentioned, a "desirably attractive escape from the present", a wishful image of what society of the late 20th century should be like in unstable times.

All those ideologies changed, however, in the 1990s when Britain had to deal with a more and more dynamic and quickly altering present, supported by the widely spreading development in technologies. Competition and profitability became more predominant in the film and TV industry than quality and fidelity to the canon of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Individuality was the status quo in order to draw the attention of the audience, thus, a great need for 'quality' television and an authentic Holmes developed. So his upcoming incarnations had to become more individual and additional material that was less canonical and differed from the classic Holmes image to a great extent was added. Critics said that "Holmes had, by this stage, lapsed into operatic, signalling what was widely seen as a relentless decline into cliché and caricature'. As an aftermath, the Granada adaptation's success declined in the early 1990s and found an end in 1994. Afterwards, doing a 'right' or 'correct' adaptation of the original Holmes stories became a desperate and almost hopeless aim to achieve which is why that task was abandoned completely.

McCaw, Neil: Sherlock Holmes and a Politics of Adaptation. In: Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle, edited by Sabine Vanacker and Catherine Wynne. PalgraveConnect, 2012.

Sherlock, 1x01 "A Study In Pink"

The very first episode of Sherlock called A Study in Pink, a BBC TV production that aired first in 2010, follows the pattern of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original story A Study in Scarlet and starts with Dr John Watson and the traumatic experiences he made in Afghanistan where he served as a military doctor. After a severe injury, he returns to London, visits a therapist and is in search of a flatmate. His former classmate at Barts, Mike Stamford, introduces him to Sherlock Holmes, an eccentric self-claimed consulting detective who occasionally visits the medical and forensic facilities of Barts in order to broaden his knowledge in "The Science of Deduction". From the moment John Watson enters the medical laboratory, Holmes deduces all important information such as his prior occupation in Afghanistan and that he has got a brother with alcohol problems. Dazzled by what he has witnessed, Watson agrees on sharing a flat with the weird but also fascinating detective and moves house to 221B Baker Street in London, the British capital the series is set in as is the original story. Shortly, Holmes is asked for help by Scotland Yard's detective inspector Lestrade in a complicated case, a "serial suicide" he has already poked his nose into before officially being called by the police, and offers Watson to accompany and even assist him at the scene of crime. For Holmes, there is no doubt that it must be a serial murder instead of suicide and he bursts into joy while connecting the clues, much to the scepticism and annoyance of Donovan and Anderson, two fellow inspectors of Lestrade. In the course of the episode, Holmes seeks for the pink thread through the case, namely the scarlet thread in the original A Study in Scarlet, investigates on his own and makes Watson do the dull work that is too much of a nuisance to him. He gets into trouble with the police for withholding evidence but, finally, he draws the correct conclusions, follows the murderer and reveals the entire case.

"... somebody who we trust even if we don't know him ..."

"... somebody who passes unnoticed wherever he goes ..."

"... somebody who hunts in the middle of a crowd ..."

Elementary, 1x01 "Pilot"

The pilot episode of Elementary serves as an introduction to a brand new adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective icon Sherlock Holmes. The setting changed radically in that the plot is set in New York instead of London what is comprehensible since the production company CBS Production Studios is American as well. Sherlock Holmes, played by Jonny Lee Miller, has suffered from drug-related problems and has come to New York in order to check into a rehabilitation centre before he escapes on his very last day of rehab and moves into one of his father's barely furnished flats in Brooklyn. On that very day, Dr Joan Watson, a former surgeon who has lost her profession due to a patient's death, starts her work as Holmes's sober companion, hired by his father, and has to be his flatmate for the next six weeks. In London, Sherlock has worked as consulting detective for Scotland Yard and now he wants to continue his profession by assisting the NYPD in their cases, either by receiving phone calls or spying on the police radio, accompanied by Watson who he introduces to Captain Toby Gregson as his valet. By using his distinctive and some kind of weird method of investigation, modern technologies such as his smartphone with an additional lense for high-resolution photos and the help and advices of Joan Watson, Holmes solves the promiscuous case of murder of the wife of an psychologist. That crime is so interwoven that even brilliant Sherlock has difficulties to decode the mystery, gets on the wrong track judging from the false clues the true murder has constructed in order to not get caught and, finally, Watson finds the most important detail that leads to the solution.

We as viewers are introduced to the series as witnesses of the crime that is being investigated in the pilot episode of Elementary. Everything is set in slow motion, we see that a red-haired woman is being attacked by a masked man when suddenly the camera becomes shaky and the action rushes while we follow the burglar right behind his steps, chasing the woman to her bedroom where she desperately tries to reach something we cannot see because of our limited perspective. So the viewer is sucked into the plot right from the beginning and does not have any choice to keep his or her distance to the crime that is happening right in front of him or her. In the end it almost seems that we even change positions with the culprit but when the scene reaches its climate the introduction is cut and comes abruptly to an end what leaves us viewers stunned in our chairs, maybe even disturbed.

You can find my detailed analysis of Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson's characters underneath the cut. Feel free to give me some feedback or do some corrections as well as additions to my analysis. : )

Getting things done

In early February, I went to the administration building of my university in order to fetch the official topic of my bachelor thesis:

Analysing Sherlock: Psychoanalytic elements in contemporary adaptations of Sherlock Holmes

So things are getting serious and I have to hand in two copies of my thesis by 6th May what is, by now, pretty soon and I am getting more and more nervous. I am lost in paperwork, drowning in books and texts because I did not do as much as I wanted to in February. I only started working diligently in March after a slight panic attack had hit me and I realised how fast February went by. Seriously, where did that month go?! Sadly enough I do not know what I actually did those days.

Apart from scanning through secondary literature, I still have to continue watching Elementary as well as Sherlock but the latter is accompanied by a higher workload since this series is riddled with more psychoanalytic elements than Elementary. My plans for this weekend are watching the US adaptation as far as I get and write some reviews for this blog in which I only sum up the most important points of the episode in focus, regarding psychoanalysis and Holmes and Watson's character features.