Sherlock and John
Currently one of the biggest UK Crime Dramas staring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as John Watson. Written by Stephen Moffet and Mark Gatiss (Who also plays Mycroft Holmes). Sherlock is set in modern day London, with a slight spin on all the original stories.
Main Story[]
Sherlock is the one and only consulting detective, advertising himself through his website: 'The Science of Deduction', he often helps out the police in their investigations, though he is also privately hired.
As of the first episode A Study in Pink He shares 221B Baker Street with John Watson, a soldier recently back from a war in Afghanistan with a phycosamatic limp, who was shot through the shoulder. John becomes Sherlock's tag along and blogger on bisare and mysterious crimes. The flat is rented to them by Mrs Hudson, who owes Sherlock a favour after he ensured her husband hanged for a crime in America.
Sherlock's older brother Mycroft is a member of the Government, and a member of the secret service, he is described to be Sherlock's Arch-enemy, though Mycroft himself doesn't seem to view thier relationship this way, and is constantly worrying (in a weird way) about his younger brother.
The Police are led by DI Lestrade, with DS Donovan and the Pathologist Anderson. Sherlock hates the other two, though he seems to get on well with Lestrade.
The main antangonist is the insane phycopath Moriaty, played by Andrew Scott
Episodes[]
Series 1[]
| Episode | Original Air Date | Viewing Figures |
| A Study in Pink | 25 July 2010 | 9.23 million |
| The police investigate the deaths of a series of people who all appear to have committed suicide by taking a poisonous pill. They turn to their unofficial consultant, Sherlock Holmes, who deduces various elements pointing to a serial killer. Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes is introduced to John Watson, a former soldier, and the pair immediately move into a flat in Baker Street. John Watson slowly gets to know and trust Holmes despite a police officer warning him that Holmes is a psychopath and will one day be responsible for murder. Sherlock's brother Mycroft, at first not revealing his identity, kidnaps Watson and asks whether he'll spy on Holmes for money, but Watson refuses. After a series of incidents, the person responsible for the deaths, a taxicab driver, reveals that his victims took their own lives by playing a game of Russian roulette with two pills: one fatally poisonous, the other safe. Watson shoots the cabbie, who reveals as he dies that Moriarty masterminded the entire plan. | ||
| The Blind Banker | 1 August 2010 | 8.07 million |
| Holmes is hired by an old friend to investigate a mysterious break-in at a bank in the City. He discovers that symbols spray-painted onto an office wall are a coded message intended for an employee of the bank, who is later discovered dead in his flat. The next day, a journalist is killed and the same symbols are found nearby. Holmes and Watson follow a trail of clues that link the two dead men to a Chinese smuggling ring, who are trying to retrieve a valuable item that one of them stole. Holmes eventually cracks the coded message based on Suzhou numerals and a book cipher, but not before Watson and a female friend are kidnapped by the criminals. Holmes rescues Watson's friend but the leader of the gang escapes. After escaping, the leader of the gang is in communication with her superior, who is identified by the initial "M". She is then shot by a sniper. | ||
| The Great Game | 8 August 2010 | 9.18 million |
| Sherlock Holmes is commissioned by Mycroft to investigate the suspicious death of a government employee who was working on a top-secret defence project: the Bruce-Partington Project. After apparently rejecting the case and handing it over to Watson, Holmes begins to be taunted by a criminal who puts his victims into explosive vests and sets Holmes deadlines to solve the apparently unrelated cases, which include a twenty-year-old cold case involving the shoes of a drowned boy, the disappearance of a businessman, the death of a TV personality and the death of a guard of an art gallery at the hands of an assassin called the Golem. As Holmes solves the cases, he finds links between them. After clearing up the original case of the civil servant, Holmes tries to force his unseen adversary to reveal himself. Near the end of the episode Holmes and "Jim Moriarty" reach a standoff and Jim reveals that he is responsible for the crimes. In the final seconds Sherlock Holmes points his gun at a bomb on the floor. | ||
Series 2[]
| Episode | Original Air Date | Viewing Figures |
| A Scandal in Belgravia | 1 January 2012 | 10.66 million |
| Mycroft hires Holmes and Watson to retrieve compromising photos of a minor royal held on the camera phone of Irene Adler, a ruthless and brilliant dominatrix who also trades in classified information extracted from her rich and powerful clients. Holmes obtains Adler's phone, but discovers it is booby-trapped and requires a code to disarm. When Adler discovers that the CIA are on her trail, she disappears and is then apparently killed, only to reappear months later when the coast is clear. Adler manipulates Holmes into deciphering a coded message on her phone which she obtained from another well-connected client. She sends the message to Moriarty, who in turn uses it to foil a British counter-terror operation. Adler then goes underground again. The episode concludes as Mycroft tells Watson that she has been killed by a terrorist group in Pakistan. This is another decoy: Sherlock helped her escape. | ||
| The Hounds of Baskerville | 8 January 2012 | 10.27 million |
| Sherlock and John are contacted by Henry Knight, a man plagued by the traumatic memories of the death of his father at the hands of a monstrous hound on Dartmoor years before. Investigating Dewer's Hollow, a local spot where the beast was allegedly seen, as well as the nearby Ministry of Defence testing site Baskerville, Holmes and Watson uncover a conspiracy wherein one of the Baskerville scientists, Dr. Frankland, is continuing the work of H.O.U.N.D., an aborted project to create a hallucinogenic gas for military use. Holmes and Watson discover that the legendary hound is an ordinary dog used for publicity that the hallucinogenic gas makes appear as a demonic monster. The 'hound' that killed Henry's father was actually Frankland wearing a red-lensed gas mask and a T-shirt bearing the logo of the H.O.U.N.D. group. Confronting both the dog and Frankland at Dewer's Hollow, Watson and Lestrade shoot the dog. Frankland attempts to flee but dies while trying to do so. In the final scene, Mycroft releases a confined Jim Moriarty. | ||
| The Reichenbach Fall | 15 January 2012 | 7.09 million |
| After a series of high-profile cases lead Sherlock to fame, Moriarty launches a simultaneous heist on the Tower of London, Bank of England, and Pentonville Prison, for which he allows himself to be captured and put on trial. He secures a not guilty verdict through blackmail and visits Sherlock, explaining he still intends to 'burn' him, taunting him with a "final problem" for him to solve. Soon afterwards, Moriarty arranges for the kidnapping of the children of an American ambassador, but traumatizes the children such that they are terrified of Sherlock. This, in conjunction with the ease with which Sherlock solves the case, leads to Sherlock becoming a suspect. Sherlock escapes arrest and soon learns Moriarty has constructed a fake identity as an actor hired by Sherlock, and has seeded the press with the story. The two meet on the roof of a hospital, where Moriarty explains that assassins will kill John, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade if Sherlock does not commit suicide; he wants Holmes to do this to cement his planted story of Sherlock being a fraud. After a tense conversation in which Moriarty realizes the two are enough alike that Sherlock could extract the code to call off the assassins from him, Moriarty shoots himself. Sherlock calls John and confesses to being a fraud (which John refuses to believe) and then steps off the roof. He is vilified in the press. John and Mrs. Hudson meet alone at his grave to say their goodbyes; the final seconds show Sherlock watching from afar, having faked his death in a manner unseen by the viewers. | ||
Series 3[]
The second series' final episode, "The Reichenbach Fall", was based upon The Final Problem, in which Sherlock and Moriarty plunge to their deaths (the later The Adventure of the Empty House reveals that Holmes faked his death, even though Doyle intended to kill him off originally). After the end of the final episode of the second series, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss both announced on Twitter that a third series was commissioned at the same time as series two. Production is unlikely to take place before the end of 2012 due to Cumberbatch's and Freeman's other commitments, with broadcast in 2013 at the earliest.
Trivia[]
- Matt Smith auditioned for the role of Doctor Watson before his Doctor Who audition
- The actual address used for filming the exteriors of 221B Baker Street is 187 North Gower Street, London NW1
- The slash pairing between John and Watson has proved to be one of the oldest slash pairings in the UK