TV Review Sherlock The Lying Detective

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A strong second episode that draws more directly than usual on the Sherlock canon of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle while also being very in tune with real life current social controversy. The title of the episode plays on Doyle’s The Dying Detective where Holmes faked illness to draw enemies into the open. The Dying detective reverses the idea with Holmes deliberately driving himself into an extreme degree of drug addiction to draw Watson to his aid after Watson split away from him in despair over the death of his wife. The emphasise of the episode was on shaking Watson out of his despair, with Freeman spending much of the episode sulking. The show’s main secondary character had little to do but be miserable and told to get his act together throughout. Holmes doesn’t really cause that to happen – Watson sees the CD-Rom message Mary left and which Holmes should have just shown him in the first place. Cumberbatch got to be more manic and extreme than ever but the real acting honours went to Una Stubbs as Mrs Hudson, relishing her chance to do high speed car chases and disregard the law. Her cheerfully telling a cop that she had no idea how fast she’d been driving because she was busy on the phone is priceless, as is her casual reveal that she has managed to handcuff Holmes and put him in the boot of her car. We get the full impact of Holmes as an addict here, right down to him shooting holes in the wall at 221b Baker Street. The main villain is for once no secret or mystery at all, with Toby Jones as Culverton Smith, a very creepy insidious celebrity philanthropist who opens hospitals and visits schools while openly calling himself a killer from his support for a breakfast cereal he advertises in his nickname, ‘The Cereal Killer’. His open references to H H Holmes the serial killer with a home-made castle full of secret passages gave his methodology away right away to me and anyone knowing about real-life murderers. As soon as the other Holmes was mentioned I knew the hospital had secret passages. Moffatt just seemed keen to use this for the coincidence of Holmes the killer and Holmes the Detective sharing a name. However it was his unassailable celebrity status that showed clearly that was modelled on Jimmy Saville, a predator with access to children and hospital patients, and whose wealth & Status made accusing him of anything so taboo. He is ultimately caught with a concealed recording devise, the same method by which Mary was tracked in the previous episode. Smith’s behaviour offers no real surprises though the final wave of twists regarding the ‘daughter’ Holmes met while off his face being both the girl on the bus and the therapist Watson sees was a genuine surprise with some great disguise, make up and camera work. Watson seeing Mary offering a ghostly wry commentary was getting irksome. The traumatized hero still talking to a dead but gone character has been used before, in The Walking Dead for example. However this was a much more entertaining episode than the New Year season opener. Arthur Chappell